Career Space E-zine

It’s that time of year again….

Last weekend I attended a most excellent writing workshop put on by Geist magazine as part of the festivities to celebrate “When I’m 64″, namely the 64th issue of their magazine. Geist magazine is put out by a non-profit organization whose interests are in promoting Canadian writers and photographers. Stephen Osborne lead the workshop on the “Art of the Sentence” to a group of about 20 writers at the Listel Hotel on Robson Street. His focus was on creating interesting sentences following the formula of the 5 Ws (Who, What, Where, Why & When). After 2 hours of exercises we had all come away with a good sense of how to formulate strong sentences suitable for writing narratives, prose & short stories. As a continuation to their workshops Geist has now added “The Writer’s Toolbox” to their website at geist.com . As part of the toolbox (http://geist.com/toolbox) they have included tip sheets and writing exercises suitable for the individual writer as well as teachers to use with their writing classes. This is the second Geist workshop that I have attended and I must say that they are quite excellent!

When I was 15 I took a drama class in which we would do a number of exercises to stretch our imagination and get our creative juices going for improv. One such exercise was to create a story whereby one student would start with one or two creative sentences and then pass it over to the next person to add to the story and on it would go from student to student creating a collaborative story. It was a lot of fun and it got a little crazy at times.

More than 20 years later enter the wiki novel. The well -known publisher Penguin Books has introduced the first ever wiki novel as a social experiment to see if collaborative creative writing can produce a novel worthy of the book loving masses. The novel is called “A Million Penguins” Read the rest of this entry »

The Northern Voice 2007 blogging conference is coming up and it’s at UBC. ‘Fess up! Who’s going?

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Originally uploaded by pfoster.

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In the latest issue of Wired magazine the editors challenged 33 master authors to create a science fiction story in 6 words or less and brought them together with several graphic design wizards. The results were quite impressive.   

Can a story be boiled down to “word bites”? Earlier today a friend Instant Messaged me with a “C U later.” Everything seems to be tightened down to the minimum. There is something very George Orwellian about this and yet there is something to be said about communicating big ideas succinctly. My favourite is the haiku form, when it’s done well.

I decided to try this new literary art form. Here are my attempts:

• Did he really leave me? Chocolate.
• Patterns in nature and structures converge.
• Tie a can to it buster!

Hmmmm. I think I’ll go back to haiku. I do much better with 3 lines.

Barcamp Vancouver will take place at the Bryght office in Gastown on April 25/26. While all 90 spots are now full there is a very short waitlist so it’s still possible to sign up. What is barcamp? It’s an adhoc unconference where like-minded tech geeks get together to discuss their fave topics. Check out the wikipedia definition. There are a variety of cool topics on the agenda including social software for the introvert, ruby on rails and Kris Krug’s famous photocamp Read the rest of this entry »

Kill the Robot (McGilligan Books), a first novel by zinester Maggie MacDonald, will make you want to read this challenging book twice as it takes you with a dizzying thud into Moore White’s fragmented memories of an alternative reality of city checkpoints and the aphoria of the all-encompassing E-Soft Corporation. Moore’s memories are related in such an intriguing nonlinear fashion that you will find it hard to resist rereading random sections to more deeply understand her Read the rest of this entry »