- 0 - [31 Jul 2003|03:54pm] [ music | Ambulance - Hey! Beat Takeshi ] My friend the sf novelist and tech writer Cory Doctorow was in London recently, and we got to talking about writing as performance. Cory's interested in dramatising the act of writing, of making it a public thing, an event, a happening, a gig, whatever. Cory would have made a great pagan priest; leading the devout through long walks designed to dramatise the landscape, bringing them through ancient light and mysterious clearings before standing before them on a sacrifice stone to tell them stories of people who try to kill themselves by shoving sharpened pencils up their noses. Thirty years ago, he would have been Harlan Ellison, literally writing in public -- anything from writing short stories in bookstore windows to the nightmarish concept of writing a short story while sitting inside a large transparent plastic pyramid at a science fiction convention. Which, let's be honest, sounds like one of the most frightening career miscalculations of all time. It's a bit like Thomas Harris sitting at the bottom of a well writing a story while wearing a hat and underpants made out of a luckless teenage girl. But Cory is a man of his time. And so he co-wrote a short story with Charlie Stross in public. He set up a blog at blogspot, and they collaborated on UNWIRER in full view of their audience. For the full effect, they probably should have put it on Movable Type, and included webcam shots and Audblog mp3s of them swearing at each other. I'm sitting here looking at LiveJournal and thinking about all this. It's not quite a closed audience, as people without LJ accounts can obviously read LJ pages. But still, the syndication system and the LJ-users-only commenting kind of create the feeling of broadcasting within a single network. And it's given me an idea. Consider this the introduction. -- Warren Ellis

navigation [ viewing | July 31st, 2003 ] [ go | next day ]