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 »
Reading Time: 7 minutes Matt Finch writes and helps communities, companies, and institutions around the world to do useful and surprising new things. His latest digital work is the interactive narrative, The Library of Last Resort. You have a varied background including a Ph.D. in Modern Intellectual History. How did you arrive at this nexus of strategy, storytelling and technology? I wrote… Read more »
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 »
Reading Time: 8 minutes As a researcher, my focus is on critically examining digital literature—texts and writing practices where digital media is rendered integral to the experience of literary or poetic forms. In recent years, I have been working so that my research manifests not just at the level of written critique, but also through creative practice, placing my… Read more »
Reading Time: < 1 minute Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest. All the Delicate Duplicates By Mez Breeze and Andy Campbell Can a first-person gaming environment be used to tell a story? Of course! But, typically in experiences of this type, the balance between story and game falls heavily… Read more »
Reading Time: 7 minutes Way back in the wilds of the year 2008, artist-extraordinaire James Morgan and I engaged in an animated discussion about Augmented and Virtual Reality. At that time James and I were collaborators-in-crime in the Third Faction Collective, a group of digital artists intent on constructing game interventions in Massively Multiplayer Online Spaces. During this discussion,… Read more »
Reading Time: < 1 minute Screenshots is a weekly feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest. A Modern Ghost By Stef Orzech My writer-bias is showing in the byline above since this app’s creators take great pains to attribute it collectively to AltSalt, the ‘digital literature studio’ from which it emerged. Indeed, the drive… Read more »
Reading Time: < 1 minute Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest. Paige and Powe By David Thomas Henry Wright On first sight of Julia Lane’s framing illustrations, readers might be forgiven for mistaking Paige and Powe for a kind of graphic novel. Instead, it is a nuanced and complex narrative built… Read more »
Reading Time: 8 minutes Origins The Poetry Map has its origins in a feature on Facebook’s homepage by which users could list countries they had visited and see these appear as pins on a map. While this was a good way of ‘showing off’, it also got me thinking about the places I had lived in the course of… Read more »
Reading Time: 8 minutes 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… Read more »