Foreword from the Editor

Foreword from the Editor

Our Strange and Wonderful House defied easy categorisation from the very moment of its inception.

Although it was a “Challenge” by the standards of the digital classification system of the collaborative fiction-hosting website Ficly, the introduction written for the so-called Challenge by the writer known only by the colourfully meaningless handle of Zxvasdf welcomed readers and would-be writers with the following statement of intent:

“Let me make one thing clear: this is not a challenge. It is your chance to become one of many architects of an impossible house. This challenge merely serves to keep our contributions in one place as to be more readily accessible than it normally would be.”

Cunningly, yet frustratingly, it elided any literary terminology, casting the writers as “architects” of the titular House. When we set about the task of collecting all the shards of Our Strange and Wonderful House into one definitive book, we were thus faced with the peculiar challenge of figuring out what, precisely, kind of book it was that we had decided to bring into the world.

What Our Strange and Wonderful House certainly is not, despite appearances, is a collection of short stories. To begin with, its ninety-odd fragments are not generally stories. Two of them, Sir Bic’s I Am An Athenaeum and McKennab’s The Spinning Room, are written in verse, and many others, were they to be published by themselves, could be termed prose poems without argument.

Indeed, although many of the fragments happen to function as narratives in their own right, Our Strange and Wonderful House’s overall structure was never meant to be a narrative one. The original premise called for contributors to write vignettes focusing on the many rooms and areas of the House, not on its inhabitants.

Oftentimes the narrators and protagonists of the vignettes went unnamed, left to stand as avatars for the writer, reader, or both. Writers joining in late were, on a handful of occasions, lightly chided by their peers for dwelling too much on a character, and not enough on the setting.

Yet the whole, in this instance, becomes more than the sum of its part: to read the collected Strange and Wonderful House is to embark on a fractured but transformative journey through mad rooms, biblical jungles, and dreamlike perspectives, which is also the journey of a community of writers feeling out the limits of the medium, slowly discovering what they are creating together.

A novel was not, at any stage, what the creators of Our Strange and Wonderful House set out to write. Nevertheless, we can think of no better way to present the complete Strange and Wonderful House than in the form of what, a decade on, it has become in the eyes of a reader to whom the gaps of weeks, months, years between entries are so many empty dates: a novel, and more than that: a true experimental novel.

For this reason, we have chosen to refer to the fifty-seven ‘official’ entries in Our Strange and Wonderful House, presented in chronological order, as ‘Chapters’. In addition to these fifty-seven pieces, we have reinserted the two halves of Into the Gardens, which were indistinguishable in form from the other Chapters despite not appearing on the hub page. We have also allowed The Fall of the Strange and Wonderful House, where Jeanne Morningstar closed the book on the House two years after the project’s spark had given out, to stand as the final chapter of the novel, bringing us to an even sixty.

As was the nature of Ficly, a number of entries among the fiftyseven also spawned ‘sequels’ and ‘prequels’. These were, in some cases almost indistinguishable from proper ‘chapters’; in others, avowed spin-offs, branching out from the main thrust of Our

Strange and Wonderful House to explore a loose thread from a given room in a more truly narrative way, deepening the setting or simply letting the writer’s imagination run wild. After much hesitation, we settled on uniformly referring to these texts as ‘Appendices’, placed between the Chapter that inspired them and the next, regardless of publication chronology.

The Fall of the Strange and Wonderful House, which was so final as to depict the destruction of the House itself, was written to mark the passing of Ficly as an active community. (Though Ficly remains online to this day, it is now a mere static archive.) However, one final text, Kendal Reed’s ironically-titled Overgrown, inserted itself into the canon of Our Strange and Wonderful House a scant few days later, picking up the loose thread intentionally left dangling by Morningstar at the end of The Fall of the Strange and Wonderful House. Alone among the works collected in this book, Overgrown was not released on the defunct Ficly but on Tumblr, although the nature of the CC-BY-SA license allows us to reproduce it here with the same ease as the actual Ficly material. We have chosen to dub Overgrown the Epilogue of the novel, though one could not be faulted for preferring to think of it as a short, but standalone, sequel.

The Ficly website gave the opportunity for readers, and the authors themselves, to comment on any given entry. Some of the comments and discussions which took place under various Our Strange and Wonderful House entries can prove enlightening concerning the beliefs of the House’s creators on the House itself. We have reproduced in footnotes all such comments which we deemed to be of possible interest, although we did not endeavour to be exhaustive. Other footnotes will provide clarity on specific editorial choices, point out important turning points in the development of Our Strange and Wonderful House, or, other times still, explicate varyingly obscure references and allusions.

The text of the stories has not received any editing liable to alter the meaning or artistic integrity of the material. However, we have freely unified formatting and punctuation, corrected typos, and obviously-unintentional grammatical lapses.

Taking advantage of Ficly’s release of all its fiction content under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License, this project has been undertaken without contact with the original Ficly team or the individual writers whose work is represented. As such, suppositions made in footnotes or this foreword concerning their intents and opinions may only reflect the views of the Editor.

To avoid violations of privacy, no efforts have been made to credit or identify the writers using names other than their original screen handles, except in such cases where they already created a public link between their Ficly writing and either their legal name, or a pen name which we found more up-to-date or otherwise suitable.

Among these:

Jeanne Morningstar’s Ficly work was published under the handle ‘Garsecg’.

The writer we identify as ‘32 Squared’ later changed their Ficly account to display the even more abstract ‘32 ^ 2’.

The writer we identify as ‘McKennab’ had their Ficly account display the name ‘sky.castles’.

Valen Lim’s contribution was done under the name ‘punpun’, though with a link in their bio to their Wordpress blog, where the ‘Valen Lim’ name is available.

Shu Sam Chen’s Ficly account used the handle ‘HSAR’, though their gmail address, including their full name, appeared in their bio.

Similarly, we have not attempted to guess the gender or pronouns of those writers who did not make either publically

available during their time as Ficly writer. Accordingly, this Foreword and our footnotes generally employ the singular ‘they’ to refer to writers. This should not be construed as active attribution of a nonbinary identity to any specific individuals.

Because it is our contention that Our Strange and Wonderful House, especially as presented in this edition, should be viewed as a complete work, we have not attempted to reproduce the ‘Jenny Everywhere License’ paragraph for every entry in which Jenny appears or is mentioned. Instead, we reproduce it below, with the understanding that it applies to this entire ebook.

The character of Jenny Everywhere is available for use by anyone, with only one condition. This paragraph must be included in any publication involving Jenny Everywhere, in order that others may use this property as they wish. All rights reversed

This ebook, to the best of our knowledge, is in complete accordance with the licenses governing the texts and concepts collected therein. However, we elect not to commercialise it. Copies should be shared freely, much like the fiction which inspired it. The copyright for the actual critical material included in this edition (including the Foreword) does, however, remain in the hands of Aristide Twain, and should not be reproduced without his consent in any format other than unaltered copies of the present ebook. The same goes for the cover design, which also makes use of assets generated using the wombo.art tool (who have our thanks) and of the original Ficly logo.

Aristide Twain January 2022