Laird Harrison may be pushing the boundaries of traditional publishing, but not because he hates bound books.

“I find myself frequently distracted by everything that’s on the internet and on the smartphone," said the Oakland-based writer, "I’m someone who has a lifelong love of fiction, and sitting down with a good book,” 

In spite of Harrison’s love for traditional formats, his new novel “Fallen Lake” will live both on the page and online.

It's the story of two couples living in 1971 California who decide to form a group marriage. To make matters more complicated, both couples have children.

The book is inspired by Harrison’s own childhood, which was spent inside such an unconventional arrangement. At the back of the book is a QR code that takes readers to a blog, where Harrison will be blogging as the characters.

The phenomenon of the interactive novel is not a new one: there have been Twitter books, online narratives of the choose-your-own adventure variety and, more recently, eBooks that feature everything from soundtracks to video.

A new book by San Francisco-based author Daniel Handler (of Lemony Snicket fame) and New York-based illustrator Maira Kalman is not even called a book on its website, but a “project."

It's about a couple through their meeting and eventual split. It’s paired with a Tumblr where readers can submit short accounts of their own break-ups. The responses range from heart-wrenching to funny. Handler personally responds to many of them.

Harrison’s project is less of an add-on to his novel than an extension of it. The book is set in the '70s and tells the story largely from the viewpoints of the adults involved. When he takes the story online on Valentine’s Day, he’ll be blogging from the perspective of Adrienne, one of the daughters, and from the present.

“I want other characters to come to the floor in the contemporary narrative, and Adrienne has a particular perspective on what happened,” Harrison said.

Harrison specifically crafted the online part of the book to allow him to maintain control of the narrative. He will respond to readers’ questions (in the voice of the characters) but they will not get to dictate the story. Depending on reader response, he’s willing to extend the narrative for a year, at which point he’ll finally bring the novel to a close.

Harrison is a first-time novelist being distributed by a small publisher. The level of interest in his experiment remains to be seen, but he may be onto something in his approach. The hunger for continued narratives is proven: fan fiction is plentiful and wide in scope.

J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter characters are frequent subjects of the genre, in which fans write their own narratives imagining plots that don’t exist in the official books. Stories range from highly detailed explorations of a subplot, to decidedly pornographic exploits between major characters.

Scholastic is banking on rapid Potter fans to gobble up online offerings in the form of “Pottermore,” a website being billed as “an interactive, illustrated companion to the books” where the stories “live on and where readers can explore them in a new way.” The site doesn’t offer character blogs, but it is sold as an experience specially crafted by Rowling, where readers can “discover all the additional information that J.K. Rowling has written.”

“I think all passionate readers have the experience of you finish a book and you wish there was something more,” Harrison said. “There’s a character you spent hours or days with and they’ve almost become your friend and you can’t stand to close the book on them. I like the idea of offering the possibility to interact with the them again.”

Correction: A previous version of this story stated that Laird Harrison is a Berkeley-based author. Harrison lives in Oakland.