My Writerly Blog

My short story " A Queen for a King " has been published in the October 2008 issue of Electric Spec . Brief description: Mabon’s father warned him about the temptations in the forest. But you can’t stop love, lust, or fairy dust. Let me know how you like it!

I played hooky last night. I played fangirl. I giggled madly throughout the evening, like I imagine my mom might have about Paul McCartney, back in the day. I've lived in LA, worked in movie studios, met big stars. None of them made me giddy the way meeting Neil Gaiman did. Neil Gaiman! His book American Gods inspired my current work-in-progress, and his cross-media talents have fed into my desire to create a multi-media visual novel for my PhD. What I would be working on now, what I would be writing without Neil's influence is an existential mystery beyond my puny powers of imagination. It was an experience all about the fans - some had expressed dismay that a favorite music act ( Paul & Storm and Jonathan Coulton ) were playing Manchester the same night. So Neil calls the musicians up, and has them play "the world's shortest set" to open up the reading. They set the tone for Neil's reading from The Graveyard Book nicely with songs about how hard...

What exactly am I trying to do? On a basic level, I can call it a digital story, or digital novel. I will have "digital" elements such as photographs, audio, possibly film. But when I google "digital storytelling," what I come up with are all these classroom tools and teacher articles for getting students involved in digital arts. These stories aren't much more than a picture slideshow with captions and music. Not exactly what I'm going for. So...Interactive narrative? These stories primarily seek to engage the reader on an intellectual level. Games, for instance, are often interactive narrative: they have a storyline, and the "audience" interacts with the text by playing the game. Again, not the focus I'm looking for: I want some interactive elements, yes, but to me the story and its emotional engagement are more important to me than any "quest" or puzzle. Multimedia novel works, too, but carries the same incompleteness facto...

I just spent the last two days looking at still shots of avatars and raids, learning about first person shooter games and suicide bomber games, and pondering the gender-imbalance issues in World of Warcraft. I sat in (or chaired) every possible session in this past weekend's Creating Second Lives Conference at NIECI , Bangor University . What did I come away with? A burning desire to live in a fairy land in Second Life, and an impression that so far, researchers in New Media are often forced to make things up as they go along. It's a new field, game study, online anthropology, virtual world sociology. We had many discussions on how difficult it is to explain what we do to people not involved in the creative industries: often we're reduced to "those people who play online all day and then try to write a paper to justify it." It only takes one weekend among these researchers to realize that is not at all the case. Many are not gamers at all (many are, of cours...

Paul and I had a free day today - no rugby, no work, no errands. So of course, we spent the first half of the day trying to decide what to do with ourselves. We finally decided on Anglesey - I've been wanting for a long time to wander around the island to the various antiquities, the burial mounds, the stone circles. I've sorted a list for myself from the BU Library catalogue of Wales & Anglesey histories, mythologies, and folklore. Monday I'll head to the library to actually check them out. I very much want to set this novel here in North Wales, maybe even on Anglesey in particular. My short stories lately ( "Wish on One Hand" and "A Queen for a King) have been set on Anglesey. There's just such a beauty about the place, so compact, wild, cultured, ancient...I can't help but want to set something magical there. We made it around to a couple of burial mounds ( Bryn Celli Ddu and Barclodiad y Gawres ), then checked out St. Gwenfaen's Hol...

The ICCWR in the form of Graeme Harper gave a little session exploring the topic of practice-led research (PLR) for we folks at NIECI , which is of course what I am doing for my PhD. I'll be writing a novel, which is only the initial phase - I then want to turn it into a "special edition" digital novel , complete with hypertext, images, audio, perhaps film. I'm starting this log because of some topics Graeme brought up during the talk, one of which is the importance of the process in PLR. Academic research typically focuses on the end product, and when you turn in your thesis/dissertation, no one really much cares how you went about tracking down your information beyond the fact that it's useful and ethical. But in PLR, it's all about the process. Yes, the final product is important, but it's about the exploration of how you got there. What did you learn, what did you have to adjust, how did your philosophic core evolve as you got deeper and deeper in...