Editorial matters

An editorial, in which the past, present and future meet

Welcome to TiconderogaOnline, the newest incarnation of one of Australia's oldest online fiction websites.

When I retired from online publishing in late 2000, I thought I'd retired for good. While the website hadn't achieved as much as my other publishing efforts it was time to move on to other things.

Late last year Lee Battersby approached me with the idea of resurrecting this site. While I was at first hesitant, the addition of Liz Grzyb and Lyn Triffitt to the team convinced me that it was both possible to do things right this time, and that there really is a need for a site such as this.

Australian SF has had some exciting times in the last 15 years: from the birth of Eidolon, Aurealis and Aphelion Publications to the emergence of newer markets in the late 1990s; the party that was AussieCon III and the flourishing of markets in the last two years. Print markets have flourished: Agog!, Borderlands, Fables & Reflections, the CSFG anthologies, Dark Animus, ASIM and others are all publishing vast quantities of short fiction.

The amount of original online fiction, with a potential audience of thousands, has changed little in the last five years. When I started TiconderogaOnline in 1999, it was the only Australian paying online market (the only other site publishing fiction was Antipodean SF, who continue to this day). With the re-launch of TiconderogaOnline in 2004 there are presently two paying markets down under, the other being Ideomancer.

It's all about ego. A lot of writers want to be able to hold the finished product in their hands, open up the contents page and point to their name. They want a place where they can physically sign their name, upon request. I should say "we", because all the editors of TiconderogaOnline are also writers of some description. We don't want to appear on a screen, at a resolution of 72 or 96 dots per inch. We don't want to be 800x600 or 1024x768, not even in 32 bit colour. We want to be perfect bound and saddle stitched, even if it means we're only read by 50 or 500 people at a time, not thousands.

As editors of an online publication, we aim to change that. We're going to bring you the best fiction being written by Australians, in part by bringing the best out of our writers. If you read our guidelines you'll see we're after gonzo fiction, offbeat stuff, because to us the best stories don't follow the crowd — they don't even try to lead it. We want the stories that stand apart from the crowd, maybe looking in a different direction to everyone else. We aim to challenge writers to produce these amazing stories, and then challenge the readers. The reward of a great story is that it will stay with you forever, and we aim to bring these rewards to readers all over the world, free of charge.

Russell B. Farr

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