For the past few days, I have been overseeing three different collaborative stories that jumped off from the same starting point:

To say she was connected would be too simple a statement. She was never disconnected. Even in her sleep, her dreams came to her in bursts of 140 characters. (She knew this because she often woke up and jotted down her dreams, a habit she acquired in her college psychology course. Her notebook was full of nighttime ramblings.)

And so, the night of the storm, with the weather forecasters freaking out about the high winds and possible lightning, she, too, began to freak out. She checked for batteries. She stood waiting near the electrical outlets, ready to pull the plugs at the first flash of lightning.

The last thing she expected was the knock at the door, but then, the unexpected always comes at the least convenient moment …

One story has been evolving at Google Wave; another at our iAnthology networking site; and the third, on Etherpad. I am calling the adventure DataStream because of the parallel stories but also because the ending will have to do with a stream of data coming together.

My aim is to close up the stories tomorrow (Sunday) and to weave the three together with a common ending, so that they all start and at the same place but the heart of the stories are different. I’m fascinated by this but also struggling with it.

You can join us — I need more writers at the Etherpad site, in particular, and the beauty of Etherpad is that no registration is required: you just go and write. So, please come join us, even if it is only for a few lines:

The Etherpad Story: http://etherpad.com/cY2ufkguQ2

Here are a few observations that I have:

• It’s not easy to keep three stories in my head. I am dancing between the stories here, trying to keep the plot moving along with clues from the writers (There have been about 20 people writing with me on these three platforms).
• Google Wave may have some potential but I have not been impressed with it, to be honest. It is slow, and not so easy to use. Not intuitive at all. I started the story to experiment primarily with Wave, and so, that has been helpful, but I don’t really like it.
• Writing on a Ning (the iAnthology) is nice because you can thread the story as discussions. I was hoping I could get a few more of our teacher-writers involved, but the holidays make that difficult, and I don’t want the project pushing into next week, when school starts up again.
• The Etherpad is probably the easiest to set up and use. It is so simple. But it has had the least amount of traffic, even though I have blasted about it on my Twitter network.
• I’m working right now in Google Docs to create a master document with all three stories together, in tables. It looks kind of odd this way, but it was the best way I could think of.

Peace (in the collaboration),
Kevin

There is a neat little flash generator for New Year’s Resolutions. I liked some of the ideas — writing a song, changing the world, be present in each moment, etc, but I ended up adding my own sentiment:

Peace (in 2010),

Kevin

I know a lot of us are mulling over where we were in life as 1999 came to a close. I remember where I was: I was a newspaper reporter and like the rest of hte world, my editors thought the Y2K bug was gonna destroy all of the computers and lead to a community meltdown.

So, I had to stay in the office until midnight and wait for The End of Technology to happen. Yeah. Didn’t happen. So, I sat around, bored out of my gourd, watching television with one ear on the scanner, thinking: this sucks.

It wasn’t too much longer that I bailed out on my career in the newspaper business, stayed at home as a dad for two years (yeah!), went back to school and then went into teaching. Meanwhile, we had one kid born before 2000 and two more after 2000, and boy, time goes by fast.

I went through two rock bands, a number of smaller groups (one of which I named the Millennium Bugs as a nod to the great disaster that never happened) and an endless number of songs, poems, stories and whatnot throughout the last decade, and the words keep coming (not all of them good).

I also began the decade as a technology neophyte (heck, if the Y2K Bug had hit, I would have been in trouble trying to figure out how to explain it), but that changed when I joined the National Writing Project and took a path into technology in education. That changed my life. I am now fully immersed in the world of tech and loving it.

At least, tonight, the only bug we have to worry about is the flu. That’s progress.

Peace (in the decade),
Kevin

Yesterday, I took my older kids to see Avatar, the movie. We had to keep reminding my nine year old that it would not be a movie version of the cartoon/comic series also called “Avatar.” I wonder if there was some legal transactions around that name recognition, since the first time I heard of the movie in progress, I too thought of the comic series. (And to make it more confusing, I see now that the series is coming out as its own movie called The Last Airbender, or did I miss it already?)

This was the first full-length 3D movie that I have watched, wearing the funky glasses and all that. Three hours later, I had a bit of a headache but it sure was an interesting experience.

But the movie reminded me of what I have always loved about science fiction and what still rankles me.

I love how James Cameron really creates an entire world on the screen. It was beautiful and rich and stunning in its vision. I was particularly swept away by the little floating seeds. I won’t go into all the accolades that other reviewers will say about the beauty of the film, but it was magical to see. I’m not sure the 3D experience did a whole lot,however, and I would probably have been just as happy to see it in 2D (and save a few bucks in the process).

I was expecting to be knocked out with the 3D effects after all the press Cameron got. Some of it was cool, but I guess 3D still has a long way to go to become a fully immersible movie experience (Don’t tell Cameron that — every interview indicates that he has revolutionized filmmaking with Avatar — don’t believe the hype).

But Avatar also contains the weakness that drives me — a sci-fi nut, really — crazy. The story was another rehash (it was an updated Pocahantas, as done by Disney) and the dialogue was mostly terrible or barely passable. Character development, which was really the heart of the story, was just OK. The acting was pretty wooden for the main character (interestingly, I thought he did a better job when he was the computer-generated avatar than when he was a live person on the screen.)

Why can’t movie producers pull these these strands (effects, new worlds, dialogue, story arc and character development) to make a film that will blow away all audiences? I don’t get it. Last summer’s Star Trek took a good step in that direction (and now I see it popping up on a lot of Best of … lists) and the old TV series-turned-movie Firefly (the movie was Serenity) had some elements and updated Battlestar Galactica (against all odds, considering its history) kept storytelling and character development at its center.

But the movie world is littered with sci-fi crap. How can I expose my sons to the wonderful element of Science Fiction if so much of what falls under that umbrella is worthless junk?

Give them the books, of course. Give them the books and let them imagine the worlds and go deep into the stories.

Peace (in the worlds),
Kevin