I had a mail on Friday from Carolyn Guertin, Director of the eCreate Lab at the University of Texas at Arlington, asking for some guidance for her students who want to contribute to ‘Flight Paths’.  It’s great to have her interest in and support for the project, but it is slightly alarming that these media arts students, doubtless highly web-savvy, are a bit baffled by how to contribute.  This supports the conversation that Chris and I have been having about finding ways to make the project more accessible, and more inviting to contributors.  I sent Carolyn the following as a reply:

“Chris and I are actually in the midst of rethinking the overall structure and approach as it is clear that people find it hard to find a way in to the story.  However, unconnected fragments are often very fruitful we find - so feel free to send us those as well.  We are going to create five little flash story hot points over the next few weeks and maybe if I run through those for you, this will help your students:

1)  Yacub before he stows away - working in Dubai in construction, alongside many other Pakistanis.  He’s a young man working hard to try to get ahead.

2)  Yacub at the airport at home in Pakistan before he stows away.

3)  Harriet in London on her way to do the weekly shop for her family.  She’s a middle-aged woman with a radical political past that she’s put behind her - has tried to forget in some ways.

4)  Harriet as she watches Yacub fall from the sky.  Yacub as he falls.

5)  Harriet and Yacub after his fall:  Yacub wakes up dead, but to Harriet he is alive, and a story develops here as he follows her through her life.

These might change, but we are thinking if we create five little flash stories around these points, people can then add their own bits and pieces.  It might be useful for them to enter the story via the point of view of either Harriet or Yacub.  Any kind of media is good for us. “

Hopefully, this will help her students and, once we get these little stories up and running, help make ‘Flight Paths’ more accessible in general.

I’ve managed to get through the rewrite of my new novel, ‘The Mistress of Nothing’.  My editor, Ruth Petrie, had gone through the manuscript and made a series of excellent comments and suggestions, both large and small.  Nothing too large, thankfully, nothing structural; it’s the structure and voice and point of view of this novel that has given me such grief over the past 13 years or so. Luckily, by the time Ruthie saw it, I had solved most of those problems and am left with tightening things up, elaborating some points, adding dialogue, clarifying, making minor cuts and adjustments.  I hadn’t read the novel since Feb of this year, and having had a good long break away from it has enabled me to come back to it with a degree of freshness I wasn’t expecting.

At the moment I am typing in the corrections to the manuscript, having made all my changes to it with red, black, and blue pens on the printed manuscript.  Once I’ve done that, I’ll print it out once again and read it through one more time before sending it off to Serpent’s Tail here in the UK, and McArthur & Co in Canada.

Let the foreign sales pour in!  Let the prizes and accolades rain down! Let the supermarkets place mass orders!

Yes indeed.

Just back from Tunis where I spent a couple of days working as part of the Medi-Cafe group for the British Council.  We had a productive time, mixing discussions about the art and craft of writing with discussions about the Maghreb, in particular, Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria.  As always, the Tunisians were great hosts - we spent our working sessions in a palace on the sea in Carthage.  Seriously. A palace on the sea in Carthage.  I sat by this window for a while during one session - I could hear the sea outside and the sun shone on my legs.  Sun!  In November!  Why do I live in northern Europe?  Why did that seem like a good idea at the time?

An issue that arose during some of our discussions was this:  the Tunisian government has taken to banning websites, including You Tube and the Daily Motion, two of the most important sites world-wide for sharing videos. One of my students was telling me that she can’t access most of the videos on ‘Flight Paths’ and we wondered why… but of course many of those videos are hosted on You Tube and linked to from there into the Netvibes Universe that hosts ‘Flight Paths’.  Chris and I will need to rethink the strategy of keeping videos on You Tube.

Banned sites has been a bit of a feature of my teaching of late, as on the online MA in Creative Writing and New Media we’ve discovered that our students in Oman and Ethiopia can’t access Skype - banned by the gov’ts who have done deals with phone companies to prevent access to free telephony.  We use Skype a lot in our teaching, but will find alternatives now.  Also, Oman bans googlegroups. Banning You Tube seems particularly draconian.  But that’s the Tunisian gov’t for you.  Maybe being allowed to live in northern Europe isn’t such a bad thing after all…

Despite our reputations as innovators in the world of creative writing and new media, my colleague at De Montfort University, Sue Thomas, and I sent the following e-mail out to our students and colleagues on the MA in Creative Writing and New Media earlier today.

We are very sorry indeed to have to tell you that the Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media will not be taking any new students and will close once this year’s intake have finished their studies in 2010. The MA is taught by a highly-experienced team with visiting lecturers drawn from some of the best new media writers and artists around the world, but we have been told that the degree is losing money and in the current economic climate De Montfort University cannot afford to subsidise it, so the Faculty of Humanities has taken the decision to close it. Today we’ll be announcing the situation more widely but we wanted to tell you first.

Over the next couple of weeks we’ll work to make sure that each of you is fully informed about your personal route through the degree. Full Time and Second Year students will progress through as normal. It will take us a little more time to decide how to proceed with the First Year programme - please bear in mind that we did not know about the decision to close the programme until late yesterday afternoon so it will take us a little while to digest. But do rest assured that we will make sure everyone has a very good experience right to the end.

We have both put a great deal of effort into devising and teaching this degree, and have broken much new ground both in online teaching methods and in the development of new media itself. We’re proud of working with all of you €“ each one of you is a high-level creative innovator and we are hugely enjoying our time together. We’d like to thank you for your hard work and commitment.

If you have any questions about the financial or administrative implications of the course closure, please contact the Graduate Office. Other questions should be directed to myself or to Kate.

Incidentally, if you have friends who were thinking of applying for next year, do tell them that there will still be opportunities to study with us via an MA by Independent Study or via a PhD, and we hope that you yourselves will consider a PhD with us once you have graduated from this degree. There is still a great deal of new ground to be broken in this area, and we plan to continue that work.

Very warm wishes.

Kate and Sue

Week before last Serpent’s Tail sent me the cover image they are going to adapt for my novel, ‘The Mistress of Nothing’, which will come out in the UK in July next year, Canada in the autumn.  It’s a lovely old photograph of sailing boats on the Nile.  I’ll post a preview once it is ready.  These past two days I’ve been discussing the blurb for the back of the book, the catalogue, etc with Niamh Murray from Serpent’ Tail - here’s a draft:

“Lady Duff Gordon is the toast of Victorian London.  But when her debilitating tuberculosis means exile, she sets sail for Egypt with her devoted lady’™s maid, Sally, as her sole companion.  It is Sally who describes, with a mixture of wonder and trepidation, the odd ménage marshalled by the resourceful Omar, as they travel down the Nile to a new life in Luxor.  When Lady Duff Gordon undoes her stays and takes to native dress, throwing herself into village life, language lessons, and excursions to
the tombs, Sally too adapts to a new world, gaining heady and heartfelt freedoms she has never known before.

But freedom is a luxury that a maid can ill-afford, and when Sally grasps more than her status entitles her to, she is brutally reminded that she is mistress of nothing. “

Does this make you want to read it?

Yesterday I posted a new blog post but, bizarrely, was unable to upload any links into the text, so here are the missing links, so to speak:

Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media

and Medi-Cafe:  Trans-Mahgreb Creative Writing Project

As well as this, Chris has put a new banner on our Netvibes Universe site for Flight Paths - lovely!

Since 2001 I’ve taught a lot online and have found it variously rewarding and frustrating.  The online environment can be a good one for teaching writing in a workshop - objective and precise, all comments written down, asychronous course structures enabling everyone to take the time to read and consider all feedback, discussions continuing on a single piece over a prolonged period, unlike in the classroom where you get your half hour and that’s it til your turn comes round again.  But there are also big disadvantages to teaching online, the main one being that it is impossible to replicate the nuance of face to face interaction online.  You can’t raise your eyebrow in cyberspace.

Currently I teach online in two places - on the online MA in Creative Writing and New Media that I helped set up at DMU, and for the British Council, in Medi-Cafe, a scheme for mentoring students from Tunisia and Morocco who are writing in English.  Will be heading off to Tunisia shortly for one of our face to face sessions; with this programme, the online interaction is fed by regular face to face meetings, which is great.  It enriches the online interaction hugely.

Working on Flight Paths today; oddly, the more dispersed the narrative becomes, the more coherent it seems to me.  Jeremy H has been sending in a series of small fragments, and some of them are developing a single character; a young man looking back on when he left his family to go start university.  Flying back and forth between two completely separate lives, noticing the changes that take place in his family, now that he has left them.

These pieces evoke strong memories in me of when I left home.  I was seventeen, which seems practically a baby to me now, a baby even when I think of the seventeen year olds I know currently.  Like Jeremy’s character, I got on a plane and flew away from my family - in my case, I flew from Vancouver Island to Montreal - a mere 3000 miles or so.  That was it, I was gone after that.  And, like Jeremy says in his piece, the patch that I inhabited in my family grew over until there was no sign of me.

Not completely true, of course, on a fundamental level; but completely true on another.

To find Jeremy’s most recent piece about this character, go to Chapter One, the bottom of the page - it’s called ‘Gone’ - at http://www.flightpaths.net.

I have no desire to become a publisher, not even a self-publisher, though of course I might be driven to it one day, either because no one will publish me anymore (hasn’t happened yet, fingers crossed) or because I figure out a way to do it while retaining some kind of foothold in the market.  Though I am very very weary of the whole ‘future of publishing/future of books/end of books/end of reading as we know it’ discussion, it still annoys me to hear publishers complaining about the cost of converting their business to the digital.  I understand that the costs of creating fully digital content accessible across multiple platforms is substantial, but the truth is that all digital formats, when delivered electronically, dramatically cut the costs of publishing, once you take warehouses and shipping out of the equation.

So why are ebooks so ridiculously expensive?

In the past year I’ve been to a couple of events to discuss the future of publishing at large mainstream UK publishers and each time I look around at the gorgeous, high-tech, central London, HUGE buildings we are in and I think, oh, oh yes, this is what they call ‘overheads’.

Surely someone is about to start up a light-weight, streamlined new type of publisher in their kitchen, with a brand new economic model:  offer books in as many digital formats as feasible, including print-on-demand, broker deals with the retailers who are pushing ereaders and print-on-demand technology, offer writers a risk/profit share in the takings, undercut all the mainstream publishers on the price of ebooks - and bingo, bob’s your uncle.  I know, I know, it isn’t easy - but why not try it?  When is a publisher going to stand up
and suggest that charging the same price for an ebook as a print book, and in many instances, MORE, is just plain highway robbery?  Readers and writers revolt!