Blog Fiction Analysis Sample

(The pictures aren't here, but it gives you an idea of the format and structure)

The Victorian English aristocracy meets 21st century blogosphere: add in plenty of bawdy humor and lecherous commentary, and you have Lord Likely, a Sherlock Holmesian hedonist whose journals have been “transcribed” to the format through which the web reader enjoys them.

The entire blog is set up to support the persona of the rakish narrator, complete with era-inspired ads (see picture to the right), “praise” for Lord Likely (“Utterly wonderful. Upon reading Lord Likely's diaries, I went out and set fire to a homeless wretch to celebrate.” THE LONDON LOOKER), and a generally vintage design harking back to sensational broadsheets and sepia photography. But the hypermediacy of the blog format necessarily draws attention to itself, not least for Lord Likely’s tweets in the sidebar or a “Paychum” (Paypal) button asking for donations to support the running of the site.

The pretense of publishing a collection of journals from the 1850s fits well into the established diary format of the blog, while social networking supports Lord Likely’s online presence (he is on Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace), even with the true author playing along as the scribe for His Lordship’s adventures.

Within the chronicles, Likely’s Victorian-ness is supported by mentions of “webbed-pages” and the “inter-net,” while at other times His Lordship is being rescued from aliens by none other than Elizabeth Darcy née Bennet, of Mrs Darcy versus the Aliens. This particular adventure even pokes fun at modern preoccupations:



She looked down at the mass of severed tentacles.

''“By jingo!” I ejaculated. “Are there more of these things?”''

''“I fear ’tis true. We have won a battle or two, but the war is not 'yet over. One day, someone will write a great book about our adventures so far, but there may yet be many sequels. As well as vignettes such as this one – although no doubt there will be debates amongst the aficionados as to whether it is a true part of the canon.”''

''“Madam, you talk in riddles!” I exclaimed. This was getting needlessly post-modern. ''

The blog manages to address various concerns raised in the writing of blogs, namely the existence of “fake blogs,” in which the online presence has all the credibility of a real person but is in fact invented by an anonymous party. There is never any question of Lord Likely’s existence in the real world (the “Est. 1857” of the site’s header takes care of that), but the front of striving for authenticity puts pressure on the phenomenon of created identities taking on legitimacy through social media, something that characters in novels rarely have been able to do.

The comment sections, usually a key feature of blog fiction and blogs in general, of Lord Likely’s adventures are not very active, though there were more regular commenters in entries a few years ago. This may be due to a migration of narrator-reader interaction to the corresponding Twitter account, where Lord Likely offers daily witticisms and banters with his followers.

Lord Likely thrives in its current format. Its serialized predecessors which it seeks to emulate worked well in print because it was the only available medium at the time, however Lord Likely proves that through the integration of new media, these markers of legitimacy, however farcical they may be, nevertheless lend a kind of credence to the online presence and engages its readers in a fun jaunt through another era while still hanging tight to modern humor and references.