My Writerly Blog

Lots of things suck this week. One, I am an Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest loser. Didn't make the next round. Didn't really think I would, but it's a bummer all the same. So I sent the novel out to a couple of publishers, but not holding out much hope. It's not my time yet. Two, it seems to be just the right time for editors to send rejections on the last short story I sent out. That's fun. Three, it's the last week of spring break. Next week I have to go back to work, back to the classroom, back to reading painful first years' writing, back to being harried and in contact with the rest of society. Blech. The good news is there are only three weeks left in the semester. After that, I'm free for the summer, to write, to travel, to fail in finding funding all over again. Whee! I feel I've gotten some good stuff accomplished these past couple of weeks. I'm back on track with my PhD stuff, having finished a short story draft, come up wit...

It was inevitable: give me three weeks on my own, with no work responsibilities, and I will read. Straight through. I haven't been able to actually read a book since the winter break; between teaching classes, marking papers, researching for the PhD, and trying to squish in some writing here and there, I just don't have the free hours to drown in a good novel these days. The closest I get are audiobooks when I'm cycling or running. So when I picked up two books on a shopping expedition last week, I knew I was tempting fate. The first had me curled up on the couch for two days, plowing through it. I had to take breaks, however, as Ben Elton's Blind Faith managed to hit on my two major phobias: crowds and enclosed spaces. His take on an update of 1984 is focused on the YouTube concept of us becoming our own Big Brothers, watching each other, with privacy actually becoming illegal. You're never alone in his world, always surrounded by people, pressed in, group...

Finding a Web-builder First, I'm not a giant corporation with tons of cash to spend to hire a web developer to create the all-singing, all-dancing web extravaganza I'd envisioned. I'm a broke PhD student, struggling to even pay my tuition. If it weren't for Google Scholar, I wouldn't even be able to find texts I need for research! I'm not well-connected in the web-world, either. I don't have that awesome buddy with tons of web-knowhow and plenty of spare time to design something for me. Besides, that takes half the 'research' out of my research. I mean, how can I really expect other authors, some who are in the same financial situation I am, to attempt this crossover to digital media, if I'm hiring out half the work? If I can't show them how to do it in the first place, I haven't done the job with the dissertation that I'm setting out to do. So I set out to discover what was out there for me to play with, to see if I could combi...

Features But what kind of website? I could build a simple flash site that takes my readers through my stories click by click, the way Inanimate Alice does. It's a pretty simple option, really, and wouldn't require a ton of web-savvy to build. I could build a hyperlinked text, like an online version of Afternoon and Patchwork Girl , simply creating links from page to page to represent my story spaces. It would be really easy to put together with the web tools I already have, like iWeb, Google Sites, or any basic WYSIWYG editor. I'm an ambitious soul, however. Hypertexts have been done. Flash has been done. Games have been done, and fan fic has been done. Not many that I've found has combined them all together into one, however. I want that capability, and nothing I'd seen was approaching this level of functionality. So I made a list of the features I want to be able to include in my digital text: Text Hypertext (i.e. networked structure) Images Sound Colla...

Deciding on a Platform This was pretty simple. All it took was my supervisor handing me some CD-ROMs containing the premier examples of electronic writing (all hypertexts in Storyspace). Then me sitting down at my MacBook with Leopard OSX. Uh, right. I could not open a single one. All were for Windows platforms from the 90s. One had Mac capability...Classic 7, I think. Ha. The best I could do was open my Windows parallel in VMware and play around with the texts. I hated it. One, it slows the entire computer down to 90s dialup pace. Probably great for people reading these texts in the 90s, because they weren't used to having 15 Firefox windows (with 20 tabs each), plus Open Office, plus mail, plus calendar, plus...plus...plus. Two, give it a few more years, and you won't even be able to open those texts on Windows machines. The Book of Kells was written on toilet paper (okay, not true) and it's lasted longer. Three, you can't go over to Eastgate and get t...

I love Spring Break. No teaching. No office hours. No meetings or training sessions. No having to talk to people. I just get to sit in my home office, make my list of tasks for the day, and work on ticking them off one by one. If only I could get paid for such endeavors, I'd have it made. Anyway... This time has allowed me to make some decent progress on my research. I'm super excited. Without much effort, I've managed to track down the software packages that deliver EXACTLY what I've been thinking I want for my digital fiction. A few months ago, I was despairing, because the few sites I've seen with all the functionality I want have been high-profile places, complex and huge, far beyond what little html-building knowledge I have. I figured I'd have to purchase some fairly hefty software packages, which was terrifying, considering the peanuts they throw into my pen for teaching all the classes I'm teaching. Today it's a totally different story, o...