My Writerly Blog

I have "Blog Entry" on my To-Do List today, among other things. It seems I have not been very good about posting in the past couple of weeks, in addition to not having been very good at lots of other things. The issue really is that I was awarded a teaching assistantship at the very last minute before classes started, and I've spent the first month of term getting up to speed, as well as getting all my little freelance gigs out the door (still working on some of those). So I haven't done much actual research (read: writing) lately. That ends today, as I have several paragraphs down now on the first story of my PhD, and I've started outlining the next paper I've got planning (on applying cinematic adaptation of visual narrative to digital fiction - it makes sense in my head). The story started forming at 5 a.m. this morning, which made for a rather restless sleep as I plunked a sentence or two every so often into my iPhone. The character is growing. Other no...

The portion of the blogosphere devoted to digital/new media writing and e-publishing is filled with concerns, despairing, and a truckload of theories about how this emerging (emerged?) literary genre is to be organized, recognized, distributed, and brought into the canon of literature. The importance of creating/accepting a canon for any given genre has been discussed much , as has the difficulty of establishing a central depository for works that often have no physical form. The technology is evolving quickly - works that are considered part of the canon are often just old enough that modern machines can't run the files, like a collection of the world's greatest films on Beta tapes. Concerns have also flown about who exactly is to do this deciding. In the past, we (humans in general) have left canon-building to the scholars. Not even film or novels, so closely tied as they are to box office numbers and bestseller lists, derive their canons from public opinion. Blade Runner was...

My plan for yesterday was to spend the entire day immersed in the beta for the Electronic Literature Directory's new site , and post about it here. Unfortunately, I woke up feeling as though gnomes had scoured my throat with steel wool, and had then smacked me between the eyes with a sledgehammer. It was all I could do to hold my head up. So I didn't. I whined a bit until the husband left to do some work, and then I plugged in the 3-hour "Dangerous Days: Making of Blade Runner" DVD extra. I'm in the midst of thinking about how visual storytelling can add depth to the narrative, and as Blade Runner is such a key narrative in terms of visual storytelling in the film medium, I thought I'd write a paper on it with another PhD in my department. In between bouts of passing out, then waking up and having to rewind and rewatch segments, I gained a lot of information about how the film was made, how the story was put together, who contributed what, what the thought...