My Writerly Blog

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In which the Apathy Monster is curtailed

Me, lately I spent my PhD years going to many, many conferences. When you're in a small department in an isolated part of the world, they're kind of a necessity. You go to meet anyone - anyone - who is doing similar stuff, and who won't stare at you blankly when you describe your research. You go to try out your ideas, to make sure the academic community you'll be pitching them to don't think you're an absolute waste of space ( imposter syndrome is for real). Also, you go just to go somewhere (though I think I went to Leicester far too often). In the last few years, as I've gained contacts and confidence, I've gone to fewer and fewer conferences. I know the ones that best suit me now, and where I'll get to meet and/or catch up with my peeps. I also know the ones, of course, where I've never made any headway at all. I was pleasantly surprised this week to be wrong about that last one. MIX Digital - Bath Spa University Let me back thi

Can Digital Fiction and Commercial Publishing Work Together?

First of all, hello again, old blog. I haven't visited you, much less nourished you, in quite some time! What's that meme that goes around about the best friends being those that can go months or years between contact, and then just pick up right where they left off as if no time has passed at all? Let's go with that. Second, the impetus for this blog post is a new research project I'm (slowly but surely) launching. I've been interested in the overlap (or, frankly, entire lack thereof) between digital fiction and the publishing industry; specifically, I've been wondering if that overlap is ever going to actually happen. So I'm kinda trying to shove them together. There have been a few promising case studies emerging in the last few years that show audiences actually are interested in interactive storytelling: Ryan North's wild success with Shakespearean Choose-Your-Own-Adventure ; Zoe Quinn's rocky go of publishing Depression Quest through Steam

Satisfaction, y'all: what is it good for?

The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon was strong with me this week. It's end of term, end of the academic year, and we're all caught up in the requesting (begging) of student feedback, along with its requisite trauma. An old friend of mine who is a nurse posted this article about patient satisfaction vs. patient health , and the sentiments strongly parallel what I hear from staff and out of my own mouth. My mom just wants it all to stop; with every purchase, site visit, and receipt, she gets a request for customer feedback, and let's face it: unless you're on one extreme of customer experience or another, you just can't dredge the energy to care. Student feedback is fertile ground for frustration. We're told we're not collecting enough feedback (the bean-counter kind): we can't get enough responses to officially administered feedback for statistically significant and/or representative feedback. On the other hand, we collect so much feedback that at times it f

"Found" Art

I've been thinking quite a lot lately about the use of "found" art, as in re-appropriating images, video, code, etc., in stories. Obviously, in my case, that means digital fiction, though I don't really think it's tied to any one communication genre or medium. After all, there are plenty of news stories I see that use stock images that either really enhance the piece, or freakishly contrast with it. It affects the piece, one way or the other. I also think it's related, but a bit different, from palimpsest (as defined by Genette) . I recently supervised a fantastic MA dissertation on how everything we create (specifically speaking about creative writers) is palimpsestical: re-envisioning our lives, what we've read, what we've written. It may be done on purpose - those intertextual references we love to embed so much - and it may be done entirely subconsciously, but in the end, the idea boils down to that frustrating and yet liberating adage that

Great Writing 2011

I seem to only do my blog writing on trains lately. Must see to that... I presented at the Great Writing new-and-improved-London-edition conference this weekend, a talk that focused on one of the finer points of my current research: how writing with the intent to mediate a story in multiple media changes the fundamental aspects of the story itself (character, structure, perspective), as well as how it affects the writer's (my) composition process. The talk consisted of several readings, sections drawn from my prose fiction in chronological order, from my MFA novel (2005) to my most recent compositions for the PhD work (November 2011 - rough draft). The progression from straightforward, MFA-mill produced fiction (i.e., literary, navel-gazing) to postmodern, multiple narrator, layered, rhizomatically structured fiction was dramatic, and I was pleased that my audience saw the same things in the work that I did. What was even more rad was that they were actually interested in it. I

Thoughts on @dreamingmethods Digital Writing Workshop

I'm on the long train(s) ride home from Kent after a one-day digital fiction workshop with Andy Campbell ( Dreaming Methods ). It's the first time I've met Andy IRL - great to put a face to the name & works. The workshop itself was set up by Peggy at East Kent Live Lit , funded by the Kent Arts Council, and she was graceful enough to let a non-Kent-resident such as me sit in. Most of the attendees were not necessarily new to digital fiction, but new to building it. They were writers, musicians, installation artists, and sometimes a combination of the above. Almost everyone save me and one other had been able to make the Friday evening session, which was an overview of digital fiction and some of Andy's background. The morning session covered a few examples of dig-fic (from the Poole Literary Festival New Media Prize ), recommended software (more on this in a minute), and resources for media files (more...). The afternoon session was more hands-on building of di