We’ve been quiet for a while here not because we’ve fallen off the Earth (it’s flat now, have you heard?), but because we’ve been spectacularly busy!
We’ve got several projects on the go: the Opening Up Digital Fiction Writing Competition, our Normal Deviation anthology, a brand new Wonderbox podcast, and more Hyperstories on the way!
Opening Up Digital Fiction Writing Competition
The 2nd annual contest closes tomorrow (15 March), but we’ve already gotten a slew of entries from all over the world, in all kinds of different formats. I can’t wait to go through them all and see what we’ve got. We’ll be shortlisting over the next couple of months, with winners announced in July.
In the meantime, why not have a look at last year’s winners and shortlist – there are fantastic works in there from Alan Bigelow, Kaitlyn Ensley, Dean Hammer, StoryMax, Robin Johnson, Phantom Williams, Lynda Clark, Serge Bouchardon, Mez Breeze & Dreaming Methods, and more.
Normal Deviation Anthology
It’s almost there! All the stories are in and edited to perfection. DeAnn and I are about to sit down and puzzle over the best order, along with font choices and all the ephemera that is involved in pagination, bios, and intros (maybe an outro?). We’ll be re-launching our Kickstarter to support the anthology in April, and expect to release in May, so keep an eye on this space and/or subscribe to our Normal Deviation mailing list.
The Wonderbox Podcast
I’m pretty excited about this one. I’ve been wanting to do a podcast for ages, but could never pin anyone down to chat with me/keep me from making each episode 3 hours long. Jordan Glendenning, a digital writer and one of my PhD students, is luckily just as enthusiastic about podcasts as I am, and a lot better at timekeeping.
This twice-monthly podcast will delve into all things digital fiction – what is it, where is it, what are the cool things it does, what role is it playing in culture, and just about anything else we can think of. Have a listen whether you’re new to digital fiction, or you’re a digital writer/researcher yourself – we hope everyone will find something interesting and entertaining in it. Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, and Podbean (or through your preferred podcast app).
Hyperstories
I have more hyperstories in the works, building on The Futographer and my latest, The Pyxis Memo. We had a fantastic 24-hour Create-a-thon last week, and I spent a good 12 hours of it brainstorming my next hyperfiction/ebook hybrid: Death After Death. The ex-geneticist geek in me even got to Punnet Square the number of possible endings I’d created for the story (and then backtracked quickly – 1024 is ambitious, even for me!).
These hyperstories are the key focus of Wonderbox’s current publishing aims, so if any writer out there has work (such as Twine games) that you could envision becoming an ebook, get in touch.
For the Future…
As many may know, my vision for Wonderbox isn’t just for it to be a review site and publishing imprint. The ultimate goal is to create a marketplace arm where digital writers (of any and every genre and development platform) can self-publish their work – the Kindle Direct Publishing of the digital fiction world, as it were.
Toward that end, I have various funding applications out, in order to develop the site, provide server space for hosting the works, market them, and bring greater mainstream awareness to the form.
Until these come in, however, we’ll keep doing what we do – reading and writing about great digital and speculative fiction!
