Tags: upsideclown

Four short stories and what I learnt writing them (31 May., 2018, at Interconnected)

I’ve been enjoying the stories over on Upsideclown so it’s great to get a peak inside Matt’s writing brain here.

I also happen to really, really like his four stories:

1. Moving House
2. The search for another intelligence
3. The Ursa Major Moving Group
4. Volume Five

I wouldn’t say I’m great at writing fiction. I find it tough. It is the easiest thing in the world for me to pick holes in what I’ve written. So instead, as an exercise—and as some personal positive reinforcement—I want to remind myself what I learnt writing each one, and also what I like.

The search for another intelligence (Upsideclown)

A wonderful short story from Matt. I can see this one staying with me.

Salvage (Upsideclown)

A tale of the Fermi paradox featuring data preservation via tardigrade as a means of transmitting information beyond the great filter.

No Planes Go (Upsideclown)

A near-future tale of post-Brexit Kafkaesque isolationism in the skies.

It turned out that taking back control also meant creating an aerial deadzone. Nothing can fly in here without a Library of Alexandria’s worth of paperwork, and nothing can fly out without the same.

A few technical words about Upsideclown, and some thoughts about audiences and the web (17 Aug., 2017, at Interconnected)

Matt writes about the pleasure of independent publishing on the web today:

It feels transgressive to have a website in 2017. Something about having a domain name and about coding HTML which is against the grain now. It’s something big companies do, not small groups. We’re supposed to put our content on Facebook or Medium, or keep our publishing to an email newsletter. But a website?

But he points out a tension between the longevity that you get from hosting the canonical content yourself, and the lack of unified analytics when you syndicate that content elsewhere.

There’s no simple online tool that lets me add up how many people have read a particular story on Upsideclown via the website, the RSS feed, and the email newsletter. Why not? If I add syndication to Facebook, Google, and Apple, I’m even more at sea.