My Writerly Blog

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...

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...

I stumbled upon an online story a couple of months ago through one of the digital fiction feeds I actually pay attention to. It was a really fun, neat little story, and I subscribed to the author's feed because I wanted to read more of his work. That first story was completely free online and on various readers (Kindle included). It was a story that used elements of the new digital world, but was essentially a straightforward print story online. Nothing incredibly innovative, just good writing. It was fairly popular, though, to date generating 72 comments (not bad for a non-commercial, non-controversial post). I didn't get any further posts from that feed for quite some time. The second story that came out was under a different model - the Kindle version was for sale, and once 100 Kindle copies had sold, he would release the free online version. It took only a few days for the free version to go up. After that, he began a new endeavor: a not-yet-written novel (novella, ...

I was invited to sit in on a talk today in the School of Computer Sciences. Yes, I was the only woman there. We won't dwell on that. What I will dwell on is my introduction to this totally rad geek toy. I'm not a computer scientist, not even a computer expert on an amateur level. I'm more of a high-end user: I love finding out what I can do with my electronic devices, and playing with them, but I don't (yet?) have in-depth knowledge like programming, building, hacking, anything like that. I might just want to learn now, however. The talk started by introducing something that it seems a lot of electronic geeks know and use already: the Arduino . The Arduino, and many devices like it, is a small electronic device, essentially a little computer, consisting of a tiny processor, a serial port, a power port, a USB port, and two sets of digital (one can also do analog) input/output switches. You build a program on your computer, feed it into the Arduino, hook it up to som...

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 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...

Which I left to more supremely capable people to actually carry out, as is my habit, of course. When I did my MFA, we had a monthly Student Reading Series, which was created during my time in the program (through none of my own effort), organized entirely by the students, and is still going today, if the listserve is any judge. It was a great time to socialize, talk about our work, our professors, our SOs, our lack thereof...oh, yeah, and to share what we were writing. Uh, there was wine involved. When I found nothing much like that here, I thought "Well that blows. We totally should." And so we did. The NIECI family (NIECI is bigger than we know, but there's just the core family that participates in most of our shindigs) got together to display our wares. We dressed up in our finest frocks and gathered for wine (duh) and a wide display of work, from critical papers and radio shows to short stories and film. We chatted, drank, showed off some more stuff, drank some mor...

Chris Joseph posted today about the Digital Resources for the Arts & Humanities 2009 Conference in Belfast. The abstract submission deadline is two days away, and I sat for an hour trying to come up with something I could present. I suppose I could present the same project I'm offering up to the Great Writing conference here in June. It would definitely be more of a completed work by September. But I'm suffering from an inferiority complex at the moment. I seem to have no problems flaunting my creative package where most of the audience aren't experts in the digital humanities, but the thought of laying my freshman efforts bare for a crowd of digital academics and artists is a little too daunting for me at the moment. So I think I'll hold off on submitting anything, wait for the program to be announced, and try to scrape funds together to simply attend. I'd like to see what else is out there, to see what other artists are doing (part of the conference is...