So thanks, again, for your enthusiasm with the project and building it out beyond the blog.

Thank you Waffarian. I’m glad you enjoyed reading the blogs – I certainly enjoyed your contribution!

I wondered about your question myself and one of the things I’d do differently if I could do this project again would be to take a much less tongue in cheek stance on the characters and try to make them as believable and blended into the blogging world as possible. I think given a much longer time-span (we were given around a month, and extended that slightly to finish the story) you could create a character and infiltrate all kinds of blogging and social networks – I think Adorna is nearly there because I don’t think *all* of the people trying to network with her, invite her to events etc on Facebook really do realise she’s a fictional character, although maybe that says more for the shallowness of social networking than it does for the reality of her character. There’s a great potential for satire there – and literature has a long and distinguished history of people pretending to be other than they are, laying claim to stories or arrangements of words that are not their own, and generally causing mischief from the relative safety of a nom-de-plume. All stories are a kind of trickery, aren’t they?

I’d love to do that, although I’m almost certain that somewhere in the blogosphere someone will already be doing that – it would only be a variation of what all of us are already doing. How truthful are any of us in our blogs? Is it even possible to present a real person using words, given the tendency of language to fictionalise anything it comes into contact with?

This is a pet topic of mine, as anyone who’s read my blog will already know, and one of the reasons I was so attracted to the playfulness of this project. I know unreliability is something Tolu is interested in too, so I’m leave off now and let him answer your question.

Do you think it would have made a difference (comments, people participating, etc) if people thought both blogs were “real” and not fiction?

I always find that when I sit down at my desk and screw myself up to the event of writing, all my inspiration and inclination totally disapears. I almost need to catch my writing self unawares and often the best ideas come to me while I’m ironing my clothes for the next day, or brushing my teeth.

It seems like you work in the same way, but we both had to go into unfamiliar territory and be a lot more demanding of ourselves for this comissioned, timed piece. How do you think the discipline of that affected you?

I don’t think I’ll use a table again, but for me, it certainly gave me a lot more faith in my ability to come up with something on time, to a deadline and in a team – all things I was very wary about being able to achieve but would be more willing to seek out as a writing oportunity now we have completed this project sucessfully.

I’m also a go with the flow writer, having come to realise that almost all plans made in the comfort of my ‘head’ will unravel once introduced to a blank computer screen…
I don’t plot characters or their traits in any charts or tables, I just set them free in my head and watch them grow even madder outside…

And, yes, you never failed to amaze me with your late-night brain waves…
(Apologise to the TABLE, not to me…)

I never plan stories or even the novels I have written in such detail. I’m more of a go with the flow kind of writer, which usually means I end up with big messy first drafts I spend a long time editing.

I worried that the table would take the fun out of the project, but I also knew that because this was a commissioned project and would be written ‘live’ that we had to get it right and there wasn’t the chance to play and mess about as I like to in my own stories.

And I think it worked out okay. I still had fun, and there were still plenty of surprises along the way. I notice when when we did deviate or ignore the table that it was usually me springing a late-night brain wave on you after I’d already chucked it into the story. Sorry about that.

This involved the creation of a ‘plotting-table’ with the following columns:

DATE
ADORNA
DESIDERUS
EXTRAS (pictures posted, links made etc)

In that table we attempted to summarise the (brief) lives (and the intersections thereof) of Adorna and Desiderus.

So the table went back and forth between us and got filled quickly, “overfilled” in some cases – it seemed better to err on the side of over-plotting…

It’s very interesting now to compare the final table with the actual story… what got left out, what sneaked in…

The table actually helped to calm us down in moments of panic; made it easier for us to believe we were in control… even if Adorna and Desi were actually the ones in control…

Right!
The story started out as a ‘good’ vs ‘bad’ / ‘true (& unsuccessful) artist’ vs ‘pseudo (& successful) artist’, but I was interested in getting those lines blurred as time went on.
As Jenn points out, Desiderus’ original high moral ground began to slip from beneath him, he seemed to be enjoying the viciousness he was getting better at doling out, and the blogging began to push his fiction aside.

And I think it got to a point where his self-righteousness began to get irritating and quite overtly laughable…

I think I always imagined her as a very polished person – and someone who’d use the blog soley as an advertising tool. One plug after another would have got boring very quickly and it was the comments from readers who’d decided to weigh in on the side of Desiderus that brought out a much shriller and more vindictive version of her – something she’d have preferred to keep hidden.

I also think the comments gave the whole project a little bit more unpredictability than it might have had otherwise. While it was clear for a whle that Adorna was the ‘baddie’, she and Desiderus switched places almost completley towards the end of the project – he was almost as bad as she was, and I think that was inspired at least in part by all the new fans Desiderus gained from his side of things.

Maybe all that fame went to his head, just like it went to Adorna’s!

And of course the comments also broadened the story, although I was glad that they didn’t sweep it off its feet completely, as I’ve read in other online fiction. The comments set a larger context, gave that ‘chattering’ sense of the blogasphere you mentioned, Jenn. I suspect many readers didn’t realise they could add their comments, and as you say probably were quite new to the blogging business anyway. Which is why we wanted to give it ago.

I’m interested to know (given your saying that much of the invention occurred after the research) how much the comments left affected the plot?