Is This Thing On?

WELL HELLO THERE, GOOD LOOKIN'.

I don't call anymore, I don't write... things have been kind of crickets around here unless I have something to sell you. And that's not cool. I'm not just saying that because I have some things to sell you. Let's leave that until later. Future posts, even!

I've let this place fall by the wayside over the last year or two for a lot of reasons. One is that I don't have a lot to say about transmedia specifically, and that's why I started this place up back in 2005. Hence my : deus ex machinatio. It means divinity from a plan, and so the art that makes my heart pound and fills me with gladness.

Why does that mean haven't I been posting? Partly because I stepped back from the conference circuit. Partly because even beyond transmedia, I say a lot of the same things I would otherwise be blogging about on Twitter or on my podcast The Cultures. (Did you even know I have a podcast, with Naomi Alderman and Adrian Hon?) I've been pretty busy! And I won't lie, the chilling effect of Gamergate is real; I'm reluctant to engage in some of the social issues that used to be one of my hallmarks.

There's also a bit of uncertainty about how to engage in thoughtful conversation via online media anymore. Should I be posting on Medium instead? It would probably be good for "exposure," but I'm not a fan. Should I be posting things on Facebook instead, where it would be more highly shareable? Or posting here and linking to Facebook? Should I be cross-posting to my Imzy community, or or or?

This stuff used to be easy when I was just a freelancer and my audience consisted almost exclusively of colleagues digging in the same salt mine as me. But now I have a mixture of colleagues from games, marketing, film, and academia mixed together with students learning from A Creator's Guide, friends who are non-transmedia authors, just friends with no work-related relationship, and even a few fans who don't know me except as a person who has made some stuff they like.

This used to be almost all talk shop, but it's slowly shifted into being a vehicle almost entirely for announcements of launches and conferences.

I don't like that very much. It feels kinda gross and manipulative. I like to be human on the internet, not a marketing bot.

So let's give this a whirl: I can't promise this is going to be the start of a bold new era, but I do have a whole slew of posts I want to make for now: some launch announcements, yes, but I also want to talk about the state of transmedia (no, really), some things I've been doing in my personal life, and some serious writing-craft challenges I'm mulling over, but have not yet solved. Maybe some politics?

And if you have things you'd like for me to talk about here, I'd love a comment. Should I be reviewing media I'm excited about? (OMG K-dramas.) Do you want an accounting of how much work I get done in a week? I dunno. You tell me.

Mostly I just want to feel like I have a home and a voice in the internet again—a place that belongs to me, where I'm not just sprinkling words into the ephemeral stream. So let's see how this goes.