NEWS: Redefining Chick-On-Chick-Lit

I received an interesting Press Release from Lee Harlem Robinson this morning that I thought was worth sharing. Lee has been maintaining a fictional blog since October, posting her ongoing story in short, episodic installments.

The website aims to explore new ways of bringing chick lit directly to interested readers. It is an on-going narrative in blog form, written by Lee Harlem Robinson, who is looking back at the past ten years of her life and the reasons why she currently finds herself lonely and seemingly exiled in Hong Kong. As Lee Harlem Robinson struggles to come to grips with the insanely fast-paced city of Hong Kong, where she was sent by her employers, she starts to wonder where it all went wrong. The reader is taken on a journey back in time from Lee's early years in romance in London and Paris to her current life in the city where “yuppie actually still works as a term of endearment”. The big question, as in every romance, is: will she eventually find love?

While she's not the first to serialize a fictional narrative online, the fact that she's looking beyond the rather structured format of a blog is exciting.

In order to explore new ways of distribution the content is also downloadable in tablet form, allowing the reader to take it away from the internet. “This is not just an adventure in fiction” says Lee Harlem Robinson, founder and writer of the blog. “I also want to test the waters of the selfpublishing world. With the rise of tablet computers we currently experience a brand new way of approaching readers. While blogging is very much becoming a thing of the previous decade, reading electronic books is definitely a big part of the future. I want to use the older medium of blogging to encourage people to download my fiction to their iPads and Kindles.”

I started reading her story this morning, and I must admit I was hooked by the time I read my way through October. I'm not usually a fan of stories that are told through flashbacks (Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind is a recent notable exception), but Lee uses the literary device smartly, introducing a sense of dramatic suspense, without unnecessarily pulling you out of the narrative to constantly remind you it's a flashback. In this case, it works well for her story. I've already downloaded her first collection, Trying to Throw my Arms Around the World, as a means of catching up on what I've missed, and I'm very curious to see where she's taking it next.

“Chick-on-chick-lit is as good as non-existing”, Robinson concludes. “I hope my style of light fiction finds its way to an audience and sparks some underground enthusiasm.”

If you're looking for something different, both in terms of content and presentation, hop on over to her blog (http://www.leeharlemrobinson.com/) and give it a read.
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