[MODERATOR POST] An introduction to The Blog Stoker's DRACULA Project, 2011 edition.
This year will mark the fourth attempt at The Blog Stoker's DRACULA Project. This year will have one difference... after this introduction, all posts will be turned over to helpful chronicler blog-stoker.
You can follow along through the following links:
* blogdracula on LiveJournal
* BlogDracula on Twitter
* The Blog Stoker's DRACULA Project on Facebook
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Some background, taken from my statement of attempt in 2008:
I am not a pixel-stained technopeasant. I am not a writer, in the conventional sense, with intent to publish. I blog, and I spend time polishing others' writing in preparation for their works to be published.
However, I'm as big a fan of creativity as the next person. And so I'm going to try to adapt someone else's experiment for my own creative purposes.
[I hope that doesn't come across as arrogantly as it reads to me. I'm trying to do homage, not plagiarism.]
Anyway.
In 2005, dietsch directed me to a link for Dracula Blogged, which posted Bram Stoker's novel DRACULA in "real time", based on the dated journal entries, letters, telegrams and newspaper clippings that appear in the book.
In 2006, two extraordinary and dedicated bloggers, elettaria and eye-of-a-cat, took it upon themselves to create a LiveJournal community to do the same thing... dracula1897... creating character LJs, creating gorgeous wallpapers and icons, and sponsoring discussion with a membership and readership of more than 1000 bloggers.
Due to time constraints, neither has been able to run the project since, and I missed it dreadfully. Even though Dracula Blogged was and is still up and running, it wasn't quite the same as the give-and-take in dracula1897, nor did it give me the insights into gothic literature as a whole that I got in 2006.
I'm in need of a bit of magic in my life. So I'm going to try to generate some of my own.
I have nothing nearly as elaborate in mind as what elettaria and eye-of-a-cat worked for and achieved. I intend solely to repost dated entries in chronological order, so that you can read along with me, and to post concurrent discussion topics if there's enough interest.
There are several points in the novel where there are "down times" with no entries for days or weeks. I was thinking of posting some other gothic fiction and ghost stories in those times.... only those works which are in the public domain and available on Project Gutenberg.
Please join me here for a haunted summer, from May until November.
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Other DRACULA online projects this year include Bite-Sized DRACULA, a melding of Michael Gordon's Real-Time DRACULA, a Twitter experiment launched in 2009, and Post-DRACULA, its followup, with character journals continuing after the events of Bram Stoker's novel and touching upon events in Dacre Stoker's sequel.
So let's set the mood, and spur our horses towards the Borgo Pass.