This title has been around for a while. Originally, it was supposed to be a think-piece on interactive fiction, but I don’t think that piece is ever going to be finished, simply because there’s too much to think about.
So, perhaps the question, “Where to now?”, is better suited to mark a waypoint, an unmarked signpost, a foolhardy attempt to navigate.
My recent writing has been concerned with place and the fine line between orientation and disorientation. I think a sense of disorientation is something we will all increasingly have to deal with, as our exposure to information (and disinformation) accelerates.
Yes, I’m still working on ‘The Seams of the City.’ At the beginning of the year, I took an online course with the National Centre for Writing, taught by Megan Bradbury, who wrote the acclaimed novel, ‘Everyone is Watching’, also very much about place. I found Megan’s course to be really useful as means of digging further into certain aspects of character and place and, importantly, forcing myself to write through some of the dead-ends I had found myself up against in later sections of the story (currently mapped into four ‘acts’). A fair amount of draft material came out of this, and I intended to release further material on the prototype web app for ‘The Seams of the City’.
However, the summer of 2025 saw significant upheavals, with me having to move home and change jobs at the same time. We are now back in the flat where we first lived together, and I am working at Norwich University of the Arts as a Senior Technician for Web and Interaction Design. While I have been wary of academic spaces in the past, I think this is possibly the best place for me. I have already found interesting people and engaging ideas, including ways of potentially using Twine to explore interactive narratives. I’ve been aware of Twine for a long time, as well as similar tools such as Ink, but I’ve been off doing (or not doing) my own thing such that I haven’t properly engaged with them. However, I recently created an Ink version of ‘Now Here’ and will try to do the same with Twine by way of comparison.
So, here are the areas I hope to re-focus on as we approach the disorienting times of 2026:
- Continue to work on ‘The Seams of the City’ and explore how stories can be told through interactive maps.
- Work on some shorter pieces, which I started developing on the NCW course.
- Take a longer look at Twine and the related IF (Interactive Fiction) community.
- Investigate developing a WordPress plugin for Interactive Fiction.
- Continue to blog as a means of journaling progress on the above.