Readers and writers blog

We’re about to get doubly literate on you, dear reader. Because now our fiction section is presenting installments of two new novels — count ‘em, two.

And, oh yeah, we also present the results of our trip to a thesaurus for a word making our headline a pun on Charles Dickens . . . hmmm, ‘prolificity,’ good word. Please attribute this act, less of literacy than of verbal gymnastics, to our giddiness at having an abundance of new works:

• First is the latest chapter of Sniper in the Mist, a novel-in-progress by Joseph Cigan that draws from his life in Chicago as well as his heritage as a refugee from Slovenia in the 1950s.

• And now, thanks to the generosity of another author, Steve Karmazenuk, we begin serializing the remaining chapters of his science-fiction novel, The Unearthing, which we debuted in February in a four-chapter sample.

(You can get to either work by clicking on Fiction at the top right of this page, then select the appropriate title or chapter.)

As we’ve said before, this is what we had in mind when we started this website-weblog more than a year ago. In fact, the weblog didn’t become part of the general website until last April, five months after we began, when it appeared that not many writers were willing to submit big-ticket works like novels for free and we had to fill the site with something — like the musings, and sometimes rantings, of a retired newspaper editor.

Our initial experience was much like that of an Internet pioneer we consider our predecessor, David Guest, who in 1998 put up a site called Readersandwriters.com only to let it go inactive after several years of waiting in vain for submissions.

“Writers all seemed to want to earn money from their efforts and were afraid to put their works in the public domain,” Guest told us after our first month of operation. “I just let the site sort of die …. I always said I would rather have a thousand readers than a thousand dollars … but I wound up with neither . . .”

(By the way, his domain name was bought up in 2004 by a British company that is holding it for resale for about $13,500. As we said in our initial blog entry, we offered them all we could afford — 50 bucks — and never heard from them again.)

Well, things are beginning to change, Karmazenuk tells us.

“I just wanted to let you know that after discussing it with some web-savvy friends and advisers, I’ve decided to release the whole of The Unearthing as an ebook in hopes that it will generate hard-copy sales,” Karmazenuk told us by email.

“Since its launch a couple of days ago, I’ve had as many downloads of the book as I have had sales in the year and a half it’s been published,” he wrote.”I don’t know if any of those people are actually going to buy the book, and you know what? I don’t care.

“The only thing I’ve ever wanted is for people to read my writing.”

We couldn’t agree more with his motivations and philosophy. That’s why we’re here — to publish works by writers who had to write them. Yes, the money would be nice, but Karmazenuk, Cigan and others, we’re sure, are writing for a more basic purpose — for the eyes and minds of others.

So today we present:

• Chapter 3 of Sniper in the Mist, a look at Cigan’s life through his main character, young Joseph Varga, in the Chicago neighborhood of East Lake View in the changing times of the 1960s.

• Chapter 5 of The Unearthing, as one of Karmazenuk’s protagonists, Professor Mark Echohawk, and colleagues take a closer look at an enormous alien ship that has been unearthed in the New Mexico desert.

We hope you lend them your eyes and minds.

– Sid Leavitt