2020  and 2021 have left all of us (except, perhaps, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos) living with more uncertainty and vulnerability than we have allowed ourselves to admit previously. Like many, I have the very strong sense that a veil has been lifted, and we are in the midst of a series of societal reckonings that reveal how broken many of the systems we rely on are and that change is needed on a large scale. In 2014, I wrote two pieces about transmedia storytelling and activism for The Writing Platform. One outlined the form and processes and one put forward some examples of projects I thought were especially inspiring and innovative. Over the past seven years, technology has advanced exponentially and profound social movements have emerged across the globe. It feels like time to revisit the role and relevance of transmedia storytelling in activism, advocacy and social change, and to consider the ways traditionally under-represented cohorts have innovated the form of transmedia storytelling to create inclusive stories to agitate for change.

A lot of predication and claims have been made about transmedia storytelling since it first appeared on the media studies scene via Henry Jenkins’ blog in 2003. However, in my effort to update my previous articles it became clear that there has been a stagnation in the field of transmedia storytelling, and perhaps a lack of impact in regard to transmedia activism, at least in the mainstream understanding and discussion of transmedia. Outside the mainstream, transmedia storytelling still has the potential to create profound projects that seek to challenge the status quo. These projects use the capabilities of transmedia to amplify under-represented voices and make stories that suggest a more inclusive future, and consequently contemporary transmedia activism looks much more diffuse and diverse than it did seven years ago. 

An often overlooked aspect of transmedia storytelling that is most potent is its capacity to illuminate the relationships between people, places and practices that can influence social change, which is precisely what creators and activists have continued to strive to harness in projects. As we grapple with issues of representation of under-represented groups and environments across all forms of media, the question of how transmedia storytelling can continue to evolve in ways that are inclusive and ethical continues to be relevant. One of the issues that could hold transmedia back is that still so little of what is written about transmedia explores the subjects, the content of the stories, the place and the purpose of the story. The focus continues to be the purpose of the platform, the design or the fan interaction, rather than the purpose of the story itself: who is the story about and who is telling it? Why are they telling this story and where are they telling it from? Do the media and platforms chosen reveal new aspects of the story? Are they authentic and meaningful for the subjects and creators of the story? Does place, not simply location, contribute something profound to the story? Is the story being told from the outside, about someone else? Or is it one of the rare stories that is told from inside a place, rather than about the people whose story it is? What unique contributions can transmedia make to the futures of storytelling? 

We cannot afford to continue tinkering around the edges. With that in mind, I reviewed the projects I presented as examples in 2014 and sought out new examples. What became clear is that place has become a central element to successfully crafting stories that might just be able to shift our perspectives. How place might be used and embedded in transmedia storytelling requires other ways of thinking about storytelling which are not necessarily common in the fields that currently inform transmedia storytelling, such as media studies, games studies, narratology or film studies. As an element of transmedia storytelling, place is best understood through the lived experiences of those who inhabit it.

The interactive, transmedia project Hollow, from 2013, continues to exemplify what is possible in transmedia storytelling to promote social change and was an early leader of how to centre place and voice in the story. The multiple methods that are deployed to create the environment in which the project is set are examples of not only the impact that attention to cultural, physical and economic environment can have on non-fiction projects, but also the consideration of how particular media and platforms can be used to best portray particular aspects of that world. Perhaps the greatest achievement of Hollow is the ways it has captured the ‘feel’ of McDowell County while also telling a universal story. At the centre of the project are around 30 stories made about and by the residents of McDowell, using video, stills, text and voiceover that are reminiscent of traditional digital stories. McMillion claims that ‘the stories are encountered within this landscape so that the people featured emerge from a context of place and community’ (Rose, Mandy. 2013 “American futures: Hollow & question bridge” Collabdocs, July 1).

This approach is also used in the current outstanding transmedia story Neo Learning created between 2010 and 2020 by Big hART.  Big hART is an Australian arts media and social change company that works intensively in marginalised communities to co-create multifaceted arts events that reflect the stories and the creativity of the participants, and raises awareness about the urgent social issues facing these communities. Both Hollow and NEO-Learning are multi-year projects that relied on multiple media and forms to extensively represent communities and to connect with as large an audience as possible. These projects foreground story and the lived experiences and expertise of the communities as the cohering element. Further, all aspects of the projects and Hollow and NEO-Learning privileged the communities ahead of audiences. Instead of asking what audiences want to see, they asked the communities what was not being amplified or shared about them? What counter-narratives were there to the dominant stories about these places and the people who call it home? What frameworks needed to be used to facilitate the community being able to lead the storytelling? 

NEO-Learning is many things – storytelling, a learning resource, comic, a platform, training, an expression of culture, a reclaiming of place, and an imagining of futures. It is one big project, with discrete parts that can be enjoyed (by audiences, creators and community) on their own but has a particular purpose as a large project. There are a number of elements that make up the NEO-Learning project: NEOMAD comic, Future Dreaming VR film and the educational platform for teachers. NEO-Learning as a suite of educational tools began development in 2018, but was preceded and inspired by the award-winning sci-fi comic NEOMAD, also created in collaboration with Big hart. The NEOMAD comic was co-created with over 40 young people in the Roebourne community, through workshops in scriptwriting, literacy, Photoshop, filmmaking and sound recording. 

The result is an entirely original and innovative view of Indigenous young people, who are so often represented across the commercial media in Australia in negative and racist ways. As a transmedia project, NEO-Learning is a tantalising glimpse of what is possible: 

• each element is  unique and purposeful; each aspect amplifies the strengths, the creativity of the participants; 
• the technology is used to support and share traditional knowledges;
• representation is determined by the people being represented and reveals complex and creative ways to share approaches to positive representation between marginalised groups.

 As an educational tool, it is focused on what non-Indigenous Australians can learn and benefit from Indigenous culture and people and is grounded in strength rather than focusing on any challenges the community may face. The community owns the project, and it is about how they see themselves and what they want to communicate about themselves in the ways they want to communicate. 

Our world is made up of stories, and transmedia storytelling has a real and important role to play in creating a world that is made up of different stories, because it has become frighteningly clear that the same old stories, the same old voices and the same old ways of communicating have little to offer when the world falls apart.

“Beyond the middle of the journey of life what we’ve done and nearly done begin to blur. Far more things nearly happen than happen … The universe is held together by the dust of human kind’s nearlyincidence.

So says The Nearlyologist Manifesto. I’m a nearlywriter, making a transmedia novel in a transmedia way, nearly a book but this one includes songs, reader contributions, even live events like this. The story has three main characters I want to tell you more about – one of them is here on stage with me.”

Thus began Night of Nearly a performance at the Earl Haig theatre space in North London featuring myself, artist Carol Laidler impersonating my protagonist Freya, and musician Alistair McEarchern as himself. Then we performed extracts from the novel I’m in the process of writing, sang Nearly Songs and invited contributions from the audience. But why?

As Director of if:book UK I’ve been lecturing and blogging since 2007 about the future of the book set free from the confines of print. Now I’m writing full time, taking a PhD in Digital Writing at Bath Spa University, and developing a creative practice defined by my interests and aims rather than the dictates of the publishing or technology industries.

For me it seems unnatural to sit alone for three years writing a story then launch it suddenly on an unsuspecting and mostly uninterested world. In my working life I’ve always enjoyed collaboration, interaction between readers and writers and different kinds of artists and I’m excited by how digital platforms for literature provide the potential to mix media, to bind together these elements not on paper but in a multifaceted package which could be presented on a website, as an app or even a bag of analogue objects.

But I want the form to be shaped by the subject, not the marketplace.

“To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination … To read is to travel through that terrain with the author as guide.” An audience member who enjoyed the event sent me this quote from Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust, not knowing I had already found these lines which define exactly the spirit in which I want to make fiction, using whatever means currently available seem appropriate to lead the reader into the heart of my story about the barmy shaman Carraday, outsider artist and nearlyologist.

Some writers may be shy and retiring, but I’ve always enjoyed performing, I was part of a poetry trio in the eighties (and appeared naked on stage for the Sheffield Friday Show at the Leadmill after writing a sketch for a nude male … then watching all the actors bottle out of performing it). Lately I’ve started to write and play songs; in the story these are composed by Freya’s husband Jamie, and using this alter ego to hide behind has liberated me creatively – I don’t need to worry whether I’m a ‘real’ musician, I’m pretending to be one, which helps me avoid the paralysis of self consciousness and lets the words and sounds flow freely. It’s also very enjoyable to make my story happen live like this, in a form which is neither just a reading nor a full on dramatization.

The most inspiring piece of transmedia literature I’ve encountered is Orhan Pamuk’s entirely analogue Museum of Innocence, both a full length novel about a love affair, and a real life building in Istanbul containing three floors of exhibits, vitrines of memorabilia from these fictitious lives and a wall of over 3,000 cigarette butts smoked by the heroine. There’s an illustrated catalogue to the museum and an audio guide which for me was the glue which bound these elements into a very satisfactory and evocative whole. I came back from Istanbul inspired to work on a podcast and a series of artworks about the things we nearly do and how we absorb these into our real lives.

“Once others decided which were real writers deserving reproduction. Today we are Nearlywriters, able to amplify and illuminate our own words and pictures – but responsible for deciding when our work is cooked enough to show and to whom to show it.” – Nearlyologist Manifesto

As a nearlywriter, I’m now grappling with the question of when and how to move beyond my creative experiments towards seeking out the agencies that might help me to fix on the best form in which to publish, by which I mean disseminate and sell the ‘final’ work.

Already I’ve collaborated on nearlythings with dancer Jia-Yu Corti, psychotherapist James Paul Kelly, artists collective Alldaybreakfast, poet Saradha Soobrayen, and the IFSO WRITERS, a group which includes a poet, short story writer, fantasy novelist, dramatist and stand up comedian, all of us working together on collaborations, helping each other with our separate projects and finding ways to promote and publish our writings. Our site, another work in progress, is IFSOPRESS.COM – take a look.

Next, for my PhD I’m approaching literary agents, publishers, digital producers, and also games makers, performers, visual artists and those who promote them, looking for their help and advice on how to take my evolving fiction forward, bridging the gap between creative experimentation and professional production. What does publication mean for a transmedia fiction involving a book-length text plus song, artworks, live events and a stream of readers’ own stories about the things they’ve nearly done?

“In the analogue age we led linear lives with beginnings, middles and ends; in digital times we can be nearly many in various virtual spaces. We are what we eat – and what we’ve nearly eaten.”

If you’d like to find out what happens next to What Didn’t Quite please follow www.nearlyology.net. If you’d like to help make it happen email me: chris[at]ifbook[dot]co[dot]uk

At the start of the year our Australian Project Editor, Donna Hancox, wrote a piece for us on Transmedia Storytelling and Social Change; describing how digital technology has provided certain communities and activists with the means to quickly create and widely disseminate stories. To follow on from this she has written up 5 examples of this sort of activism:

Transmedia storytelling and transmedia activism both afford and demand new approaches to telling our stories.  Contemporary transmedia utilises multiple tools to engage audiences by creating stories that offer unique approaches to narrative, character, setting and innovative ways of looking at social issues. Here are 5 of the best recent examples.

Welcome to Pinepoint was borne of nostalgia for a town that no longer existed and the lost art of remembering through photo albums.  As a transmedia project it differs from older more traditional projects by existing entirely online, but sits easily alongside the more contemporary transmedia in which the notion of separate platforms is replaced by a range of storytelling techniques using text, sound, photographs and film to create a layered experience for the audience. This project does not immediately appear to be explicitly activist in its approach; it feels much more like a personal story. However, as with the other projects mentioned here, Welcome to Pine Point combines personal narrative with innovative storytelling techniques to invite audiences to connect with issues portrayed, and in this case to consider the ways in which we capture and honour our memories.

The Hollow is a community participatory project bringing together documentary, digital storytelling, photography, audio and interactive data mapping on a HTML5 website to explore the social and economic devastation of McDowall, a rural town in West Virginia.  At the centre of the project are around thirty stories made about and by the residents of McDowall that provide a context and personal perspective around the broader issue of the social and economic disintegration of rural communities, and the efforts by the people who live in those communities to tell their stories with dignity and in their own way. The Hollow has much in common with Welcome to Pine Point in its intentions and celebration of ordinary voices. New expressions of transmedia storytelling allow for projects to exist in ecology of storytelling and to choose aesthetics and methods that most effectively tell their stories and portray the participants in those stories.

Highrise was created to ‘see how the documentary process can drive and participate in social innovation rather than just to document it’ and the result is a many media collaborative experimental, interactive documentary. Highrise is not one self-contained project rather it is a series of projects that together create a multi-faceted view of what it means to be an urban species and homes in on a particular tower block in Canada to investigate what occurs when the residents of a high rise are provided with means to create a better version of urban living. The result is a 3D immersive documentary powered by HTML5 and other open source JavaScript libraries. In the same vein as Welcome to Pine Point and The Hollow, Highrise (and its components Out my Window and The One Millionth Tower) have found new ways – through re-mixing existing media and through new software – to articulate the stories of marginalised or overlooked voices in exciting and authentic ways.

Lowlifes consciously blurs the line between fiction and non-fiction in an experiment by producer Rob Pratten. This project tells the story of drug addicted San Francisco cop Larry Hayes and his fight to save his career, his life and his family. The other two characters in Lowlifes are Haye’s ex-wife Jennifer and the private detective she has hired Lauren Ortega. The story is set in and around the Tenderloin in San Francisco (which is almost a character in itself in the story) and uses three distinct storytelling styles for each of the characters. Larry’s story is told through a novella in the tradition of the hard-boiled detective novels from the early twentieth century by writers such as Dashiell Hammett (who lived and wrote in the Tenderloin), Jennifer’s story is told through a series of blog posts, her Facebook page and her Twitter account and Lauren’s story is a series of webisodes shot on the streets of San Francisco while looking for evidence on Larry.  Pratten uses each of these to their fullest potential and they are perfectly suited to the character. Lowlifes is also interesting in its approach to social activism.  Traffic from the Lowlifes site is directed onto the Coalition for the Homeless San Francisco website where the audience can explore ways to become involved with the not for profit organisation. Also the business model for Lowlifes means that all the content is available as paid and free media, and is licensed under a Creative Commons agreement meaning readers can add their own content.

Half the Sky is a movement dedicated to addressing the challenges facing women and girls globally such as sex trafficking, forced prostitution, gender based violence, maternal morality and poverty. The campaign began as a book of the same name in 2009 by journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn that has been amplified by a four hour television series for PBS in America and a Facebook game and mobile games.  Audiences are encouraged to get involved in multiple ways and to share their stories.

It’s a little tricky trying to recall just how ‘The Kills‘ developed. The books were pitched as a series of inter-related novels, and in the first discussion with publisher Paul Baggaley and editor Kris Doyle, it became obvious that Picador, if they took on the project, would want to do more than publish the novel as a straight forward publication. It’s my good fortune that these two people were enthusiastic about the project, and very open to offer and consider ideas. At that point there was no specific plan to have multimedia elements or digital publication: it was a project of four books.

The progression from text to image is natural for me. I trained as an artist, and worked with a group called Haha in the 1990s where we developed public art projects, which differed from piece to piece (a lipstick slathered blimp in France, a series of camera obscuras in Italy, an HIV/AIDS resource in Chicago). The process of creating work with a team, so that the work changes through its development is something I value, highly. One of the questions I ask is about form: what is the most suitable way to represent these ideas? What would be the optimum way to encounter and experience the work? So there’s plenty of fluidity, and I like to keep the possibilities open throughout the entire working process.

The idea to publish digitally first came from the publisher. A highly sympathetic idea about how to stage a work, which needs to be read in sections. Releasing a work (The Kills is four novels in one), one book a month for four months, handsomely referred back to serialisation – which suits projects that are large and dense.

In developing the third book, a self-standing crime novel, I had produced a series of treated photographs, where I reconstructed the faces of the principal figures in the novel from images found online. These composite faces were deliberately darkened and blurred, and I had the idea that they should be presented before each chapter or section in which that character featured. The problem is, I didn’t want them to last. I liked the idea that you would turn a page and these faces would dissolve as you looked at them. In writing this book I was also interested in genre. What, exactly, makes a crime novel a crime novel – not just a body, a murder, a crime – but what, structurally, is it about the form that makes it what it is? I’d worked on an earlier novel, where the story was, pretty much, only a premise, and hoped that the reader would continue the story beyond what was written. Potentially each reader would have a different notion about what might and should happen (I’m not sure that worked). In printed-form books are somewhat absolute. There is the possibility that you can read chapters and sections in different order, if you wish (as with Cortazar’s ‘Blow Up’), but the very physicality of the book means that there’s an authority to the way it is presented to you, as a reader, and to be honest, flicking back and forward through a book, while a minimal effort, is still, an effort.

The digital elements aren’t just the ‘extras’ – and this is where my thinking is developing – I liked the idea that text can be reorganised, presented in shifting hierarchies, orders, to change emphasis. For the moment, digital texts are a stream, a continuous chain of words without heft. Location, for most of us depends on the weight of the book in your hands, and memory is acute enough for us to remember the placement of sections and events physically within the book. Think about Sebald’s images and how they work as anchors. These anchors are important; they let you know where you are. There are expectations in reading, given how much of the book you have physically on your left side and on your right side. The less you have on the right, the closer you are to some kind of resolve. With a digital book I have only a slider to indicate that shift forward, or a counter to tell me (worryingly) how many hours and minutes I have remaining. I’m thinking that images can be anchors to help with navigation, as well as providing content. Alongside this there’s another crucial relation, which is also increased by having the book physically in your hands, and this has to do with how time passes within the narrative you are reading, alongside how time synchronously passes in your life, as you read. It isn’t that this doesn’t happen with ebooks, but there’s less of an awareness (because of habit: we don’t only use our devices to read but for business and play, which can make for a certain kind of attention). There’s also less of an examined history and analysis about the processes and functions of reading digital work. With a physical book a great deal is taken for granted. With digital texts we are still, happily, figuring it out. As a writer, that slight indeterminacy is intriguing.

With ‘The Kills’ we decided very early that none of the films, extra texts, or audio, would effect change in the main narrative. They might inflect, but they wouldn’t deliver significant plotted elements, which would transform the text. This, mostly, was to recognise that not everyone who might read the book could be supposed to have an expensive digital device. I also wanted the short films to be free standing, if possible. We also bumped into technical limitations very early on. Some things just weren’t possible. The technology keeps changing, adapting. It isn’t stable – and this is a very significant difference between physical and digital texts. It’s possible that a digital text can be fugitive, impermanent – which contradicts our expectation as writers that when you publish you enter into permanent record. Each ‘extra’ was to be a taste, a sense of a place or a person, a piece of history, and as far as could be managed, self-standing. We didn’t want them to look like illustrations. Optimally, they appear at the ends of chapters, so that you can pause, if you want, and not feel that the main narrative or flow is being interrupted (that’s a nice feature of having different media side by side).

I’m a big fan of performance, 8mm film, and early video – particularly works that were developed in transitory periods when artists were finding their way around ‘new’ media. William Wegman and early video; Sadie Benning with Fischer Price toy cameras; Stan Brakhage playing with basic film elements; the comedian Ernie Kovacs amazing live transmissions; et al. They all met these new technologies with a kind of innocence and curiosity, which keeps the work honest and direct. I’ve tried to keep to that sensibility with a deliberately lo-fi approach – it’s no different to me than writing, where you build a narrative through simple accumulation. At the moment we are in a transitory period, the challenges for publishers are acute, no doubt, but the opportunities for writers are open. You don’t need a huge amount of know-how to enter this arena, and while the debate often sticks on certain subjects (self-publishing; the demise of printing), we are developing a discipline that is, by its nature, unfixed.

The avenues through which communities and community organisations raise awareness about the issues they face and how they agitate for change have developed rapidly in the past ten years; and digital technology has provided community activists with the means to quickly create and widely disseminate stories.  Perhaps the most influential and wide reaching of recent innovations in storytelling has been transmedia storytelling. The term transmedia storytelling first came into prominence via Henry Jenkins; he used it to describe a particular approach to storytelling that made use of the emerging media platforms being utilised more frequently by everyday consumers.  Jenkins’ concept of transmedia storytelling, which remains the generally accepted definition – albeit oft revised and somewhat fluid – was first introduced in his Technology Review column in 2003 stating ‘a transmedia story unfolds across multiple media platforms with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole’. The practice of transmedia storytelling, in turn, has expanded the possible modes and styles through and in which stories are told, and the opportunities for storytellers to connect with audiences.

The pervasive examples of transmedia storytelling that have emerged over the past ten years are big budget, mainstream film and television franchises that roll out their marketing campaigns disguised as story or narrative over a number of distinct media platforms, such as Lost, Prometheus and Avatar.  However, over the last three years other types of independent, stand alone projects like Lizzy Bennett Diaries and Granny’s Dancing on the Table have become more commonplace. These projects utilise recognisable conventions of transmedia storytelling and borrow elements from other forms of storytelling that predate transmedia, such as digital storytelling and documentary film making.  In addition to being hybrid in form these projects are independent and solely focused on raising awareness about particular social issues or telling the stories of marginalized groups, who otherwise do not have a voice in the public sphere. These types of projects have re-worked and re-purposed some of the conventions of transmedia storytelling to suit their intentions, and have much in common with the notion of transmedia activism. Lina Srivastava has defined transmedia activism as ‘creating social impact by using storytelling by a number of decentralised authors who share assets, create content for distribution across multiple forms of media to raise awareness and influence action’.

Transmedia activism challenges a great deal of what we understand to be transmedia storytelling.  Much of what has been identified as transmedia storytelling fetishes mainstream, franchise based stories (and even in the instances where fans have to an extent taken control of the story it is still always in the interest of the large corporations at the heart of the project) or what James Bridle calls ‘sleek black box, corporate controlled objects, platforms or services’. Without dismissing or diminishing these mainstream projects or the ways in which they are considered, the aim of redefining transmedia is to open up the field to encompass other works that instead champion what Bridle describes as ‘open source, hackable, comprehensible and sharable alternatives’.

The kind of activism illustrated in projects such as 18 Days in Egypt, Highrise and The Hollow are inclusive in their approach and focused on illuminating hitherto unexamined aspects of an issue, particularly the experiences of the people involved, to create alternative media representations and express alternative political possibilities. 18 Days in Egypt, Highrise and The Hollow clearly show how potent storytelling can be in this space, and it is useful to explore the ways these kinds of projects re-define our understanding of transmedia as an evolving concept.

Highrise is described as ‘a multi-year and many-media collaborative documentary experiment funded by the National Film Board of Canada’. The online project is comprised of two main components – Out my Window and One Millionth Tower, and the aim is to ‘see how the documentary process can drive and participate in social innovation rather than just to document it’ . One Millionth Tower was released in August 2012 and tells the story of one Canadian high rise in a 3 D immersive documentary powered entirely by HTML5, WebGL and other open source JavaScript libraries. The residents of the crumbling tower block collaborated with a group of architects, animators and web developers to create the three dimensional documentary.

18 Days in Egypt is a group storytelling project that encourages a dynamic and dialogic method of storytelling via the use of many contemporary storytelling tools such as tweets, Facebook updates and mobile phone footage and uploading them to the purpose built 18 Days in Egypt site. Egyptians were encouraged to contribute stories they had from Tahrir Square and then invite family and friends to contribute to the story uploaded by adding their own perspective on the events.

The Hollow is a ‘community participatory’ project and interactive documentary that explores the social and economic devastation of rural towns in America through the story of McDowell County in West Virginia.  It brings together personal digital stories, photography, sounds, interactive data and grassroots mapping on an HTML5 website which was designed to ‘discuss the many stereotypes associated with the area, population loss and potential for the future’. At the centre of the project are around thirty stories made about and by the residents of McDowall using video, stills, text and voiceover that are reminiscent of traditional digital stories.  The director of The Hollow, Elaine McMillion, states that when she arrived at McDowell County she found ‘really phenomenal stories of pride and hope’ and realised that ‘she wasn’t comfortable editing those into 75 minute form and putting a title slide saying “The End”.

Similarly in Highrise the vision of the creators was to see how ‘the documentary process can drive and participate in social innovation rather than just to document it; and to help re-invent what it means to be an urban species in the 21^st century’ rather than to document and implicitly claiming objectivity while simultaneously authoring the work on behalf of the participants.  18 Days in Egypt is described as a ‘collaborative documentary’ that aims to capture the days in Tahrir Square leading up to the ousting of President Murbarak on the 11^th February 2011. The use of the word ‘capture’ rather than to ‘document’ or ‘report’ is important; and suggests that unlike traditional documentary this type of group storytelling offers a more authentic and representative picture of the Egyptian revolution.

The kind of activism demonstrated in 18 days in Egypt, The Hollow and Highrise highlights a fundamental belief in the dignity of the subjects and strives to convey the complexities of the lives and issues by taking advantage of the technology available to challenge audiences to enter, experience and interact with the stories in new ways.

The first time someone mentioned the term transmedia to me I was already collaborating with four project teams. We were working to produce a comic anthology centered on my urban fantasy novel Fallen Heroes. I was also co-writing the first episode of an audio drama spin off. The name I gave to this transmedia project was Unseen Shadows, which referred to the trilogy I was working on, of which Fallen Heroes was the first.

My goal in using transmedia was to create stories in other mediums that could be enjoyed as stand alone adventures. However, when those stories were combined with the novel they would expand the world established within its pages. This meant that a single line of prose within the novel could be transformed into a 22 page comic or a supporting character could take the lead in a five part audio drama.

An Unseen Shadows project begins when someone, usually a writer, reads the novel and wants to become involved. I start by asking them what character they want to work on rather than choose one for them. This has led to some interesting choices, including both main and very minor characters being given the transmedia treatment.

The next stage is for the writer to give me a brief overview of their idea. Once I’m on board they will work up a full pitch, including any suggestions I may have made, before moving onto the scripting stage. At the same time the artist begins work on the main character sketches.

In my goal to create stand-alone routes into the novel I am involved in every stage of the process. I approve each story pitch, comic or audio script, character design and every line of dialogue spoken by a voice actor.

There are currently around forty writers, artists, letterers, colourists, graphic designers and voice actors working within the Unseen Shadows team. Their talent and experience are as diverse as their backgrounds and locale. Members can be found in the UK, Ireland, Portugal, Scotland, South Africa and the US.

Overseeing a team spread across the world is definitely a challenge. I quickly found that email, cloud storage and social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter and Skype were the greatest weapons in my communication arsenal.

All the past and future Unseen Shadows projects are stored using cloud storage. The projects are divided into folders with each one containing scripts, artwork, sound files and more, with access provided for relevant team members. This helps avoid any time zone issues as folders can be accessed 24/7.

I created an Unseen Shadows Facebook group where team members could share developments, discuss ideas, welcome new members and anything else they wanted to use it for. I also use the group to feedback on the progress of future novels or anything else of importance.

One of the main issues a writer working in collaborative fiction must face is the time demands. Projects have to be managed, timescales set and monitored. In some cases I have been the main reason that progress on a project has stalled. This can be because a team is waiting for me to read a script, approve a character or respond to an urgent email before they can continue.

A significant amount of my own writing time is spent overseeing the transmedia and collaborative elements of Unseen Shadows and that can be hard. However knowing the amount of work the team members are putting into their projects and seeing the end results spurs me on to manage my time better, which can only be a good thing for my writing in the long run.

Working within these different mediums has meant that to effectively manage the teams I had to develop, at least, a basic understanding of the terminology within each medium be it comics, audio or more recently film. It also pays to know some of the advantages and disadvantages of working within in each one. I have been lucky to find a lot of people along the way willing to offer me help and advice on that front.

The positives with working on collaborative fiction are many but overall it is the feeling of never being alone. In the dark days when the fear of a blank screen comes calling, a piece of art, a new script or question is not far behind. The light never goes off in the world of Unseen Shadows and knowing there is always someone at work is a great motivator.

These extremely talented people work on these projects not for the money, as all profits go back into the development of new projects, but because they love the source material. They constantly challenge me with their ideas, questions and suggestions for new ways to expand this world they have had a hand in developing.

I have found over the years that these new stories and characters have influenced me in unexpected ways. I have already referenced several of the events and characters created in the comics and audio drama in the second novel.

Working with the teams has taught me how to express to a writer why a particular line of dialogue does not work or to an artist why a character sketch does not feel right. This has helped me with my own self editing when I write.

The last two years has been a great training ground for learning when to step in and when to step back and trust these talented people with my world. The collaboration aspects of the various projects have given me a deeper understanding of my own characters as I watch them written, drawn and spoken by others.

10 tips for collaborative fiction

• Your story may be at the heart of everything but in the realm of collaborative fiction you need the creative lifeblood of your team to keep that heart beating. Respect them and their opinions.
• Ensure your team has a clear idea of what you expect of them before they join the project. I have a statement of intent document, which every member of the team receives, which must be read and its terms agreed to before they can join the project.
• Never dismiss ideas out of hand.
• Used wisely, social media can be a great aid to team communication. Used poorly it can a massive time drain.
• No one knows your world better than you but always be prepared to back up your decisions with reasons that don’t start with ‘It’s my book so…’
• Never be scared to get your hands dirty in another medium yourself. (I had never seen an audio script before Unseen Shadows much less co-written one.)
• Try to gain an understanding of the terminology used within the mediums you will be working in.
• Collaborative fiction can be a huge time commitment. Keep that in mind when deciding which projects to undertake.
• Keep yourself included in every stage of the project.
• Communication is the key. Keep your teams up to date and ensure they do the same. So many problems can be avoided with regular communication.