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.

The novel in question is Ex Libris and regardless of which copy you read it contains twelve chapters that can be shuffled into any order. The number of variations possible with such a structure is a little over 479 million. It has been published in both standard paperback and ebook editions, each copy a newly shuffled order of chapters unique to that copy alone. The manuscript that Ryan read in order to create his introduction is different to the finished copy now in his possession, which is in turn different from every other copy ever made.

I have written about Ex Libris previously where I noted that this kind of storytelling has its precedents, the most significant of which all hail from the 1960s. Nanni Balestrini’s Tristano was conceived and written using early computer programming to randomise its content between copies, though it wasn’t published as intended until print technology had caught up in 2007. Other similar books were housed in a box, either as loose leaves (Composition No. 1 by Marc Saporta) or as chapter booklets (The Unfortunates by B. S. Johnson). Of these, Johnson’s novel provided the most direct influence on the structure of Ex Libris: the fluid pieces of the story are defined not arbitrarily by the size of the page, but by the narrative itself. The story is broken into discrete, meaningful components that combine to form a larger picture.

What Ryan alludes to in his opening statement is that any work structured in this way presents a challenge to critical reading. How can readers universalise their experience if the texts they read are never consistent? You may disagree with someone else’s reading of a text, but you do so on the fundamental understanding that both of you have at least read the same words in the same order. John Bryant’s scholarship on textual fluidity through editions, translations, and adaptations demonstrates that texts are never as concrete as we might assume. But variation between editions is a long way from a narrative that changes by design between individual copies. Although it is possible to arrange Ex Libris in approximate chronological order (some events in the story clearly happen before others), each of the novel’s fluid chapters is a vignette, dependent on the others for context, but not for prior knowledge. I have used the analogy of a jigsaw puzzle to explain this to readers: smaller narratives link together to form a larger picture. The order in which the pieces are placed changes the individual’s progress but doesn’t change the ultimate picture.

The coding to compile finished print-ready files is done in Automator, the computer equivalent of a Rube Goldberg machine.

It can be difficult to get past the structure itself and the mathematics behind it as many contemporary and more recent reviews of recombinant works demonstrate. Umberto Eco in his introduction to Tristano, focuses almost exclusively on the novel’s number of permutations with only a cursory nod to the story. This might be understandable for a novel that, though beautiful, has a deliberately tenuous grip on character, plot, and setting. But the same approach is repeated in reviews of Saporta, Johnson, and other similar works. It is as though the flashy acrobatics of the novel’s physical construction obscure what the writers are doing within. And the critics’ resulting performative bewilderment or pithy dismissal of a wacky experiment seem to me like missed opportunities.

When the assumed shared experience of an audience is modified or removed altogether, how does their engagement with a narrative change? Some clues may be found in my own experience on both sides of the reader/writer divide. How I initially read and thought about a fluid novel like The Unfortunates, for example, is very different to how I have come to think about Ex Libris and that change in point of view has been illuminating.

My experience with The Unfortunates suggests that a first reading looms large in one’s perception of story. While reading, I had to keep reminding myself that the clever positioning of two adjacent scenes was attributable not only to the author’s craft but also to sheer happenstance. We’re trained to read stories as linear and it’s a hard habit to break. When I return to The Unfortunates today, no matter how many times I reshuffle its contents, the story is always coloured by that first reading and how the chapters initially unfolded. That first reading has become my definitive version of the novel from which all others deviate.

Readers of Ex Libris may have a similar experience, perhaps moreso given their copy cannot be physically reconstructed. Information that colours the perception of the characters and their actions may come earlier or later and its impact will undoubtedly shift. Readers who see more of a particular character earlier, for example, may centre the story around them in a way others won’t. Several of the fluid chapters also contain crucial pieces of information that change a character’s image or motivation and cast events elsewhere in the story in a different light. Reviewing the chapter order for each copy, I frequently pay attention to where these chapters fall, wondering how their precise location changes the tenor of the story.

I say I wonder because, primarily, I must rely on guesswork. My perception of the novel is not of a puzzle but of narrative pieces in constant motion, a true fluid state. As I worked on it, Ex Libris formed a kind of web, a set of interlocking shorter narratives that fed into a larger complex. For me there can never be a definitive version of the story, only discrete narrative chunks that cross-reference, echo, or contrast, but never line up precisely.

Unlike The Unfortunates which can be endlessly reshuffled, Ex Libris is presented to the reader as a single, fixed manifestation of the narrative. But it’s also a window, a viewport through which you might catch a glimpse of what I see. Without the capacity to physically manipulate pages, the reader must instead imagine that fluid state and the differences in emphasis that come with changes in how the story unfolds. With Ex Libris, like with all fluid texts, a critical reading should regard not only the text as it’s presented, but also with the text in every conceivable other version. The success or otherwise of any one version of the narrative is merely a subset of nearly half a billion possible narratives in the aggregate. Though difficult to fully conceive, this is something I suspect many readers instinctively know. A common reaction from those who have finished the novel is to seek out other readers to compare notes.

But what readers who squint to catch glimpses of the author’s view may not realise is that they have experienced the story in a way I cannot. I can cast an eye over any number of versions of my story, but I can never see the flow of a linear narrative, only a single path running through that fluid web of chapters. For better or for worse I can never have the experience I had reading The Unfortunates.

I suspect that’s why the story that emerged turned out far more self-reflexive than I had originally intended. Maybe it was inevitable that a narrative featuring a band of literary misfits reconstructing a library from fragments in a dystopian world would eventually turn in on itself, a comment on how fiction can become a vehicle for revealing how we construct our own truths. In the same way the story’s characters can never truly reach the author, so too a reader’s and writer’s experiences always remain tantalisingly out of reach for each other.

Ex Libris is out now.

Reference

Bryant, J., 2005. The Fluid Text. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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 work. It’s more instinctive. Manipulating pace is one of the writer’s primary tricks in taking a simple sequence of events and turning them into narrative. But what in retrospect looks deliberate and disciplined, is in the act of writing more like manipulating the feel of the story as you go.

When it came to my current publishing project, all that instinct counted for nothing. An experiment in recombinant narrative structure requires careful consideration and active manipulation of the curve.

Ex Libris is a novel containing twelve chapters that can be shuffled in any order, yet always presents as a cohesive narrative arc. It is being published in a print run that randomises the chapters between each copy. With close to half a billion possible combinations, each copy will contain a unique version of the text, yet all will tell the same story.

The title for ‘Ex Libris’ comes from the nineteenth century fad for bookplates.

The two books that, more than any others, inspired the structure of Ex Libris are The Unfortunates by B. S. Johnson and Tristano by Nanni Balestrini. Curiously, both were written in the 1960s, though Tristano wouldn’t find its true form until 2007.

The Unfortunates is a beautiful but restless story about grief and the intrusion of memories that overlay the banality of daily life. The novel was structured with a fixed opening and closing and with freely fluid chapters between. The first edition and its more recent reproduction was published as chapter-length booklets contained in a box, which the reader was free to arrange in whatever order they desired.

Balestrini envisaged Tristano as a standard bound work with content that was randomised between copies. Sound familiar? The author was unable to realise the work as intended until forty years after its initial publication and with the advent of digital-based print technology. As the title suggests, Tristano builds its text using Tristan and Isolde as scaffold, which frees Balestrini to desiccate the narrative into the smallest of fragments, hints of meaning that only ever briefly come into focus.

Both works experiment boldly, not just with structure, but also with the language itself. The result is intoxicating: as a reader you feel like you’re having fun, even as you stumble around the text, constantly trying to find your footing. Tristano is one of the best examples of what I call ‘narrative drift’, the sense that, as a reader, you must let go of any sense of structure or meaning and allow the pages to take you wherever they lead. The Unfortunates is more focused, a narrative that initially drifts, but tightens as more of its pieces fall into place.

When I began writing what would become Ex Libris, I didn’t have a particular structure or publishing method in mind. What I wanted to do was write a work with fluid text without sacrificing a reader’s sense of plot or narrative arc.

I started with much more complicated mechanics and elaborate concoctions of fixed and fluid chapters. I ground my way through three drafts of the story, never completely satisfied, trying to find some magic key that would unlock how the story should work.

Eventually, I abandoned these versions of the story altogether. After a break from the manuscript, I returned and found myself back at first principles. Finally, I contemplated the curve.

I created a storyboard of sorts in Scriviner—movable lists in dot points—obstinately refusing to write anything resembling finished prose until a supporting structure had been mapped in sufficient detail. Slowly, a new structure began to take shape. The story begins in media res, at the beginning of the climax. Then it backtracks. It fills in details and circumstances that led directly to the opening scene. Then it jumps to the rest of the climax and conclusion. This means Ex Libris, like Johnson’s The Unfortunates, opens and closes with fixed chapters that frame the narrative. I had hoped not to invite such direct comparisons with Johnson, since clearly I would come off a distant second best. But the structure he pioneered, with its parallels to classic storytelling technique, is compelling in its simplicity.

Beyond the framing device, the fluid or recombinant chapters in Ex Libris primarily concern themselves with exploring character and world. These chapters exist in a weird state of semi-independence. A fluid chapter is episodic, with its own miniature arc. It cannot rely on prior knowledge. That doesn’t make it a short story. Although it shares traits with the short story form, a fluid chapter’s raison d’etre is to contribute to a greater whole. Detached from their surroundings and the framing of the novel, these little stories might struggle to pass a ‘so what?’ test.

Story and the structure developed in tandem. Part dystopia, part satire, with doses of paranoia and farce, and a self-reflexive bent, the novel is set in a hyper-networked surveillance state that has abandoned and almost forgotten the book. It focuses on a small band of subversives who collect the fragments and scraps of stories left behind. Calling themselves the ‘free readers’, they are attempting to rebuild a grand library they know must have once existed. A fragmented book about fragmented books, Ex Libris both feeds off and contributes to its own structure, a virtuous cycle of knowing winks.

I was very conscious of the reader’s experience.

I was very conscious of the reader’s experience, signposting and orienting the text at every opportunity to counter and minimise the sense of narrative drift. I maintained strict upper and lower word limits for each chapter. Too long indicated waffle that needed to be broken up. Too short pointed to a lack of substance. Often throughout the long planning stage of the project, I would stare at a dot-point breakdown for a chapter and think ‘but where’s the story?’.

I also avoided working on chapters in any particular order. Instead, I jumped around. From its initial use as a storyboard, Scrivener became a kind of reference tool as I wrote, a way to maintain a wide-angle view of the story, while moving the chapters around. The texts themselves were composed in separate documents, organised by character name and working title. Early printouts were separated into chapters, each one held together with a bulldog clip, so that I could shuffle and reshuffle while reading.

When I finally created the first complete manuscript, I used a random number generator and manually combined the chapters into a single file. I’ve never considered putting together a preferred or canonical order. The thought of it seems a bit…wrong to me. The chronology of the story can be reconstructed in part—some events clearly happen before others—but a grand overarching chronology would be impossible to determine. That’s not how this story works.

At the end of an exhaustive process, I wasn’t sure if I’d succeeded. It wasn’t until the first feedback from beta readers (each of them with their own unique random shuffle) that I suspected maybe this was working as intended. A good indication was that some of these early readers did their own reshuffling to see if I had cheated.

The coding to compile finished print-ready files is done in Automator, the computer equivalent of a Rube Goldberg machine.

The long process of conceiving, planning, and writing Ex Libris has led me to a different way of thinking about raising tension in a narrative arc. The behaviour of the characters introduced in the opening sequences is gradually becomes clearer as their background is revealed. It doesn’t matter in what order those revelations happen.

The best analogy I’ve found is that it’s like a jigsaw puzzle. The order in which you place the pieces doesn’t change the final picture, but it does change how you experience the journey towards it. Adjacent chapters might flow or they might juxtapose. A character might disappear from the story for a while. A particular piece of key knowledge might be revealed earlier or later. The story has a different rhythm between copies. If the traditional narrative arc is the linear curve, this is more two-dimensional.

So does it work? That remains my burning question as I finalise editing and prepare to publish. It’s impossible to speak for every possible combination. There are 479,001,600 of them so I can’t check. It’s something every individual reader will have to determine on their own based on the version of the text they receive. I’ve always hoped that the story might be good enough to transcend its construction. I imagine a reader happening across a copy of Ex Libris, with no prior knowledge of its creation, who will read from cover to cover and enjoy it.

Is that even possible? I guess we’ll see.

The crowdfunding campaign to publish Ex Libris is live until 25 November 2019.

Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest.

17776
by Jon Bois

“What football will look like in the future.” It looks at first like just another opinion piece by just another American writer for sports-focused site SB Nation. But, very quickly into the story, it becomes clear that something is terribly wrong. The text itself warns you of this shortly before the page disintegrates. The opinion piece falls away from the page before it can really begin, nothing more than a ruse that deposits you into the world of 17776.

Distant satellites pointing back at Earth bring you the story of a generation of people who have not died or even aged, a generation that must find ever more elaborate ways to occupy its time. What football looks like in 17776 is a game with neither time nor physical boundaries. It’s a fascinating premise that leads to an extended mediation on immortality, boredom, and the deeper meaning of games: a strange brew that Bois handles with deft assurance.

The tech behind it uses simple html and embedded YouTube videos, with only a little javascript trickery, which has already given it a reasonable shelf life. Originally published serially in 2017, it’s a story worth revisiting or discovering.

https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football

The Writing Platform offers a unique environment to publish writing that focuses on non-traditional.

We publish at the intersection between technology and writing and support sharing knowledge that is underrepresented in traditional academic publishing.  TWP connects you with your community of artists, scholars, and publishers and provides the capacity for high impact publishing.

Contributors include well-known writers and thinkers such as Margaret Atwood, Philip Hensher, and Naomi Alderman, and industry heavyweights like Porter Anderson and Richard Nash.

Take a look at this short video with our editors who explain who we are, what we are doing and what we would like to achieve.

We welcome pitches for articles, with a word length between 1000 and 2500.  If you are interested in submitting a paper for us to consider for our ‘Experience’ section, please contact hello at thewritingplatform.com with a short description or abstract. Do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.

It’s been an exciting year for digital fiction: we saw a major work emerge in the mainstream, for the mainstream, and turn into a viral hit – Jon Bois’s 17776: What Football Will Look Like in the Future. The mobile digital fiction platform oolipo was launched, and Dreaming Methods and Mez Breeze’s All the Delicate Duplicates received a rave review from no less than the Los Angeles Times Review of Books.

Likewise, last year’s Opening Up Digital Fiction Writing Competition was an overwhelming success. We received 110 entries from 24 countries all around the world. Our judges were actually overwhelmed with the quality of the submissions! The shortlist featured some of the top names in digital fiction – Alan Bigelow, Dreaming Methods & Mez Breeze, Serge Bouchardon – as well as a wide array of newcomers bringing fresh takes. The Judge’s Prize went to Alan Bigelow’s How to Rob a Bank, which would also go on to nab the 2017 Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature. Entries from StoryMax, The Marino Family, and Kaitlyn Ensley rounded out the top picks, all fantastic examples of digital fiction with mainstream appeal.

Winner of the 2017 Opening Up Digital Fiction Writing Competition

For the second iteration of the Opening Up Digital Fiction Writing Competition, we’re excited to be partnering with Wonderbox Publishing, who is hosting the competition and offering publication to the winners, as well as Literature Wales and Jisc Wales, who will be helping to promote awareness of the competition and digital fiction. Bangor University, through their Bangor-ESRC Impact Acceleration Awards, is funding the prizes.

The goal of the Opening Up Competition to introduce more readers to digital fiction; likewise, Wonderbox Publishing’s goal is to help digital writers carve out a niche in the publishing world so they can earn a living doing what they love. This competition is a big step toward these goals, helping to raise awareness of digital fiction for the public, and giving writers a chance to earn a bit of cash for their work. As it’s open to everyone, everywhere (as long as submissions are accessible, and in either English or Welsh), we hope to find digital fiction that will appeal to the public, and a public that is hungry for more.

Wonderbox has also published a resource for writing digital fiction.

If you’re not familiar with the form, digital fictions are stories that require the reader to interact with the narrative throughout the reading experience. This may include hyperlinks, moving images, mini-games or sound effects. In many digital fictions, the reader has a role in constructing the narrative by controlling a character’s journey through the story. You can read more about them, as well as links to examples, here and here. They’re not prose fiction, and they’re not games, but when done well they can really impact both author and reader alike.

Digital fiction has been around as long as computer games. Some of the first commercial computer games (text adventures like Zork! and Colossal Cave Adventure) are now considered a form of digital fiction; as more literary-focused “interactive fiction”, this form still thrives! One of the most prominent movements in digital fiction is currently going on in the Twine community. Twine is a free, open source platform that a few indie game developers adopted and promoted – the result is a blooming form of digital fiction usually called Twine games or storygames, which has resonated with creators who often don’t feel they have a voice in mainstream publishing and game development: women, minorities, and LGBTQ.

One of the first digital fictions

As a writer, I love the possibilities digital fiction offers. Digital media is a versatile platform that can encompass all modes of storytelling – linguistic, visual, audio, interactive – and bundle them all together for complex, additive narrative and aesthetic effects. The reader can be involved in the actual shaping and direction of the story, through the selection of links, through navigation and choices, and even through gameplay. It’s a big challenge to craft a story that works on multiple levels, and that can have multiple potential narratives, depending on what the reader does – a challenge that drives a lot of really creative impulses (and shenanigans!).

The Opening Up Digital Fiction Writing Competition is open to authors of all kinds, no matter what age, ability, experience, or location. We want to inspire authors to challenge themselves in this emerging medium, and to bring enjoyable digital fictions to an expanding audience of readers. Winners will receive a cash prize, and an option to publish with Wonderbox. We’re lining up a fantastic team of judges with a wealth of experience and a range of approaches to digital fiction – in both English and in Welsh – and we’re all excited to see what emerges from the competition!

Click here for more information on the competition or to submit an entry.

I have tried again and again to become another person. I have spent years trying to think my way into different people’s heads, language, rhythms. These people have sometimes been real people. More often they have been narrators and characters. Sometimes, though, they have been writers – writers I tried to be.

One was the imaginary author of a novel that was published as King Death. I was convinced this novel should come out not by me but under a pseudonym – that of a Japanese woman. I wanted the novel to appeal to readers of Banana Yoshimoto.

This didn’t happen because my agent assured me that anyone reading King Death would know it was by me. (Still not sure about this.)

With Lilian’s Spell Book, the novel I first put out on the Wattpad website and am now publishing on kindle, I had another serious go at being another writer – in Lilian’s Spell Book’s case I was going to be Alex Warden. (Alex being either male or female but, in my mind, definitely female.)

The whole idea behind the book, right from the start, was that I – Toby Litt, male, “established”, literary author – might be putting potential readers off.

Here’s a quick summary of the story:

Lilian’s Spell Book is a paranormal adventure novel about an ordinary English family – mother, father, pre-teen son, baby daughter – who inherit an extraordinary house. They move to this vast Elizabethan mansion in rural Sussex from their small South London maisonette. Very soon, they all find out their new home is haunted. But it is the mother of the family, Jeane Jonson, who begins to suspect that the secret to the house lies in the Elizabethan portrait that hangs in a gallery just off the vast entrance hall – a glittering, gorgeous oil painting showing the proud, red-haired Lilian holding in her hand a small leather-bound book. But the real wonders start when the narrator discovers the book itself, in the secret library of the mansion. Lilian’s father was an alchemist…

Find Toby Litt’s latest novel here too.

What I hoped was to have my unnamed narrator be as close to her reader as possible.

In fact, by writing my narrator as I did, I was trying to entice my reader – a new reader for me, I hoped – to discover the book I’d made for her.

When the time came to submit the novel to publishers, I confused matters by insisting that it went out under the Alex Warden pseudonym.

This didn’t fly – none of the major publishers went for the novel, which they were told was by ‘someone they would have heard of, when the author’s identity is revealed’.

Lilian’s Spell Book was a ghost story, and publishers generally liked the first half, but then it didn’t continue as they expected. Put bluntly, it wasn’t scary enough for them.

But I’d never intended it to be scary. The haunting that takes place is meant to terrify only until it starts to be understood, after which it becomes wonderful.

Before J.K. Rowling gazumped the idea for her Book of Spells, I’d thought of calling Lilian’s Spell Book not a ghost story but a ‘wonderbook’.

After being rejected by all the publishers I’d hoped would love it, the novel sat around on my hard drive for a couple of years.

Cut to 2013, when I was teaching a residential creative weekend at Tickton Grange. This was part of the Beverley Literature Festival. (So, thank you to them.) I sat in on a presentation by Alysoun Owen, Editor of the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook. She was talking to my students about ‘bespoke tips on getting published’.

Alysoun mentioned What Pad – I think that’s how I first wrote it down – as one interesting platform. (So, big thank you to her.)

Once back home, I looked Wattpad up. Conventional publishing had told me Lilian’s Spell Book failed because it wasn’t scary enough – it took a generic detour. Fine. I’d see what readers with no investment in it thought; readers who’d got it for free.

Publishing on Wattpad also gave me the chance to do something I’ve always wanted to do – serialize a novel. Between 14 October 2013 and 10 December 2013, I put a new chapter of Lilian’s Spell Book up every day. (I did this under my own name, rather than Alex Warden. I wasn’t risking any future confusion about who’d written the book.)

Whenever a new reader started on the Prologue, I got a notification – and I made sure to message them, to say I hoped they enjoyed the book, if they got the chance to keep reading.

My first impression was that a lot of the readers were young, and the messages they sent back were often enthusiastically mistyped. These weren’t fussy people. What they wanted was a good story that gripped them – and that they could get for free.

I was really delighted. These weren’t my usual readers. Most of these new readers had no idea I’d written other books. They sometimes said I should keep going, because I had talent. I found this incredibly touching, and encouraging.

I wasn’t hiding my identity or that I wasn’t a first-timer. On my Profile page, I’d put up a biography, explaining a little about who I was.

Alex Warden aka Toby Litt (https://www.wattpad.com/user/TobyLitt)

I hoped a few readers might cross over from Wattpad to the world of physically published books. I’m not sure if any did. The Wattpad readers seemed to be a separate bunch. A typical message might say, ‘I enjoyed your novel so much I couldn’t put my phone down until I finished.’ Being read on phones – this was new for me.

I had been worried that as soon as it became clear that Lilian’s Spell Book didn’t follow the conventional ghost story structure of escalating scares, including false ones, that word would get around that the book was a disappointment. (Word on Wattpad can get around really fast – there are readers’ comments at the bottom of each page.) But as the days went by, the number of readers increased, and quite a few were sticking around waiting for the next chapter.

As a Wattpad author, you get access to a lot of stats about what you’ve written and how it’s being consumed. I immediately learned that the drop-off in readers between the Prologue and Chapter Five was high. Lots of people read openings of books online, just as they would if they picked a physical copy up in a bookshop. I tried not to find this disheartening.

Only about 4% of the readers who read the Prologue get to the final chapter. But the drop-off from Chapter 6 to the end is far more gradual. If a reader makes it to Chapter 6, there is a 50% chance they’ll continue to the end.

Writerly vanity would want both figures to be 100% – instant and total addiction, no quitters whatsoever. That’s never going to happen. (Not in my experience.)

By itself, without promotion, Lilian’s Spell Book picked up a much bigger than average readership. (I’ve put a few stories on Wattpad that have had around 200 reads in total.) Quite often Wattpad books are only read by a dozen or a few dozen people.

Each chapter that’s looked at is counted as a ‘read’. That’s exactly equivalent to a hit on a webpage. A hit doesn’t, of course, mean that someone has read a whole page, just opened it in a browser. But consecutive hits make it almost certain that someone is reading attentively. The number of reads for the final chapter is likely to be the total number of people who have finished the book. For Lilian’s Spell Book this is around 7,000 in four years. The reads figure is an impressive 750,000.

After Lilian’s Spell Book had been around for a few weeks, Gavin Wilson of the Wattpad Team contacted me.

He said they’d noticed that Naomi Alderman, another Wattpad author, had mentioned me in a tweet. It was possible, Gavin said, for the site to feature a novel. This would mean it appeared on the home page of both Web and App. Algorithms could be nudged, coaxed. Lilian’s Spell Book would appear on reader’s screens a little more often. I said yes.

The effect was immediate. Lilian’s Spell Book got into the top 10 in Paranormal and Adventure, and fairly soon was number 1 for Paranormal Adventure (when you combine both categories under the search). Then, for a while, it was the most-read Paranormal book on the whole site. [3 March 2014.]

Some of the other books there in the most-read had up to three million or in one case seven million reads.

Until very recently, Lilian’s Spell Book tended to climb back into the Paranormal top 200 every weekend. I can only assume that new readers find it, carry on for more than a couple of chapters, increasing my stats.

The comments I’ve had – because I politely asked for them, but also because they’re part of the culture of Wattpad – have been very useful. They’ve ranged from pointing out typos to full editorial run-downs. The most frequent comment, I think, was that people would like to know more – or to have a sequel in which the character Lilian is able to speak for herself.

In the Afterword, I asked for specific feedback on one part of the book. The narrator is a mother with two children, one of whom is still being breastfed. Several publishers saw this as a real flaw. In terms of plotting, it limited the main character – she wasn’t so free to roam around the haunted house, and to get into trouble. (Although she does do this increasingly, as the story progresses.) I asked in the Afterword whether the breastfeeding was off-putting, whether it was too much? Some people definitely thought so. Others said it was one of the things they felt was most refreshingly different about the book. They understood what I had been after – that the book was about the alchemy of family, and how that can turn time to gold.

When I finished writing Lilian’s Spell Book, in a hotel room in Belgium, I wept. Nothing else I’ve ever written has had such a powerful effect upon me. Partly because I was a little hungover and exhausted. Mainly because I thought, I’ve done it!

‘It’ being write a book that was straightforward, heartfelt, not distancing, and that would get through to lots of readers.

I’d also constructed a really complicated book (in terms of plot and backstory) but managed to bring it home, and in a way that felt genuinely achieved.

I thought it was the best end of a book I’d ever managed.

The disappointment when it didn’t find a publisher had been very deep. I hoped I’d written a gift of a book – it was returned; it felt like it had been unopened.

Wattpad enabled me to give the book away as a gift – I’ve made no money from it so far, except the £50 I’m being paid for this blog. Everyone who’s read it has done so for free. But now that the Spell book has found an afterlife on Wattpad, I’ve decided to go the whole way.

As so very few of the reader’s comments have been disappointed, I can only assume that the publishers were wrong and the readers – and I – were right. Ghost stories can be about wonder and healing as much as horror and screaming. I’ve decided to take Lilian’s Spell Book to other readers – making it available on Kindle to start with, then elsewhere.

I’ve been reluctant to do this because I like the first home it found, on Wattpad, and the readers there who made me think I’d done the right thing by not hiding it away as a shameful failure.

I believe that Lilian’s Spell Book is different from my other books. One of my tests of whether a book of mine is successful is whether or not, looking back, I can easily imagine myself writing it – can I trace an obvious line between it and me? If it’s too obviously me, that’s a disappointment.

So, I think I’m able to be a little proud of Alex Warden – the writer I believed I was, that I believed I was going to become, all the way through writing Lilian’s Spell Book. She wrote a good book. But I am more proud of the kind, insightful, magically enthusiastic readers of Wattpad. They collectively performed their own alchemy – bringing a dead book back to life.

A version of this illustrated article was given by J.R. Carpenter as a Keynote Address at the New Media Writing Prize Award Event at Bournemouth University in January 2017. 

Things Rarely Turn Out the Way I Intend Them To

According to a note, I wrote in a primary school scrapbook when I was eleven years old, my favourite subjects in school were maths and science. My least favourite subject was French. So naturally, the minute after finishing secondary school I moved to the French-speaking city of Montreal to study Fine Art. I graduated with a BFA in Studio Art in 1995, six months after the release of Netscape, the first public web browser. I have been using the web as a medium for experimental writing since its inception, but my digital work remains heavily inflected by the material practices of drawing, collage, crochet, and sewing.

The first thing I did after art school was to apply for a visual arts thematic residency at The Banff Centre. The theme of the residency was Telling Stories: Telling Tales. I wrote a fictional artist’s statement, in which I told them I was a writer. For some reason, they believed me. During the residency, I tried to make a small book work that told a circular story, but when people got to the end they just stopped reading, because that’s how books work. Then the guy in the next studio over told me that if I rewrote the story in HTML I could link the last page to the first page and the story could go round and round.

When I got back to Montreal, my artist friends informed me that web-based work was elitist, because so few people could access it, and my writer friends assured me that the internet would never catch on. Fishes and Flying Things is still online and it still works.

In 1994 or so I attempted to use QuarkExpress to write a non-linear, intertextual short story which incorporated diagrams and texts from old geology and civil engineering textbooks into a first-person narrative. This story appeared in print in Postscript, a journal of graduate criticism and theory published by Memorial University, Newfoundland, Canada, in Spring 1995, but I remained unsatisfied with the linear layout. In 1996 I used a fountain pen to write hypertext markup language on a print out of my own QuarkExpress layout. In the resulting web-based iteration of Mythologies of Landforms and Little Girls, readers can choose their own narrative path through the story.

Because I went to art school, for many years I thought I was a media artist. In 2000 I was commissioned to make new web-based work called a sleep I fell for an exhibition called Engaging the Virtual at the Dalhousie Art Gallery, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The web had only been around for five years. I was the only web artist in the show.

On one page, a quadratic equation shrouds a charcoal drawing I’d made from a live model when I was in art school. On another, a photo of me attempting a headstand back in the days when I wanted to be a math teacher teeters over a hand-drawn equation. Elsewhere in the work there appeared a short text about a woman who dreams of flying, which I supposed was a prose poem. A few years later, when I was starting to write fiction more deliberately, I made a note in my notebook to develop this text into a short story. I wrote out a plan for how to go about it. A few weeks later I saw this note, went to my computer, opened up the file, and found that I had already expanded the prose poem into a short story called Precipice, but not at all in the way that I had intended. I submitted the file as it was to the CBC Quebec Short Story Competition, which it won.

Okay, fine, I thought. So maybe I am a fiction writer.

I could tell a similar story for just about every one of my works. Things I think are prose poems turn into short stories. Things I think are web-based somehow become physical. My web-based work Entre Ville started off as a poem written with a pen and published in the early UK-based online journal Nth Position in 2005. The web-iteration was commissioned by Oboro, a visual and media art gallery, for the 50th anniversary of the Montreal Arts Council in 2006. It’s included in the Electronic Literature Collection Volume Two and has been widely taught in English departments in universities around the world. My first novel, Words the Dog Knows (2008), re-mediated images and texts from Entre Ville, and two other born digital works – How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome and in absentia. The novel sold its run and is now out of print, but the web-based works are still online.

By the time my web-based work CityFish was short-listed for the New Media Writing Prize in 2012 I had been working on it for over fifteen years. It started off as a very short story told from the first-person point of view of a fish. A very early web-based iteration was presented in an exhibition in Nuremberg, Germany, in July 1998. An archive of photographs, video, found images, maps, objects and quotations accrued over the years. The very short story expanded into a regular-sized short story. The point of view gradually shifted from first-person fish to third-person girl.

Somewhere in the midst of this process, I started applying for funding for another web-based project called The Elevated. My first grant application wasn’t successful, but I did get into a residency at The Banff Centre, where I edited about twenty-five short videos for the project. Three years later I re-submitted my grant application. Whilst I was waiting to hear back it struck me that the CityFish story was actually the text of The Elevated project. I began work immediately and was already a third of the way through by the time the funding came through.

In 2015 I won the Dot Award for a proposal to create a new web-based piece called This is A Picture of Wind. I intended for this work to respond to the storms which battered South West England in early 2014, resulting in catastrophic flooding in Somerset and the destruction of the seawall and rail line at Dawlish. Listening to the news in the months after these storms, I was struck by the paradox presented by attempts to evoke through the materiality of language a force such as the wind, which we can only see indirectly through its affect. I began to explore weather, and wind in particular, in all its written forms. My love of science resurfaced as I looked through mountains of private weather diaries held at the Met Office Library and Archive in Exeter, applied for further funding to develop the project, and worked with other writers to generate new writing on the weather.

During the first week of August 2016, I had the pleasure of participating as a principal performer in the South West Poetry Tour, along with Steven Fowler, Camila Nelson, John Hall, Mattie Spence, and Anabel Banks. Each night we performed new works written in collaboration. In my collaboration with John Hall I used classical texts on weather as raw material, and in my collaboration with Anabel Banks, we worked with two texts on clouds. Anabel added one tricky constraint to our collaboration, that we write in hendecasyllabic — eleven-syllable lines. Agreeing to this would later come to haunt me.

In early September 2016, I was commissioned by NEoN Digital Arts in Dundee to create a new work for their festival set to take place in November of the same year. The theme of the festival was The Spaces We’re In. The curators asked artists to respond to the physical and digital spaces we live and work in, and consider alternatives uses and futures for them, both virtually and materially. I immediately knew I wanted to talk about the environmental impact of so-called ‘cloud’ storage. I’ve thought and written a lot in the past about the complex relationship between biological, digital, and networked memory. The scale of the digital cloud is too vast to think about in terms of the body. I had to think bigger, so I turned to the clouds in the sky.

The resulting work, The Gathering Cloud, builds upon Luke Howard’s classic essay On the Modifications of Clouds (1803). Howard was the first to standardise the names of clouds that we still use today. I incorporated other more recent online articles and books on media theory and climate science. Just to keep it interesting, I decided to stick with the hendecasyllabic constraint. I situated sparse hypertextual hendecasyllabic verses within surreal animated gif collages composed of images materially appropriated from publicly accessible cloud storage services. The cognitive dissonance between the cultural fantasy of cloud storage and the hard facts of its environmental impact is bridged, in part, through the constant evocation of animals: A cumulus cloud weighs one hundred elephants. A USB fish swims through a cloud of cables. Four million cute cat pics are shared each day.

The Gathering Cloud, launched at a Pecha Kucha Night in Dundee, the night of the US elections. I hadn’t intended for the title to wind up sounding quite so ominous, but now more than ever we need to find ways of talking about the enormity of climate change in human terms that we can understand and act upon.

A small print iteration of The Gathering Cloud was produced at the same time as the web iteration. It continues to be shared through gift, trade, mail art, and small press economies further confusing the boundaries between physical and digital, scarcity and waste.

In January 2017 The Gathering Cloud won the New Media Writing Prize.

In March 2017 The Gathering Cloud was an Editor’s Pick in the Saboteur Awards.

In May 2017 a print-book iteration of The Gathering Cloud was published by Uniform books, with a foreword by Jussi Parikka and an afterword by Lisa Robertson. This book collates and extends the research that went into the web iteration. This research material is presented as a sequence of texts and images, acting both as a primer to the ideas behind the project and as a document of its movement between formats, from the data centre to the illuminated screen, from the live performance to the printed page. In his foreword, media theorist Jussi Parikka, author of A Geology of Media, describes the work as “a series of material transformations made visible through a media history executed as digital collage and print publication, hendecasyllabic verse, and critical essay”.

Somewhere in the middle of this cloud gathering process, funding finally came through to develop the wind project I had set out to make in the first place. I am now working with IOTO: DATA to create a new commissioned web-based work called This is a picture of wind.

Things rarely turn out the way I intend them to, but so far this has mostly been a good thing.

Late last year, whilst in the final throes of my doctorate in Creative Writing, I was invited by my supervisor at the University of Southampton to join an interdisciplinary Leverhulme Trust-funded research project entitled: ‘StoryPlaces: Exploring the Poetics of Location-Based Narratives’. Working alongside the university’s creative writing undergraduates, professional writers such as Philip Hoare, and colleagues from English (Verity Hunt) and History (James Jordan), my role on this project was to write a short story about nineteenth-century Southampton for two techies investigating how the latest location based apps (for example, GPS mapping) could grow mobile, location-aware digital storytelling into something that “[escapes] the confines of the desktop and [intertwines] in new and interesting ways with the physical world” (Millard, Hargood, Jewell, Weal, 2013: 1). ‘But I know nothing about computers,’ I responded, before agreeing to join the project.

A few months later I was invited to the university’s school of Electronics and Computer Science – a contemporary glass-fronted, air-conditioned, high-security, sparsely-populated and altogether alien establishment when compared with my nonagenarian campus inside which droves of students can be ‘seen’ and ‘heard’, tatty brown mock-leather sofas abound, the comforting smells of coffee and pizza pervade and cast-iron radiators produce year-round balmy/barmy temperatures that warm already roasted cockles ─ to attend my first meeting with the techies, Dave Millard, Senior Lecturer of Computer Science, and Charlie Hargood, Research Fellow in Web And Internet Science (WAIS). At this point in my digital-fiction-writing journey, the task, or ‘commission’ as it now appears on my curriculum vitae, was still not entirely clear to me: as far as I knew, I was simply going to write a story about Southampton that would be used by my colleagues to make some sort of digital advance in this mysterious realm they called location-based hypertext fiction. Armed with my Moleskine and pen – not even a laptop or tablet device ─ I prepared to note down the following innocuous particulars: word count, submission deadline, required genre, theme and setting. Meanwhile, the whiteboard was peppered with what looked to be, to a sufferer of mathematical anxiety at least, algebraic equations. These algebraic equations were in fact a diagrammatic representation of my colleagues’ conceptual sculptural hypertext model, a model which sought to “create interactive, location aware narratives […] where the [reader of the story] is the principle locus of activity, and interaction is accomplished by moving through a physical space (typically carrying a smart device […] as the interaction mechanism for the virtual space)” (2013: 1, 2). Clearly, I wore my mathematical anxiety upon my face as plainly as some wear their heart upon their sleeve because what followed was a patient explanation of the above in language I could understand. Crucially, ‘Nodes’ became pages; ‘pinned’ nodes became the pages of my story that would only be made available to the reader of my story once they were situated in a predetermined location specified by me; ‘unpinned’ nodes became the pages that could be read by my reader in any location i.e. of their choosing; while sequences of unpinned nodes known as ‘stacks’ became the pages that might or might not be pinned to a specific location, but that I had determined must be consumed in a specific order. (Even as I write this, I’m still not confident that my interpretation of the ‘node’ ─ and I take full responsibility for it ─ is accurate, but it is with this particular understanding of the node that I forged ahead and wrote my digital location-based story.)

As I have already stated, the story was to be located in nineteenth-century Southampton but was to feature the city’s Emigrants’ Home – a home built to accommodate the influx of emigrants who were entering the city to await transportation by ship to the New World. Furthermore, in order to provide a walking and reading experience that would last between thirty and sixty minutes, the story had to total 5,000 words in length, be connected to between three and six additional locations, and provide a narrative capable of being traversed in more than one way. In response to this brief, I duly wrote ‘The Destitute and The Alien’, the synopsis of which follows:

“It is 1895 and Jack the Ripper now lives in the City of Southampton. Newly promoted to caretaker of John Doling’s Emigrants’ Home in Albert Road, he spends his days fumigating the new arrivals and his nights visiting prostitutes in nearby Simnel Street. For seven years he’s kept his knife sheathed and his predilection for murder and dissection supressed. But with the arrival of Golda – a beautiful Jewish girl fleeing from persecution in the Russian Pale – comes the reawakening of Jack’s psychotic compulsions. Will Golda survive her stay at the Emigrants’ Home to board the ship to take her to the New World? Or will her final destination be the cold mortuary slab? To find out, charge your smartphone, don your walking shoes and head for the City of Southampton. In ‘The Destitute and The Alien’, streets you never knew existed, and likewise histories, await your exploration…”

I chose to locate ‘The Destitute and The Alien’ in the following places: The Emigrants’ Home; Simnel Street; Queens Park; the French Garden in Town Quay Park; the White Star Line’s Head Office, Canute Chambers; The Old City Walls; The Frog and Frigate Pub; The Genting Club, and Dock Gate 4.

Six of my locations: The Emigrants’ Home, Queens Park, The French Garden in Town Quay Park, Simnel Street, Canute Chambers, The Old City Walls. Photographs by Tory L. Dawson, 2016

In order to create more complex digital interactions and experiences for the reader, I was also encouraged by my colleagues to attach temporal as well as locational conditions to the story. This I was able to achieve when relaying the historical fact that before the Emigrants’ Home was constructed, many emigrants were forced to spend nights sleeping rough in Queens Park. To help the reader visualize this scene, I decided that the relevant page/node should only be made available to the reader in Queens Park after dark. (In the interests of keeping the reader safe, I also attached the condition that this node/page would only be made available when there was more than one reader present in this location i.e. a group of three or more.) In terms of genre, the choice was mine alone. However, since my story had to be located in nineteenth-century Southampton, a Neo-Victorian sensation thriller seemed the natural choice since, like location-based fiction, “Proximity is, indeed, one great element of sensation” (Mansel, 1863: 484). I also wanted this story to be a ‘page-turner’ not some thinly veiled didactic tour-guide that bored my reader and failed to breathe life into my chosen locations. I imagined the digital location-based fiction equivalent of a ‘page-turner’ to be one that compels the reader to hurry, not amble, to the next location in order to access the next page/node of the story. To achieve this, I knew I would have to ensure my reader was totally immersed in the Victorian setting. However, in order to reach the story’s Victorian places, the reader would have to pass, and therefore experience, Southampton’s twenty-first century places such as its high-rise tower blocks, car parks and shopping malls. It was then that I became interested in anthropologist Marc’s Augé’s theory of the ‘non-place’ which he describes as “a place that cannot be defined as relational, historical, or concerned with identity” (Augé, 1995: 77, 78).

Southampton’s ‘non-places’. Photographs by Tory L. Dawson, 2016

As far as I could see, my story was located in a geographical area that was littered with Augé’s ‘non-places’. What was I to do about them? Was I to acknowledge these ‘non-places’ by means, perhaps, of a dual narrative, or simply ignore them in a bid to preserve/maintain the nineteenth-century setting? I began to view these ‘non-places’ as potential saboteurs capable of causing my story to fail and by extension, my reader to amble between locations. In response, I spent many hours at the locations, travelling between them, attempting to view them as my reader might. Ultimately, I decided that Southampton’s ‘non-places’ would not be ignored and that it was better to acknowledge them directly. Thus, the narrator of ‘The Destitute and The Alien’ invites the reader to take some time away from the narrative to consider their own first impressions of Southampton. The reader is made to ask the narrator: “Victorian Southampton or twenty-first century Southampton?” Before the narrator replies:

“You can see how hard it’s been to keep you in Victorian Southampton when contemporary structures such as the one before you on the corner of Albert Road, intrude. (Betwixt you and I, dear reader, these ugly modern architectural excretions have caused me more than one attack of the vapours.) I have often had to consider how best to proceed. Have you ever been present when an upright elderly relative has loudly let one fly in company? Consider what might be one’s reaction? The unpleasant eructation is generally ignored”.

This narrative exchange is designed to enable the reader to acknowledge Southampton’s ‘non-places’ before swiftly returning them to the story’s Victorian setting where, hopefully, they’ll feel compelled to hurry on to the next location to discover what becomes of Golda and Jack.

I began the StoryPlaces project claiming to know ‘nothing about computers’ but it would have been more accurate to say that I knew nothing about digital locative fiction. Now that my participation in the StoryPlaces project is at an end, I don’t claim to be an expert in the field, but what I will say is that I enjoyed writing digital locative fiction and would jump at the chance to do so again.