Reading Time: 6 minutes We were in lockdown when the final piece of the Ephemeral City puzzle fell into place. It was late 2021 and my book Ex Libris had been out for more than a year. Though it had been released at the height of the first pandemic wave, the idea of a novel made from recombinant chapters… Read more »
Articles by Simon Groth
The Challenge of Reading Ex Libris
Simon Groth
Reading Time: 5 minutes In introducing my new novel, author Ryan O’Neill puts it most succinctly: This is an introduction to a novel you will never read. He adds hastily that he is referring not to the book in your hands, the one he hopes you’re about to begin, but the novel that inspired his words, the novel he… Read more »
Screenshots: The Library of Last Resort
Simon Groth
Reading Time: < 1 minute Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest. The Library of Last Resort by Matt Finch The Library of Last Resort is a ruse. You’d be forgiven at first for thinking this is a standard text-based branching-narrative game, a multiple-choice point-and-click that harks back to thousands… Read more »
Screenshots: Gothic Body
Simon Groth
Reading Time: < 1 minute Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest. Gothic Body by Eda Gunaydin Published to the web by Australian literary journal Voiceworks, Gothic Body is divided into two parts. The first concerns itself with guilt and the author’s relationship with her mother, as well as the… Read more »
Screenshots: A Poem Floats
Simon Groth
Reading Time: < 1 minute Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest. A Poem Floats by Pascalle Burton How much can you say using only thirteen words? What if you could animate those thirteen words across 793 frames? Contributing to the long tradition of works that blur the boundary between… Read more »
Screenshots: The Book of Hours
Simon Groth
Reading Time: 2 minutes Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest. The Book of Hours by Lucy English A book of hours describes an anthology of illustrated sacred and devotional texts, popular in the middle ages. Divided into the canonical hours, they contained psalms, prayers and gospel extracts and… Read more »
A book in half a billion
Simon Groth
Reading Time: 6 minutes When writers discuss plot and pacing in narrative craft, especially in creative writing classes, we often talk about the curve of stories, the rise and fall in tension that characterises the most common story structures. Now usually, at least in my experience, that curve is not something a writer actively thinks about while composing a… Read more »
Screenshots: A Place Called Ormalcy
Simon Groth
Reading Time: < 1 minute Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest. A Place Called Ormalcy by Mez Breeze Meet Mr Ormal, a happy-go-lucky law-abiding citizen of Ormalcy, a Utopian world full of contented creatures and happy citizens. Happy, happy citizens. Right from the beginning, something is off in A… Read more »
Screenshots: This is a Picture of Wind
Simon Groth
Reading Time: < 1 minute Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest. This is a Picture of Wind by J. R. Carpenter Gales from westward. Sharp depression. Late summer thunder. Removed from their context, the language of weather reports has its own poetic lilt, something observed by many poets and… Read more »
Screenshots: Black Room
Simon Groth
Reading Time: < 1 minute Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest. Black Room by Casssie McQuater Described by its creator as ‘a game about falling asleep on the internet’, Black Room comes across as a mashup of game styles and characters with a meditative bent. What begins as a 2D… Read more »