Eric Brown, a former English professor, has written a "digital epistolary novel" called Intimacies that is meant to be read using a software interface. The story is told through emails, instant messages, and web pages. Brown plans to sell software to help other writers create their own digital novels using a similar format. Some scholars see this as a promising new form of electronic literature that captures how people communicate digitally, while others are skeptical of how engaging or "literary" the format currently is. The digital novel format has attracted over 5,000 readers so far.

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TECHNOLOGY
Call Me E-Mail
By ADAM BAER APRIL 15, 2004
A CORPORATE e-mail message goes astray. Two young strangers flirt in
cyberspace. They agree to meet. An assault ensues. And a mystery built on
digital clues is born.
It's not a plot that breaks new ground. But then, the earnest new ''novel''
that it fuels, ''Intimacies,'' by Eric Brown, is drawing notice more for its style
than for its content.
A former English professor who teaches executives how to write, Mr.
Brown, 59, calls ''Intimacies'' a digital epistolary novel, or DEN, terms that he
has trademarked. The plot of ''Intimacies'' is based on ''Pamela,'' the 18th-
century work by Samuel Richardson that is one of Western literature's first
epistolary novels. It is the format of Mr. Brown's work rather than its story
that makes it postmodern: it is meant to be read with the aid of a software
interface designed by Billy McQuown, an employee at Mr. Brown's consulting
firm, Communication Associates.
The story unfolds through e-mail messages, instant-message
conversations and Web sites, all within a window generated by the DEN
software; the program can be downloaded free from
www.greatamericannovel.com, Mr. Brown's Web site.
But more intriguing than ''Intimacies'' itself is Mr. Brown's plan to begin

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selling a version of the software that he used to write it, one that will help fans
of the form execute their own digital epistolary novels.
Of course, writers have long experimented with e-mail narratives; some
say that by now it is almost impossible to avoid, given the prevalence of e-mail
communication.
''E-mail fictions have been going for at least a decade -- it's a pretty primal
urge,'' said Rob Wittig, 48, a writer who began posting fictional messages on
electronic bulletin boards in the early 1980's. In 1999 Mr. Wittig created
''Friday's Big Meeting'' (www.robwit.net/fbm), a story set in a virtual
chatroom, as well as ''Blue Company 2002''
(www.robwit.net/bluecompany2002), arguably the first epistolary e-mail
narrative to be written and published for paying e-mail subscribers in real
time.
Other examples of what Mr. Wittig called message fictions have ranged in
style from ''Online Caroline'' (www.onlinecaroline.com), a multimedia story
that lets users interact with a fictional character by means of timed e-mail
messages, her Webcam and her Web site, and SMS cellphone text-messaging
and pager-message shorts. Then there is ''The Case of the Molndal Murder,'' a
September 2003 project at the Molndal Museum in Sweden, where people
using Bluetooth-equipped hand-helds followed a map while their devices
received short movies and chunks of text that told a mystery story.
Mr. Wittig, whose current project is a fictional blog, www.robwit.net, said
he believed that Mr. Brown's interface for ''Intimacies'' and the composition
software he plans to market were the first of their kind. The interface, for PC's
only, mimics e-mail and instant-messaging programs; the reader opens and
reads each character's messages in sequence. A second version due this month
will deliver the messages at timed intervals, Mr. Brown said, so that reading
them will more closely resemble the experience of receiving e-mail and instant
messages.

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With the current version of the program, DEN 1.2, the screen is divided
into four windows: one for e-mail, one for instant messages, an imitation Web
browser and an imitation pager screen. At the top of the main window are tabs
that read: ''Week One,'' ''Week Two'' and so on. Below that menu, in the
program's e-mail window, is a list of messages that the reader clicks through in
chronological order (though it is possible to backtrack or jump ahead). Links
summon transcripts of instant-message exchanges, Web pages, or pager
messages in the program's other windows.
The composition software that Mr. Brown plans to market, DEN
WriterWare, which is expected to cost about $150, resembles the reading
application and works much as popular screenwriting programs do. The user
creates a cast of characters, then writes the story in e-mail or instant-message
installments that can be saved individually. To create ancillary story aids,
writers can incorporate virtual snapshots of screen images that are created
with a small toolbar or taken from real Web sites. The saved messages can be
sorted by sender, time or subject, allowing writers to change the sequence of a
story or to write one character's side of the correspondence at a time, a feature
that would allow children to write stories together.
Mr. Brown said that watching young people use e-mail and instant
messaging inspired him to create ''Intimacies.''
''My younger employees say they don't have time to read books and
instead focus on e-mail and Web writing,'' he said. ''There's this huge group of
readers in our office -- a communications company! -- and they're reading
snips and pieces. It got me thinking: Why not write stories in this form and in
the process give readers a way to write their own?''
The response from young readers who visit Web sites like
www.theonion.com, a satirical online newspaper where Mr. Brown advertises,
suggests that the form has struck a chord. ''I'm not much into staring at a
computer screen for any longer than is strictly necessary, since I work in front

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of one all day, everyday, like most people,'' said Roberta Gray, a 26-year-old
editor at The Sunday Tribune in Dublin. ''But I really found 'Intimacies' quite
addictive, and ended up reading the whole thing more or less in one sitting.''
Alex Michas, the 25-year-old director of business development at Spring
Street Networks, a New York Internet personals company, said he found Mr.
Brown's concept to be in tune with the times.
''There's a very different rhythm to e-mail and chat -- it lets our users
reveal a lot about themselves very quickly -- and this form of storytelling is
similar in that regard,'' he said. ''There aren't too many books that have
successfully captured how these interchanges really work.''
Although they have attracted a lot of attention, digital epistolary and
message fiction like ''Intimacies'' are not the only electronic forms of literature
vying for attention on the Web. A small community of so-called hypertext
writers, many in academia, have been publishing experimental work in online
journals like The Iowa Review Web (www.uiowa.edu/iareview) and BeeHive
(beehive.temporalimage.com) for more than a decade. Such writing includes
texts with animation and works created by using rules and random processes
that yield something different for each reader.
Thom Swiss, editor of The Iowa Review Web and a professor of English at
the University of Iowa who focuses on those forms of hypertext, said that to
him Mr. Brown's creation seemed mechanical. ''While inventive if buggy, I'm
not sure how useful it is,'' he said. ''At this stage of its development, it's more of
a game and less literature -- and not because of the pulp story but because the
formal elements of composing the piece are given to you: you just fill in the
content.''
Still, Mr. Brown's digital novel has drawn praise from some scholars interested
in new media, especially those who hope to take e-literature mainstream.
Noah Wardrip-Fruin, 31, a traveling scholar at Brown University and

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visiting researcher at the University of California at Santa Cruz, said texts in
the form of fictional digital artifacts like e-mail or blogs held promise for a
generation that grew up with computers. ''I read more on the screen than I do
on paper,'' he said. ''I'm pleased to see people take imaginative writing and put
it into the spaces where we do our living.''
Mr. Wardrip-Fruin compared ''Intimacies'' to an epistolary story by one of
his students that consisted of e-mail messages with attached photos and diary
entries, which was published through a Yahoo e-mail account. He said that
such projects, as well as some narrative and life-simulation video games,
qualified as literature worthy of attention.
''These are forms of e-writing as surely as experimental hypertext poetry,''
he said. ''We just have to understand that like traditional literature, e-
literature has a range of styles, including popular ones.''
What will take electronic literature to the next level, Mr. Wardrip-Fruin
suggested, are multimedia projects involving so many inventive procedures
that they cannot be reproduced or mimicked on paper. ''Think of the textual
analogue to video games,'' he said. ''You can't really capture the way a video
game works by printing it out; that's what will have to happen with electronic
literature for it to become popular.''
''Intimacies'' has achieved a level of popularity: in the four months it has
been available online, Mr. Brown said, about 5,000 people -- over 10 percent
of the visitors to his Web site -- have downloaded it, and youth-oriented Web
sites like Fark.com have included links to it.
His next step, he said, will be to use e-stories in communications training
for executives and to teach writing to schoolchildren who may enjoy
computers more than they like reading. He said he was also working on
customizing the third version of his software for hand-held organizers and
cellphones in the hope of reinvigorating the concept of the e-book.

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''The problem with e-books has always been that they use traditional text
and layout,'' Mr. Brown said.
With ''Intimacies,'' the interface had to be developed before the narrative
could unfold. ''We made it especially to look like the place where people get
their most interesting and vital forms of information today,'' he said. ''How
else is a modern writer supposed to get involved in his readers' lives?''
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