About the author
Virginia Ruth decided to be a writer when she was seven years old, and hasn’t changed her mind yet. Her first books were very short, single editions, illustrated and bound by hand, usually featuring a horse or a princess, and often both. Since then she has delved into a number of genres, but her perennial favorites are fantasy, science fiction, and mysteries. Her favorite authors as a child were C.S. Lewis and Madeleine L’Engle; since then she has added Dorothy Sayers, Rex Stout, Wilkie Collins, Diana Wynne Jones, Terry Pratchett, and countless others. Books she reads at least once every three years include: Middlemarch, by George Eliot; the Riddle-Master trilogy, by Patricia McKillip; Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card; Emma, by Jane Austen; and Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Aside from reading and writing, she likes singing and walking in the woods, and always has at least one craft or hobby currently occupying her time. Oh, and her love for Doctor Who is entirely beyond reason.
For whatever success she achieves here, Virginia is indebted to: her loyal band of encouragers, particularly Molly, Leah, Emily, and Gretchen; the people who run the Web Fiction Guide and Novelr, for inspiring and facilitating this whole web fiction enterprise; all the authors named above and many more, for writing stories that infected her brain and made her want to spread the virus; and most especially, Mike for the hosting and tech support, and Libby for being her number-one Idea-Bouncing Buddy.
About the books
Nona Umbra is a fiction serial, begun in January 2009. It is a fantasy set in the modern world, incorporating elements of mythology, folklore, and superhero stories. It is told in a series of books, which unfold over the course of three or four months. The author has been cruel enough to put it on hiatus only three chapters into Book Two, but she expects to continue again in early 2010. And she promises not to do such a thing again. Much.
The Blue Bull is a fairy tale adaptation still under construction. In addition to the eight chapters published here, there are about twelve chapters written but unpublished, and an estimated… oh… twenty-odd chapters yet to be written. When more of it it available to read, you will be the first to know.
About web novels
Web comics have been around for a while, and have gained a pretty firm foothold in the world of comic readers. The freedom and low expense of online publishing allows a lot of artists to make and distribute their work. Inevitably, this allows there to be a huge amount of cheap, insignificant, poorly drawn and poorly written work out there, but it also allows some excellent artists, who might not have met the narrower demands of traditional print publishers, to produce brilliant, original, beautiful work. Strips like Sluggy Freelance could never have appeared in a newspaper or a comic book, and what a tremendous loss that would be.
I believe that the time has come for a similar revolution in prose fiction. Traditional book publishing is notoriously hard to break into, and there are a lot of writers out there who have great stories to tell, stories which will never be read outside their own families. Web publishing has the potential to change that, or at least to dramatically increase the number of stories that get a chance in the world. As more and more writers publish online, a critical mass of really excellent web fiction will build, and that in turn will draw more and more readers, which will attract more writers. Et cetera.
At least, that’s my dream. To that end, I’m trying here to contribute my portion of really excellent web fiction, and draw in my share of eager readers. Time will be my judge.
About time
People assume time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey… AHEM. Sorry. Accidental Doctor Who quotation, happens to the best of us. Apologies to Steven Moffat and the BBC.
