New Projects and Ooooold Projects

I mentioned in a previous post that I was interested in putting together an interactive project or two using the Infinite Canvas tool (pauses to add links to text).

I’m still interested in that.

I’ve spoken to a couple artsy-types about collaborating.  Typically I’m a one-man show, though, so I’m not sure just how one goes about something like this.

There were two pieces I’d envisioned for this.  The first was going to be an original work, a short, prose-style poem (I think, I haven’t written it yet).  The second, for no reason I can possibly cite, is something Iwrote years ago for a short-short story contest (I think that’s what it was for).

It is, at the basest level, a Peter Pan story.  There’s more there, though — it’s a short-short, of course, so it’s economical — but I’ve always looked on that story fondly.

When I went to dig it up and retool it for this new format . . . well hell, where is it?  For that matter, where’s ALL my old stuff?  Oh crap, I didn’t delete it, did I?

Okay . . . okay, I’ve got hard copies and what-have-you, but crap, I’m going to be missing something, right?

This has been eating me up inside for a week or so but this morning I remembered, or thought I remembered, a CD I burned some time ago (2002, it turned out) and stuck in a binder with a lot of other CD’s during one of my office purges.

It took some digging but I found the disk.  I’m copying the files from it over to the Freeagent Go drive I use to transport stuff around.

Just a couple quick glances at some of the stories, poems and miscellanea (is that a word?  Yes?  Awesome.) and I’m pleased to find most of it’s . . . not horrible.

I know writers are frequently their own harshest critics — one of the things I did this weekend was review Chapter One of the current story to make sure it wasn’t a mound of tripe, and was quite gratified to discover, surprise of surprises, that it wasn’t — but those stories, in my memory, have not aged well.

I’m quite pleased to discover I may have been overly rough on them.

I’ll dig through some stuff this week, after-hours.  I’ll see if I can’t get the Peter Pan story into a form which would work for what I have in mind, Infinite Canvas-wise.

And hey, if nothing else, at least I’ve got all my old stuff centralized again.  Which makes me feel better than I thought it would have, before I found it all again.

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The Day The Saucers Came (again)

I posted about a month ago about Neil Gaiman’s, The Day The Saucers Came.  I have since received my print and it’s off for framing (it’s rather striking and I can’t wait to see what Jessy did as far as the framing itself).

Yesterday I found a link to the same poem on Infinite Canvas.  This is another of those things I could try and explain — and fail miserably at.

So, I’m just going to link it and send you on your merry way.

The Day The Saucers Came — Infinitecanvas

There’s lots of other good stuff there, as well, so browse around.  It seems, to me, like an interesting place to experiment with “paperless” expression.  For example, obviously, writing a story or poem where you want to guide the reader’s experience in more than just left to write, top to bottom fashion.

I may have a short-short story I could adapt to this medium.  I’ll have to monkey around.

Filed under: Blather, Writing | 4 Comments