jill/txt

I’ve got two more days to finish up the final version of the manuscript for my book Blogging, and it’s going pretty well. And look, the cover is ready! The book is part of a series called Digital Media and Society (the first book in the series is Mark Deuze’s Media Work), and so the books have a uniform sort of look, with the grey, black and white and the rain of zeroes and ones. Andrea, my wonderful editor at Polity, asked whether I had any particular ideas for the cover image, and when I asked Scott he suggested a megaphone, which is what the designer has chosen to use. I think it looks great - I like the semi-see-throughness a lot. And it looks a bit like a steering wheel, which you know, I’m the navigator of my blog, that sort of fits, though I’ve no idea if the designer intended that.

Also it’s my book! Look, there’s my name, right there in the bottom corner! Hooray!

Update: Here’s the Table of Contents.

Amazing how suddenly one can just not blog for a whole week, after blogging many times a day for a while. Most of the reason I didn’t blog was that we just spent three and a half days up at Hilde and Atle’s place in Sogn, where Hilde and I drafted the introduction for our anthology on World of Warcraft, and Scott finished his chapter and read our introduction for us. I really don’t spend enough time just exploring this beautiful country. I mean, I’ve lived here most of my life and still I hadn’t really grasped not only how close Sognefjorden is but how stunningly beautiful it is. Oh, of course I’ve seen it before, but after this trip I really want to spend more time there. So Scott and I extended our initial plan to take visiting family on Norway on a Nutshell before our wedding and have started thinking about a three day trip the week after the wedding, for those family members who are still around. It should be wonderful.

I was planning to blog the table of contents for the WoW anthology, but I’m going to wait until the final final drafts are in in a few days time so we have the final chapter titles.

Yay! My paper for DAC was accepted! One reviewer loved it, the other was much less enthusiastic but had some really useful comments about bits of the stuff I’m doing that I’m uh, still working on attaining expertise in. Lacan, actually, see, if I’m going to write about how we’re wild about photos of ourselves in mirrors well, you need to talk about the mirror phase*, which I know a bit about but need to work more on. I love reviews that are actually helpful and include references and specific things to work on. And I love having written a full paper and being able to revise it.

Here’s the abstract, which I’ll probably revise some before it’s all finalised, because I don’t think it quite expresses what I’m trying to do, really.

Mirrors and Shadows: The Digital Aestheticisation of Oneself
This paper takes the multitude of photographs of our own reflections and shadows that are published online as a starting point and demonstrates their place in a history filled with myths and stories of reflections, shadows and their simultaneous danger and fascination. I connect this to the self-representation of online diaries and weblogs, and relate it to psycho-analytical discussions of how we use our own mirror images to come to an understanding of our selves, concluding that our contemporary fascination with reflections and shadows is an expression of our newfound subjectivity as individuals able to represent ourselves rather than simply succumb to the generalisations of mass media.

One reviewer didn’t like the title, finding it clumsy. I see the point, but can’t quite think of a better one. For some reason I love “Mirrors and Shadows”, but the rest of it I could see changing.

This was another fun paper to write, though. Like the feral hypertext paper, where I woke up one morning just wanting to put the words “feral” and “hypertext” together. The idea for this paper came when I was in Oslo this spring, and I started writing it as a stream of consciousness kind of a draft of ideas sitting in an Oslo café. Then I picked it up again in August.

* The mirror phase is this basic idea used in lacanian and other psychoanalytic literary and film theory that we become subjects - that is aware of ourselves as individuals - in the “mirror phase”, by seeing our infant selves in the mirror and realising that that reflection is me. This recognition is always also a misrecognition, because, well, my mirror image isn’t “me”, and this leads to all sorts of theories of how the gaze works in cinema and how so on.

OK. Today I totally need to get cracking on the paper I’m writing to submit to DAC. The deadline’s Monday and while I have the structure and ideas pretty clear, there’s a lot of writing left to do. I found something that might help motivate me on one of Simon Hughes’ blogs (he’s an English teacher and writer living in Northern Norway, which is cool, since I get to do the yay fellow anglo who’s spent ages in Norway thing) and so I hereby introduce the word meter:

5,408 / 6,500 (83.0%)

The paper itself is about how we use digital technologies as mirrors of ourselves: cameras, phones, blogs and chatrooms. It’s still at the point where when I explain it it doesn’t sound quite as cool as I feel that it is when I’m writing it, but I think it’ll work out just fine.

Don’t you hate it when you can’t track down a citation? Amazon’s full text search of books shows that William Gibson’s Neuromancer certainly doesn’t contain the words “the street finds its own use for things” or any sentence, in fact, with the words street, use or uses and things in it. The line is all over the web, though, always attributed to Gibson, and usually to Neuromancer. Where it is not. And me, well, I like the line, which makes me think of Neuromancer, and I want to use it!

I love it when I forget that I submitted something and then I get a letter of acceptance!

My paper on distributed narrative, the revised, 10 page version of what I presented at AoIR in September, has been accepted for publication in the Association of Internet Researchers Annual! That’s a real book with just a selection of the papers that were presented at the conference. The second annual’s not out yet, but this is what the first annual looks like. My paper will be in the third annual.

I have to make some small changes. Make the intro less abrupt, make some colloquialisms easier for non-natives to understand, I forgot to put Gibson in the bibliography, that sort of thing, nothing big. I’m so glad I forced myself to rewrite the paper and send it in, even though I assumed it wouldn’t be accepted.

Ooh, this makes me all eager to do more work on distributed narratives! There’s been no research in my life this month. All my time has been spent on teaching, coordinating, organising and you know, stuff that has to be done and is quite interesting in its own ways, but leaves no space over for reading, thinking and writing.

Also, I downgraded from Word 2004 to Word X so that I could use the Cite-While-You-Write feature of Endnote, which is lovely because you can easily add references and reformat the bibliography at your leisure. Endnote has yet to release an upgrade that lets it talk to Word 2004. Unfortunately I’d forgotten that the Word/Endnote combination also seems to radically slow down my computer, giving me spinning wheels of misfortune that offer the perfect opportunity to pop over to another more responsive window and just, well, just get totally distracted. As I am now. Back to Word.

I’m off to AoIR on Sunday. Today I’m frantically writing my paper, which is supposed to be uploaded before the conference starts for website archival. This is definitely a Good Thing, and definitely good for getting me well started on really writing the distributed narrative stuff I’ve been planning for months.

In between writing I’ve got to do shopping, make some kind of dinner that will work for kids some of whom are doubtlessly muslim, lactose-intolerant, highly picky about food and/or allergic to peanuts, and plan an afternoon for my daughter’s “friendship group”. It’s a great idea: the teacher’s set up groups of four or five kids who don’t play together much at school, and parents host playgroups for them, the idea being that if kids know each others families they’re a lot more likely to get on with each other and respect each other, and the more you can build these kinds of ties the better. Bullying prevention, in other words. So far it seems to work admirably, and the kids are really enthusiastic. I’m especially pleased that both boys and girls are keen, because the girls and boys in my daughter’s class usually don’t interact at all outside of schoolwork, apart from the occasional chase or fight. Anyway, hosting the friendship group will be fun, and maybe really challenging, and definitely quite exhausting. The parents are coming to pick everyone up at six so it’s not endless.

OK. Write paper. Then shop and cook.

I made a to do list on a large sheet of paper, spatially organised by topic but with enough white space that it still looks calm. This semester I’m going to write consistently, although it’s easy to look at the list of things to do (teaching, admin, ELINOR, our conference) and see that research will be the activity most easily postponed for more immediate deadlines.

My plan is simple: I’ll write an hour a day. That doesn’t sound like much, but I think that might be the beauty of it. I want to work less and get more done, and limiting time will not only make each bout of writing more intense, it will make me much more likely to actually get around to it. And if I’m totally dying to write more in the evening I guess I’ll let myself.

And no, blogging won’t count for the hour-of-writing. This hour will be for intensive, sustained writing, writing of essays. I’m updating my short paper on Links and Politics for Library Trends, I’m writing a paper on distributed narrative for AoIR and another on games and teaching. D’you think an hour a day will suffice?

This cheap motivational trick for writers sounds just like the sort of thing that’d work for me. Would work well for PhD writers too. Which reminds me, it’s about time I put my PhD thesis online. But, see, something’s weird with the Word file, so when I PDF it it becomes three separate PDFs, which the printer could handle, but which I keep meaning to splice or otherwise fix before putting it online. Only I never get around to it cos I don’t have Acrobat Distiller. Tut tut.

The traditional solitude of writers is so different from the companionship of blogs. Marguerite Duras wrote alone:

The solitude of writing is a solitude without which writing could not be produced, or would crumble, drained bloodless by the search for something else to write.

She writes of her room, a room of her own, though it could be many rooms, requiring

..certain habits that I always maintain, wherever I go, wherever I am, even in places where I don’t write, such as hotel rooms–like the habit of keeping whiskey in my luggage in case of insomnia or sudden despair. During that time I had lovers. I was rarely without at least one lover. They got used to the solitude in Neauphle. And its charm sometimes allowed them to write books in turn. I rarely gave those lovers my books to read. Women should not let lovers read the books they write. When I had finished a chapter, I hid it from them. This thing is so true, for me, that I wonder how one can manage elsewhere or otherwise when one is a woman and one has a husband or lover. One must also, in such cases, hide the love of one’s husband from lovers. Mine has never been replaced. I know that every day of my life. (Writing, page 2-4)

It’s a very different idea of what writing might be to the way we write in blogs, isn’t it? I remember William Gibson saying that he would have to stop blogging when he started writing his novel: “It would be like trying to boil water without a lid,” he wrote, in his blog. On September 12 he stopped blogging, for now, anyway, in order to write.

There are different strands of writing, that’s clear. I didn’t blog my PhD thesis directly, instead I blogged around it, between it, quite often ahead of it, blogging what it might become. In research, blogging has been my site of research as much as my reporting of it.

I wonder whether Duras’s lovers read her novels after they were published?

Today I need to finish my article on electronic art in public spaces. I’m procrastinating like mad, so this post is going to be my personal motivator, like I did when I was trying to finish my PhD before last Christmas. The article’s only supposed to be 2000 words long, and it’s an introduction to a booklet presenting twenty electronic artworks in public spaces in Norway, from imported international classics to sound installations to art on state websites. I need to:

• Write brief descriptions of other, non-Norwegian works (e.g. Lozano-Hemmer).
• Paragraph introducing electronic art in general.
• Public art, electronic public art.
• Paragraph on interactivity, follow me, stamping
• Paragraph discussing potential for publically funded art in public digital spaces (like Tegnemaskin 1-12).
• Go to the hospital and experience Adsonore.
• Check dogeared pages in Digital Art for more examples.
• Discuss relationships between works presented. Sound, concept, object.
• Go for a run. Bonus: thought about article!
• Non-related but necessary: Attend meeting, pick up my daughter from school, shopping, dinner, buy sweets in case kids come for Halloween (not a tradition here but they must have been watching television or something because it’s starting), daughter’s friend staying the night, kids in bed, lights out. Then work more.
• Work out how it all fits together. Sequence.
• Write introductory paragraph.
• Proofread.

Yes, I’m blogging like crazy because I’ve cleared the whole day so I can concentrate on working on two pieces I’m writing and so I was just going to have a few minutes of surfing first… I’ll start concentrating on the essays now. Yup.

I’ve been fretting and procrastinating over another definition I’m writing for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, you see, this one’s on cyberpunk (the genre) and I’ve never published a thing on cyberpunk. Except for a hastily written definition I sent to the Narrative mailing list a few months ago when someone said “what’s cyberpunk?” That definition is why I was asked to write the encyclopedia entry - an editor of the encyclopedia happened to read it, you see. Today I’ve started reading the pile of books I got from the library about cyberpunk, and now that I’ve actually opened them I’ve discovered it’s fascinating stuff, and I’ve read almost all the books they’re talking about too. Better yet, I went and found the definition I posted to the mailing list, and do you know what? It’s pretty damn good for a hasty, informal definition:

Obviously this will need editing and I’ll be adding references, origins, context, a mention of the gothic influence and so on but it’s an excellent start. It’s 144 words already and the maximum is 500, which includes references. That’s not much. And oh, I’m just so relieved at discovering (to my surprise) that I’m not such a fraud as I’d thought I was.

Alex Golub is finishing an essay he’s going to submit for publication and his description of the mixture of elation and fear is wonderful, culminating thus:

My ideas quite often lack such confidence, but I love this image of ideas furiously wanting to be expressed and the writer, struggling to find out how.