My Writerly Blog

Fresh off mid-semester vacation, our New Media Research Circle had a mini-poster session today.  I threw together mine based on the method I'm using to take my stories from print to digital, pompously titled "From Pen to Screen: Remediating Stories from Print to Digital Media."  It's a process in development, as that 4th step you see in the image there only emerged a couple of weeks ago.  It will be a major portion of my PhD writeup, far too much to go into here.  The abstract gives the basic gist: Ubiquitous and mobile applications such as SmartPhones and Tablets are attracting growing numbers of readers to digital stories. Many experienced print writers may see this trend as an opportunity to direct their storytelling skills toward an emerging genre, but lack the skills and knowledge needed to remediate their own print stories into digital form; they may also prefer a remediation methodology that begins in their comfort zone (print), and moves step-by-step tow...

I spent 3 days in London this weekend, and almost all of it can be classed research. Amazing. Friday was spent entirely on the Underground - no joke, I saw sky only when the trains emerged aboveground - taking photographs to use (likely much altered) in my digital fiction project. I know, I know, there are a ton of subway station and train photos available on Flickr, etc., but as a train system is the foundation for my work I really wanted the experience of taking the photos myself. Particularly as it's one discipline in creating digital stories that I do have experience with (learning all the coding, web building, and networking has been humbling). So I dusted off my old film camera (yes, film is still better for art photog, in my mind), and trolled the Underground. I don't have the film back yet, but I do want to note the experience of that portion of the process. For one, I got tired. I spent 5 hours taking pictures, and I don't recall ever being so sick of a s...

Saying straight lines are bad isn't going to suit well with Amy, my very OCD friend and colleague. But when it comes to stories told in digital environments, I'm discovering it's true. Those of us from more traditional writing backgrounds - stories, novels - tend to think of stories in terms of plot and character development. Go figure. But people exploring stories online or in mobile or locative displays often aren't thinking of them as linear stories at all. They're exploring, as they'd explore a playground or theme park. We're doing them - and ourselves - a disservice if we either A) force them along a linear path, or B) create a linear path and then break it up, offering it to them out of order and in pieces. This discussion came up during the Transliteracy conference in Leicester last week, through the various presentations and discussions over the course of the day. Gareth Howell discussed McCloud's concept of closure (readers making na...

This is the presentation Amy Chambers and I gave at the Transliteracy Conference, complete with annotations for those who weren't there to hear us rush through the topic in our short allotted time. Visualizing the Story from Text to Screen on Prezi

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

It is officially Spring break, mid-semester break, whatever you want to call it. I will not call it Easter break, as the school officially does, because I find that officially dunderheaded. Ugh. Anyway, for the next three weeks, I get to do nothing (well, not much more than) but write and work on my PhD stuff. My plan is to increase my writing sessions to 4 per day, 3 for my short story (that is nearly done) and 1 for the novel that's been languishing in the bowels of my computer for the last 6 months. It has a way better chance of winning the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award than my current one does, at least IMO. Once the rough draft of the story is completed, I can spend a little more time exploring the digital adaptation side of it. I have to admit, part of my procrastination process today has been to start this exploration already, by looking into wiki-building programs. More on that later. I've already found that without the pressures on my time, it's hard for m...

I attended the second session (having missed the first due to being brain dead) of the Collaborative Digital Research in the Humanities (CEDAR) postgraduate training program this past weekend. (Don't ask me about the acronym.) The topics covered corpora and wikis, specifically with regard to knowledge sharing and collaboration. The corpora discussion was very linguistic-based, and so not much was very directly applicable to my own work. I can use the tools to do some curiosity-led analysis of my work, figuring out which words come up the most frequently in a piece of fiction, and in what relations and contexts they appear. Of course, what I found when I did this on my novel WIP is that the character names overwhelmed everything else. Duh. But this topic also included something a little fun, in the form of Wordle . This is a fun little web "toy" that takes in a plain text file, a blog, and a few other source types, and builds a word cloud that you can then play with ...

I've written fiction now for a while, always intended for print publication. The adages there are always "first drafts are shit," "we're not writers, we're REwriters," and "revise, revise, revise." We hear about Hemingway reworking his prose over and over, until he was merely deleting and inserting the same comma. It works for print fiction. It leaves you with a refined, polished piece that (hopefully) no one can poke holes in. Every writer develops a process for their stories. Some sit down and write and write and write, letting whatever may come out spill across the page, the story shaping itself minute by minute. Others plan and plan and plan, like navigators mapping a trip. They know exactly where they're going, and how to get there. I've always been a bit in between. I know where I'm going - I have a destination - and I vaguely know some stops I might make along the way, but I'm usually up for interesting detours an...