On June 4, two of Inhae Lee’s teeth (or as she puts it, “teef”) jumped into a bathtub and scrubbed themselves clean with toothpaste. On August 4, they went for a dip in the pool. These are a few of the recent entries on My Milk Toof, a blog that details, through photo essays, the not-so-mundane adventures of the creator’s liberated baby teeth, lovingly named ickle and Lardee.

Each photo is a treat to behold, having been painstakingly assembled with a mix of both miniaturized props that complement the teeth’s small size as well as actual-sized objects. And though visually stunning, the narratives themselves are surprisingly straightforward. A recent post called “Sweet Treats” consisted of nearly 35 photos of the two “teef” eating ice cream, and a large majority of those photos were merely captioned with the words, “slurp slurp slurp.”

Faulkner, it ain’t.

But readers loved it. “Sweet Treats” has received over 200 comments and counting, and while there are no statistics available about the readership of the site itself, the 13,500+ fans on My Milk Toof’s Facebook page indicate this is more than just a casual project.

My Milk Toof is only one of a rising number of Internet-based projects that reinterpret the notion of “creative fiction.” Twitter has spawned dozens of minute-form artistic undertakings: you can now find 140-character poetry and fiction, collaborative Twitter stories, and even Twitter musicals. With Youtube’s links-within-videos feature, users can now enjoy choose-your-own-adventure films. The scope of online fiction today is much broader than it was a year ago, or even only a few months ago.

But photo essays are nothing new. Flash fiction is nothing new. Neither are choose-your-own-adventure stories, though in the past they were limited to Bantam Books, Goosebumps, and DVDs starring Frankie Muniz. So why are things so different now? Why are projects like My Milk Toof such a hit?

One constant among these new fictional pursuits is that few of them aim to be the sort of thing you’d study in class. Projects like My Milk Toof obviously aren’t out to speak to some profound truth or stir a cultural revolution with their messages. I mean, for God’s sake, it’s about baby teeth getting sunburnt by the pool. But through the silliness, there’s a certain joy in these narratives that sometimes evades us when we are reading the classics or watching early cinema. We’re used to treating the classics like something to be studied seriously and held sacred, and all too often we can forget that it’s supposed to be fun too. With My Milk Toof and Twitter poetry, that seriousness is stripped away, and what we are left with is joy. The joy of the craft of storytelling, the joy of devouring that story and sharing it with our friends. The joy of seeing the world of fiction as it is, and as it can be.

But are websites like this just a passing gimmick? Will projects like Twitter poetry soon be a thing of the past as we discovers these opportunities in fiction on the Internet and then exploit them until they become passé? Or is this truly a new form of storytelling? I have no idea. But while I wait, I’m going to see with ickle and Lardee are up to.