It’s an odd experience, returning to my two previous collections, which were published in 1988 and 1997. Re-reading Tiny Lies is especially disconcerting.  I have not read most of these stories for more than twenty years, and reading them now is like travelling in a time machine back to the 1980s.  The stories are both more and less autobiographical than I recall, and they’re full of politics, sex, and swearing (three Great Themes, of course, if you can call the splendid use of the f-word a theme).  The story ‘Tiny Lies’ itself is about abortion, something I’d completely forgotten I’d written about. 

Of course, it might be a massive indulgence to be republishing these old stories now; and the very idea of a book of ‘collected stories’ is probably seriously dodgy - only ‘venerable’ writers do collected stories.  But the thing I like best about these stories, both the old and the new, is that they’re often funny - I seem able to strike out for comedy in the short story, something I find far harder to do within the confines of a novel.  Short stories allow for a kind of freedom and playfulness, and I hope that’s what readers will find with this book. 

PhDs by Published Works are odd beasts - you take a selection of your own work and attempt to write about your practice in relation to those works.  The fact that I work in the parallel fields of fiction for print and born-digital fiction was useful for me, in that I was able to write an essay that looked at the similarities and differences between these two distinct modes of writing and publishing. 

My plan is to publish the PhD essay online once - if - I get through the Viva examination, which will be toward the end of July.  I’m looking at a few options for how to do that.  I’m interested in PressBooks and hope to talk to them about using their software as a platform for publishing a version of the PhD that will be open to comments and questions.

I think the way I feel now is down to a combination of factors - relief at getting it to the printers combined with anxiety over whether it is good enough; the ongoing stress over the uncertainty over whether or not DMU is going to renew my contract (I’ve been waiting to hear about this for the same amount of time that I’ve been working on the PhD, and time, and my contract, is about to run out); and just plain old nerves.  It’s been a very long time since I submitted work to examiners.  Of course, handing in a book to agents and publishers is a similar process, but somehow the whole thing about academic judgement feels very different.  I am, after all, a drop-out, so of course academic pressure isn’t something I’ve responded well to in the past.  Ha ha! I can hear all my students shouting, Now you know how It Feels!  Well, all sympathy, that’s all I can say. 

Gulp. 

To kick off our project, Andy has been experimenting with the first story from ‘Flight Paths’, ‘Yacub in Dubai’; he’s created an open source version of it that is compatible with many devices and platforms, including iPhone, iPad, and Android, as well as all desktop computers.  This version gets round the problem that we’ve had with Flash not working on certain devices.  Here’s the link: http://labs.dreamingmethods.com/flightpaths/chapter1_open.html

This link to the latest Dreaming Methods newsletter also showcases several of Andy’s other projects, including his own Digital Fiction Boilerplate, which allows creators with some knowledge of HTML and Javascript to create works that are viewable across platforms and devices, including smartphones. 

As well as that, the newsletter provides a link to the Dreaming Methods mobile site. 

All very exciting and, indeed, ground-breaking, developments for our work on ‘Flight Paths’. 

The lecture was a big deal for me.  I left home at 17 to go to McGill on a scholarship, but I did not thrive - or rather, I did thrive, but in all the wrong ways.  By the time I was 19, I had lost my scholarship and dropped out of university.  So to be invited back to give this lecture was a huge honour for me.  And, despite my nerves, it turned out to be a great evening, at least as far as I’m concerned.  There was a big audience, which included my sister Joanne and her husband Doug (when I dropped out of McGill I went to live with them in the Yukon, so it was great to have them there to help mark my return), and my friend Lubin Bisson (Lubin and I shared the same corridor in the McGill residence, Molson Hall), and my Canadian publisher, Kim McArthur.  It was wonderful to have them all there with me.  And afterwards, the Friends of the Library took us to dinner at the McGill University Club, and we had a great time there, with hilarious tales from Lubin, and general mirth about the fact that Montreal still had men-only taverns back then, where you could get 33 glasses of beer for $10, in ‘Verres Sterilises’ no less. 

I’m hoping to publish the lecture eventually, more on that when I have it. 

Ellen makes a few appearances in ‘The Mistress of Nothing’; she lives in Alexandria where she works as lady’s maid to Janet Ross, Lucie Duff Gordon’s daughter.  Ellen was one of the people who seems not to have spotted the fact that Sally was pregnant, though they saw each other just days before Sally gave birth on the Nile.  As well as that, at one point in my novel Ellen announces to Sally that she has plans to get married, though she has no idea who she’ll marry - not for her the lifelong role of spinster lady’s maid.  This announcement, this scene, was entirely fictional - I was looking for a way to demonstrate the extraordinary fact that lady’s maid were expected to not marry.  But it looks as though it turned out to be true, and that Ellen went on to have a family.  But the idea that both Naldrett girls might have stayed on in Egypt did not occur to me; perhaps Ellen was able to be more of a help to Sally after all.  Perhaps Ellen helped raise Sally’s child…

Truly extraordinary.  And it’s got me thinking… It would be great fun to research what happened to Ellen Naldrett.  And it would be so interesting to look into whether or not Omar really did go on to work for the Prince of Wales…

Today’s explosion of capital letters was prompted by the announcement from FutureBook and The Literary Platform that they are co-hosting an event, the FutureBook Innovation Workshop here in London in June.  This is an entirely good thing from two good people, indeed two organisations, who are dedicated to thinking about the future of the book in ways that highlight innovation and experimentation.  The description of the day sounds great:  publishers will get the chance to ‘showcase their recent apps, enhanced e-books and e-books, and share best-practice with fellow publishers. In addition, the conference will provide a platform for publishers to meet with developers, with a “speed-dating” session aimed at putting book professionals in touch with potential digital partners’.  Fantastic.  I want to be there.

Except for one thing - no writers included.  No mention of writers, no mention of writing, no mention of stories.  I can see why this makes sense - this is an industry event aimed at publishers and developers, co-sponsored by FutureBook, which is an off-shoot of The Bookseller, the publishing industry’s main source of news and comment.  This conversation - about the future of publishing, indeed, the future of the book - is one that writers have been largely absent from throughout the past decade.  But this omission is symptomatic to me of the weird division that exists in our bookish world between the makers of content and the sellers of content.  I say ‘weird’ because it never ceases to amaze me how ignorant most writers are about the industry they work so hard to survive in;  that said, if writers are ignorant about the industry, most of us are even more ignorant about digital technologies. 

What would writers do at such an event - pitch their incredibly cool ideas for digital projects at the cohort of publishers and developers present?  Hmm.  Now there’s an event I’d like to attend.  I’ve got this great multi-platform idea - book plus web apps, growing its own interactive reading community…

There’s very little information on the podcast webpage itself, but I can see from the url that it comes out of ‘pitt.edu’ which is the University of Pittsburgh in the US.  A few tweets later, I’d figured out that these students are working with Jamie Skye Bianco, who is Professor of Digital Media at Pittsburgh (also known online as @spikenlilli).  Jamie teaches both ‘Inanimate Alice’ and ‘Flight Paths’ to students on her ‘Narrative & Technology’ class; her students wrote a series of interesting blogposts about Alice and FP earlier this year. 

It’s been nearly two years since new episodes of Inanimate Alice, created by readers, first started appearing online, and these new episodes continue to proliferate.  The pedagogical community around the project continues to grow; if you are interested in it, a good place to start is the Facebook Inanimate Alice group page.  Recent developments include a Scottish teacher, Hilery Williams, who has written a series of wonderful blog posts about using ‘Inanimate Alice’ with dyslexic teenaged readers; the post linked to here is number four in a series on Alice.  As well as that, another Scottish teacher, Kenny Pieper, has been using Alice in his secondary school classroom and, again, blogging about it in a way that I’ve found both useful and inspiring.  Both groups of students are working on their own episodes of Alice. 

For writers who work in the genre of science fiction, this kind of reader-story interaction is fairly commonplace - ‘fanfic’, or fan fiction.  But for a writer like me, working in both the genre of literary fiction, and with new forms of digital fiction, having readers talk back to my story in this way is an extraordinary experience.  Every time I see a new episode, or a new blog post from people working with ‘Inanimate Alice’ I feel absolutely amazed.  To me it seems a very meaningful form of interactivity and I’m thrilled that these stories are being used by students and teachers around the world to find new ways of talking and thinking about storytelling in the 21st Century. 

I was interviewed recently for an article called ‘Are Midlist Authors An Endangered Species?’ that appeared in the Globe & Mail newspaper yesterday - somehow I’ve become one of the go-to-girls for journalists who want to talk about the future of the book and the future of stories.  My conversation with the journalist was, of course, vastly reduced in the context of the article, and I ended up being quoted in the final paragraph, given this as a not-very-bright-sounding last word:  “Writers will make a living in a lot of different ways, only some of which are writing,”  Uh-huh.  I was described in the article as a writer who “publishes both conventionally and online, where she posts fiction for free.”  While, strictly speaking, when it comes to ‘Inanimate Alice’ and ‘Flight Paths’, this is true - these works are available online for free - to see the vast interactive community project that Alice in particular has become reduced to ‘fiction for free’ is infuriating.  This is not to fault the journalist;  my point here is that at the moment the argument about the future of publishing seems to be focussing on self-publishers vs real publishers, on ‘free’ versus ‘paid’ content.  To me this feels like I’m watching a couple of mice argue over a tiny piece of cheese while around the corner a big fat cat (representing the vast potential for multimedia, interactivity, mobile delivery, etc etc etc that digital platforms offer to writers) sits calmly licking her paw. 

This post is getting long and I need a cup of tea.  We live in interesting times. 

Speaking of rhubarb, I spent February guest blogging over at OpenBook Toronto.  I enjoyed my stint, but blogging every other day seems to have worn me out on the blogging front.  March may be quiet.  Speaking of more rhubarb, I’ve been doing more interviews about the future of literature, most recently for the Observer newspaper here in the UK, and the Globe & Mail in Toronto.  I’ll put up the links once the pieces appear.