A week ago I looked at a copy of Time magazine,usually not on my reading list. The cover story was just too seductive. Here was a place to read about America's ambitious gen x'ers who are shaking a collective mental fist at older people for having dismissed them before they were ready. The article featured a famous film director (his break was "Clerks") and a nail polish entrepreneur (her hook was colors).

These days, when every popular magazine can pretty much reduce an entire generation to two sides of a shiny coin, it's especially good to find your rescue in another type of storytelling.

Martha Conway's online novel, In Some Unrelated Land, is about a woman in her mid-20s who is looking for her life. At times her voice reveals that she is someone soaked in grief (she has lost her parents in a car wreck and is wandering Berkeley with very little cash); then sometimes the perspective shifts just a little, so that at other moments she is just considering a reflex � her own hunger for a meal, for example, or what clean, ironed sheets feel like. Always her voice is consistent.

Through all her stories, Conway is studying people's longings. Often her characters are interested in various solutions or alternatives (homeopathy, nutrition, body work, even pyramid schemes). About this preoccupation with such things she says:

"I'm interested in how people cope with their circumstances. In every community there are certain, sanctified ways to cope �going to church, or working with the less fortunate, or going to support groups, or eating a certain diet � usually several related types of activities or life styles. However, there is also often some competitiveness around these activities: people who go to church every day, or go to several support groups, or are not only vegetarians, but macrobiotic as well. I'm interested in people who go to extremes, since this exposes the limitations of that activity. Nothing can absolutely �fix' you."

No one person is the basis for any of her characters. Instead, she says she begins to notice someone who keeps recurring in her life. She uses the example of the "hyper-vegetarian, beautiful, alternative-lifestyle-seeking woman." Then she starts to write about this person. "Believe me, this type is not unique; nothing is. I do not mean this cynically. It comforts me, in fact."

The novel took her over a year to write (she did it during '93-'94). She stopped working on another novel to put it up on the Web in the summer of �95. Conway is an Antiweb member and the story editor for Enterzone (where she has started a column on fiction on the net; don't miss it this month because it features The Bathrooms of Madison County). In Some Unrelated Land is published by Pilgrim Press, a collective press made up of Conway, fellow Antiweb members Christian Crumlish, Levi Asher, and others.

As for the photos for In Some Unrelated Land, Conway says: "Most of them I took for the novel; some I already had. Briggs Nisbet [who works with her on Enterzone] came out with me one Friday afternoon and we took a bunch around Berkeley. I also went to New York to take a few. The photos were intended to extend the writing, not illustrate it. I wanted to give the flavor of Berkeley, of the life the character was leading. Also, you may notice I have a lot of photos of signs � this fit with my idea that my character was looking for people (or things) to tell her what to do with her life, even if she wasn't able to follow their advice."

No, she says, you can't support yourself by publishing on the Web yet. "I'm not holding my breath. But you can't really make a living publishing fiction in the more traditional way, either, unless you're writing bestsellers. Literary fiction, forget it. All the authors I like have additional jobs teaching, or as journalists."

She is also working on a novel, which may or may not find its way to the Web. "My dream is that I can convince some publishing company to publish it as a paperback AND on the Web. I'd like to find an illustrator for it � someone professional. I have an idea of line art drawings. But we'll see."

Next time: Finishing up � more about women, editors, Enterzone, learning how to draw, and something called Posiweb.