My Writerly Blog

Well, it was exhausting and nerve-wracking, but I gave my first presentation amongst actual professionals in my field today. I barely got the presentation done in time - isn't that always the case - and I managed to have several anxiety attacks in the week prior about various and sundry, but today went a long way in validating the work I'm doing. So that was cool. In my 20 minute presentation, I introduced my PhD research: practice-based, writing a print 'novel' (interlinked short stories), and the digital version concurrently. Then I showed a video demo, the exact same as below. The audio is a reading of the print story (the first 1000 words or so of a 7500 word story). The visuals are a 'voyeur's experience' of the digital version; due to the nature of the demo, of course, the audience could not click through the digital story themselves, so I asked them to think of it as though they were looking over someone's shoulder as they moved through the...

Bruce Sterling over at Wired.com posted eighteen of them for Contemporary Literature. It's a skeletal overview: a list of statements without background or exploration of any. I'd like to offer a few brief thoughts on the list, just for my own brainstorming sake. Who knows; there may be eighteen papers in here somewhere. 1. Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot. "Contemporary society" is a pretty big blanket, there, Bruce. I think you might mean "contemporary digitally literate culture" - after all, it's only in the Westernized world that we are beginning to share our language and culture through global media such as Facebook and mobile phones. This also assumes a very strict definition of literature: that which is published in print form, presumably a book. 2. Vernacular means of everyday communication — cellphones, social networks, streaming video — are moving into areas where printed tex...

One of my supervisors is a big champion of the free and open source. To you, I offer my apologies. I tried. I really did. I got to know GIMP well enough to actually use it. I found a great free wiki builder that I still think will be a great base for the community of my digital fiction site. I use Open Office , and even attempted to use their presentation software to build my prototype story. I still won't use PowerPoint. Never fear on that score. But. I. Had. To. Get. Adobe Creative Suite 4 . Software companies are like dope dealers. They give out that free taste, knowing they'll hook you for life, and that after 30 days you'll be jonesing for that registration key bad enough to jack your mama's stereo. It's how Scrivener got me. It's how Circus Ponies' awesometastic Notebook got me. And now, it's how Adobe's gotten me. I'm presenting a prototype of my PhD work in just under two weeks. After weeks of working on the story with free...

We all toss around the word 'interdisciplinary' like it's a good thing. "We're an interdisciplinary department", "I'm doing interdisciplinary research", blah blah blah. But when it comes down to it, we often just mean we'll look at papers in different disciplines to see what's interesting, or even what directly applies to us. We don't really mean we want to participate in a bunch of different stuff. I come off all weird pretty frequently, for various reasons, but it is interesting to see people's faces when they find out I was once a biologist, or that I trained to work in artificial reproduction. It's a strength of my experience that I've written everything from plays to nuclear facility safety documents, that I participate in activities from stage productions to drinking games. I didn't think my latest foray out of my comfort zone would be quite so inspiring. I showed up to the "Labyrinth Theatre Workshop...

One week. Seven glorious days. The equivalent, for me, of a snow-in. I got s**t done , people. My husband signed up to attend a conference in Erice, Sicily for a week in the end of May. I said, "Sicily? When teaching is done and my conferences haven't started yet? Put me in your luggage, dude." So I hitched on to his conference, and spent a week in a mountaintop stone city that was once home to the Cult of Venus. The sun was shining brutally, which means my sorry white bum was restricted indoors on threat of dire illness. Oh, darn. Trapped in a monastery-turned-hotel with my computer, my current project, and not enough touristy stuff to fill a morning, much less seven days. Sweet. I outlined. I storyboarded. I edited images and animated and chose fonts and decided what parts of my print story my digital reader would get. I discovered the initial stages of creating digital fiction: that even with a heavily edited and revised short story, the creation of its digi...