Blogging the Dark Art ARG: Reading in the next Dimension
Picture this, an outdoor cafe on a sunny Saturday in June, friends meeting for coffee, burgers, and the taste of another reality. The WiFi connection provides our portal to another world. We’re deep in the story now, and it feels like going to a movie and being able to step through the screen to interact with characters and the set. We’re reading the new interactive novel, Personal Effects: Dark Art,by J.C. Hutchins. We pass props around, make notes on legal pads or the backs of envelopes or on napkins. This is like no book we’ve ever read. And while we read the book itself the way we’ve always read stories,…
Writing Outside the Lines
no_boundaries on Flickr – Photo Sharing! A few years ago, the lead editor of a small magazine asked me to do some graphic layouts that would break the magazine out of it’s design rut. She pulled a couple of envelopes from the slush pile — this was a few wheelbarrow-sized loads of manila envelopes, heaped in the middle of the office floor — and said, “Show us what you’ve got.” What I had was no experience in magazine layout. A week later, when the editor called me into a meeting about my submission, her first comment was, “This not what I expected. You didn’t just color outside the lines, you…
Another solve for Romance Writer’s team
Kelly Jamieson and I have been dabbling with the Personal Effects: Dark Art ARG. The Gamer Geeks had a big head start on us and I don’t know how we managed to come out in front on this one. The clue was left on business cards distributed at the Game Developers Conference® in March. I never saw it until I visited the the Pixelvixen707 website yesterday afternoon. I cracked the code on the business card last night. I had a note in my email this morning that I was the first to get the answer. I really needed a solvable problem. Thanks Rachael and thanks to the Dark Art ARG…