Shelldrake
UPDATE to V1.2: Some structural elements revised. If interested, you may reread.
As with my previous reflection, this is not intended to be a summarization. While there are some summarization elements, the focus is supposed to be on reflection. If you have any feedback, feel free to leave it in the comments. Thank you.
I would deem Project Shelldrake with Robin Sloan to be a profound success. I loved working with Robin. He was an interesting, creative, smart and entertaining person and an excellent collaborator.
The greatest collaboration came on the evening of Friday, the 16th of April at Rob’s house. The small group including Robin, Charlie, Tati, Marcelo, Tobin, Tatiana and I were extremely productive and had an excellent time crafting the foundation for Normal Heights. This was the evening where the story evolved from a just a collection of soft ideas that generated during that day to something concrete.
I also loved the fact that Robin was able to so effectively crowdsource the work of reviewing our writing and generating seals and citadel-in-the-sky images. This work make it not just our own proprietary and closed project that only we were participants in, but an open collaboration, something anybody on the web could contribute to and make wonderful. Our success motivates me to build my own online presence so that I have a crowd of intelligent people interested in collaborating with me.
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Also, I was fascinated and excited by Robin’s group “brain-dumping” method for garnering story ideas. It’s an efficient process to record everything that might be useful in a story and simply sift through it later, whenever you need to, because it’s always there.
One of Robin’s own analogies suits the brain-dump well: “There’s a stream, and you can dip your hands in it whenever you’d like, but no matter what, it’ll still be flowing”. While he actually used this analogy to describe his philosophy on Twitter, it can also be applied to the brain-dump.
In the couple of weeks that I was paying attention to words and names on the city streets, I came up with some of the most interesting names I’ve ever heard, like Voit McGrath, Avery Roche and Alfred Fairchild, for example. Just hearing these names inspires me to write something great.
I additionally appreciated that this project referenced locations in San Diego. This made it not solely a writing project, but an exploration project. This was even more so emphasized by the fact that we actually visited all of the locations in the story-and then some.
The exploration made for an exciting experience that allowed us to better apply the locations in the story and also better familiarize us with our very own city.
It is my belief that writing that references real locations also makes for more exciting reading, especially when the reader has that “I’ve been there!” moment.
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If we go to San Francisco next fall, I would love to collaborate with Robin on another project. (What other rivers in Michigan are there to name it after?)
Of course, we’d plan the details then, but the only thing I would like that I didn’t get out of Shelldrake would be to do some of the writing myself.
Of course, I’m perfectly aware that I’m free to write whatever I want right now and email it to Robin for feedback, (and I may do this sometime in the future), but I’d love to collaborate with him on something and write part of it.
