If Dead Authors Had Blogged

Poe rantin' and raven on a PC? Orwell worried about spyware? Steinbeck pushing his new web tutorial program, "Of Mice and Manuals?" If our literary greats of the past were around today, would they be online-- and blogging?

Well, today, I thought I'd share just a few of my best guesses:


William Shakespeare
For his day-job, he anonymously writes a high-profile PR blog for an influential celeb politician . His task? To pump up the candidate's idyllic family life, community service, policies and event appearances...

All the while demonizing details of the politician's opponents with salaciously-spun content, YouTube video clips and some sly reenactments which border on slander.

Will's personal blog, on the other hand-- MuchAdo4Nothin.net-- is written under the penname "IronWill". And readers aren't quite sure if this swashbuckling narrator is real, or simply a character of another blogger named Marlowe. Marlowe, it seems, has a strikingly similar avatar, appears on all the same social networks but never at the same time, and works off the same ISP server.

Partial post--

To blog, or not to blog, that is the question;
Whether it's cooler to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous commenting trolls,
Or to write posts against their slanderous lies,
And by opposing, end them. To delete, to sleep;
To sleep, to get keyprints deeply embedded on one's face.
Note to self: stop falling asleep at my desk.

Charles Dickens
He maintains a fiction site called "TheOldeCuriosityBlog" under the username "Boz." He posts part of his serial stories once a week, and has gained a strong regular following-- largely housewives falling into the soap opera fanatic demographic.

In a rare personal post, Boz relays his concerns about the print publication industry:

I would like to thank all of my readers, who supported me during the serial I've now compiled into one unified work, renamed "The Pickwick Posts." I know you've all been emailing, asking for an update on the possible publication of this.

Well, I've shopped it around to a number of print publishers and I am hearing that it doesn't fit into the hot markets right now-- like Self-Help, Inspirational, or Drooled On by Oprah. The rejection letters indicate no one wants to take the risk. So I'm thinking of self-publishing. Anyone have the good word on Lulu?

-Boz

Charlotte and Emily Bronte
These home-schooled goth girls from Yorkshire, "Char" and "Em," write a joint blog called "Blathering Heights," a mix of dark emo poetry, steam-punk painting, graphic novel reviews, and personal posts on their slow progress in therapy. You can listen to the music that inspires them through their on-blog streaming MP3 playlist. Char's faves are the ethereal Cocteau Twins, Black Tape for a Blue Girl, Dead Can Dance and the Smiths, where Em's taste leans more toward newer punk and thrash-metal influences.


Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Due to strong search engine traffic, and having a lot of popular blogger friends, "SammyC" has gained a big audience with the psychedelic crowd for the few posts he's written. Unfortunately, he posts very rarely, and almost never finishes anything he starts. His blog will be giving readers a permanent 404 error in under a year.

Partial post-

After a serious night of partying with buds Byron, old Keatsy and the gang, I crawled part of the way home and fell asleep under the shrubbery. That's when I had this seriously weird dream. When I woke up, still groggy, I wanted to write it down, but all I could find within arm's length was a broken crayon and an empty Cadbury wrapper in the gutter. I jotted it down, then passed out again. So this is the most I could read off that wrapper, misspellings included...

In Xanadu did NewtonJahn

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where ELO, the sacred singers sang

Through discos measureless to man

Down to a sunless roller rink.

I'm not sure where the whole Olivia Newton John roller disco theme came in-- I never really even liked that movie. But maybe there's something there. Possibly I'll rework it. But right now, I've got the munchies.

Later!
-SammyC

Jane Austen
Jane is a marketing-savvy heiress with a large fan base in the personal diary set, due to her quirky, catty exploits. Her stories are loosely-veiled recaps of her own "Super Sweet 16" party, her hanging with Paris and Nicole Richie, and her social gala photo ops. She spends 50% of her time on Twitter tweeting friends, friends of friends, and friends of friends friends who are actually paparazzi using pseudonyms, talking about parties she's attending, designers she's into and books she's reading. She is already being approached by agents and publishers, some of them not even friends of her daddy.



I'd love to add some more here, but I ran out of time. So any ideas for literary greats who you'd envision blogging today?

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