Kate Pullinger

This is my last blog post for Open Book Toronto. Thanks to Open Book Toronto for the invitation, and thanks for reading the posts.

I'll end on a note about the perils/opportunities we face over the next decade as readers and writers. While I think there are many reasons for optimism about the future of books and the future of reading, I also think we need to be vigilant.

Writers need to lobby hard to be heard in the ongoing discussions about pbooks, ebooks, social media, social reading, digital engagement, etc - we need to be in that space, making ourselves heard.

I've been attempting to start my next fiction project for a while now, but I've been slow to make progress. I'm calling it 'my next fiction project' instead of 'my next book' or 'my new novel' because I'm hoping that this project will encompass both multimedia digital and pbook/ebook elements. The overall story arises out of my ongoing digital fiction project http://www.flightpaths.net, and my plan is for it to include a novel written by me, plus a collection of collaborative digital fictions.

This sounds complicated, but for me it is part of a process of trying to join things up, of my desire to unite print and multimedia elements to create a larger story.

The way I see it now, the end result will be several things, indeed several ways into the story. There will be a novel. There will be a collection of web apps. And there will be a large-scale digital fiction project that involves two of the main characters from the novel, but is set a couple of years prior to the novel. In a way, I suppose, overall, the project will create a 'storyworld'; hopefully all the components will both stand on their own, as well as contribute to an overall narrative whole.

Okay. I've said it. Or rather, I've written it down in this blog. Now I just have to go and do it. That's the thing about writing: at the end of the day, what counts is the graft. And talking about it is always so much easier than actually doing it.

Two things that have amused me, and caused me to waste time, online in recent days:

A pac-man style game based on The Great Gatsby! Except Nick Carraway has a gun, and he's trying to find Jay Gatsby!

http://greatgatsbygame.com/

And you can tell yourself it is all about literature, really, all about the books, and that The Great Gatsby is your favourite (it's one of mine), so how can you resist?!

And this gem, Michael Winter on 'How to Shorten a Manuscript'.

Ah, the internet.

I am currently doing a PhD by Published Works. This is an academic option open to people like me who work in universities but come from non-academic backgrounds. I'm a university drop-out, but I have a long list of publications, and I've been teaching in universities for many years. The PhD by Publication allows me to submit three published works accompanied by an essay that frames and contextualises those works. I've chosen my novel, The Mistress of Nothing, along with two works of digital fiction, Inanimate Alice, and Flight Paths. My essay will compare and contrast my experience of both the world of trade publishing and publishing online.

Welcome to Pine Point

This morning I woke up to an email in my inbox from The Goggles, a media company based in Vancouver. Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons (who are, I believe, The Goggles) have created a remarkable piece of interactive creative nonfiction – an interactive documentary about an NWT mining town, Pine Point, that no longer exists. Taking as its starting point photo albums and high school yearbooks, it looks at this small northern town through its former residents’ memories. It’s a moving and innovative piece of work. Great music too, from The Besnard Lakes.

For someone who has long been an advocate for the digital and the potential the new technologies bring to us for finding new ways to tell stories, I took my time when it came to getting an ereader.

Although I have no doubt about the convenience of reading books on an ereader, and while I’m optimistic about the potential for digitisation to bring greater numbers of readers to a larger variety of stories, I’ve been much more interested in thinking about writing for new platforms than I have been in the paper-under-glass approach to the digital that is inherent in any ereader.

Last night I went to see 'The Children's Hour' on stage in the West End here in London, a new production starring Keira Knightley, Elisabeth Moss, and Ellen Burstyn. It's a beautifully designed and directed production, gripping and times mesmerising. The stars are all terrific and the girl who plays the main child - Byrony Hannah - is great as well. I can confirm that Keira Knightley is amazingly beautiful, just in case you were wondering. When I got home last night I discovered that tickets for The Children’s Hour are so in demand they are selling on ebay for £1000 - about $1600 Cdn - each.

Today marks the launch date of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2: http://collection.eliterature.... This is an elegantly curated collection of eliterature, a great starting point for anyone interested in the way the new technologies can be used to tell stories.

Narrative voice is such an odd and powerful thing. What I mean here is not ‘voice’ in the sense that I wrote about last week, i.e. point of view, the choice of first person narrator vs third person narration etc. What I’m referring to is something more intangible – the ‘voice’ of the author and how that comes through in a text, via the rhythm of the prose, the use of language. I think narrative voice is partially directed by an author’s chosen style and tone, but I also think there are elements of it that are beyond the writer’s control; narrative voice emanates from the writer’s very body – the way they breath, the way they sit or stand, the whole of their life up to that point.

I’m currently reading ‘Lemon’ by Cordelia Strube (Coach House Books) and this has lead me to think about the perils and pleasures of first person narratives. Strube’s narrator, Lemon, is a sparky, hyper, angry teenager surrounded by useless adults and less-than-useless fellow teenagers; the world she inhabits – the world Strube creates through her eyes – is bitter, harsh, and funny.

Egypt and Tunisia

While I’m Writer-in-Residence I’ll be mostly blogging about writing and reading, but I couldn’t resist the opportunity to write a bit about North Africa this morning.

Over the past several years I helped run a mentoring scheme for writers based in Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria. These young adults were all writing in English, their third language (after Arabic and French and sometimes Berber as well); the scheme, Medi-Café, was run by the British Council. They were a mix of students, teachers, and academics, and they were united by their passion for reading and writing, and their desire for knowledge and experience. Our work online was supplemented by a series of three day workshops in both Tunisia and Morocco.

Thanks to OpenBook Toronto for inviting me to be Writer-in-Residence for the month of February. I’m writing this in London, England, where I live, but because of Our Beloved Internet, I’m able to take up residence in Toronto online.