(from The Beacon News, January 2003)

Big City is like any big city ... except different.

It has gourmet coffee, the Internet, DVDs, crime, traffic, commerce and

tensions between cultures and philosophies. The difference is that those tensions exist between the human inhabitants of Big City and the Elves, Goblins, Sirens, Vampires and other creatures that also live there.

You see, this Big City started in the minds of West Aurora High School

graduates Eric Schwartz and Greg Twait, and now exists in cyberspace,

at bwatersmedia.com/bigcity.html. Big City is an online serial, a series ofshort stories based in the mythical city with a stable of recurring characters. The words of Schwartz himself, from the Web site, can explain it better: "Quite simply, Big City is a cross between Noir Films, NYPD Blue, Lord of The Rings and a little bit of the X-Files.

The stories center around five main characters; Adam "Stack Fury" Forray (a Big City Police detective), Robert "Smiles" Johnson (a private investigator), John "Needless Action" D'yen (Stack's partner), Charlie Pickens (Smiles' operative) and Laura Medrano (award winning journalist and Charlie's love interest.)" The set-up sounds like something that 50 years ago would have graced Sunday night radio, 40 years ago would have shown up at the movie houses on Saturday mornings, 30 years ago might have been a Saturday morning TV show and even now could be a cable TV staple. But because Schwartz and Twait do not yet have big city exposure, they chose the more accessible Internet as a

way of getting their serial out.

"It's much more immediate," Schwartz said. "I wanted to do it as an online radio show, but the logistics didn't work out. But this way, the series can get out right away, and I get immediate feedback." And that feedback has been good. Science fiction and fantasy fans and fellow writers have given Big City good marks.

And it turns out that online publishing is not only popular now with the masses as a way to an audience, it could be the wave of the future. It is to the written word what mp3 downloads have been to the music world. In fact, within days of putting up the Big City site, Schwartz had heard from so many other fellow writers that Big City quickly joined several writing web rings that all link to other online writing sites, including the Ring of Fantasy Writers, Science Fiction Creators Webring (sfcreators.com) and the Ultimate Sci Fi/Fantasy Webring.

So far, online publishing is high on exposure and low on money-making ability, but who knows what lies ahead. The exposure is fine with long-time collaborators Schwartz (who now lives in DeKalb) and Twait, who once started the Aurora- based comedy group Strange's together and have written together many times. So far, Schwartz and Twait have written the five Big City episodes, except for one which Schwartz' wife, Millie Collins, wrote. (It should be noted here that this reporter also collaborates with Schwartz on other ventures, including other ones at the Boundary Waters media site, but has nothing to do with Big City).

One of the democratic virtues of online publishing is that it is easy for anyone with a computer and Internet access to contribute. In the Big City site, Schwartz has a primer on Big City and a prospectus for anyone interested in writing an episode. In the meantime, Schwartz and Twait continue churning out episodes at a rate of about one a month. That makes for a lot of good reads for web-cruising fantasy and science fiction fans at a most reasonable price -- free!