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writing with a child on the sofa watching cartoons

Jill2 Comments

This week is the school winter break, so I’m writing with my ten-year-old sitting in the sofa watching cartoons. Go outside, the weather’s beautiful, I say, as I type hunched over my computer, carefully ignoring the dishes piled on the kitchen counter and the dust highlighted by the sun shining in through the window again after a long winter. Today is the deadline for the DAC paper, and thank goodness, late last night it started making sense to me again instead of just being a bunch of isolated bits and pieces. I have an argument and a contribution. I think. And a lot of words. I think I can pull it all together today.

At four I’m taking my daughter to see Night at the Museum, and then we’re going up to the Natural History Museum, armed with torches for a special museum in the dark experience. I’ve tried to scare my daughter telling her the whale might come to life, but she just laughs and says it’s only bones, anyway. Isn’t that even scarier, I say? Nah, she replies coolly.

We’ll see. Now I just need to finish this paper before four.

Update: I finished it!!! Hooray!!!

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2 thoughts on “writing with a child on the sofa watching cartoons”

  1. Christina Chau

    hey, jill, I know that you are busy so there is no rush…

    I was just pondering about all of the typographies that map out different kinds of interactivity in digital narratives (particularly Espen Aarseth and Marie-Laure Ryan, which you draw on in Chapter 5 of your thesis). What I’m wondering is where can I find the same but for narrative? with all of the hybrid narratives that continue to form, there must be a mapping of them … yeah? or not? I guess I am thinking about this because I am looking at the iea that the common defining feature for hypetext fictions is a perspective on narrative rather than one kind or a familiy of interactivity.

    any insights?

  2. Jill

    I don’t know of any such typology of narrative – other than the genre system. And narratology, obviously.

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