A couple of weeks ago, on twitter, a teacher from St. Joseph’s College, Echuca, Victoria, Australia, posted a great photo of four students with the line, ‘Boys preparing their Inanimate Alice digital stories (cool stuff)’.  Years 5 and 6 at Redhills School in Exeter, Devon, UK, published a whole series of new episode 5s created using Photostory.  As well as that, the American social network for kids, Everloop, which has just won a Parent’s Choice Award , has included ‘Inanimate Alice’ as one of its partners; the Alice team has created a whole set of assets for Everloop, that only Everloop kids can see. 

In Australia, we are about to launch a series of digital photo-novellas, ‘Alice in Australia’.  These stories, commissioned by Education Services Australia, will chart the lives of Alice and her family during a year they spend based in Melbourne.  The stories are set in the time period between episodes one and two - so after Alice and her parents have left China, but before they move to Saudi Arabia.  All the digital assets of these stories will be available for teachers and students for mash-up and remix.  Here’s the url - but note that this will only work in Australia.  Sorry about that, rest of world. ‘Alice in Australia’ 

And, finally, at last, we have now got a timetable for the production and release of our own ‘Inanimate Alice: Episode 5’; after a long delay, this all new episode will appear before the end of 2012.  Hooray! 

Before Christmas I had a working draft of the first part of the novel, an eighty page chapter with which I was rather pleased.  In it, I’d used an almost random mix of first and third person, as well as past and present tense.  Needless to say, on reflection, spurred on by the incredulous horror expressed by one of my agents upon reading it, this didn’t work. So I’ve embarked on a complete rewrite, which I’m about half—way through. 

The story of Our Stuff and Our Things grows out of my digital fiction project ‘Flight Paths’, created by me and Chris Joseph.  When it comes to works of multimedia that reside on screens, like ‘Flight Paths’ and ‘Inanimate Alice’, I’ve found that the first person works extremely well.  There’s something about the intimacy and immediacy of the first person that works well for text on a screen; it’s the voice of the character, speaking directly to you as you click and scroll and navigate your way through the story.  Many of the multitude of episode 5s of ‘Inanimate Alice’ that have been created by students around the world use the first person.  ‘Flight Paths’ uses two first person voices, interwoven to tell a story.

So I suppose it was only natural (read: not thought-through) that when I embarked on writing a novel that takes as its starting point the ‘encounter’ between the two characters from ‘Flight Paths’ - Harriet and Yacub (he falls out of a plane and lands on her car) - that I should continue to write using their first person voices, voices that I could hear very clearly inside my head.

But it doesn’t work.  If there is one thing that long-form prose fiction offers above all forms of story-telling, it is the ability to provide psychological insight, to go inside characters’ heads and bring forth their memories, their perceptions, their ideas.  Writing in the first person has severe limitations when it comes to opening out and exploring a story through an ensemble of characters over time.  So I’ve ditched it. 

Hard work.  As @touretteshero, the brave young woman campaigning to raise awareness of Tourette’s Syndrome, said on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme earlier this week:  Biscuit. 

Thompson’s talk was fascinating; he gave an in-depth analysis of where the publishing industry is at currently in terms of digital transformation.  He told a few good stories, focusing on the unpredictability of the shift to digital; for instance, how the overall trade publishing percentages of market for ebooks disguise the fact that, within the market for fiction, the shift to digital has been much much higher for certain authors in certain genres.  He talked about ‘the hidden revolution in publishing’ over the past decade, the complete transformation of workflow and production from analogue to digital.  He discussed how many people within trade publishing have been surprised to discover that readers have a big appetite for reading on e-readers, and how sustained narrative in the form of fiction or creative non-fiction has proved to be hugely popular in the digital realm. 

One of the things I found most interesting in Merchants of Culture was the final chapter, ‘Trouble in the Trade’, in particular the section ‘Damaged careers’, where Thompson gives several case studies of writers who have, to put it bluntly, ended up on the scrapheap after failing to sell as many books as the market deems fit to survive.  The thing that struck me most forcibly in this section - and that clearly struck Thompson as well - is how these writers operate within an industry of which they have next to zero real knowledge.  To repeat: most writers know nothing about the publishing industry.  They know how much they’ve been paid, and they know how much their friends have been paid.  But as to how the industry actually functions, both on a production level, and on a larger cultural level - what, for instance, makes a ‘Big Book’? - writers function in a knowledge vacuum.  There are many reasons for this - writers are interested in writing, and they are interested in reading, and they are interested in other writers - but during the question period I got to ask Thompson about this.  Why does he think that writers are so ignorant about their own industry? 

Thompson pounced on the question, saying that his next big research project will focus on this very thing - writers, and the world we inhabit.  Then he said a very interesting thing.  He said, ‘Writers outsource their relationship to the publishing industry to their agents’. 

This struck me as a very simple way of stating a profound truth, and one that carries with it many layers of complexity.  Writers can’t survive in the industry without agents.  Agents act as our intermediaries - we let them get on with business while we write.  But, more than this, this statement reflects a cultural truth - writers aren’t supposed to be business people, we’re supposed to stay in our garrets and dream our beautiful dreams.  No publisher wants to have to deal directly with a writer over a contract.  And while writers outsource their relationship with the industry to agents (apart from, of course, the writer-editor relationship we all hold dear), publishers outsource the finding of new writers and new books to agents. 

Of course, the rise of indy or self-publishing is beginning to disrupt these relationships:  I suspect that whenever any writer self-publishes, the thing they discover, above all else, is how much they don’t know - and how much they need to learn - about how books are published. 

Thompson also stated that one thing that isn’t talked about in all the endless discussions about the future of publishing, and the state of the industry today, is the human cost to writers who are experiencing the blunt end of change.  Last week the agent Jonny Geller published his excellent ‘An Agent’s Manifesto’; he says its time for the industry to wake up to what is happening to writers, that this industry would not exist without us.  ‘The author is not an object which a publisher has to step over in order to achieve a successful publication,’ he says.  But he also adds that writers need to step up and understand more about how publishing actually works. 

Geller is right to say that now, more than ever, we writers need our agents.  But we writers also need to wake up and understand how this big complex industry works as it heaves itself, groaning and moaning, with bits dropping off, and two black eyes, into the twenty-first century. 

There are a number of reasons for this.  First off, in traditional publishing terms, I’m a classic mid-list literary fiction author.  At this stage in my career, I’ve written a lot of books, and many of them are no longer in print.  The exception to this is my most recent novel, The Mistress of Nothing; the fate of this book was transformed when it won the GG in 2009, Canada’s Governor General’s Award for Fiction.  This prize gave me access to a much larger readership in Canada, and led to the publication of the book in a number of other territories, editions, and translations.  But even now, with several translations yet to appear, this book is fading from the market; it will doubtless have greater longevity than anything else I’ve written, because of the prize, but - unless of course the movie gets made - it will have a placid, quiet, life. 

It’s tough to find ways to continue to promote a book that was originally published in 2009; as a writer, my focus is elsewhere, as I move onto working on my next book and other new projects. This is not helped by the fact that one of my publishers appears to be in serious trouble - haven’t had a royalty statement (nor a payment) since the one that covered the period up to December 2010.  So any sense of the book as an on-going project, with a building readership, has faded.  As well as that, the idea of trying to promote a novel that was originally published two and a half years ago just seems a bit weird. 

But the opposite is true of several of my digital fictions, and the powerhouse in this field is, as mentioned earlier, Inanimate Alice.  IA has not published any new episodes (there are four existing, out of a projected ten) for several years now, well before The Mistress of Nothing first came out.  However, the audience for this digital fiction, about a girl growing up in the near future, surrounded by technology, continues to grow and grow.  This is largely down to the tenacity of the project’s producer/publisher, Ian Harper; he has spent many years now looking for the right business model for IA.  We took a step in the right direction with this project early on, when we decided to publish teachers’ guides alongside the episodes themselves.  The pedagogical project found its first audience in universities, but it was when secondary and primary school teachers and pupils grabbed hold of it that it really began to take off.  Now all the investment that is going into the project is coming from the education sector.  We’ve found our niche - it’s a global ‘niche’ -  and we’ve found ways to continue to engage new readers and new audiences, and the audience for this digital fiction continues to increase, year after year.  Inanimate Alice, a completely new, hybrid form of storytelling that combines text with video, animation, music, and games, shows no signs of fading away, shares none of the second-hand, remaindered, dog-eared fate that so many of my books have met. 

I’m not completely sure what this means.  It certainly won’t stop me from writing my next ‘traditional’ novel.  But it is interesting to note that this most ephemeral and technology-driven piece of fiction is proving to be so enduring. 

It’s a short novel - less than seventy pages - translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey, and this extreme brevity is part of what makes the novel work so well.  For anyone interested in point of view in creative writing, as well as how to execute an extremely controlled, darkly funny, experiment in narrative, ‘Down the Rabbit Hole’ is itself - dare I say it? - a masterclass.

Reading Amy’s thesis promoted me to look at the current status of ‘A Million Penguins’ online.  We heard early last year that Penguin was going to give up hosting the project, and we didn’t have the time, or the resources, to figure out how to archive the massive wiki, with its many many pages, ourselves.  I regret this, though it is hard to see how we could have saved it in time.  So the original site no longer exists.

However, a good portion of ‘A Million Penguins’ was archived by the amazing people at the Internet Archive in San Francisco, and you can find these pages by searching for it via the Wayback Machine. 

During Amy’s viva we talked a bit about the phenomenon of the networked book itself.  Amy pointed out that during the noughties there were a significant number of projects that called themselves ‘networked books’, both fiction and non-fiction, my own on-going project, ‘Flight Paths: a Networked Novel’ among them of course.  Amy wondered if the networked book concept has had its day.  I think that we are now seeing trade publishing approaching publishing fiction in a manner that owes much to the networked book concept, although of course, all in the service of marketing.  Social media marketing campaigns are now being built around books; these campaigns include bespoke web content, games, extra content, author interviews, etc.  These campaigns aim to foster reader engagement around a newly published book, whereas the networked books of the noughties all sought to foster creative engagement with text and other forms of media.  The networked book emphasis was on collaboration and contributing, whereas, of necessity, a trade publishing networked social media campaign is about sales. 

The story takes the premise developed in my digital fiction, ‘Flight Paths’ and develops it further.  It tells the stories of the two characters in ‘Flight Paths’, Yacub and Harriet, and it tells the stories of a number of other characters as well.  At the risk of over-complicating this description, if not the project itself, the novel will have three chapters that will be published in bound book and ebook format, and one stand-alone chapter, a multimedia digital fiction I’m working on with Andy Campbell of Dreaming Methods, called ‘Duel’. 

The weird thing is that I am finding the writing process fun.  Really a lot of fun.  I have no idea why this time around it is fun.  Maybe it’s because ‘The Mistress of Nothing’ was such an epic research job, and while ‘Our Stuff and Our Things’ does require some research, it’s nothing compared to MoN, where I even attempted to learn Arabic (six months of 1-1 lessons:  I know four words).  The writing process - and this peculiar experience of ‘having fun while writing’ - reminds me a little bit of when I wrote my novel ‘Weird Sister’.  That was the only other novel I’ve ever written where I knew pretty much where to start, where to go next, and how to end, before I started writing. 

Hmm.  Maybe there’s a lesson there.  Or maybe not.

So, doubtless now that I’ve written this blogpost, it will all go horribly wrong.  But I just wanted to put it on record - writing can be fun.  There, I said it.