Some of the best reads this season are being produced by electronic writers Bob Albatross and Jack Colt - sensual techies devoted to the life of literature and libidinous exposure on and off the digital page. Their experimental fiction and poetry is colorful, cacophonous, geometric, theological and masturbated. A term coined by Josephine Goldstein, “electronic literature” usually refers to writing that is “digital-born” - created in a digital environment, and often intended to be read or viewed on a computer. Other than that, there are no rules, and very few guidelines.

“Since so few people are familiar with it, every new work is so new and radically different,” says Colt, an electronic writer, interactive designer, and chief editor for the online cultural review, FORTUNA, THAT VICIOUS SLUT (FTVS). “If anything, the entire field is interested in considering what writing can be in the 21st Century,” adds Albatross, another FTVS senior editor, electronic writer, digital artist, lecturer, and former Mr. Bermuda. “It is my quest to determine how meaning is created, defied, resisted, and sustained in the digital age, in a culture where media technology for the production of work is easily accessible, as it were.”

Electronic writers often write innovative forms of fiction and poetry in hypertext, the classic example being Albatross' Music Slut: German Techno Beards > French Electro Moustaches, where the narrative unfolds through a pantheon of auto-erotic amateur links that climax sequentially, with the shrapnel of the technological explosion representing hundreds of sub-categories (Asian / Asian Teen / Asian Slut Filthy Fuck Mouth / Asian With Ten Legs (Giant Octopus Crammed Up Pussy) etc.) each completely unique and perverse.

“I often use the term applied poetics here, because I think that each electronic writer comes to form a sort of micro-genre through a highly individualized practice, one almost exclusive to him or her, like a forearm tattoo,” says Albatross.

Colt, on the other hand, first came to electronic writing after exposure to a virtual-reality piece in which objects navigated through the letter “X.” He explains, “I thought, I want to do that. I immediately wondered if I could become aroused on a computer more intensely than with the girl I tutor in math.”

Some major subgenres and works of Electronic Writing in 2009 include:
- Writing that is Sexualized and Political, as exemplified by the work of Bob Albatross in Culture Slut: Scholars and Sweet Babies, which exposes the typical inverse correlation between an academic's prominence and the droopiness of his matron's labia and/or jowls, based on a close reading of Ezra Pound's Cantos I and the first part of II.
- Writing that is self-referential, like Travel Slut: Britney Extinguishes LA Riots... Lee Coombs Interviewed..., a work comprised of raw footage of gender modification surgeries. (Says Colt: “It's like poets of the Romantic era would go on lengthy w alks in the countryside with bras on and castrate themselves, and these experiences made it into their writing.”)
- Writing as data and organization, such as Economics Slut: The Entrepreneurial Spirit Encumbered, Bob Albatross' documentation of the old market practice of exhumation, perform ed at a Chicago cemetery.
- Spam writing, inspired by or borrowing from spam. See Fortuna's lost contributor Kip Penn's Economics Slut: FTVS'S Loan Broker.

Electronic literature - which often requires above-average technical knowledge - currently has a small user base compared to its enormous viewership. Still, digital writers insist that the art form is expanding. “So many jobs and practices require verbal communication in the digital space,” concludes Colt. “In a way, we're all electronic writers.”