Owen Egerton: What does online publishing mean to you?

The stars are bright during the season of light–a jolly good thing for our continuing conversation of literary luminaries. Today ASF presents its penultimate voice, with one final favorite coming on Monday to round out our stellar lineup. Check it out.

The topic of conversation: What does online publishing mean to you.

Get up to speed on the conversation:
Monday, Rick Rofihe and Rick Moody began the discussion.
Tuesday, Matt Stewart continued the dialogue.
Wednesday, Deltina Hay lit up a publisher’s perspective.
Thursday, Matt Bell exposed the deep darkness before the light.
Today, Owen Egerton explores the strange sex-and-death nuances of the topic…

ASF‘s Stacy Muszynski asks: Owen Egerton, what does online publishing mean to you?

Owen Egerton answers:

What does online publishing mean to me? To me personally? To me as an air-breathing, lady-loving, Nazi-hating man? It means life. It means adventure. It means having my prose only a click away from the pornographic video that may or may not have inspired it. It means being out in the world of eyes longer than the paper page can hope for. It means opportunity! It means God has blessed the literary world with a new Eden, an unexplored country, a Project Genesis, a hot, pale virginal playland begging to be tattooed along her goose-pimply thighs with story and rhyme! She beckons, O writer, she beckons and begs! Give her content, browse her and comment! Fill her nearly endless void with words!

It also means nothing and less. Where be my paper? Where be my yellowed pages? Where be my book? Future Lady hover-walks into the musty used-book store and finds not the bent, spine-broken volume of my words. Words that can be touched, pages that can be smelled. A book that holds the skin oil of a dozen past-readers! Skin oil, I say! No, Future Lady may find me not. My online stories bound in the archaic clumsiness of HTML, a language outlawed after the Third War of Tralfagian. She will leave the bookstore, she will zip away in her air-car thingy. No purchase will she have made!

So I am torn. My soul flaps like a poorly hung holiday flag in a particularly windy suburban neighborhood. Yet, my soul’s flapping is little more than ectoplasm in the breeze: meaningless, impotent, gooey. My yappings effect nothing. The winds of change may blow me, but I, though I try, do not blow the wind. So, Web-God, I will learn to scribble for you. I will study your Tweets, your Waves. I will discover your dark desires and strive to satisfy them. Not because I honor you, but because I honor those that honor you. Give me your readers, Web-Beast, and I, I, I will give you my words.

Owen Egerton is the author of a novel, a short story collection, screenplays, and more. His novel The Book of Harold: The Illegitimate Son of God is forthcoming from Dalton Press in Spring 2010. The Austin Chronicle named Egerton Austin’s favorite writer in 2007 and 2008.

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Check back Monday—we’ll be posting new thoughts from our final illuminating voice on online publishing, Dagoberto Gilb.