My Writerly Blog

First, a note: This blog is moving away from the specifics of my PhD research and experiences.  If anyone was interested in those, well...sorry.  The work is progressing, and it's a delicate balance!  Best to keep it on the DL till it's finished.  :) I do continue to have thoughts, however, about the nature of e-lit, e-publishing, digital narratives, tools. Tools.  Nick Montfort (et al) just released Curveship , which integrates interactive fiction and interactive narrating.  Which is motto-speak for "it does cool stuff to allow linear storytelling or interactive nonlinear storytelling at the reader's preference".  I think.  I just downloaded it, and I probably won't have time to play intensely (and intently) with it for another week or two, but I've been excited about this for a while. The blogs and mags and news-rags seem to be filling more and more with blurbs on the "new wave" of storytelling.  The New Yorker's Book Bench blog was all ove...

I spent yesterday at the Teaching Digital Writing day at the Phoenix Digital Square in Leicester (yes, again - I seem to spend more time in Leicester than anywhere else, which is probably because Sue Thomas is a gravitational force in digital lit). I had a small role in it, in that I contributed in a teensy way, via my students, to Astrid Ensslin and Alice Bell et al's poster on teaching digital writing. Other than that, I pretty much came to network and soak in the discussions on digital writing in the classroom. The day started off with Tim Wright and Kate Pullinger demonstrating their recent projects, Kidmapped! and Lifelines (available only to schools), respectively. I hadn't seen Tim's work before, but I'm determined to explore it, as it pulls in nonfiction, classic fiction, as well as ideas of trespass, transgression, and participation. Kate's Lifelines, as a collaborative storytelling teaching project, would be a great thing to look at for me in my coll...

My supervisor brought to my attention today that she actually does read this thing (if anyone wonders, my supervisor is rad and awesome and the best ever. Ahem.), and that it's very interesting for her to read my post-supervisory meeting posts.  And I er, have not had a moment to post anything after our semesterly meeting last week. Sorry.  Here goes. I am becoming less nervous about these meetings, though I think I need to be watchful that I don't lull myself into thinking I'm safe.  If I want to finish this PhD before my funding runs out, I'm really going to have to get on top of things. At any rate, I find it always helps my mental state of being to compile a list of what I've actually been doing, so it doesn't look like I've done nothing. The list helps me see I'm not a total slacker. I brought in a preliminary outline of my critical thesis, and she promptly noted that each of my chapter titles contained an entire thesis.  Oops.  Narrowing in y...

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...

A friend posted this short, collaborative film on Facebook the other day. It was cute, and included an actor I like, so I was amused. At first. After exploring the hitRECord site a bit, however, I was amazed. While the short film was written and filmed the way many are - as a collaboration of the few - its final(?) iteration is the product of crowdsourcing, via members of hitRECord. Happily for my purposes, a kind user on the site mapped out a timeline of its production . Now, this is a site created and sponsored by a pretty well-known guy. He has connections. He can fund project entry into Sundance, and he's the one who ultimately decides what gets a big-boy push and what doesn't. Not all of us can do this to this level of success. But... It's still an amazing example of this new sort of creativity that the Web 2.0, along with the open licensing concept, is facilitating. Some artists are letting go of this evanescent concept of copyright, letting it go ...

I've finally done it. I have entered nerdhood, via the rather embarrassing route of sustaining a significant injury from too much time spent in front of a computer screen. My osteopath was beside herself. It was time well spent, however, as I managed to update my entire website, form the platform for my work in the next few years, and gain a lot more knowledge about the software I'll be using to create my digital stories. But the truly interesting thing I learned by using new software and rebuilding my site from the ground up was this: I need better pencils. As it turns out, I'm rather crap at designing unless I have a pencil (not a pen) and paper. I couldn't even begin putting the pages together until I had thumbnail sketches and hastily drawn scribbles and lists in a notebook in front of me. My sole mechanical pencil broke one evening, and I found myself unable to continue working. In a related episode, I attended a lecture this week that was not up ...

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...