It’s hard to believe this is the first blog post I’ve written since April. I’ve been knee-deep in living several dreams at the same time, besides being bitten hard by spring fever. Throughout half of April and most of May, I spent most of my free time outside. Every week-end I worked outside made my weight drop by two pounds — an added bonus. Plus, my mornings are now spent exercising, not drinking coffee while feverishly working on my computer until the last possible minute before I have to get ready for work — which was how I created most of my Web Site design. It’s hard to have balanced, healthy habits while working full-time and fleshing out a fictional Web Site part-time. continue reading »

I’ve decided to make all of DreamFishery.com a fictional Website, including even the philosophy wiki. Everything on DreamFishery.com, except this blog, will be a part of the digital storytelling that Alice Mountolive is doing as the narrator of The Myth of Merula. Making this decision just feels right to me. As soon as I imagined doing it, I could feel my creative juices start flowing more than ever. Making the whole site fictional feels liberating. It’s like taking a boat out to sea after being landlocked for a while. It’s also fun. It’s like playing pretend. Writing fiction is like playing pretend, in a way, too; but making the whole Website fictional really puts me into character, so to speak. And being in character, as the narrator Alice, helps me create the story. It occurs to me how much writing can have in common with acting, and I wonder why it never occurred to me before. continue reading »

In A Short History of Myth, Karen Armstrong writes that writers and artists, not religious leaders, are filling the age-old human psychological need for myth in the contemporary world. Writers and artists are filling the vacuum that was left by the suppression of mythos in the wake of the Enlightenment. Logos is all well and good, but it can’t deal with our deepest, darkest imaginings, yearnings and feelings. The need for myth lives on and, when not filled by something better, results in everything from Nazism to Elvis worship. It will be expressed, one way or another. continue reading »

I never knew that there was such a variety of romance heroes and heroines. Writing about archetypal heroes/heroines my characters remind me of: that’s my exercise this week in my Forward Motion Writers’ Community online writing class. To prepare for the assignment, one source of research was a Web site listing eight romance hero archetypes and eight romance heroine archetypes. Think the macho man or the perfect woman are the only type of romance characters? Think again. Such creatures as The Professor (if a man) or The Librarian (if a woman) lurk in romance and are also found in many other genres, too. These are but two surprising animals to be found in the zoo exhibit of romance hero and heroine archetypes. continue reading »

This January, I joined a free online class in novel writing at the Forward Motion for Writers community, and I’m glad I did. Its timing is perfect to help me write The Myth of Merula. It’s a two year novel writing class with weekly assignments that cover every aspect of novel writing, from idea to characters to worldbuilding to writing to editing to submission and publication. Lazette Gifford, a very prolific author with many published novels under her belt, is the teacher. Her attitude is practical and experienced. I sense that this gal knows how to go through all the steps of writing a novel without wasting her time. I could use some o’ that. continue reading »

After reading what Anais Nin has to say about writing, I’m convinced that she’s right about the indispensability of the subconscious and its language of poetry, metaphor, metanym, symbol and image. At first, I thought that this insight would only have a personal value to me, but it would not be something I would use in my writing. After all, I want to write more along the lines of science fiction. I’m not that great at writing poetry, and I want to write about new subjects, not just old subjects with new style. Not only that, but I thought that since the content of my writing wil be so strange, the medium for conveying it should be clear. Otherwise, it may just be confusing. But now I’m trying to think of ways to integrate a more lyrical style of writing into science fiction. There are a few examples of this type of style around. The Martian Chronicles and Einstein’s Dreams both come to mind.

GAM3R 7H30RY, a draft by McKenzie Wark, is another book that is being shared online before finishing and publishing it. Wark hopes to use the GAM3R 7H30RY website to foster discussion around two questions:

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Without Gods is an interesting experiment in going from blog to book. Without Gods is currently a blog by Mitchell Stephens, who is writing a book on the history of atheism. He is making his writing process transparent and interactive online on his blog. The end result will be a book that will be published by Caroll and Graf. His blog has attracted a good bit of discussion and debate.

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A new system, called Literatronic, has been created for hypertext authoring. Rather than using links to connect the passages of their stories, authors can assign numbers to tell Literatronic how much affinity one passage has with another. A reader will be presented with choices of what to read next, based upon these affinities. Once a reader has read a passage, it will not be available again as a choice to read next, unless the reader goes back to the map of already read text and marks the text as unread. The system goes further than this, in that it uses artificial intelligence to adapt to a reader’s previous choices and to use information about them to compute the next set of choices. A much more detailed look at Literatronic, and how it has the potential to change the way the way that hypertext literature is written and read, is available on the WRT blog.

I like the dynamic words of simply7 by Deena Larsen. It’s billed as a Flash treatise on the nature of language in electronic poetry. The words in this piece reflect words more closely to the way they behave in our minds than we are used to seeing when we read a text. Words don’t hold still in our minds, as they do on a printed page. Words don’t come in only one version in our minds; we often go through multiple possible speeches or drafts in our minds, simultaneously and quickly. We often think of several words that could do, but we must choose only one to fill its slot in a sentence. We sometimes have words behind words in our minds, one word we think behind the word we put out front, in public. Words in simply7 reflect all this.

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