My Writerly Blog

The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon was strong with me this week. It's end of term, end of the academic year, and we're all caught up in the requesting (begging) of student feedback, along with its requisite trauma. An old friend of mine who is a nurse posted this article about patient satisfaction vs. patient health , and the sentiments strongly parallel what I hear from staff and out of my own mouth. My mom just wants it all to stop; with every purchase, site visit, and receipt, she gets a request for customer feedback, and let's face it: unless you're on one extreme of customer experience or another, you just can't dredge the energy to care. Student feedback is fertile ground for frustration. We're told we're not collecting enough feedback (the bean-counter kind): we can't get enough responses to officially administered feedback for statistically significant and/or representative feedback. On the other hand, we collect so much feedback that at times it f...

I've been thinking quite a lot lately about the use of "found" art, as in re-appropriating images, video, code, etc., in stories.  Obviously, in my case, that means digital fiction, though I don't really think it's tied to any one communication genre or medium.  After all, there are plenty of news stories I see that use stock images that either really enhance the piece, or freakishly contrast with it.  It affects the piece, one way or the other. I also think it's related, but a bit different, from palimpsest (as defined by Genette) .  I recently supervised a fantastic MA dissertation on how everything we create (specifically speaking about creative writers) is palimpsestical: re-envisioning our lives, what we've read, what we've written.  It may be done on purpose - those intertextual references we love to embed so much - and it may be done entirely subconsciously, but in the end, the idea boils down to that frustrating and yet liberating adage that ...

I seem to only do my blog writing on trains lately.  Must see to that... I presented at the Great Writing new-and-improved-London-edition conference this weekend, a talk that focused on one of the finer points of my current research: how writing with the intent to mediate a story in multiple media changes the fundamental aspects of the story itself (character, structure, perspective), as well as how it affects the writer's (my) composition process. The talk consisted of several readings, sections drawn from my prose fiction in chronological order, from my MFA novel (2005) to my most recent compositions for the PhD work (November 2011 - rough draft).  The progression from straightforward, MFA-mill produced fiction (i.e., literary, navel-gazing) to postmodern, multiple narrator, layered, rhizomatically structured fiction was dramatic, and I was pleased that my audience saw the same things in the work that I did.  What was even more rad was that they were actually interested in it. I...

I'm on the long train(s) ride home from Kent after a one-day digital fiction workshop with Andy Campbell ( Dreaming Methods ).  It's the first time I've met Andy IRL - great to put a face to the name & works. The workshop itself was set up by Peggy at East Kent Live Lit , funded by the Kent Arts Council, and she was graceful enough to let a non-Kent-resident such as me sit in.  Most of the attendees were not necessarily new to digital fiction, but new to building it.  They were writers, musicians, installation artists, and sometimes a combination of the above.  Almost everyone save me and one other had been able to make the Friday evening session, which was an overview of digital fiction and some of Andy's background. The morning session covered a few examples of dig-fic (from the Poole Literary Festival New Media Prize ), recommended software (more on this in a minute), and resources for media files (more...).  The afternoon session was more hands-on building of di...

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...