What is a web serial? It’s like a webcomic, but all prose.
Daron’s Guitar Chronicles tells the story of Daron Moondog (real name withheld by request) from about the time he was eighteen onward. He arrives at RIMCon (Rhode Island Musical Conservatory) in the mid-1980s, desperate to leave behind a dysfunctional family in New Jersey’s suburbs and discover himself. It’s the advent of MTV, AIDS, and punk versus metal, all of which would affect his journey searching for fame, artistic expression, and the courage to seek out the sex and love he needs.
Daron’s Guitar Chronicles is a bildungsroman, which is a fancy word for a novel where the coming of age process is long and gradual.
New posts appear every Monday and Thursday, and on Saturday too each time the Tip Jar hits $25, with other incentives offered to readers along the way. If the posts don’t appear as scheduled… something went horribly wrong technologically. Posts appear at 12 noon Eastern US time. The site had a soft launch on November 1st, 2009 and a “real launch” on November 9th 2009.
Sometimes “liner notes” posts appear on other days, too, as a bonus.
News: October 24, 2010. An ebook edition of DGC is now on sale at Smashwords or for direct download right from this site. Visit our new online store.
News: March 4, 2010. Daron’s Guitar Chronicles has won the 2010 Rose and Bay Award for crowdfunded fiction!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Daron’s Guitar Chronicles is by Cecilia Tan, the award-winning author of many novels and short stories, ranging in topics from baseball literary fiction to erotic fantasy.
She first began writing about Daron when she was 16 years old, in high school in suburban New Jersey in the early 1980s. Fragments of stories came and went, and Daron figured in several short stories she wrote for classes in college, though never as the central character. It seemed for many years like Daron’s story was being told to her by the characters all around him. It wasn’t until 1992, in graduate school for a masters degree in writing, that she buckled down and started writing from his point of view.
What followed was six years of work, as Cecilia worked on the tale on and off while finishing grad school and starting up Circlet Press. It had quickly become clear that the story was not a traditional 80,000 word novel in the same way that a road movie is not a traditional three-act film. The story was more of a bildungsroman. The original final draft was mammoth in size. Several editors and one agent persuaded Cecilia to cut material equal to the size of a whole novel from it, but what was left was still more than twice the size of a commercial fiction novel.
And so the material–much praised by editors who nonetheless rejected it as unsalable because of its size and scope–sat on Cecilia’s hard drive for about ten years. Until now, when web serialization became a viable reality.
The story was not written as a “period piece” of the late 80s/early 90s–that was when the bulk of it was conceived and written. That’s how it was, then, before cell phones, before “alternative music” became hip, before there were out gay celebrities.
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