Chapter One
I’ll state my intentions, for me more than anything, to keep me focussed: I want to keep this blog for writing projects. Not necessarily the same one, but I certainly intend to use it for my current large writing project: a scrap-book for ideas and images: a notepad for character developments and plot structuring. I think this could be really useful to me: to see ideas take shape, and to see writing in print before its point of no return: to have something fluid and lucid, flexible and changeable. Exactly how writing should be… And if anyone out there happens to accidentally stumble across this blog, then I might even get some input and ideas from outside… and help make this writing project the textured patchwork quilt I can only at present imagine… while it awaits realisation…
I don’t have a name or title yet for my current book, so I’m not sure how I’ll refer to it. It’s in the realm of the speculative or utopic/dystopic, splitting an already split world to tell the stories of two communities; one in each split: the first are the survivors of a first world who form a commune on the Welsh coast. The other is a commune living amidst the random structures of a war-torn city in what would be second or third world (maybe the middle east). But this is not a binaric world of polar opposites, so there will be plenty of storytelling in margins, plenty of travel tales between each world, and plenty of third spaces. At the same time the two worlds will unravel and reveal the ways in which they are two sides of the same coin.
My writing is my own, but in the back of my mind, whispering their own quiet stories, are the works of writers such as Ursula Le Guin, Marge Piercy and Margaret Atwood. So I’ve chosen as the first picture for this digital scrapbook, a picture I found in DeviantArt that reminds me of many of Ursula Le Guin’s worlds. I think it’s too green and lush to be a visualisation of any part of my climate-ravaged world, but still, there’s something there, perhaps in the lone figure, that evokes a feeling that equally lonely characters in my world might also feel…
Meanwhile, in its own way, this blog is going to be its own little world, and I hope its languages will be multiple, and its colours explosive, and its cultures diverse… Isn’t this what digital story-telling is all about…?
