Hear about creative matchmaking from second team, Caden Lovelace and Laura Grace, here.

The final projects from both teams will be showcased on the 15 July at our Making Day for writers at the MIX Conference 2013, a day of experimentation, collaboration and play for writers looking to learn new skills and develop their creative practice. 

Book your tickets here.

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Understanding the benefits and limitations of what we’ve created has taken up most of our time.

We’ve written test stories – a tapas of tales – and plotted our future schedule. We’ve stayed up late into the night writing and recording, tinkering and testing. We know, for sure, that it won’t play in your pocket when you’re on a train. We also know that disco dance powered stories are a-go-go. We now understand our platform better which has honed our palette for creating content.

The visceral engagement with stories that we were after is already evident in our beta versions 0.1 and 0.2. Although it feels somewhat of a Pandora’s Box, we expected limitations.

We’ve recorded two test stories: one has a soundtrack, the other doesn’t. We’ve got technical specifications to figure out yet and continue to test. We’ve sent the beta out to some testers and we’re looking forward to the feedback. One of them is currently in Spain and testing how transposed the story makes you feel, even when surrounded by another language. One of them is fellow bursary winner Caden Lovelace and he has been instructed to find ways to kill it as efficiently as is possible and return it to us in several million pieces so we may figure out: one, how he was able to do so; and two, how we can ensure no one can do it again.

We’re meeting with sonic ethnographers, User Experience designers, and User Interface designers before we make 0.3.

James is cracking on with how best to integrate soundscapes, sound effects, and drafting music to match the form. Ben’s been recording his dulcet tones and honing story extracts to test out.

We’ve found the more you walk with someone whispering, bellowing, or laughing a story at you – a story that’s directly in your ear and responds to your movement – the nature of the stories we can use is affected. This is far more than an audiobook: your attention is piqued by these stories written specifically for this moving form.

You don’t want to stop moving. You want to finish the story.

The post The Writing Platform Bursary Diary Entry #1: Fabler – The Story So Far appeared first on The Writing Platform.

Enter Fiction Express For Schools. This publishing start-up is one of those very simple ideas that you can’t believe someone hasn’t done before. The company offers serialized, interactive stories to its subscribers ­– primarily junior schools, mostly in England, but also available to English-speaking schools around the world.

Chapter vote and a winning cover designed as part of the logo designing competition.

The readers interact by voting online for the path they’d like the story to take, as well as via the Fiction Express Blog, and through competitions that also help shape the story.

I started writing for them last year, and it’s not like any writing experience I’ve ever had before. Faster, scarier – because you’re handing over a large degree of narrative control to a bunch of tiny strangers – but also much less wracked with self-doubt. When there’s no time to agonize, there’s no agony.

Here’s how it works. Each week, for five weeks, you write a chapter, giving a few possible paths for the story to go down next. For example, you might ask “Does the heroine go into the dark cave, or explore the mountains above”, though usually it’s a choice with more at stake, morally speaking, than that. The readers then vote online, and whichever path gets the most votes, wins. Basically, it’s Choose Your Own Adventure meets The X-Factor.

The “live” element of it means the reader is forced to wait for the next installment. I can’t help feeling this is part of the pleasure for the readers, allowing anticipation to build. There’s something frustratingly enjoyable about being denied instant gratification when you’re used to it – with books or videogames, say, that you can pick up or put down whenever you like.

The writer’s in the same position as the reader – until the votes come in on a Tuesday, after the chapter going up on the Friday – you have to wait to find out what’s going to happen next out of the options you’ve provided. Sometimes those options are life or death.

One thing that really surprised me was how kind the children were in the choices they made. Perhaps I’m cynical, but I’d expected them to want to put the characters in peril, to make their lives hard, to make them, well, suffer. But actually, they often made the choice that seemed (at least in the short term) to protect the character and get them out of trouble.

This often turned out to be the most interesting narrative choice, as it usually meant taking the quick fix out of trouble that brought even more problems down on the character’s head in the long run.

Of course, while the readers vote for where the story will go next, it’s still within a structured context. Having run a lot of writing workshops with kids, I know that if you give completely free rein their stories can spiral into beautiful but baffling chaos, introducing new characters and changing location with the dizzying pace of a Bollywood set piece. With Fiction Express, the writer is the readers’ puppet,  while retaining enough control to give the story shape and drive it forwards.

Planning a piece of writing like this involves a lot of diagrams, a lot of “If X then Y” plot thinking. Necessarily it means a lot of roads not taken, too; a whole host of ghost paths that you never got to write, and the readers never got to read. There’s also an element of seat-of-the-pants improvisation of course – sometimes, a new idea emerges from the choices the readers have made, which leads the story to a whole new place you never envisaged.

As well as the voting, the readers interact directly with the author, via the Fiction Express blog.  Alongside the stories, I blogged here, as do all the Fiction Express authors. I’d write about what was happening in the story, I’d ask questions, I’d post doodles and “what ifs”. The readers came to the blog to ask questions, discuss the story – saying what they liked, what they just didn’t get, what made them angry – and post their own ideas for stories.

Often, in class, they’d write their own versions of the paths not taken. But they also helped to shape the story in ways other than voting. For example, while I was writing my second Fiction Express story, we ran a competition to design a school emblem for the main character’s school. This was then folded back into the story, as part of the last chapter. Different Fiction Express writers interact in different ways, but I think what the kids really enjoy about it is the opportunity to get one on one attention from the author, and to feel part of the process. To feel like they’re in the inner circle, I suppose.

The business side of things:

For an annual subscription of £199 + VAT, a school gets 12 interactive e-books as well as comprehensive weekly teacher resources to help them guide discussions about the stories and do spin-off classroom work such as creative writing, art and comprehension exercises. Each book is written “live”, so no cheating is possible for the readers. They make a choice, and they’re stuck with it, though pupils often write the paths not taken as stories of their own. Over 350 schools are signed up, which means thousands of pupils reading the same stories at the same time around the country and abroad. This publishing start-up was the brainchild of CEO Paul Humphrey, who previously founded, and still runs, book packager Discovery Books. Laura Durman is the managing editor of the project. The authors are all professional, published authors.

The post Fiction Express: Co-Writing With Thousands of Children appeared first on The Writing Platform.

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The many parts we each play on the Internet’s stage, once were simply the stuff that memes are made on.

Cyberia, our colleague Douglas Rushkoff intoned.

Cyberspace is the term popularized by William Gibson, that “consensual hallucination…lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind.”

The Matrix became the Wachowskis’ answer. But in coining WorldWideWeb,  Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau already had spoken for it.

And now?

Ah, well, now. Now, there is Platform.

Here is a term for which I can offer you no one or two authorial instigators. As publishing’s newest pageant wagon, Platform trundles, populist but unpopular, over the cobblestoned commedia of our toes and our prose as horses rear in the streets and small children scream for their overweight parents.

The Platform is followed by a long and winding callithump, a parade of priests, cowled and howling over their candles and finger cymbals. They’re fighting for air, these “teachers” and “trainers” and “coaches” and “mentors” and, Krishna forgive us, “gurus” in the One True Way of author platforming.

And no, it doesn’t exist only online, of course. You might still find yourself reading aloud to a group of people who’ve never heard of you at a neighborhood bookstore.  Bit of a race to see which will go first, the bookstore or the neighborhood.

More likely than not, your time en-Platformerie is Tron-like. Don’t forget to charge up your clothing. Ideal engagement with one’s presumed readers is thought to happen best on the Internet because one likes to think there are too many of them for the parlor.

If Platforming is about connecting with your potential audience—that community you’re meant to serve, according to the most churchly of the Platformists—then the center of your off-world universe is your Web site. So say these uninvited advisors, who want you to pay them for courses and seminars and tutorials in planking up one’s perfect Platform. You must blog there, they say, and you must draw your disciples to you: woo and wow your audience, and it will follow you anywhere. So they say.

Me? I collect other people’s audiences. For aerial performance.

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Other People’s Money opened at the Minetta Lane, a prominent off-Broadway house in Manhattan in 1989.  It would go on to have a 1991 film treatment with Danny DeVito, getting shorter by the frame.

Curiously, there was a play of the same title mounted almost a century earlier in New York, an 1895 farce written by Edward Owings Towne. Although on any given Monday it can feel as if I covered that 19th century production personally, I actually was still relatively new to my career in journalistic arts criticism in 1989 when I reviewed the latter-day Other People’s Money by Jerry Sterner.

In journalistic criticism, your earlier exposures to good work tend to stick with you. Later, rounds of 200+ productions a year will run together, but the early ones—and the best ones—come back to you.

I think of Other People’s Money nowadays each time I tell somebody about my “other people’s audiences” mode of a brand-building on the Ether. I’ve used it for close to two years. But I can recommend it only with the singularity of my own situation. I’m peddling nothing here.

In the American publishing community based in New York, a phrase was coined two years ago by a technologist named Brett Sandusky. “Anecdata” is what he called anecdotes being cited as revelatory data by traditional-publishing insiders facing digital disruption.

I’m eager to avoid pushing anecdata. I cannot tell you that my experience will work for you. But it may be worth your consideration.

I I I

The going wisdom about Platform designates the author’s Web site as the hub—the center of all activity to which the author wants to draw all even marginally interested parties. Come-hither as much of the world as you can, say the author-marketing sages, and keep them coming back.

I, instead, use my site as a switching station. When someone arrives at PorterAnderson.com, they find links to my latest writings at other sites. And then I show them the door.

On Mondays, for example, there’s Ether for Authors at PublishingPerspectives.com.  On Thursdays, it’s Writing on the Ether at JaneFriedman.com.  On the fourth Saturday of the month, it’s WriterUnboxed.com—I’ve been talking to the organizers of that site about branding that series, the Porter Provocateur pieces. I’m hoping to add more such regular venues later this year. During the London Book Fair, for example, I was glad to find myself producing London on the Ether for The Bookseller.

At PorterAnderson.com, you’ll find nothing longer-form than an excerpt from a column and a link: I’m shoving you right back off to go to the site kind enough to host that column, and read it there. Give them the Web traffic, that’s part of my intent, part of my gratitude.

There’s an About page at my site, of course. There’s also a list of upcoming conferences, since a large part of my work involves live coverage of conference events. There’s a Contact page, and so on. But my site isn’t the home of my live blog presence as it is for most people. Instead, my real hub is floating on those digital gases. That’s the aerial part.

• I spend most of my online time on Twitter, the main, gassy wagon of my Platform. From there, I point out my and others’ writings on the Ether.

• I’m gently tethered to several spots in the town of publishing, places at which I regularly write.

• And my roamings are mapped, or indexed, if you will, by my own site’s quiet, palmy listings of those writings.

At my own site, Web traffic—how many hits, how many unique users—isn’t the big concern for me that it is for many others. I’m delighted for you to visit, sure. But what I hope you’ll do at my site is find a headline or image that interests you and jet off to see that article where it lives—on someone else’s site, entertaining someone else’s audience, giving them the traffic. If you like what you find, I hope you’ll “follow” me on Twitter at @Porter_Anderson so I can whisper sweet nothings into your data-stream more frequently.

At my host sites, I’m much more concerned with attracting goodly numbers of eyeballs, naturally, in gratitude to the folks who have been kind enough to invite me to have a steady presence with them, brave souls. Jane Friedman was the first to do this, in August 2011. Writing on the Ether at her site is the original entry in my expanding “Ether” franchise. Not only “verified” by Twitter but a powerhouse figure online and in publishing with 180,000 followers, Friedman—a digital publishing professor and the Web editor with Virginia Quarterly Review—is the former publisher of Writer’s Digest and an endlessly supportive colleague.

Which brings me to one caveat on how this development in Platform works: I may be lucky enough to have regular access to “other people’s audiences,” but it’s not done by trickery. You should be very clear with your host(s) about this strategy, should you try to build it, yourself. They must know that you’re producing material at other sites. Don’t blindside them. They are your fine enablers and your best friends on this roll through the streets of your own pageant wagon. Write well for them.

This is not guest-blogging in the usual sense of a post here and a post there. The popular and, I think, effective idea of a “blog tour” to promote a new book or other property is closer to this concept, as you appear in several venues. But the distinction here is regular, consistent, and scheduled appearances on a set cluster of pedestals. Plus that über-presence on a social medium to tie things together and keep the patter going.

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One of the many lessons of my years at the networks of CNN, and especially at CNN.com, was just how hard it can be to draw a crowd online.

Our biggest day at CNN.com during my tenure there drew 600 million unique users—not hits, users, twice the population of the United States—in a single 24-hour period. An annual hit count (pages served) at CNN and other large sites can run into the billions. But this was the re-election of George Bush. And our amazing tech team kept CNN.com running even under such an avalanche of interest from a worldwide audience.

Nevertheless, CNN.com went to battle on a daily basis, as do all such major sites, to hold its own against the competition. As fast as they come to you, they can click away from you. Online, getting somebody to “hunker down” is a tall order.

Having seen such a powerful operation work on a dead run every day to maintain its leadership online meant that when I shifted my attention to publishing, I wasn’t inclined to hang up a sign and shout “y’all come see me.” I was entering publishing as a journalist with a critical approach to news of the digital disruption. Luring the crowd to me, to my own site? That wasn’t going to work.

What I needed was a steady presence where readers already congregated, just as I’d had at CNN’s networks, for that matter, and at newspapers and magazines before that.

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Why Twitter as the “flyover” element?

Tech and publishing startup creators are infamous for the silly, cutesy names they give their companies. Twitter to me is a news ticker. Like Reuters, like the Associated Press, it’s a steady stream of information and comment coursing through and between us, sliding by, churning. I’m comfortable with that because for decades in newspapers and network coverage, I’ve depended on just such a “priority wire” chattering at me.

And so my first real home in terms of an online presence was Twitter. It works best with your face as your avatar, your name as your handle, and your genuine background as your bio. You are not your products. The “social” in various social media means you’re interacting as a pleasant, professional version of yourself. Not as some freak talking book cover.

And Twitter is as much a language as a cyber-place. Use its @-handle names, look them up and light them up, so the companies and people you refer to know you’ve mentioned them. Hash its #-topics so people looking for action on one or more terms discover you. In other words, become fluent in Twitter, don’t pretend—you never fool the Parisians with bad French.

On Twitter, you meet both the influential and the aspirational, and in manageable bursts. With dashboards to section out lists of specific groups or topics you want to monitor (a better term than “follow”), you’re able to survey from a high viewpoint any community and profession but especially the industry! the industry! of publishing, which loves Twitter and is fondly tearing its hair there during the digital transition.

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Whether using “other people’s audiences” or another means of approach, control your Platform, or it will control you. You may be more successful on some days at this than others. Sometimes, your platform wins, your writing time is lost to engagement, your community eats your lunch.

I prefer RescueTime.com and its “FocusTime” selective Internet-blocker for timed sequences of concentration. An effective lashing to the mast. (Here is a referral link for a free trial, if you’re interested.)

But no assist is foolproof and anyone who tells you that he or she is fully in control of the allures of Cyberia, Mr. Rushkoff, is lying to you. Be kind to yourself. Never in history have we had such a world open up at our very fingertips. It is inside our homes and offices, on our phones, guiding our cars, singing us to sleep and keeping us awake.

Platform is demanded of all people of ambition today, not just writers. We must try not to complain too much.

Look up and wave bravely as I float by announcing Important Things from my gondola.

I’m on the lookout for other people’s audiences.

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Main images: iStockphoto- Bowie15 /AllenSima

The post Aerial Performance: Other People’s Audiences appeared first on The Writing Platform.

The Making Day consists of showcases and hands on experimentation for writers, artists and academics interested in learning new skills to help them extend their creative practice. The key themes of the day are: tackling the creative process, collaborating with other creators and writing for new platforms and audiences.

Workshops are designed and led by writers, technologists and other practitioners whose work blends storytelling, creativity and digital technologies. By the end of the day participants will have created something new and be inspired to explore new creative opportunities.

Making Day is brought to you by Bath Spa University and The Writing Platform as part of the MIX Conference 15-17 July, 2013.

Book now or find our details about the venue.

Programme:

10:00am Welcome from Kate Pullinger, Writer and Professor of Creative Writing and Digital Media, Bath Spa University.

10:15am Keynote and group exercise with Naomi Alderman, Writer and Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. Naomi will lead a group exercise to create a massively multi-authored story with all the Making Day participants.

11:00am An introduction to The Writing Platform and TWP bursary project showcases, hosted by Joanna Ellis, Associate Director, The Literary Platform.

The Fabler App: Bursary recipients, James Wheale and Ben Gwalchmai, showcase a prototype of their app which reveals story through movement.

Creating with strangers: Bursary recipients, Caden Lovelace and Laura Grace, discuss their approach to working together.

11:45am Break

12:00pm Workshop

13:00pm Lunch

14:00pm Workshop continued

16:30pm Quick fire feedback from workshop groups

Workshops

Making Day attendees are invited to take part in one of the seven workshops on offer. There is a maximum of 15 places on each workshop and places will be allocated on the day on a first come first serve basis. Please come along early to avoid disappointment.

Workshop 1: Improv Writing with David Varela, writer

Writing an interactive story means anticipating what your audience is going to do next – and being able to quickly ad lib when they do the unexpected. This workshop will help you exercise those improvisational muscles, making sure your interactive work is truly responsive.

David Varela is a writer and producer with experience in a huge range of media. He has written for film, theatre, radio and games, working on some of the world’s most exciting transmedia projects along the way. These include Perplex City (for Mind Candy), Lewis Hamilton: Secret Life (for Reebok) and Xi (for Sony PlayStation). He was also script consultant on the apocalyptic fitness game Zombies, Run!

His most recent production was The Seed, a transmedia adventure combining four plays, a treasure hunt and an online story, as part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. With Naomi Alderman, he teaches Arvon’s residential ‘Writing for Games’ course.

http://davidvarela.wordpress.com/

Workshop 2: The Object of the Story with Lucy and Barney Heywood, Stand and Stare Collective. 

Objects often spark stories or memories, from the jewelry we wear to the ornaments in our homes. If you are a writer and would like to explore how digital technology is offering new platforms for telling stories, join us for this fascinating workshop. Led by artists, Lucy and Barney Heywood from Stand + Stare Collective, you will write, record and edit a short story. Using RFID technology (found in libraries and Oyster cards), you will attach your story to an object to create a unique audio experience by the end of the day.

Lucy and Barney will draw on their broad experience of writing and producing audio and video experiences. As Co-artistic Directors of Stand + Stare, their current clients and collaborators include the Royal Shakespeare Company, MOSI (Museum of Science and Industry) in Manchester, and Birmingham REP to name a few.

http://www.standandstare.com/

Workshop 3: Making Things Fast: How to Stay Motivated and Creative with Leila Johnston

This workshop will cover how to practice *making* regularly, deliberately doing things out of strong personal interests and enthusiasms rather than a commercial brief, as a sort of creative rehersal. Using limited resources the group will create mini-projects that correspond to things they don’t feel they know how to do, but to which they can bring their personal skills and passions to.

Leila Johnston is Managing Editor of The Literary Platform’s magazine site. She is a writer, maker and broadcaster based in Sheffield. She is the co-creator of popular geek comedy podcast Shift Run Stop, was a columnist for the BBC Comedy website, and regularly writes for WIRED UK and other publications. She is the creator of the newspaper ‘Hackers!’ for ‘makers, players and explorers’ and the author of two humour books including an interactive gamebook. Leila now speaks and writes regularly on everything from the culture of technology to creativity and science fiction.

Her choose-your-own-adventure book and iPhone app Enemy of Chaos was featured in WIRED UK in 2009, and her humour book How to Worry Friends and Inconvenience People was adapted for interactive animations by BBC Comedy in 2010.

http://finalbullet.com/

Work shop 4: Transmedia Activism with Donna Hancox, Leverhulme Visiting Fellow, Bath Spa University

The conventions of transmedia storytelling are predominantly deployed in the area of film and television; and particularly big budget and mainstream projects. However, there is increasing interest by community and activist organisations in how they can exploit the apparent strengths of stories told across multiple media platforms to raise awareness or challenge dominant perspectives about social issues. This workshop will introduce participants to the features of this dynamic and emerging field of storytelling, and provide some innovative examples of transmedia storytelling projects. During the workshop we will guide participants as they create a plan for a project of their own and share those ideas with the group for feedback. This is a great opportunity for anyone interested in exploring new ways of telling stories and engaging audiences.

Dr Donna Hancox is a lecturer in Creative Writing and Literary Studies from Queensland University of Technology, and is currently at Bath Spa University as a Leverhulme Visiting Fellow. She has been involved in researching community storytelling practices and leading storytelling projects since 2009, and has more recently been researching transmedia activism. She has presented workshops on this subject in India and Australia.

Workshop 5: Exploring branching narrative using inklewriter with Jon Ingold

As we move to consuming fiction on devices, readers have new opportunities to invest in the narratives they encounter. In this workshop, learn how to use inklewriter to make stories that readers explore and shape, but that still surprise and delight.

inkle are the creative software company behind Dave Morris’ Frankenstein app that recreated Mary Shelley’s classic as a dialogue with the reader, and the interactive fantasy adventure story, Sorcery!

www.inklestudios.com/inklewriter

Workshop 6: Telling Stories to Our Computers

However much we like to think of computers as being fiendishly clever, the truth is that they’re actually pretty thick. Life as a computer can be quite dull – all you can see is an endless stream of bits, bytes and text go past, which the humans seem delighted by. No wonder, therefore, that we get frustrated with our machines from time to time - something which appears basic to us, they just don’t understand. In this workshop, we’ll explore a method for bringing the joys of storytelling to computers – helping the machines to understand the delights and drama of the narratives we construct.

This workshop will explore how the structures and narrative devices we’re familiar with might translate into the world of the Web, and how this can support new ways of crafting and experiencing stories for ourselves. As well as a closer look at some of the theory, participants will have a chance to try their hand at translating stories for machines using RDF and SPARQL.

Paul Rissen is a Senior Information Architect in BBC Future Media, having served his apprenticeship working on BBC iPlayer in the year up to launch. Since then, he’s worked on the BBC’s /programmes platform, across BBC Knowledge & Learning, and News, and, from 2008 onwards, has been investigating the interplay between Linked Data, the Semantic Web, and storytelling. Paul is a keen advocate of Domain Driven Design, having taught the process to design trainees and MSc students at City University and has written about it for several publications. He was a co-producer on the R&D Mythology Engine and Storybox prototypes.

http://www.r4isstatic.com/about

Workshop 7: Ekphrastic E-Poetry Exercises with Sarah Tremlett and guest

Bath Spa University has an exciting art collection on display at Corsham Court. Following a quick tour you will select one artwork to provide a brief and instinctive written response (which can also include photographing or using drawings to capture the subject). These will be used to create experimental e-poetry sketches, interpreting the original artworks in new ways, and using edited sound and visuals to produce short, response-based, playful e-poetry exercises. The aim is to facilitate a liberated approach which attendees can then bring to their own practice.

Sarah Tremlett is a screen-based poet, arts theorist and doctoral researcher at Chelsea College of Art and Design. In conjunction with performance poet Lucy English she cofounded MIX 2012 and is currently organising Liberated Words film poetry event at Bristol Poetry Festival as part of National Poetry Day, October 3.

Book now!

The post Making Day for Writers at MIX 2013 appeared first on The Writing Platform.

The publishing story behind Inanimate Alice is a tale of mistakes, bad ideas, good ideas, dead-ends, lucky accidents, and spectacular success.  Inanimate Alice consists of four episodes that reside online, with a further six episodes planned.  Created by myself and web artist Chris Joseph, Inanimate Alice was commissioned and financed by Bradfield Ltd producer Ian Harper.  The stories are told through text, music, games, images, sound effects, and video and are available for free.

Inanimate Alice tells the story of a girl called Alice, growing up in the near future, surrounded by technology.   Ian Harper had written a screenplay for a feature film and had the idea that he could generate interest in the script by publishing a series of short, interactive, online multimedia stories that provided a backstory to the script itself.  Harper was also involved in a company that had created a gadget, for domestic use, that could detect electronic emissions, the Electrosmog Detector; the sound made by the detector when it picks up electronic emissions is used as background noise in all the episodes.  To date, the screenplay has not been made into a film, and the gadget has not sold in vast quantities; however, Inanimate Alice continues to grow and thrive.

In 2006 there was so little of this kind of storytelling around – accessible, screen-based, digital stories – that Chris and I had no idea of what to call it.  We used the term ‘webvid’, which, thankfully, hasn’t survived. Our budgets were very small; we considered using photos of actors to represent our characters, Alice and her parents, and we considered animating the characters, but we couldn’t afford either option.  This was our first lucky accidents: one important aesthetic feature of Inanimate Alice is that Alice herself is never represented visually on screen.  This practical decision had large creative ramifications:  the fact that Alice remains off-screen throughout renders this hybrid form of storytelling closer to that of reading a book, where it falls upon the reader to imagine the main character’s appearance.  This aspect, combined with the first person narrative voice, draws readers into Alice’s world, allowing readers to identify with Alice, to place themselves in the story.

Lucky accident number two was that Chris Joseph and I did not initially consider the fact that a work about a child might appeal to children, an aspect of the project that seems obvious with hindsight.  Children have been among our most passionate readers.

Lucky accident number three: our character, Alice, wants to be a games designer when she grows up, and it was this aspiration that allowed us to embed games into the stories in a way that made narrative sense. In each episode the games included are representative of what a talented child Alice’s age might be able to create herself.   Accordingly, the level of interaction and gaming skill required by the reader increases with each episode as Alice reaches age 8, 10, 12, and 14.  This gradual increase in interactivity through the episodes has meant that the work functions well as a primer or introduction to digital fiction.

In 2007, I was teaching part-time at De Montfort University, where a PhD student, Jess Laccetti, was researching multi-modal fiction.  Jess was very interested in digital pedagogy, and was in contact with a number of educators at primary, secondary, and HE level. We’d already begun to have interest in the project from teachers, so Ian Harper commissioned Jess to write a set of teacher’s notes, and this was part of what kick-started Inanimate Alice as a tool for digital literacy in schools and universities.  As well as that, Jess is an Italian speaker; she offered to translate the text of the work.  From the web analytics it became apparent early on that Inanimate Alice was drawing readers from many non-English speaking countries and we decided to provide translations of the text in French, German, and Spanish as well. These multilingual aspects of the project fuelled further growth in its readership.

From early on, Inanimate Alice won prizes, including awards in Italy, South Korea, the USA, Ireland, Germany, and Spain. It featured in digital arts exhibitions as well as being promoted by countless teacher-advocates, desperate for engaging digital content suitable for use in the classroom. All of this meant that our audience continued to grow and expand.  Other factors contributed to its success as a title, not the least of which is that all four episodes are available to view for free.  Episodes three and four have two versions:  ‘read-only’ and ‘full version’.  In the full version readers need to complete games before they can move on in the story; in the read-only version the games are by-passed.  Early and anecdotal reader response showed us that our audience is split evenly between those who enjoy the games and those who do not; we took a decision to accommodate both types of readers throughout the remainder of the series.

For me, a pivotal moment came in March 2009, when my Google Alerts first picked up multiple versions of Inanimate Alice: Episode 5;Chris and I had not yet created a fifth episode.  Following the links I discovered that an American high school English teacher, Ms Aronow, had been using Inanimate Alice with a group of ‘hard to reach’ teenagers, encouraging them to create their own versions of episode five using Microsoft Powerpoint, which Ms Aranow published on her class blog.  Discovering these episodes gave new meaning to me for the potential of ‘interactivity’, a term often heralded at the time as the new paradigm for reading and writing.  It was flattering to discover a text I’d written disseminated and reconstructed in this manner, of course, but more importantly, these new episodes are a true indicator of the potential for reader-writer, reader-text interaction, as well as for digital fiction in the classroom.  New episodes have continued to appear online regularly, from around the world; for example, a New Zealand teacher, Mr Woods, encourages his Samoan students to use their own language and culture in their versions of the stories.  Ian Harper has continued to expand the project as a pedagogical tool, making links throughout the large education market; our most recent commission, from Education Services Australia, was a series of twelve photo-stories describing a year Alice and her parents spend living in Australia.  This is where the still developing business model for the project is emerging; the fact that there hasn’t been a new episode since 2009 has not hindered the growth of the project.

It’s been a fascinating process to watch a work like Inanimate Alice, which was not intended, originally, as an educational title, being adopted, adapted, and augmented by educators.  We’ve been able to capitalise on that interest by creating pedagogical tools and spaces for discussion specific to Inanimate Alice and have collaborated with Promethean Planet, Edmodo, and Everloop to create bespoke materials. 2012 saw two big developments:  the American Association of School Librarians named our site as a ‘Best Website for Teaching and Learning’ and the Mozilla Foundation Webmaker project used Inanimate Alice to develop their online remix tool, X-Ray Goggles.

In conclusion, the sizable audience of children for Inanimate Alice has redefined the work as children’s literature, while its popularity with teachers has repositioned it as a classroom resource. Neither of these outcomes were anticipated by us when we set out to create our first ‘webvid’ back in 2006.  

A few examples of new episode fives:

Aronow’s English 10 blog:  http://aronowsenglish10.blogspot.com/

http://6cathie.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-itUTAlahrw&feature=related

Alice and Friends – Digital Literacy wiki built around IA, created by two teachers in Australia: http://aliceandfriends.wikispaces.com/

Mr Woodz NZ class lesson plans:  http://inanimatealice-aperspective.wikispaces.com/

Mozilla Webmaker, ‘Make Your Own Episode of Inanimate Alice’: https://webmaker.org/en-US/projects/make-your-own-episode-inanimate-alice/

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