I’ll leave the writing to speak for itself, but simply say that there’s aliens, balloons, fireworks, romance, brides, spies and cats. Except my headline prompts, my Larger-Than-Life nouns, don’t do the writing justice; it’s all turned out to be a lot more subtle, poetic, beautifully-crafted than that.

Leaving the writing to speak for itself, instead let me wax lyrical on all things digital. First the festival itself; I love the mixture of disciplines, the Digital Plus nature (Plus art, Plus music, Plus storytelling). I enjoy – and have benefited – from its natural segue into social media. Twitter and Facebook have been great for Geo-Writing. Writers admiring each other’s work, making contact, sharing prompts across continents. Marketing certainly has an easy base level, when the product is digital, and you can simply spray hyperlinks around. Somehow, though, it’s more than that. I’ve had the chance to eavesdrop on writers in Scotland, New York, Paris, Canada, Johannesburg – as well as Brighton and Hove – commenting on each other’s writing and enthusing about the project.

Does the writing make sense as a whole? Probably not. It’s going to take some kind of extraordinary omnipresent narrator with hallucinatory powers and a selective blind spot to make sense of those eclectic pieces. But does the project work as a whole, is it enhanced by its digital component, does it fit with the experimental, inspiring nature of the rest of Brighton Digital Festival?

Absolutely.

Richard Hearn
http://www.geo-writing.com

Having started by painstakingly transferred latitudes and longitudes for places such as Lower Rock Gardens, Hove Town Hall, or Southover Street (& about 75 more), this year it’s not just Brighton, but Beyond! A further 150 are now digitally deposited out of area.

Last year, with all prompts with the BN1 to BN3 postcode, anyone in New York’s nearest prompt ended up being Portslade old village, and anyone in Sweden might get Hollingbury’s Asda. While that works as a sort of randomised Tourist-Information-At-A-Distance, I thought i would widen the net of prompts. But once you start widening, where do you stop? The net now covers the globe (although with holes big enough to let East Anglia through).

Yes, I know the internet’s global reach is well known (the clue is what the ‘www’ stands for) but it’s still kind of humbling to realise that your little event run as part of Brighton Digital Festival is being looked at – inspiring – people in Chicago, Brisbane, San Francisco, Oslo etc on its first day.

Oh, and after the first day, I was thinking ‘this is proving unexpectedly popular in Lanzarote.’ with probably 10% of visitors enjoying that prompt. Then i realised it’s what my code gives out if it thinks your latitude and longitude are both zero. (I’d be a useless Sat Nav). Still, I’ve now included a Plan B where people can still take part.

Having tracked people accessing their prompts, I’ve now started receiving the first few pieces of writing. Take a look via the site. If you’re the type that likes a list here and now then here’s one: balloons, arguments, falling dolls, ripped photos, and an alien all feature in the first submitted stories. (Yes, aliens again. They were big last year).

What next? That’s up to you.

Geo-Writing.com runs until the end of September.

This became Geo-Writing. I at that point didn’t have a name – geo-tales, and geo-stories had been used. I decided on ‘Geo-Writing’ and hastily constructed a logo to incorporate a hint of grid lines and map markers.

Let’s explain the concept. Participants access writing prompts based on their geo-location (this is the digital bit) and then submit very short stories inspired by these. It might be ‘Seagulls attacking a couple’ at the bottom of West Street, or perhaps “The sound of splintering glass” just off New Church Road.

These prompts could either be worked on live, or emailed to use later, and my hope is that sometimes the prompt will be the main subject matter, and sometimes a minor background detail. My ambition is to build a “hallucinatory mismatched story jigsaw”. And yes, I’m copyrighting that phrase.

From my experience of creating Paragraph Planet I know there’s a strong community of Brighton writers out there, both published and aspiring-to-be-published. I also know there’s a generous, supportive spirit for collaborative projects too, so hopefully it’ll get some submissions. I’ve added some guidelines here .

So since that meeting at The Old Market, I’ve been working on the website; ensuring its responsive enough to work on various platforms and battling with styling, writing prompts and getting the code in place. I dream of geo-location, geo-location, geo-location.

I did have one particularly sticky coding moment when I had two web pages that wouldn’t ‘gel’ – a bit like having a couple of fancily-decorated train carriages in need of a coupling – but luckily a Twitter SOS brought an answer from coder Graham Lally of exmosis.net. (thanks, Graham).

So with five days to go until launch, I know the exact latitude and longitude of the Brighton Pavilion (and am prepared to use that, unhelpfully, to any tourist that asks me for directions) and am looking forward to curating Many Tales of One City.

Richard Hearn

http://www.geo-writing.com