"I like the idea that private blogs are more and more taking over. The idea that labels will start to send young seventeen-year-old girls in Texas shoes and bags, hoping they would post it, which means that those young women have the power to raise sales. Magazines will change a lot in the future, the younger generations don't trust advertising anymore, and the Internet will push the publication industry in another direction," Christiane Bördner, creator and creative director of I Love You, a Berlin-based fashion magazine.
- www.iloveyoumagazine.blogspot.com

How can I create a genuine character without seeking the expert opinions on the subject? Beyond the authenticity of her voice, I truly want to engage teenage girls, to hear how they see, feel, read, experience, and most of all, how they imagine this character. I want to hear it in real time, not three years from now, when it's too late for me to make the necessary changes. So, the best way of making this character more real, more human, more alive is by making her virtual.

Furthermore, spend any time looking at the blogs of teenage girls, and you'll see that they love writing; they love books; they love sharing and creating books by printing out images and words that touch them, designing image and text in unique ways in order to make those books their own, and I would like Saccades to be included in that process. Of course, in terms of copyright, all the artwork I choose for the blog and site remains the property of the respective artists, and whenever possible, will be identified with links to those artists' websites. However, anything I write and post on the Saccades site and blog are not only fair use, I encourage readers to take my writing and do with it as they see fit.

My attitude is this: Revise it. Rewrite it. Change it. Expand it. Deface up. Pass it on or hand it back. I don't care: because whatever writing I post on the site is there for the taking; and whatever anyone else posts is mine to use. This model exists in open source software: forking, pushing; pulling; patching and cloning; root branches, repositories, all of which Cam knows like the back of his hand. And for the record, Cam is left-handed, and I have known this about him from the start - trust me, I've known some lefties - but I'm preparing a blog post that illustrates exactly why. It might sound like a trivial detail, but it's critical to his characterization and the overall design, equally. However, as for Linux or its descendants, well, as Tavi Williams would say, I feel bad that the model had to work with such a boring setting. Indeed.

As I imagine it now, Saccades Project will share certain properties, but it's also quite different than "fan fiction" (such as you see for shows like Battlestar Galactica, LOST and ALIAS) for the simple reason that I am the author, and there will be thousands of subjective decisions that I will make, alone. Although, one day, who knows, maybe in a year's time, there could be a core team involved in another incarnation of Saccades, the book. In fact, I'd love Thea to have a personal blog, to launch a blog within the blog, yes, but more importantly, a blog created entirely by contributors that would be international in scope.

The first draft of Saccades is approximately one-hundred-and-ten pages in length, but it's skeletal. It's a frame, and the advantage of posting this now is that I like the idea of young readers, in particular, treating this first draft like a literary coloring book, if you will; dismantling it, rebuilding it; transforming it into a comic book or a zine; scanning, uploading, and posting it on their own websites and blogs. But my dream, of course, is that the character Thea speaks to some brilliant young girl, out there, somewhere in this world, a real teenage girl who will one day turn Saccades into a truly mind-blowing video game of her own design. But, for now, Saccades Project is simply an open studio for a book, and an open invitation to anyone with Internet connection to view the process of writing that book, to contribute and engage in the writing process.