Three things motivated me to write xo bri xoxo me xoxoxo love you christy: a love for Brian, Margo and Christy, the characters I created in my first novel, The Little Girl I Once Knew; a desire to project their stories, friendship and lives out of the setting of that book (their high school years, 1974-1977) and into the present (their early-40s-adulthood); and, finally, a spirit of experimentation. I wanted to do more than just "write a novel in e-mail." Many authors have taken on the epistolary form before, and even the idea of "writing-a-novel-in-the-characters'-voices-except-that-instead-of-letters-it's-in-e-mail" probably isn't all that original. I don't know specific titles of books or stories or author's names, but I'm certain it's been done already.

I'd guess, though, that those email epistolaries were written in the same way as a traditional novel --crafted and polished-- and that the author's choice of e-mail as a device probably didn't influence their choice of composition technique one way or another.

I didn't want to do what I did with my first novel (sit down with a pen and paper and hack out a rough draft, except in this case I'd be pretending to write emails... then take those roughs and, between the computer and MORE longhand, revise and re-revise and re-re-revise them till they "worked" as a novel). Instead, I thought it'd be fun to try to tell a story through real-time, actual e-mails.

I'd already created e-mail accounts for each of my characters (don't ask), so I started typing messages between "them" in their voices and as I wrote, a story unfolded. The e-mail addresses in the chapter headers are actual working e-mail addresses; the times and dates in those headers represent the actual times and dates the messages/chapters were written. Almost all of xo bri xoxo me xoxoxo love you christy is presented here unrevised, the e-mails standing as they were when I first hit SEND. Typos and grammatical errors stand uncorrected; only a handful of minor inconsistencies (places where I honestly just lost track of the story, or the characters, or their whereabouts, or --ha ha-- all three) were corrected. None of the dates or times were changed. This made xo bri xoxo me xoxoxo love you christy a very engaging, consuming and involved piece of writing. During the two months that I wrote it, I found myself very conscious of time as it related to my characters and the work I was creating for them: "what," I kept asking myself, "would Brian, Margo, Christy and the others be doing right now? Would they be online writing at this time, or would they just pick up the phone and call? And what would be said or left unsaid, repeated, referred to, amplified or ignored in the messages they sent?" Fortunately, I don't have much of a life, so this wasn't a very big problem.

xo bri xoxo me xoxoxo love you christy will be available online only. I neither wish nor intend that it be published in print or (Good gawd) read aloud as an audio book. This work was written online, electronically, and many of its quirks, strengths and weaknesses derive from the medium in which I created it; I feel it works best in that format.

Does it work as a novel or as literature? Uhhhhhhhh... well... all I know is, at the end of Christy's and Margo's chat at the end of this work, I felt like I'd not only reached the end of the so-called Story Arc, but that I'd accomplished what I'd set out to accomplish: conducted a literary experiment and, more importantly, brought the characters that I loved into the present day. That satisfies me; I hope you enjoy it, too.

Thanks for reading this!

Max Harrick Shenk
September 2004