Sometimes an idea takes a life of its own, and you become its willing vessel. Sometimes stories need to be told. Sometimes you need to follow your bliss, wherever it takes you.
Even if it takes you to Denmark.
I recently sat down with my good friend and fellow OurPDX author Michelle Anderson to talk about her new project, The Miracle in July. It’s part story, part online community, part immersive multimedia experience, all wrapped up in a very personal yet somewhat fictionalized memoir of her experiences with love, loss and relationships.
So what do you do when you find yourself at the end of a tumultuous long distance relationship? Some people eat ice cream. Some cry in their beers. I’ve heard some people will even try to screw every person that comes their way (always a favorite!) Michelle decided to write, as a way of working through the loss, of coming to terms with it. (She may have done a bunch of that other stuff, but we’ll never know. Or will we?) With the help and guidance of her good friend Sarah, she embarked on short story writing assignments every week that would stretch her creative skills and make her dig deep into her writing talent.
From the prologue: “Having my heart ruthlessly gashed, left behind to hemorrhage faith and clots of dark pride, was the best thing that ever happened to me. Professionally.”
Eventually she realized she was compiling quite a collection of short stories, and her thoughts turned to perhaps publishing it as an anthology. The literary world, however, can be unfriendly to an unpublished author. She started researching ebooks and self publishing. It was also around that time that she realized that all her short stories were in fact about this relationship that ended, and had impacted her so profoundly that they were coming out in her writing; they were all connected by the common thread of dealing with the loss. Then, she ran across the work of French artist Sophie Calle, and saw what she did when she got dumped: She used it as a focal part of her art.
Eureka, as they say.
So Michelle decided to say screw the publishing man. She was going to publish her own dang story, adding a new segment every week. But here is where the brilliance comes.
It’s MORE than just a story you go to a website and read. There’s pictures. Video. Music. All embedded into the story, and it truly makes it come alive. You are instantly immersed into the sounds, the images, the feel of the story. And since much of it takes place in Portland, there’s links to local places, and events, and people. “I want to integrate the community with this effort”, she told me. “I want to prove that you don’t need to go through traditional publishing channels. I decided to reverse engineer a publishing deal, and try to build a social movement about the story.”
That’s right. YOU can influence the story. Yes YOU. And me. And anyone, really.
How, you ask? Well I’ll tell you. You see, Michelle only has about 3-4 weeks of segments ready, so if the community says “hey I really like this character, I’d like to see more of them” or “dude this guy is lame. Sayonara!”, Michelle will be listening and blending the community’s influence into the story. Kind of like choose your own adventure stories!
I asked her what sort of reaction she’s hoping people who read this story will have? “…I’d like to see other people doing the same thing I’m doing, self publishing. Just like newspapers are becoming outdated, publishers don’t need to control who can publish stories and who can’t. And with social media tools, I can generate community interest for the book.”
She starts out the first segment with a quote from Anais Nin, quite possibly the most passionately erotic writer ever (in my opinion). I asked her what was the reason for that?
“Good question. It’s gonna get hot. In a long distance relationship, you often have sex online, and there’s many ways to do it. One way would be to write each other stories, because we were both writers.”
For all the blogger geeks out there, the tools that Michelle uses to embed all this amazing content into her story is called Apture. She uses WordPress, like a good little Portlander, and a stack of widgets to keep everything looking fabulous. She’s currently hunting for an improved media library plugin, and is planning on adding a members area soon.
Check out Michelle’s story, The Miracle in July. A new segment comes out every week.
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Thank you so much for spreading the word about The Miracle in July. I hope once people understand what it is, and why I’m doing it, more aspiring authors will give this “writing thing” a try.
I’m just gettin’ started, so fasten your seat belts!
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