Virtual Yardies

You may recall, dear readers, that in the August 2007 CRB I interviewed writer and lit-blogger Geoffrey Philp. Our conversation ranged over various issues confronting Caribbean writers who explore online media, and it ended with Geoffrey's description of his most recently completed work:

NL: You recently announced that you’ve completed the manuscript of a new novel, “Virtual Yardies”, in which the story is told “entirely as blogs, IMs, and e-mails”--with a mystery plot, no less, in which a group of Jamaican bloggers are stalked by a religious zealot. What inspired this, apart from your own blog?

GP: The idea was a spin-off from another recently completed novel, “Zone of Uncertainty”, which is being shopped around. I realised that the “lost daughter” character lived in the world of blogs, so I wanted to carry that idea a bit further. I also asked myself, what would an epistolary novel look like in 2007? The plot needed something to propel it forward, and given the duplicity and anonymity of the web, it seemed a natural fit for the creation of my Jamaican “Cotton Mather” character who will take God’s law into his own hands and kill the unrighteous: “fornicators, adulterers, men who lie with men”.

One important note. Because it’s also a love story, the characters alternate between IMs and emails, depending on their level of intimacy.

Geoffrey's twenty-first-century "epistolary" novel has now gone live, via a series of blogs he's set up, each belonging to one of his fictional characters. Virtual Yardies starts here, and the plot will unfold in the coming days and weeks....