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

After the success of the last four MIX conferences, MIX 2019 returns to the beautiful surroundings of Bath Spa University’s Corsham Court Campus in Wiltshire on the 1^st and 2^nd July 2019. This year’s conference will be a more intimate, single strand version, curated for a smaller audience to give time and space to instigate conversations around digital writing with a focus on experiential storytelling, including immersive technologies and new forms of publishing, from transmedia and poetry film to virtual reality to AI in storytelling. Confirmed speakers include publisher, Maja Thomas, Chief Innovation Officer, Hachette Innovation Program; Thomas Zandegiocomo, Artistic Director Zebra Poetry Film Festival, Berlin; Guy Gadney, Charisma.ai and writer Nikesh Shukla.

Bath Spa University is the UK’s foremost provider of creative writing programmes at undergraduate, masters and PhD level and MIX is well-established as an innovative forum for the discussion and exploration of writing and technology. MIX has previously attracted an international cohort of contributors from the UK, Australia, and Europe as well as North and South America. MIX is situated within the international research centres, the Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries, in collaboration with the Centre for Media Research, Creative Writing Research Centre, and The Writing Platform.

This year, our conference focuses on experiential storytelling, which encompasses works that foreground the experience of the audience or reader. Within the single-strand programme there will be four themed panels. We would like to encourage the submission of research papers and artist/practitioner presentations on the following topics;

• Emerging forms of digitally-mediated narrative, including projects that use artificial intelligence, machine learning, algorithmic writing practices and locative-aware narratives.
• Poetry film, including the future of poetry film, current developments in social media sharing, current developments in poetry film content and practice.
• Immersive technologies and narrative, including Extended and Mixed Reality, VR, Augmented Reality, and Ambient Literature
• Ethics of Storytelling, including accessibility and appropriation, but also issues around technology and ethics, i.e embodiment in VR, algorithmic bias in cultural works that use AI, etc.

A conference where creative writing and media creation intersect with and/or are dependent upon technology should be as interdisciplinary as possible, and that’s what we are aiming for with MIX 2019. The conference will host a vibrant mix of academic papers, practitioner presentations and keynotes.

We are looking for proposals for 15 minute papers/ presentations or 60 minute panels (composed of three 15 minute papers with time for q&a). Please submit 300 word abstracts for each paper/presentation you are proposing via http://mixconference.org/submit/ by Monday 4th February 2019. We will let you know whether your submission has been successful by the end of February 2019.

Speakers who are selected to present at the conference will be encouraged to develop their papers into innovative, practice-focused outputs published in Bath Spa University’s recently launched International Journal of Creative Media Research. The journal is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed and open access journal devoted to pushing forward the approaches to and possibilities for publishing creative media-based research.

For queries on your conference submission, email mix@bathspa.ac.uk

You can find the full call for papers on our website.

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

Beemgee
An online authoring tool

Beemgee is a web-based tool designed demystify complex narrative, breaking it down into its components, and step its users through the minutiae of storytelling, one concept at a time. Essentially, it is a storyboarding tool, using a card-based interface to provide a broad overview of a project. It guides its users through the often mechanical processes writers undertake—character profiles, switching between chronology and narrative order—cleverly integrating them into an engaging visual design. Beemgee’s bet is that these tasks can be approached step by step, like baking. Maybe they’re right. But storytelling is an idiosyncratic process and the inevitable assumptions all tools such as Beemgee must make are unlikely to suit all writers. Having said that, this tool’s real value may yet lie not so much in the creation of new stories, but in the breakdown and analysis of existing ones.

As a web- based tool, it also comes with built-in caveats. Using an app within a browser window is not for everyone. Even widely adopted apps like Google Docs have always felt to me like swimming fully clothed. It also raises concerns about the long-term storage and accessibility of its data. But Beemgee does bring a fresh and well-thought-out approach to the tricky business of story planning.

Beemgee is available to try for free online with the option of a subscription for additional features.

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

Sleepless
By Natalia Theodoridou

What happens to dreams if no one sleeps? That’s the question explored in Natalia Theodoridou’s dark and unsettling short story built on Twine. Based on the premise that human sleep has suddenly become a thing of the past, the story follows its characters—never quite asleep, never quite awake—through all-night coffee shops, nightclubs and call-in help lines.

Maintaining a tight focus on the text, the story makes sparing and sometimes subtle use of visual and audio accompaniment to reinforce its mood. Sleepless is at its best though in its use of dynamic text and arrangement on the screen, capturing all too well a liminal state of consciousness. Like many Twine stories, it can feel a little slight depending on the choices made by the reader, though it is worth repeating for a fuller experience.

Sleepless is available online.

What happens when a story comes to you where you are reading? What new types of storytelling are made possible when narrative accesses technology to personalise itself to you?

Breathe is a digital ghost story to be read on your phone. It tells the story of a young woman, Flo, who can communicate with the dead. As Flo attempts to make contact with her mother, Clara, who died when she was a young girl, other voices keep interrupting. The ghosts that disrupt Flo’s search for Clara recognise your surroundings and begin to haunt you, the reader, in the same way they haunt Flo.

For the past two years, I’ve been participating in a research project called Ambient Literature. With colleagues from the University of the West of England, University of Birmingham, and my university, Bath Spa, we’ve been investigating the locational and technological future of the book, scoping the field of digital literature and thinking about what urban data flows and the smartphone as a reading and listening device can bring to storytelling. At the heart of this research lie questions about how literature can make use of novel technologies and social practices to create evocative experiences for readers. The funding for the project (provided by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council) has allowed for three creative works to be commissioned as practice-as-research and Breathe is my response to that commission.

Breathe is a collaboration with the digital book space Editions at Play, which is itself a collaboration between Google Creative Labs Sydney and the London-based publisher Visual Editions. What we’ve created is a literary experience delivered using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and context recognition technology that responds to the presence of the reader by internalising the world around them. The story uses place, time, context and environment to situate the reader at the centre of Flo’s world as the book changes in ways that we hope are both intimate and uncanny. It’s a book that personalises itself to you.

The story takes about fifteen minutes to read; it is available for free and can be read on mobile devices via www.breathe-story.com.

The two other commissioned works, Duncan Speakman’s It Must Have Been Dark by Then, and James Atlee’s The Cartographer’s Confession, take diverse approaches to the challenges set by the research project; each of these works was created with a different set of collaborators. Along with the three creative pieces, the Ambient Literature project is producing a range of publications, from a how-to toolkit for writers and makers to a scholarly book co-written by the research team. As a creative writer, it’s been fascinating to work on Breathe, which builds on my own work in the field of digital fiction. With Visual Editions and Google’s Creative Lab Sydney, I couldn’t have asked for a better team of collaborators to bring this personalised locative ghost story to life.

As Anna Gerber, Creative Partner at Visual Editions, says, “Breathe is a story for anyone who wants to know what it’s like to read and experience a personalised book. Here, the book knows where readers’ are, the street names around them, the cafes nearby – and will give them a chill when they see their digital and real worlds combine. Breathe plays with readers’ minds as it explores what books can be like when you marry technology, literature, readers’ physical spaces and their everyday worlds.”

One final note – The Ambient Literature Project is looking for participants to try out Breathe and talk with us about their experience. If you are interested, follow this link to the sign up form.

Recently, my collection of flash fiction, The Paradise Project, was published simultaneously as an ebook and in a book-arts edition using technology that would have been familiar to Johannes Gutenberg: hand-set type impressed on handmade paper with a hand-operated press.

As the two versions progressed, I had a stunning realisation: publishing has circled back to its roots. I, the writer, was expected not only to produce the words, but to collaborate in both the making and the marketing of these past and future books.

To that end, I spent time in the studio with the paper artist commissioned to produce the endpapers, using plants from my gardens. What started out looking like a slurry of wet Kleenex did indeed resemble a sheet of limp paper on a humid day by the time she lifted it from between the blankets of the paper press.

“See that?” she said, pointing to an almost imperceptible indentation surrounded by an infinitesimally thicker ridge. “That’s a papermaker’s tear.”

I found it hard to see that tiny dimple as an imperfection. The entire landscape of the page was a riot of dips and clumps, knots and swirling fibres, as if the paper itself were supple, complex, alive.

A few months later, the papermakers, typesetters, proofreaders, and Hugh Barclay, the irrepressible octogenarian owner of Thee Hellbox Press, gathered to put The Paradise Project to bed. One by one we took our turns at the flywheel of the antique Chandler & Price press.

After this, the metal letters would be dumped into the hellbox, the 294 printed copies would be bound, and there would never again be books that were exactly like this.

I had helped set the type, choose the paper, smear the ink, and now it was my turn at the flywheel. I placed a folded sheet of thick, creamy paper upside down on the tympan as Hugh instructed. I centred the page as best I could, and gave the flywheel a whirl. I felt like a contestant on Wheel of Fortune. 291.292.293.294

I lifted the last page off the press. It looked like all the others we’d printed that afternoon, nothing to declare its ultimate place in those four and a half months of printing. Ironically, the page we’d just pulled 294 copies of—page 48—was the first page of the last story I’d written for that collection. In it, a man complains to a woman he meets in a park that his children and his children’s children have “no sense of history. No sense at all.”

While the others hoisted glasses of single malt to toast the occasion, I read the story, thinking how fine a gathering of words could sound when they were this beautiful on the page. Then I noticed, in one corner, a faint smudge. I peered more closely. The smudge was clearly a fingerprint.

“Oh dear,” I said, showing the page to Hugh. “Should we print another?”

“We should charge extra!” Hugh exclaimed, dismissing my question with a wave of his hand. “That fingerprint—that’s what makes this copy distinct. Human. It says, ‘Somebody printed this.’ Imagine what it would be worth, a book with Gutenberg’s fingerprint!”

There are no fingerprints on the ebook version of The Paradise Project, only the smudges readers leave on their plastic e-ink screens.

That’s not the only difference between publishing in paper and pixels.

While Hugh and I chose hand-made rag paper for the guts of the letterpress book, my ebook-designer son, Erik, and I blithely skipped past considerations of heft, texture, colour, and tooth. Epaper combines ink and paper in one; even typeface is delivered as digital software that a reader can adjust to any size in several different fonts. For hours I toiled in Hugh’s grubby studio, hunting-and-pecking metal letters and sliding them, upside down and backwards, into a chase, but with a few strokes to Erik’s keyboard, my text instantly flowed into an EPUB file.

Does that make a book designer as redundant as the guy inking metal type with a leather pouch? Well, no. My son sent me the pages of Paradise as a file that I say is onscreen, but it wasn’t. The pixelated image of the words were on the screen; the file itself was a knot of coding, an intangible, almost-indecipherable Rosetta stone. The designer’s skill is in making the text accessible across every electronic reading device now existing, and yet to be invented (as they like to say in film contracts).

I played with the EPUB file on my old and new phones, my iPad, my laptop and ancient desktop, shrinking the text, then blowing it up until I could see it across the room. No matter how I manipulated the words, the flow was perfect.

“There’s a certain magic to this, a certain finesse,” Erik said quietly. “Really, really clean code is a beautiful thing. In the same way that a smooth-running press with a perfect skim of ink and a perfect bite of type into the paper, and perfect consistency to the prints—in that same way, there’s beauty and elegance in a well-coded ebook.”

The printed page that Hugh pulled off the press was a material object. It rustled lightly in my hand. I recognized the words that I wrote, the metal letters that I slid into the chase that Hugh set in the press, perfectly inked, to make the words appear on that rectangle of pressed rags.

I looked at the page head-on, as I might look at a painting. Then I held it up to the light, as the paper-maker taught me to do, to look for variations in opacity and how the paper fibres were dispersed. She called this the look-through. Then I held the printed page at a raking angle to the light—the look-down—to check the texture on the surface caused by the felts, the moulds. I watched for papermaker’s tears.

Hugh plucked it out of my hand and offered it to me again, on edge.

“Like this,” he said, holding it perfectly flat, at eye level.

I looked across the terrain of the paper, its landscape of hills and hollows cradling thick, chocolate ink. I could have got lost in there.

“On paper like this,” Hugh said, “words make an impression.”

Why would an Aussie library get its designers to build a drag and drop comics website?

Aren’t there already plenty of free comic makers online?

What are you even playing at?

Last year, Talia Yat and Phil Gullberg of the State Library of Queensland’s innovation space the Edge built the Fun Palaces Comic Maker. It was based on a comic book dice game I devised at the Manila Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in the Philippines.

The maker allowed people to create their own five-panel comic strip by dragging and dropping images. These were published online as part of Fun Palaces, an annual celebration of community, arts, and science around the world.

Our pilot project in 2015 encouraged users worldwide to surprise us with non-narrative comics, cheeky horror stories, and even comics in Te Reo Māori.

This year, people won’t just be surprising us with their stories – they’ll be free to reimagine the project wholesale, as we’ve released the code behind the Comic Maker on Github, with the help of developer Steven Moschidis.

Putting the maker on Github means the public can download the code and adapt it to create variants, add different images, or develop brand new features. The only limits are your ambition and imagination.

In 2015, the Comic Maker permitted web users around the world to create stories which we couldn’t have predicted – smart, sophisticated, crude, dark, funny, twee and all points in between.

This year, releasing the code behind the project opens the doorway to an understanding of “digital literacy” which is not just about consumption, or one institution’s objectives.

We aim to encourage a digital future which is open, flexible, community-led, and most importantly, capable of surprising us all.

So what’s all this got to do with libraries? And what are we playing at?

• Physical, digital, it’s all materialIt turned out that MCAD Manila had a plentiful stock of cube-shaped cardboard boxes which we were able to transform into comic book dice. Players drew on each face of their cube, rolled them like dice in teams of five, and then the teams told stories by arranging the five images that landed face up.And of course, wonderfully, the kids and teens we worked with didn’t just do as they were told. They began rearranging the cubes in other ways, creating towers and pyramids which told the stories they wanted to, in the way they wanted.
• The collaborative approach meant that you didn’t need to be the best at drawing, or the best performer, to contribute to the finished product. You could tell stories in English, Tagalog or any language you pleased. The aim was to juxtapose images in space and then weave a tale which linked those images.
• The comic maker was born from necessity – running a workshop in a modern art gallery with a bunch of Filipino kids aged from infants to teens, not all of whom spoke English.

Fun Palaces: The Next Generation

The dice game evolved into a biographical comics version based on the art of MC Escher and a text-based version intended for professional development workshops – alongside appearances at street fairs in Brisbane and London.

That was great, but we also wanted to explore digital offerings with a similar degree of freedom and unpredictability.

One example was a choose-your-own book review for Australian magazine The Lifted Brow, which saw you trapped between the panels of a comic book – but even that was still too constrained by authorial intent for my tastes.

In the UK, I began working with Fun Palaces, an international movement which helps communities to celebrate their own talents and ambitions in the arts and sciences. On the first weekend in October every year, communities around the world take over local venues so that their friends, neighbours, colleagues, and strangers can come together and try their hand at the arts and sciences for free.

The Fun Palaces manifesto “everyone an artist, everyone a scientist” chimes well with the vision of libraries as “the TARDIS on your street corner” – a public gateway to all knowledge and culture, which lets anyone, from any background, explore whatever they want to from the realm of human understanding and imagining.

As part of a co-producer role on eleven simultaneous Fun Palaces in the London Borough of Lambeth, I arranged for the State Library of Queensland to build a pilot online comic maker.

Some people wondered why we would do this, when there were already free comic book makers available online.

We turned the question around.

This was about process, not product – the aim was not to build the best comic maker in the world in a matter of weeks during late 2015. It was to invite the community to join a conversation and use our resources – much as we like them to use our collections!

If libraries offer creative play, storytimes, makerspaces, and, yes, Fun Palaces in physical locations – why don’t they do that online too?

Encouraging the library’s web team to design this game meant acknowledging their creativity and capacity to do amazing and innovative things beyond “business as usual” – because good work, in any sector, means respecting your team’s ability to innovate and think for themselves.

Releasing the code behind the Comic Maker meant that we were empowering the community – in the very broadest sense of “all web users” – to play with the infrastructure as well as the content of our digital offering.

The essence of a library project is that it’s not meant to teach, preach, or fulfil the requirements of a curriculum: it’s meant to open doors for people to learn and create on their own terms. Comparing it to existing free cartoon makers is like saying we don’t need libraries because we have Amazon and e-books.

• Games have their own art historyBut the truth is more complex: digital and physical traces are interwoven in the Maker’s history, going back through its comic-game forefathers.These images came from Jessica Abel and Matt Madden’s Panel Lottery, an exercise to help people devise their own comics.McCloud had devised a game called 5-Card Nancy, where players laid out individual panels from the Nancy comic strip as playing cards. The aim is to create a five-panel comic, with players voting to decide if each panel is judged worthy to continue the story.
• McCloud pays tribute to the Surrealist game Exquisite Corpse in his account of 5-Card Nancy’s origins, but he also acknowledges a Usenet post written in the 1990s by Barry Deutsch. The comic maker of 2016 traces its history back through physical comics to the Surrealists, to the iconic Nancy cartoon, and back once again into digital space, and the early days of open-ended Internet discussion.
• However, games have their own art history – Abel and Madden were inspired in turn by the work of Scott McCloud, whose Understanding Comics remains one of the defining studies of the medium.
• The original Comic Book Dice challenged players to tell stories using three simply drawn characters: a tall person, a short person, and a penguin.
• We’re always so attracted by new and shiny things. With the current vogue for everything digital, it would be fun to hold up the Comic Maker as a bright example of 21st century library outreach.

• Nothing new under the sun?An old quarry was transformed into a space with three play areas and a thousand-book library, plus indoor games like table tennis, and workshops for kids to learn dressmaking and woodwork. Brisbane’s Sunday Mail described it in 1937 as a “kingdom of happiness”.Yet the truth is this: libraries have always been about play and exploration, not just shelves and storage. More and more we recognise that that kingdom of happiness should be open not just to children, but to everyone, regardless of their age or identity.And that journey into the kingdom of happiness has already begun…
• US librarian Justin Hoenke compares libraries to video game platforms: if they host storytimes and makerspaces within their walls, stock fiction on their shelves, and participate in events like Fun Palaces that embrace the whole community, then you should expect to find playful as well as pragmatic offerings in digital library spaces too.
• Stories like that make me smile. So often people marvel at the novelty of 21st century libraries being about more than books, or we have to battle against dumb detractors who think that digital media has somehow removed the need to support public access to knowledge and culture.
• I live just down the road from a suburban Brisbane play area called Bedford Playground. It was founded in 1927 after a number of children had been injured playing in the crowded, dirty streets of Spring Hill.

Take your next step here.

Creative/Researcher at British Library Labs and 2016 Creative in Residence at the State Library of Queensland

…Your chance to test the Write Track 5 day challenge

At Write Track we use persuasive technology to encourage writers to write more regularly – and become more productive. Something we’ve written about before for this website.

Today, we’re inviting Writing Platform readers to test out our new free 5-day writing kickstart – a writing challenge we’ve designed around the principles of behaviour change and the science of habit-forming products.

The product’s at a very early stage – so advance apologies for any small bugs you might meet along the way – but we really hope that it help writers get off the starting blocks and write. So how does it work?

First off, we don’t tell you what to write – that’s up to you – but we will give you the support, motivation and structure to continue.

We ask you to tell us your writing goal for the week and then set a first step towards meeting that goal – there are five steps in total.

We give you a 24-hour deadline to ‘track’ and tell us your progress on each step –and every time you track, we email you with a new ‘secret’ of writing productivity – all backed by behaviour change science.

Because we know that writing consecutively every day is tough, we give you two writing ‘lives’ to use – or two days off. However, if you use both your lives, you’re off the challenge. Sorry, no excuses!

We’ve already run the challenge as an email MVP with 40 participants so we know that the challenge works – when writers stick with it. We’ve seen people finish projects, submit short stories and grow in confidence – over just five days.

If you’re interested in taking part, find out more here or just send Chris an email at beprolifiko@gmail.com and we’ll add you to the wait list.