Once upon a time, I completed a PhD in transmedia writing. Those were halcyon times – the overly earnest, intellectual discussions (‘What would Barthes say?’) in first year, swanning around in coffee shops having discourses with fellow PhD candidates in second year (‘I prefer Dan Harmon’s Story circle to Campbell’s Hero’s Journey), self publishing my first novella Choose Your Own Death because I needed a break from all the intellectual thinking (third year), getting pregnant in the last six months the thesis was due, which in hindsight was a good thing because the extra weight made sitting down really appealing and that’s how I finally wrote my thesis.

In the aftermath, I was gutted (quite literally as I had a caesarean). I couldn’t much process what my PhD meant, how I felt about it, and where to from here. It’s only twelve months after my PhD was conferred that I had time to process the Limerance Project.

My PhD is a practice-based research project, meaning it consists of a studio component as well as a thesis. The studio component (the part that has been shortlisted for a Queensland Literary Award) is a story application designed for the tablet called Limerence. It is way more experimental than anything I have ever done. Limerence is a fragmented story about love, friendship, and social connections in cyberspace. The story application is designed for the tablet and is a commentary on the way our culture digests media—the way that media has been embedded into our daily lives, our guilty, voyeuristic pleasure, and our addiction to being online.

Both Limerence and the accompanying thesis investigated how writers should approach interactivity when designing digital literature. I basically came up with a new framework called the ‘transmedia triangle’ which showed that there are three types of interaction: gaming, filmic and reading.

Most interactive narrative works borrow heavily from gaming types of interactivity but for readers, we should be designing towards ‘readerly’ interactivity. I won’t focus on any details here but anyone interested can read my 58,000 word thesis which is now online:

https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au/items/d068b9c7-8bb4-45da-b145-ed1c3ad511c4

And as always with my crazy art projects, a big thank you goes to my superstars James Warr (my rock!) and Andi Spark (my diamond!)