3 Jan 2009, 5:05pm
Real Life
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2008 in review

So, that was … well, a surprisingly good year!  I spent some of New Year’s Eve trawling through twelve months of tweets and blog posts, trying to organise the happenings of 2008 into some kind of order.  It took a bit longer than I expected, but here’s the potted version -

WRITING

  • Originating from a GLP-authored meme which kicked into life back in July 2007 (link), Friday Flash Fiction continued to gain speed – thundering through the forest on gnarled chicken legs of unhinged creativity (link).  A solid burst at the start of the year (cf. Fatima’s Funeral, Silver Eagle) ebbed with growing university commitments, but gave way to something extraordinary …
  • Illuminations - a small press anthology of our best stuff – was launched at Eastercon.  Actual dead-tree books! Without ever meeting in … meatspace, we’d managed to get our act together: compiling, editing, and printing the thing in a matter of mere weeks.  I’ve already talked about my experiences of the process (and of Eastercon: Pt. 1 / Pt. 2), but this was definitely one of those things that sends your life hurtling down an entirely different route.  Heck, I got a good review, and the publishing process even managed to worm its way into my dreams.
  • Shaun wrote this story – it made me laugh so hard, I almost peed a little.
  • With final-year submissions out of the way, a second wave of F3 (starting with The Terminal) ended up as the cornerstone of something significantly bigger (codename “Stockholm Syndrome“).  Channelling the core concept into National Novel Writing Month (November), I wrote an additional 30k over the course of the month, and another 10k in December.  At 40k, I’m now about a third of the way in, and – thus far – it contains more than its fair share of cybernetically-enchanced owls, dissatisfied Gen Y “entrepreneurs“, and QR codes.  It’s written almost entirely in a shifting second person perspective, which is weird.  All that aside, I’m still a little in love with the thing, and will be returning to it in the spring.
  • Other miscellaneous pitches from 2008 included this, this, and this.  If any of them strike you as interesting, drop me an email.  Time willing, I’m always up for the collaborative side of things.

LEARNING

  • The last couple of months of undergrad life were an exponential curve of weird, with 10,000 words penned in the final week.  Indeed, the final hours were a blaze of sleep-deprived, fragmentary glory.
  • As a direct result, the end of July saw me graduating from the University of Sussex with first class honours for my BA in International Relations & Anthropology.  I shook this guy‘s hand while doing my best impression of a rabbit caught in headlights (link), and – a couple of days later – drank my own bodyweight (link) and danced like a happy idiot to The Ting Tings.
  • The current plan, then, is to follow the Bachelor’s degree with an MA in Digital Media, commencing this autumn.  In early November, I took the train up to Goldsmiths for an open day, and quickly fell in love with the place.  So now, I’m up to my waist in application forms and draft personal statements. The course outline indicates a programme that combines sturdiness and flexibility, with a decent grounding in the basics standing alongside plenty of opportunities for the pursuit of peculiar tangents (one of my favorite things).

WORKING

  • Superstruct was, well, quite unlike anything else I’ve experienced.  I have a lot of sympathy for this review from Justin Boland, which outlines many of my own concerns: “the Superstruct information work[ed] so much better on other platforms, I’m kind of confused why they’d take the time to code up a clunky site in the first place.”  Frankly, the impermanence of the site made me nervous, and was part of my initial unwillingness to commit my optimism to the project – the swarm of bugs in the first week dented my resolve.  Of course, as the weeks ticked by, something strange happened – at each point that I was about to resign myself to disappointment, something unexpected and utterly awesome happened.  Be it financial fraud and MMORPG embezzlement scandals, or a covert plan by the United States’ “liberal” Western Seaboard to secede, the best bits of the project were summarised in our weekly updates, which are well worth a look (Wk 1 / Wk 2 / Wk 3 / Wk 4 / Wk 5).
  • The game concluding with a live webcast; by far one of my most energising experiences of the year.  As Jamais, Jane and Kathi raved about their (and our) favourite bits of the preceding six weeks, most of the players who’d committed their time, effort, and content to the game were in the chatroom, joking and cheering each other on.  Despite the contributers being thinly spread (in a global sense), the sense of camaraderie was really something special.
  • In the game’s aftermath, I feel like I’ve started to get to know Phil, Laura, Stuart, Sven, Josh, RJ and Tom … and I’ve tentative plans – finances willing – to hit SF in April, for the release of the official Superstruct report.
  • In the final weeks of 2008, I compiled a fairly lengthy application for an editorial internship with a British technology magazine, pulling no punches about my thoughts on the precarious state of print media.  It seemed to work, as I start on Monday!

POLITIKING

  • Following a tip from Charlie Stross about the Open Rights Group, I’ve signed myself up for tickets to The Convention: Modern Liberty at the end of February.  Should be good, and the whole constitutional / technological nexus is something I seem to be drawn to.

CONSUMING

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