My Writerly Blog

I see a lot of proposed business models floating around, blog posts on what works and what doesn't for making a living off of storytelling online. So far, I really like the idea of "pay for what you like" - it's not only an impetus to produce quality work, but it's a direct feedback mechanism for the author. Essentially, the digital author offers content for free, but asks for donations from those who like the work. Novelr has some posts related to the theory and practice of this model. I've participated in this from a consumer standpoint: I download podcasts from PodCastle, EscapePod, and PodioBooks, and I use Duotrope as a resource for short story markets. All of these services are free, but I have given donations to all of them in appreciation and support of the quality of service they provide. And this was before I started my digital fiction crusade, before I recognized what the creators were doing, before I understood it from their point of view. ...

No, there's not much chance I could keep up with things enough to post a weekly update every week. But I wanted to pull together a collection of the things I've been looking at and reading lately. Please add on to it in the comments if you know of something I might enjoy! Chris Joseph's blog Flight Paths Drunken Boat The Iowa Review Dreaming Methods ( Consensus Trance is the most recent, and it's great fun. I particularly love the way the author has incorporated nonlinear and ludic elements in a primarily linear story.) Net Art Commissions on Turbulence ELO's Electronic Literature Collection e-Fiction Book Club Novelr Digital Fiction Show And a short story on the web that I absolutely loved: "Mr. Penumbra's Twenty-Four Hour Book Store" by Robin Sloan It's interesting to me that electronic literature is already splitting off into a gajillion splinter genres: visual novels, ludic stories, digital poetry, twitter fiction, serials, Flash fiction (...

Okay, technically not really, but if this blog is evidence, I've been comatose from either natural or artificial causes for the last month. In reality, I have: Revised my online novel communities paper (and it was accepted!) Attended a wedding in the States (no comment) Presented the above paper at the MeCCSA postgrad conference (poorly attended session, but whatever) Applied for umpteen jobs and one grant (the only one I can apply for) to drum up money for this year. It's not looking promising, kids. Attended a workshop on academic papers...taught at a 3rd grade level. Or something similar. Disappointing. Cleaned up administrative messes in the grade reporting for almost all the classes I taught. So far, the errors have not been mine, but it's hard to tell when every school in the uni does it differently. Started a gig creating video tutorials for graphics software. So far, I've done vids for Adobe Flash. I like this gig. Too bad it's not ongoing. My supervi...

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...