Noteworthy

Selected Rants, Raves, and Writings by Dylan Kinnett

2019-04-13 Text Adventures that Go Beyond: One of these text adventures takes a new approach to the old experience, and another pushes the medium towards a limit that could suggest its future direction.
2019-03-11 Open the Pod Bay Doors: Conversational Interfaces in an Epistolary Literary Style: A look at two hypertexts: one game and one visual novel, that tell their stories in a conversational way.
2019-02-06 Bandersnatch, Hypertext, and the State of Interactive Stories: Interest in non-linear storytelling is rekindling. Two months ago, the Black Mirror studio released an interactive, non-linear movie called Bandersnatch on Netflix. The choices aren’t merely about what should happen next, but also about the mood, style, and even the meaning of the story that unfolds.
2018-11-21 Aleatory Writing Experiment: An experiment, after Bernadette Mayer, to systematically eliminate the use of certain kinds of words or phrases from a piece of writing.
2018-11-21 Chapbooks, Zines, and Rare Books from the Early 2000s: These book reviews describe the works of poets and publishers at a time right before the web became ubiquitous, so they are a useful archive as well as an enjoyable read.
2015-05-03 How I Made a Repository of my Writings, and Why: If you have a lifetime of writings, it can get difficult to sort through it all. I’d like to describe a the system I use to keep track of what I’ve written. Suggestions for improvement are welcome!
2015-03-27 Composing with Words like John Cage: In about two days, I plan to get on stage to perform a written work in front of a live audience and read, not from a script, but from something more like a score. I’m not the only person engaging in this literary experiment. There are about a dozen of us. What are we doing?
2015-01-08 Submission Strategy Review: If you submit more writings, you get published more often. It’s simple. Here’s how I keep track of it all.
2014-07-22 Authenticity Versus Expectation: There are probably some of you who would say that “clichés are clichés for a reason”, and to you I would say “cry me a river!” and I would add that the clichés may be useful, or comfortable, but cliché has no place in poetry, because it isn’t artful.
2014-05-19 Git and the Writer: Image the power of your editors and beta readers to commit changes for your review through a freely distributed application where each participant can enact changes without the knowledge of others doing the same.
2014-04-13 Ten Things Not to Do at a Literary Reading: Literary events, like any live performance, are bound to have some glitches here and there. Some of those glitches are easily avoided.
2014-01-21 Following Silliman’s Blogroll: There’s a treasure trove of vibrant and enjoyable literary blogs on the Internet. You can still subscribe to them all and join the conversation. I’ve created a tool to help.
2013-09-11 Leaving Microsoft Word Behind: I have amassed a collection of files: .doc files, .docx files, .rtf files, .html files, but I set out to convert them all to plain text files.
2013-08-06 Scrivener, Git and Version Control for Writers: Scrivener projects are laid out as application bundles with the .scriv extension, and, as it turns out, are amenable to Git version control.
2013-08-02 Useful Features of Version Control Software: Version control for writers, and why it’s useful.
2013-07-30 Version Control for Writers: Authors, editors, literary scholars, archivists: all eventually have to do work with multiple versions of a text.
2013-01-21 My Grandmother’s Writings Part Two: File Cabinets and Beer Boxes: the writings were carefully removed from their original file cabinet and transferred into a set of brown cardboard boxes emblazoned with the irrelevant phrases “Bud Ice” and “Corona” where they remained, stored in the basement, for about 20 years.
2013-01-06 My Grandmother’s Writings Part One: “Look at all this paper!”: In October of 2012, my dad gave me the entire collected writings by my Grandmother, Elizabeth Kinnett. I’m going to catalog, annotate and digitize these writings. Along the way, I’ll blog about the work I do.
2012-10-30 Generative Writing Cut-Up Tools: DadaDodo is a program that analyses texts for word probabilities, and then generates random sentences based on that. Sometimes these sentences are nonsense; but sometimes they cut right through to the heart of the matter, and reveal hidden meanings.
2012-07-15 How I Do My Word Processing: I am both a “computer person” and a writer. You might be interested to know: how do I combine the two? Here are some thoughts on how I do my word processing, most of the time.
2012-07-07 When to Abandon a Creative Project: My list of ongoing creative projects is too complicated. I’m declaring creative bankruptcy, so to speak. I’ve had too many irons in the fire for too long. Why so many? It seems I have trouble bringing an end to some projects.
2012-02-23 The Death of Hypertext?: Does anyone write literary hypertexts anymore? Are the existing tests future-proof?
2011-06-27 My Favorite Notebook: I’m looking to replace my very favorite notebook, which is all filled up now. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to make these anymore. I’m posting this in the hopes that someone can help to point me in the right direction.
2011-05-21 Scriptwriting Software: I sampled the various software apps that are designed to help a writer to produce a stage play
2011-02-26 Writing with Audio: I’m interested in adding audio equipment to my writing toolbox. So, I think I need some gear. I’m posting this to solicit any advice from musicians, technicians and writers: what works and what doesn’t? How can I do these things sufficiently well, on the smallest possible budget?
2010-08-30 Ten Reasons Why I (don’t really) Love Lists.: With a list, you can quickly fill up the page without having to actually write very much. It’s kind of like using a really big typeface to get out of writing a long book report.
2010-07-13 Altered Text: I’ll call it altered text, although for the thing I have in mind there are actually many things, many names, from many times and places. My notion of “destroyed text” is somewhat unique, but not really. I’ll show you some examples of a family ideas I think the idea is descended from. I’ll try to give you explanations, citations and examples for each.
2007-02-27 Book Companion Websites: A survey of websites designed to promote books, authors, and publishers. How are they designed? How do they work?
2005-12-11 Spoken Word, Recorded Poetry, and Hip-Hop: The creative challenge here is to find a way to take my favorite elements of each of these groups, and go my own way with them.
2004-12-10 The Legend of Alexandre The Savage Gnome: a carnival atmosphere of human oddity and depravity, inexplicable beauty in the strangest places