Novels, November, and TransMedia

Back in July, I posted this bit on TransMedia and fiction. Since then, I've continued to mull on the subject, and much to my happy surprise, I got into a pretty cool email conversation with Scott Walker, one of the founding members of BrainCandyLLC, an online startup that does exactly what I was talking about--facilitates world-building for all sorts of media, and unlike the Harry Potter fanfiction type stuff referenced in the Henry Jenkins essay that kicked my mind off on this whole thing in the first place, Walker's flagship at the moment is a custom fantasy world, Runes of Gallidon, with a surprising breadth of detail and contribution. So from what I can see, this sort of collaborative setting is working out to be a very successful force even outside the already successful fan-fiction realm. And this is a good thing for fiction. Good because:

1. In an increasingly electronic world, classical literacy is decreasing, so an increase in these types of sites, fan-fiction, or not, will help combat this loss of literacy.
2. I'm deeply bothered by people who casually say, "I hate writing." Often I think this stigma is created by bored teachers in the public realm, who lack either ability or energy to properly motivate students to write. Online collaborative communities change that.
3. If traditional print fiction is languishing, fan-fiction, and now other types of fiction are demonstrating that a new collaborative home on the net, may be the spark to kick things into a new renaissance.

So, coupling in with National Novel Writing Month next month, I've decided to start pushing my own brand of collaborative openness. Here's how.

I've been a D&D gamer since way back when. 5th grade maybe. And in those many many years, I found that as a DM, I've always gravitated away from official gameworlds to my own, Ae'rinus. I have a wiki: http://aerinus.wikispaces.com, and an Ae'rinus related blog, neither of which have been all that active in recent years, but I've always wanted to do something with them. So here's the gameplan: I'm going to start writing the fantasy novel I've always wante to write. The one that I've forever put aside for the silly notion that literary fiction was what I needed to do. And while I won't be posting it as I go (because good god, my early drafts are bad), but I do plan on posting both environmental information about Ae'rinus, side stories, as well as other relevant material as I develop the main novel. When the novel's sections reach "publishable" form, I'll post them in serial, and hopefully one of two things will happen:

1. People will read and enjoy what I've written
2. People will feel motivated to start adding to this ontology of Ae'rinus.
3. (with a 3rd pipedream goal of: I become a rockstar D&D DM/writer and get to tour the country running gaming sessions, writing books, and having plenty of time with the family without having to have a soul-sucking dayjob..oh and medical benefits too [hey If I'm going to dream, might as well dream big.]).

Here's a blurb of what I'm working with. A sort of half-assed preface if you will:

Deep-seated in the heart of history there is always the blemish of darkness, dark times, of painful memories and hearts hardened—winter for the soul. Every age knows these stories, of overcoming darkness, transforming a landscape, but stories embellish—they forget the depths, the lows we sink to when faced with demons on all sides. They celebrate the outcome as an inevitability, as if men and women are born heroes destined to save us all. Stories are a point of convienience; they have the vantage to see the whole process from afar. But sliding within the morass, buried in the deep-gut-drop stink where your life is entrusted to a dagger blade so chipped and stress cracked you're pulling your thrust a bit and hoping to hell you don't catch it off a rib or hidden hauberk.

To a great many, Nigel Caedman was a hero—involved with bringing the gods back to the land, becoming one himself, slaying demons. Spread the growth of independent guildhalls, which led to safer roads. He fought in the civil war to overthrow the corrupt Dirulean crown. He traveled the planes. Found lasting love, married, and raised seven children. How could he not be a hero? Unblinking, he murdered men, women, and children if they crossed his ideals. He lived by gypsy code to point of fault; respecting nothing, taking everything from food and lodging to sex. He raped. Pillaged. And even despite the grandeur of ascending to the role of deity, this two he has squandered again and again, opting to cast it all off for a few more years wandering a land that he loves. A land where he has no permanent home. Surely no hero does these things. Heroes are just and pure. They stand for light and hope. Faith, humility, honor and love. Heroes are legendary and celebrated, like Cersee Nailo Caedman—Nigel's wife. But this is not the tale of a true hero. This is the story of that which creeps in the shadows, the bloody knife blade, the stink of whiskey-breath in the morning rain wet from another night under the stars. Doing what needs to be done, whether or not the people agree or realize what horrors are kept at bay by his stained hand.

More on the future of fiction

Apparently the topic of my Ontologica essay is on a lot more minds than my own. American Book Review just did a big bit on Fiction's future. Many of the authors quoted there echo a lot of what I was talking about in my essay. (By the way I'm writing this, you'd think I inspired people [I didn't though {wouldn't want to set the wrong impression}]). Though I did particularly enjoy Larry McCaffery's quote: "I have seen the future of fiction, and its name is Mark Z. Danielewski."

Ontologica 1.1

is LIVE! Check it out: http://www.warriorpoetgroup.com/Ontologica

Authors featured:
Sheldon Compton
Jarrid Deaton
Rod Dixon
Sameha Farag
Cameron Fry
Dave Harrity
Kilean Kennedy
Drew Lackovic
Jason Lee Miller
Jae Newman
Chelsea Pruckner
David Tipton
Amy Watkins

Artists Featured:
Susane M Lackovic (Andracki)
Dennis Waddell

Building Thoughts on TransMedia Fiction

Lately I've been reading a lot of essays about technology, preparing for my "The Age of Information" theme that I"ll be launching this fall in my composition class[es?]. The primary texts I've selected are:
Technopoly - Neil Postman
The Gutenberg Elegies - Sven Birkerts
The Dumbest Generation - Mark Bauerlein
The Pirate's Dilemma - Matt Mason
Convergence Culture - Henry Jenkins

My primary goal with these texts is to design a course content that invokes introspection on some level relating to the technology that we all take so easily for granted. Back in 1995, Sven Birkerts warned his readers in the essay, "The Idea of the Internet," that taking the technology of the internet for granted would be a huge failing for our culture. Not only does the internet remove us from conventional definitions of communication (I'm paraphrasing Birkerts paraphrasing Derrida here), where the communication takes place between two physical people in an exact location at an exact time, but its top-level appearance abstracts the complexity lying underneath. For example, prior to the internet, a person was only reacheable via phone (most likely landline/fax) or in person. If that person wasn't home, I couldn't establish communication. Now, I can email a video of myself to someone's phone. I don't have to know where the other person is, nor does that person have to have his phone on when I send the communication--the idea of concrete time and place are effectively removed from the schema for communication. Furthermore, since the internet is so abstracted, without considerable computer skill, it's VERY hard to ensure that your communication is being delivered only to the person or people it's intended for. Consider the notion of a embarrasing email forwarded on to an entire organization, or the Bush administration's extensive wiretapping. Specificity of communication is also no longer restricted to exact recipients. Therefore communication as a whole has changed, yet few of us (if anyone) truly acknowledge this shift, or seem to care.

Consider this: How many 18 year old college freshmen post their drinking sex party pics up on facebook? Lots. Now consider this: A large number of HR firms these days make it a regular habit to Google EVERY SINGLE APPLICANT BEFORE SELECTING THE INTERVIEW SLATE. Guess who doesn't make the slate? Titsy McGee and Joe Pukeface.

While I can drive on in this vein for a while, all of this reading has been jarring up my notion of fiction and how it's to be consumed. A good chunk of my essay for Issue 1.1 of Ontologica has to do with the notion that contemporary realism, the dominant literary movement of the day, is driving fiction into the ground because contemporary realism offers little if anything over any other form of media, and in many cases, is very easily interchangeable with other forms of meda. And while this notion of media convergence, as cited by Henry Jenkins is inevitable, I can't help but think there has to be a better way to cross-pollonate fiction with other media without diluting the form. I think it bears importance to mention that I'm primarily concerned with Literary fiction, since the Literary genre seems to claim to have some sort of presigious clout over the other, more lucrative forms of fiction. I'm bothered by the notion that Literary fiction, for all it's clout cannot compete with other genres, and fares even worse in competition to other media. And at the same time, I'm not ready to just write off America as being too dumb to consume Literary fiction.

In Convergence Culture, Jenkins traces shifts in TV Series' plot formatting from Episodic , to Character driven, to season long arcs, to World Creation. Looking at these terms, you hear a lot about Character Driven fiction in MFA programs and other writing groups--it's definitely high on the do-this-and-you're-writing-good-literary-fiction-list. However, in terms of other media, that puts fiction FAR behind the curve. Think about the complexities in a story arc for a season of Lost, or better, the story arc for the entire series. Character driven fiction can't meet that, and it can't build any form of fanbase similar because it lacks said complexities. These complexities, or the current Trans Media way of doing things is that of World Building. Give me a world, any world, and we can build all the plot-driven or character driven stories we want, and each one contributes to the greater whole. Think Star Wars. Think The Matrix.

This idea of world building, of course, isn't new. Faulkner did it with his Yoknapatawpha County. Ben Marcus writes it from the inside in The Age of Wire and String, George Saunders in The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, etc. All of these fictions employ world building at the most intrinsic level.

Brian McHale's Postmodernist Fiction talks (again I'm paraphrasing) in great deal about the effects of what he calls "Worlds in Collision," or, what happens to a reader when the reader is forced to recognize that the world within the fiction is not the world that the reader lives within. Such a collision firstly forces the reader to abandon all forms of epistemological interpretation for ontological interpretation. By doing so, the entirety of the fiction necessitates analysis--nothing should be taken for face value. Since ontological interpretation, at its most base level, is concerned with plurality and the absence of any absolute truths, our subjectivity, level of reading intensity, and knowledge come to be more heavily important on the understanding of the text than in traditional epistemological readings. Furthermore, in an age of TransMedia exploitation, particularly dense works get easily dissected by online forum groupThink exercises, where each person brings a different skill/knowledge set to the same text, allowing for greater depth to be achieved than possible without other perspectives.

I'm part of such a groupThink exercise--the Warrior Poet Group; and throughout our book discussions, we've consistently avoided contemporary realist works in favor of those that involve the creation of entire worlds: The Age of Wire and String - Ben Marcus, Rant - Chuck Palahaniuk, Visionary/Prophetic Poetry, and Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov.

So why do worlds work so well?
Perhaps in this age of information, our ability to be truly affected by an event is thoroughly diminished to a point nearing total desensitization. Everyday we joke, sing, or causually talk about killing, rape, stealing, etc without blinking an eye. Media Piracy is called "Filesharing" to downplay its illegality, and ask any college student, not one of them will tell you that music piracy should be illegal. Perhaps world creation works so well because in this age, we spend so much of our time trying to assemble a self out of the cacophany of information surrounding us--one tiny voice in the datafeed, we scrabble and scream our way to the top of Facebook, or whatever online den we call home. Star-struck and searching for fame and fortune, we fall into the glamor of world-building because it allows us to transpose not our true self, but the self we want to be into an alternate world where we pull a Burger King and Have it Our Way (for once). Look only to the success of Second Life, WoW and other MMORPGs. Shitty jobs become suddenly bearable when there's another world to run off to once you punch out.

My escape worlds have always been rooted in D&D and video games (currently Fallout 3), but increasingly, as I develop this thing called Not an Autobiography, the inter-connections between stories has begun building a growingly more complicated ontology of Self stemming from each individual voice. And as I see it, the book becomes multi-layered in this way--each character telling the what-if story of several personal past events and claiming each other character, but also the over-arching inter-connectivity; a sort of super-self that gets generated by the cross-overs, similarities, and other flair.

So what am I saying?
In addition to writing good stories, I think we should also start considering how the masses are to consume our fictions. If you can get a group of peole to dedicate a forum to your book, then you're also generating word-of-Internet marketing for your creative endeavor; it's like free promotion.

What if we take this a step further. Take the notion of world building and tack a Creative Commons license on our fiction rather than 1st American Publishing Rights or whatever other licensing offered by publishers -- you can still make money on your own work, but with Creative Commons, you also enable your fans to drive your work futher in derivative creations, building upon your world, and expanding, further your fanbase. Surely this already exists, but can such a creation lead to one or more published books? I'm not sure, but at the very least, on this blog entry, it sounds like a very tantalizing idea.

This is exactly not what I wanted to hear:

From Gargoyle:

Sorry Drew--

Almost impossible to land anything more than 20pp anywhere right now in these grim times. And we're in the 5-15pp range with most of our stuff lately.

Pax,

Richard

Thanks Gargoyle, for at least breaking up with me quickly. I hate that long drawn out feeling.
The good news: that was a < 24 hr response. I have to say though, if Richard is correct, I'm in a world of hurt. Look only to my currently unpublished list:

• Self [Inflicted] Portrait - 38 pages
• Endings Lead to Beginnings - 37 pages
• 7,500 Miles to the Bottom - 24 pages
• The Poetics of Self - 18 pages
• Contents Within - 17 pages
• Substrate - 17 pages

I guess this really means only one thing, I need to finish Not an Autobiography and start marketing it as a finished collection. If only I weren't so interested in developing long winding sentences each with a series of footnotes....

Everything Ends goes Electronic and other stuff

A cappella Zoo, recently started posting electronic versions of their back issues on their website, and as a member of issue one, "Everything Ends" now has a new electronic home. Given that my story is full of XML, footnotes and other elements of structural screwity, the folks over there assuredly had to do a lot of finagling to get that story online, so take a moment and read it again. Maybe even buy a subscription because they are one of the best mags out there as far as I'm concerned (one of the only literary magazine that touts that it prints experiemental fiction and actually follows through with it).

In other news, Rod, Dave, and I are getting very close to publishing issue one of Ontologica. The website is ready to go, and we're sliding into editing time right now. I expect things to be live sometime in early July. With that said, we're already starting to lay grounds for the Winter release--I know Dave's done some work on setting up the theme for that issue, basing it partially on some of Colleen Harris' work (Her new book is out soon. Buy it).

Lastly, my summer job's led me down the path of web-development, and I've recenly learned massive amounts of CSS, XML, and XSL, all of which is coming mightily handy in building the Ontologica site and setting forth a roadmap to one day rebuild my own domain and the Warrior Poet Group Main Page.

Good bye Spring '09, Hello Summer

As I type this, I'm finishing up the last of my grading deluge. I posted my composition class' grades the other day, and momentarily, Business Writing will be set to the books. It's an awful nice feeling to be 'done;' very much akin to the done-ness achieved at the end of a semester when you're a student. Funny how when you're a student you never consider how much work is involved on the prof's side of the house--really it's about the same as what the student faces.

Between Last Thursday and Sunday, I slammed through 71 five page essays. I just finished slugging through 5 business proposals weighing in at nearly 20 pages a piece (some more, some less), and sorting out grades on a multi-tiered system for them.

Here are some more stats:

Overall, I read over 3,050 pages of student writing this semester, and that doesn't include revisions; so I wouldn't be surprised if there was another 150-300 pages sneaking around that average that I didn't account for.

I went through 7 pens.

I averaged 10-15 student emails per day.

For my business writing class, we read two books: Matt Mason's The Pirate's Dilemma, and D. Michael Abrashoff's It's Your Ship, as well as three 30 page articles from CQ Researcher, and a good chunk of The Business Writer's Handbook

In Composition, we read five essays: Gerald Graff's "Hidden Intellectualism," Christopher Lasch's "The Lost Art of Argument," Sven Birkerts' "The Owl Has Flown," Susan Bordo's "The Empire of Images in the World of our Bodies," and Arlie Russel Hochschild's "From the Frying Pan into the Fire." We also watched and discussed Steal this Film.

On the side, I managed to read Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism, Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts, and The Watchmen. Currently, I'm reading Robert Coover's The Public Burning, and Nation of Rebels by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter.

Oh and I haven't written a word of fiction since...um...maybe November? So sad.

As far as students, I noticed a dramatic improvement in attentiveness, class participation, and overall quality of writing in comparison to the fall semester. Part of this is due to students moving into the comp class after having taken an introductory class (which is optional based on entrance tests), and/or repeating the class after having failed in the fall. In any event though, we generated a lot of good discussion, and I didn't have any 'dead' sections like I experienced in the fall. I also had a dramatic improvement in seeing students going to get writing tutor help; largely this was a good thing.

I did however learn that there are several topics that I never want to read about again. They include:

• The Drinking Age
• Gun Control
• Abortion
• Steroids
• Gambling
• The Smoking Ban
• Stem Cell Research
• The Death Penalty
• Alternate Fuels
• Global Warming
• Illegal Drugs

While I encountered exceptional papers throughout the above list (particularly there was a fantastic Pro-Life paper, and last semester brought me a stunning Legalizing Marijuana Paper), overall, these topics end up being dry, predictable, and very very similar. Fortunately, next semester, Behrend will be kicking into full-on LRS mode, which will involve required course "Themes," so as long as I'm crafty enough to select a theme that doesn't involve any of the above topics, I'll be safe so to speak. As far as themes go, I'm currently kicking around the following:

• Capitalism
• Piracy
• The Information Age
• Counterculture
  

Now that I have a couple semesters under my belt, I hope to start revising and deviating my lesson plans a bit for the future. I want to incorporate more focus on MLA citation in my Composition classes--this semester's addition of the Annotated Bibliography assignment revealed that many students are still clueless about proper citation. Also, in one of our departmental meetings, Craig presented a sort of handout relating to asking "Good Research Questions." It's something I hadn't considered before, and when I presented it a couple weeks ago, the students really seemed to like it; so that'll go in much earlier in the semester. Also, I think I'd like to develop Problem Statement Format introductions more clearly from the start-- the weaker writers in my classes always benefit from this, as it helps them form a clear direction to their papers. Currently, PSF comes in around week four; I think I'm going to move that up to hit before the first essay is due.

I altered the way I handled open revision this semester (in the fall I didn't put a timeline on revision and received a deluge of last-minute revision), and it worked really well, so I'll definitely keep that as an option.

I'm also working on creating a sort of revision checklist of common errors that I'd say 80% of my students make. Things like putting your punctuation inside your quotes, proper citation format, not opening or ending paragraphs with evidence, etc. Hopefully such a document will help them organize their workshop sessions more, and help them get away from focusing only on grammatical feedback.

So now that School is over for the moment, I've been working at gainful summer employment. At the moment RGIS is my only current holding. I had my paid training session today. The work is ridiculously easy; the hours are awful. Strange times are dealable--Verizon hardened me against weirdo shifts, but the pay is awful, and they only have me down for 17 hours in the next 2 weeks; nowhere near enough to pay the Man.

Fortunately, I managed to land an inteview tomorrow for a Marketing/web development gig at a place that's less than two miles from my house. From the sounds of it, it might solve all the summer monetary problems. So I'm looking forward to that with gusto.

Plus, since my next big project is to build the site for Ontologica, it'll be nice related practice. Speaking of Ontologica, I am finally going to be able to start drafting the essay that's been floating in my head since before Rod posed the notion of putting this journal together. Although I'm not traditionally an essay writer, I'm pretty psyched up to write this, so hopefully it'll pan out well.

Finally a note on the homefront: Sue's gone back to work, and though on many levels I feel like I'm somehow failing at bringing home enough money to cover bills, her work environment has changed drastically for the better, and she's really enjoying herself there; which is really good (and it's really helping with finances).

Molly's just coming out of a real bad stint of no sleep week (see my previous blog post). I guess most of the molars have cut through, because after nearly a week of no naps, and really poor sleeping at night, she's more or less back on her regular schedule (though the daytime nap is more floaty now--she used to crash immediatly after lunch, now it's hitting anywhere between 10:30 and 14:00). She and I have been hitting up the Zoo pretty regularly, and Molly likes that a whole lot. We'd like to hit some other zoos this summer, so hopefully that'll happen--kind of all dependent on work schedules and whatnot.

So now that I've written a blog post that, by all website usability rules is far too long, I'm going to end with a hopeful note about summer.

I hope summer rocks as much as I think it's going to rock.