1.  Who is Brian Cotts?
2.  Why's everything look so... artless, so... unadorned....?
3.  What is *30*?
4.  Is "Heaven" supposed to be like that?  If so, explain.
5.  "Noise Writing?"  Are you serious?
6.  Is Ted Lamna real?
7.  Is The Tahiti Objective ever going to be finished, or at least stop changing its title?
8.  Is there comfort in obscurity?
 

1.  Who Is Brian Cotts?
          Brian Cotts is a chronically unpublished Canadian writer.  One day he got sick of being ignored and/or insulted by the Canadian publishing community and decided to take matters into his own hands and start a web page solely devoted to the dissemination of his writing.  He called it COTTSWEB.  Sure everyone's doing it, but it's free and easy and pretty fun, and besides it's a good way to create both a resume and a fairly impressive body of work.  So, why not...?

2.  Why's everything look so... artless, so... unadorned....?
        What you really mean is "Why's everything look so crappy?" but you're way to polite to say that to anyone's face.
        The look of COTTSWEB is a very conscious and deliberate choice.  Brian wanted something that would load on almost any system.  But at the same time he did want a little art, hence the very few banners and backgrounds.  It's a little art but not enough to distract from the issues at hand.  And unlike Java, Flash, and Quicktime websites that give you music and lots of dancing bears, COTTSWEB is almost always there for you.  Occasionally, the larger images may take a minute or two to load on a slow connection, or if you have an older machine, but rest assured they will load, and not send your computer crashing into oblivion.  Also, Brian is a writer, not a painter-- and definitely not an animator-- and so cute little animations of shimmying dwarves while "Jesus Loves You" plays over and over in the background just ain't his style.  Sometime in the future there will be a little of Brian's music here (he may primarily be a writer but he also dabbles a little bit with sound and production), but it will be sequestered away from the writing, in a special music section that you can either go to or ignore.  It won't be thrust upon your unwitting self the instant you access the main page, quadrupling your download time and rudely overriding whatever CD you like to play on your CDR drive while you surf the Net.

3.  What is *30*?
          *30* is a twice-monthly web column and the reason most people seem to visit COTTSWEB.  It's a combination improvised novel / journalistic report and is comprised mostly of dialogue, and set in a cappuccino bar (although occasionally there are strange detours).  *30* was begun in 1999 and will last until the early bits of 2003.  Sometimes it's funny, sometimes it's angry, sometimes it's just plain weird.  It's structured in three "Phases," each "Phase" representing the goings on in a specific year.  Each "Phase" has several "Acts."  There will also be an epilogue that stretches through 2002-3 and at that time Brian will probably write a big prologue for the whole thing, too.
          Anything is fair game in *30*.  Topics have included:  Anime and Manga, James Joyce, 20th century opera, George W. Bush, Talking Coca-Cola sculptures, love and loneliness, university life, true friendship, growing up alienated, the human eye, William S. Burroughs, the destruction of the environment, music, old people, young people, Jar Jar Binks, all those Russians who died in that sub, "reality" tv, "reality," "hyper-reality," death tapes, Lara Croft, spies, Christmas, censorship, religion, pornography, international politics, Jacques Derrida, Japan, and on and on....  You get the idea.

4.  Is "Heaven" supposed to be like that?  If so, explain.
          Yes.  There is nothing wrong with "Heaven."  (Or at least Brian's "Heaven.")
          One day Brian thought it would be extremely funny to write a bleak choose-your-own-adventure type book about the afterlife where every page is exactly the same.  After all, the afterlife is eternal.
          In order to create the full effect Brian wanted, the book was going to have to be thousands of pages long.  However, Brian is very lazy and correlating thousands of identical pages and linking them up with thousands of other identical pages either in a grid pattern, or completely randomly just seemed like too much effort.  Also most publishers, for the most part, are not suicidal fools and refused touch this project unless the all the printing costs were paid in advance by Brian which Brian (also not a suicidal fool) was not going to do.  No way.  Not in a million years.  Not for this book.  Therefore, he decided to translate his book to hypertext and put it on COTTSWEB where it's actually generated little bit of positive feedback from a group of very cynical, bitter people-- but mostly generated masses of confusion and slow, baffled head-scratching.
          FUN FACT:  If you notice when you click on links in "Heaven," the links do take you to different pages.  There are literally hundreds of identical pages making up "Heaven."  Hundreds.
          Oh, and by the way, the title isn't an ironic joke.  Brian is saying: "This is Heaven, this is as good as it gets, this is the best we can hope for, and if this is Heaven you don't even want to try and imagine what Hell is like."  Which of course may or may not be an ironic joke in itself.  And if it is, we're not really sure how.

5.  "Noise Writing?"  Are you serious?
          Partially tongue-in-cheek, partially serious, inspired by William S. Burroughs's cut-ups, Gertrude Stein's Cubist Modernism and Avant-Garde Japanese music, you can find out more about noise writing by following this link here.

6.  Is Ted Lamna real?
          Nope.  He's made up.  It's amazing how many people have actually asked that question.  Ted is the result of Brian's having read just a little too much bad highschool and university poetry.  Once Brian was accused by an angry writer friend of parodying something that does not exist.  This puzzled Brian (and still does) because, he thinks, if you just open your eyes and look around any junior writing workshop, or University level creative writing class, or even-- gasp!-- surf the net looking for poetry, you will find hundreds, nay thousands of budding Theodore Lamnas.  Go figure....

7.  Is The Tahiti Objective ever going to be finished, or at least stop changing its title?
          Right now The Tahiti Objective is in limbo, but it's only in limbo a little bit.  It's going to be revised and expanded some time early-to-mid 2003, and then it's going into stasis for a few months.  So, in 2003, when *30* is over, The Tahiti Objective will take the place of *30* as the ever-changing, ever-evolving centerpiece work of COTTSWEB.  Hopefully by that time it won't suck.  Right now, however, it sucks.  And more than a little bit, too.  Also, the title will be changing again, this time to (in some way) reflect the splendor of Jamaica.

8.  Is there comfort in obscurity?
          Brian Cotts sleeps very well at night knowing the whole world cares more about the corns on Madonna's little toe, or the scabs on the tip of Eminem's dick, or Stephen King's car accident than whether Brian actually lives or dies.  And when he's not sleeping well he can usually be found outside screaming at the clouds as they drift by above, swollen, indifferent and vague.