So, what is it about coffee lately? Whether you're drinking a cup of French Roast in your kitchen, cradling a now-familiar green and white Starbucks cup on your drive to work, or just hanging out in your favorite coffeehouse, you know that coffee and espresso have become hot items. Now, as with seemingly everything else, the bean is moving to the Internet.
Blame it on Sun Microsystems, with their "a-good-name-is-better-than-a-fully-realized-technology" Java programming language. As soon as Java began its caffeinated marketing buzz, the media pulled out their well-thumbed thesauri and began an onslaught of synonyms not seen since we were all promised a dizzying ride on the information superhighway (complete with its speed bumps, potholes, roadside attractions, and the overabundant road kill).
Or, maybe you can blame it on the new phenomenon/fad of cybercafes, springing up in most major metro areas. You no longer have to grow a goatee, buy a used PowerBook, and hang out at your favorite coffeehouse pretending to write while actually playing Solitaire. For about ten bucks per month, you can set up an account and seat yourself in front of a computer (usually sporting a fast T1 connection) where your email is delivered alongside your double-tall nonfat no-whip half-decaf mocha with extra chocolate.
On the surface, this pairing of drab office technology with the warm atmosphere of a coffeehouse seems likely to produce a bizarre hybrid, some venture capitalist's multi-genre wet dream. But surprisingly, the two realms blend together like Bailey's and espresso. For over four centuries, coffee and coffeehouses have brought together people's ideologies, arts, discussions, and writings. With the Internet growing larger and broader than anyone can accurately track, these same people are taking their ideas online.
I don't think it's an understatement to say that coffee (and other forms of caffeine) are fueling large chunks of the Net. It's the propane that keeps most of us up late into the night, working on our ezines, our short stories, our Java applets, our games (developing and playing), our multimedia apps, our novels-continually-in-progress. It`s what wakes us up at ten o'clock the next morning at our "real" jobs, and keeps us coherent enough to function before we can go home and start all over again as readers, programmers, and, for the purposes of this introduction, writers and publishers.
Armed with a cup of coffee and an Internet connection, anyone can become a modern-day publisher. Forget about raising capital, developing business models and drawing up marketing plans. Publishing online doesn't require a tie or a degree. It requires initiative, ideas, a lot of spare time, and coffee/tea/Coke/Jolt/Pepsi/Water Joe/Mountain Dew to stay awake enough to do it all. Most of us publishing on the Internet aren't making money from what we do. We have day jobs to pay the bills, and work online at night to soothe whatever it is that drives us to get lost amid bitmapped typefaces, RGB color palettes, and some of the best electronic words online for hours on end.
Throughout the process of editing and producing this year's eSCENE, my own level of coffee appreciation has grown considerably. Numerous cups of espresso have proved invaluable as I've found myself staring at my computer, trying to figure out why StudioPro is eating all my RAM while rendering a mug with phong shadows; or, when I needed that extra kick to keep me awake enough to read another of the 117 stories stories we received. Pausing to occasionally check my email at 2 a.m., I've found solace in the fact that there are other editors, writers, and friends who are just like me, staring at pixels through the steam of a fresh-brewed cup of java.
It seems natural, therefore, that this year's eSCENE, a forum for reading and discussing the year's best Internet-published short fiction, should revolve around a coffeehouse theme. Despite the graphics, sound files, plug-ins, and QuickTime animations on the Web, the Internet is still largely a text-based, word-based, written-content-based medium. Although the graphic designer in me has striven to make your stay here visually enjoyable, the impatient, I'm-sick-of-waiting-for-graphics-to-load side of me has prompted me to create text-only and minimal-graphics routes through the site as well. The benefits of text can't be understated--sure, you can design a site with all sorts of graphics and animations and sounds (and there are cases when that's entirely appropriate). But when it comes to writing on the Net, nothing beats the ease of displaying a story and printing it out for reading later on the bus ride home. It's mostly for this reason that I believe publishing online has a promising future.
I started eSCENE two years ago because I wanted to be able to find good fiction on the Internet. With the help of many editors, authors, and readers, I've been able to enjoy the best works being published online and offer them in one easy-to-access electronic anthology. Hopefully, you'll agree that eSCENE is definitely worth viewing and downloading. The next time you're in a cybercafe, or exploring the net in the early hours of the morning, brew yourself an especially strong cup of coffee, drop by <http://www.etext.org/Zines/eScene/>, and spend some time with this year's stories. They're worth the hours, the espresso, and the occasional sunrise.
Jeff Carlson,
Series Editor
eSCENE 1996