Seeing what we sometimes can’t

There’s tons of bad news out in the ether. I can’t deal with it now, I don’t have the wherewithal, but I wanted to do something constructive. So I wanetd to talk about looking at the things you do and letting yourself see the good in it. Western society — or at least this corner of Western society that I live in — thrives on hypercriticality. Things aren’t quite good enough. Maybe it’s because I’m a woman and I will never be attractive enough or thin enough or charming enough on my own, so I really really need to buy a panoply of things to cover my hopeless flaws. Maybe it’s not. Anyway. I was sitting around with friends yesterday and recounted a summary of a story I’d submitted in the hopes of getting it published and I thought at first I wouldn’t remember it properly. (Memory and I don’t … Read on!

Today is a hollow day.

There are days I feel like I’m striving toward something, striding. Something purposeful, something meaningful. Today is not one of those days. I suppose it’s all right; I suppose you can’t always be on the march, you can’t always double-time through the shadows with a burning brand smoking up the corridors. But it leaves me hollow and empty and with no motion at all. I don’t like being motionless. Well, that’s not entirely correct; I like being motionless when it’s a thing I’ve chosen, and serves a purpose. Or even if I didn’t choose it, but I know it leads to something else later on. An enforced sabbatical. That’s not what this is, though. It’s a permeating fog of dissatisfaction, and I think that’s what I hate most. If something’s not quite right, I like to be able to try to fix it, or think about why leaving it alone … Read on!

Get to the point

You know the person who, when telling you about some achingly mundane event in their lives, turns it into a sort of narrative epic of questionable insight and imagined valor? That’s me. And I know it’s me, when I’m in the middle of explaining the emotional context of a 3 AM subway ride and I can hear the rusty creaking strain of patience from my friends, and I can’t stop myself. I just can’t. So thank you, friends, and family, for your patience. It’s times like those that make me wonder if my lack of self-esteem isn’t some foreign overlay, because when I’m telling you about the joyous schadenfreude of watching the jerk who cut me off halfway to my destination get pulled over by the cops for speeding, I am certain that you are feeling the righteousness just as much as I am, even though I’m only a third of the way through … Read on!

Evolution of research

powered by Fotopedia   So before the middle of the year hit, I was in the middle of refocusing my research from the application of polyphony to transmedia storytelling, to examining polyphony and its role in shared emergent narrative in tabletop role playing games. A friend of mine calls this a “PhD&D.” There are studies on the culture and anthropology of gamers and gaming (and when I say gaming here, I mean tabletop RPGs); there are studies on performativity in gaming, the potential of gaming in therapy, and in education. There are evaluations of gaming materials as literature. But so far, there are no examinations of narrative processes happening in a game in progress. Because polyphony posits that every voice influences the collaborative results of the interaction of those voices in a given work, and because an RPG setting constitutes a voice contributing to a game even partly based in … Read on!

Memory Makes Us

One of the things that has helped me replant my feet on the ground is Memory Makes Us, a project put together by if:book Australia. Over the past couple of months, people contributed long-term memories, anonymously, some of them with photos, some of them just text. This served as the foundation for a very audacious live-writing event in which Kate Pullinger, in full view of the public at the State Library of Queensland, composed a story of “lots of middles” for six hours. For those who were at the library, three typewriters were available for the contribution of more long-term memories which got delivered right after completion to her table as she wrote. For those unable to visit the library for the event, she composed on a GoogleDoc, where anyone in the world could drop by the web page and watch the cursor reveal letter after letter, word after word, … Read on!

A more nuanced welcome.

Now that I’ve had a bit more time to sort things out here, I want to explain a few things. This is, primarily, a professional site. It contains professional thoughts on professional things. But it is also my personal site, too. It will contain personal things that I am happy to have associated with my professional life. This means that there may be politics involved, sometimes. I promise to be respectful and rational in the commentary that I post. This site is also a research site. Behind the scenes I’m working on practice-based research into the nature of transmedia. How does it work? Why does it work? What does it mean to write for multiple platforms to get a single story across? What are these platforms? Which may lead you to the question of just who the heck am I? (Me as in me the writer, not you asking yourselves … Read on!