New project: The Ark at the End of the World

The Emerging Writers Festival has got me all fired up - one of the benefits of taking time out of your regular life to think about the process of creation and how you want to engage with it.

So after probably not nearly enough reflection (!), I have decided to do something about the story that has been itching the back of my brain for months now; the one I keep thinking up new twists for in the shower, that I've had dreams about, that I've started writing and want to continue writing.

And being, by clan and branch, a blogger and a talker, I've decided to eschew the usual quiet-place drafting process and instead to write this thing out loud, horrendous messiness and all.

So I have set up a blog for my project - which is called The Ark at the End of the World - and I'm going to write the ... story like thing ... there in posts. The episodic nature of this appeals to me a lot, as does the idea that I'm going on a journey that will be measured in bytes on a screen rather than word count in the depths of my computer.

I don't know yet if this is destined to be a novel, a novella, or a series of linked short stories. I know two of my main protagonists rather well (one of them won't stop bugging me to get going, in fact) but I have yet to form views on the others. I know roughly what's going to happen and why, but I'm not sure yet about event order, all the locations, and the dialogue.

I am 100% certain that a great deal of this blog-book-project will be pretty crappy. I know it will ALL be unpolished, imperfect, screaming loudly for an editor's touch. The point is to engage with the process in the way that feels right for ME, deep embarassment aside.

I do not expect to publish this book. I may create a PDF for download of the complete work at the end of the process (I probably will, in fact) but I don't see this as a publication journey per se for me. Rather, I see this as a personal creative project that I hope will give me satisfaction, teach me things, get rid of the itchiness of this idea that I have, and yes, maybe bring me joy.

(If you would like to read - and comment too, comments are love :-) - the blog is at http://www.arkendworld.blogspot.com.au/ 
It is a science fiction-y sort of story, and uses haiku poetry as part of the text. But it's not terrifically postmodern or highbrow, because *I* am not those things!)