Xangans are unique; they are the only blogging community who have named themselves after their on-line playground, Xanga.com, The World's Greatest Blogging Community. It is their jungle, their pulpit and endless party, Xanga. Knowing each other well onscreen, yet rarely meeting in real life, they form an Empire on which the Sun never Sets, straddling the world from Detroit to Liverpool, from Toronto to Singapore. Entertaining, quarrelsome, compassionate, bitchy, they have used Xanga to express their talents, their beliefs, their confusions, their pain, their joy, until it has become an essential and enduring part of their lives. I first joined Xanga in 2006. I too flirted with other blogging systems, and saw them swell to vast size, only to dwindled into irrelevance; Xanga has remained the only one in which the written word has ruled and flourished. In this collection of thirty-three blogs, stories and poems by Xangans writing today, some published writers, some - as yet - unknown, we hear the voices of on-line authors struggling to make sense of this world. From the raw cynicism of Lindensmith's "Another Night on the Town" to the life-affirming cheer of Lyne Hamel's "Blessings," we pass through eroticism, through the joys and terrors of love, through the conflicts of religion and the confusions of society, through satire, humor, horror and sentiment.
About the Author: I was born in England. Not the England of bustling London, nor even the southern counties, but the North of great industrial towns, separated by vast expanses of hills and moors, the land of "Wuthering Heights." I read a lot from childhood onwards, and attempted my first short story at age eleven. "Would you like to be an author?" a girl asked me in my teens; "there's no money in it," I replied, not from desire for wealth, but from desire for life, and travel, which require a solid job to bring in the cash. So I worked, and travelled through life, though experience, through the world, yet always the dream of the novel drifted in the back of my mind. Europe I saw, touching its worn stone, and ancient Istanbul, and crazy Rio de Janeiro; and America too, from cold Toronto to sweltering Miami, touching its chill chrome, its smooth plastic. My first published novel is Wake of the Raven, the first of a series chronicling a disastrous love affair from the early nineteen-fifties to the end of the century. I wanted to first try something completely different next, in a different style, so my next published was Zorn, set in 2035, tracking the loves and misadventures of a group of teenagers in a changed world of the not too distant future. By this time I was well aware of the difficulties faced by an as yet unknown author, and attempted a project that had been cooking in my mind for a couple of years: to publish a collection of short stories, poems and blogs writers on my favourite social networking system, Xanga. I titled the book Xangans, and I hope you'll find this collection as interesting to read as I found to edit.