Benchley, who channels the rock 'n' roll catechism of Nick Hornby's novel "High Fidelity" ("I gave a secret prayer of thanks to the god of indie rock, which is Lou Reed," Benchley says), has a word for such low moments.  "I had reached the state of total antirock, which I call 'Train,' after the band," Benchley writes, recalling a date that had disintegrated into a tiresome fit of tears and personal confession. "When the head of every drum is torn, and all guitars are out of tune, when the microphone melts in your hand, that's Train."  Trains are a recurring motif for Mr. Ford -- a towering, big-bellied, relentlessly polite man with a recent history of mainlining Diet Coke and Marlboros. Every few minutes, from the windows behind the computer table squeezed into a corner of his room, the F train, elevated high above the neighborhood, can be seen cutting a diagonal path toward the Gowanus and Coney Island.  It inspired the name of Mr. Ford's personal Web site, Ftrain.com, the font from which everything else, he says -- jobs, friends, the book -- has sprung.  Since 1997, Mr. Ford has honed his prose at Ftrain, experimenting with narrative architecture and programming derring-do, and spinning random thoughts or diarylike yarns about the life of Paul Ford -- reared in West Chester, Pa., son of an English professor and a professional puppeteer, educated at Alfred University, 80 miles south of Rochester, a school best known for ceramic engineering.  Ftrain painted a life that looked a lot like Mr. Ford's, with its loosely connected tales of girlfriends, bars or rehearsing a 12-minute musical about a squirrel and a rat in Prospect Park. But each dispatch was just as likely to be made -- unapologetically -- from threads of fiction as fact. He sometimes posted under pseudonyms, growing tired of his own voice.  Mr. Ford said Ftrain was never about keeping a journal or, worse, blogging, but simply about writing, and telling stories: funny, introspective, winsome stories. The site developed a loyal Internet audience that began yielding opportunities.  Editors at Harper's Magazine admired the way Ftrain eschewed linear, temporal archiving, opting instead for quirky thematic nodes like "Story" and "Theory" from which narratives spread like veins into cross-linked subnodes and subnarratives. One result, over many years, was an almost hierarchical map of Paul Ford, the person and the persona, and the magazine hired him to bring the same approach to its online presence.  Another admirer was Rosecrans Baldwin, who, along with Andrew Womack, founded The Morning News in Brooklyn in 1999.  "Paul and I met years ago when I wrote him an e-mail saying I liked an article he'd written," Mr. Baldwin said. "He wrote back saying he wanted to rape me. I replied with similar zest and our correspondence has continued similarly."  Mr. Ford was one of the first writers The Morning News invited to contribute to the site, so when he came to them in 2003, infused with a fresh disdain for the deadly serious alternativeness of Williamsburg and the idea of serializing the story of a young, obliviously upbeat rocker establishing himself in New York, the magazine didn't blink.  "We'd been really eager to try something along these lines, serializing books as they're written," Mr. Baldwin said, "so we loved the idea, and readers went nuts."  In June 2004, a link and a nod from the online kingmaker of media ephemera, Gawker.com, drove thousands of readers to The Morning News site and Gary Benchley's letters. Within weeks, Mr. Ford was receiving calls from agents and publishers. The deal with Plume was sealed by August of last year.  Some readers -- particularly fans of Ftrain, or Mr. Ford's other work for The Morning News -- knew all along that he was Gary Benchley. Others, including an editor at this paper who invited Mr. Benchley to consider writing for The New York Times, did not.  "Sure, Benchley's story is still good," wrote one disappointed fan, on learning the truth at GloriousNoise.com, an indie-music site where Benchley's escapades were closely watched by artists living vicariously through the rocker. "But a part of my soul died this day."  Mr. Ford seems genuinely concerned about having abused the trust of readers who believed in Benchley, but not so much that he isn't tickled by his small taste of rock stardom.  "The thing is, rock stars like Gary can be young, but as a writer -- when I was 22, I looked around at the other writers and I thought, 'Ah, that's something you do after you actually know something,' " Mr. Ford said, emphasizing the years of what seemed like directionless Web scribbling that led up to this moment.  "Not that I know anything now," he added.
Profile of and interview with Paul Ford, editor and Webmaster for Harper's Magazine, who comments on his new novel, Gary Benchley, Rock Star; book is edited and expanded version of Web-based serialized rock chronicles of Gary Benchley, 22-year-old Albany-reared striving indie-rocker invented by Ford; photos (M)