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Oh look, someone opened a wormhole and transported me straight from week 7 to week 10. 😅 (No, I’m kidding, someone opened a wormhole and dumped a whole lot of work on me, and that’s why I’ve not been keeping up with my blog.) But I have Thoughts about Things and will be updating those in the days&weeks to come.
Also, I spent 45 minutes trying to get this table to show up properly and failed, so here’s a screenshot.
Two weeks ago, I came across the term visual novel and pounced on it. While the story I plan to write for my dissertation certainly won’t be novel-length, the concept of visual novels encompasses the middle-ground between text and game that I would like to explore. They’re close enough in interactivity to Twine that I would be able to include the ideas inspired by that medium, and still fairly new and niche (so rewarding to explore) but well-established enough that I can build off of existing structures without having to handicap myself with development.
Still, they’re a medium that I’m not incredibly familiar with and bring up several topics that I need to delve into in preparation for my dissertation. These can, broadly speaking, be split into 3 separate categories:
The Content
The Execution
The Conversion
Which sounds like a great outline for a cyberpunk story, if you ask me.
While there are many topics of interest that I’d like to explore at some point and that would lend themselves well to a dissertation, some of the questions I entered into the Narrative Futures programme with and that I keep coming back to are: How can writing grow beyond its own boundaries of what is commonly done today? What if a novel weren’t only a novel? What is the future of the publishing industry? What storytelling forms are possible in publishing beyond merely words on a page?