Volume One Issue Twelve marks the last issue of our first year. To celebrate I’ve put together a special issue that I’ve been planning to do for some time. This issue features a chapbook of automatic fiction I composed under the pseudonym sheisty while logged into the online literary forum on craigslist. (an online community website) The fiction I composed was usually very different from the fiction I generally write. The idea was to create a character, develop a separate style, and check out what’s going on with the world of writing outside of the world of industry critics and the like. It was basically to get a sense of what the average writer/reader was looking for, found interesting in fiction, which new literary writers were and were not getting love from everyday people and so on and so forth. The results turned out to be pretty interesting.

This issue is divided in two sections. The first section is an essay describing the experience being sheisty, the writer of automatic fiction. I describe generally what impressions I got from other people on the forum, which writers are talked about a lot, how people feel about our living and dead literary and commercial writers, and where a lot of folks think fiction should head. The second part is a “chapbook” with selections of the automatic fiction I composed while I was on the website. Enjoy!