Shelldrake Reflection
The inspiration for project Shelldrake was originated from reading short stories. We were interested in getting in contact with one of the authors. We eliminated the authors that were dead (obviously) or very famous and decided upon author Robin Sloan. After back and forth emailing with him and a skype chat, we invited him to our school to write a story with us. He was happy to come, and on April 16th, we started project Shelldrake.
We started our writing by doing a big brain dump, which I thought was really interesting. Using a giant piece of butcher paper as our whiteboard, we all wrote down anything that came to mind for the story. Names, places, character traits, etc. We were able to read each others ideas, and get inspired from that. He read the ideas and circled the ones he thought we could incorporate into our story. Once we had all our ideas out there, we discussed a basic plot line. This was one of my favorite parts of the project. We were all deciding on what would and wouldn’t work and trying to fit everything together. We split up into groups and decided what the purpose of our main concepts were.
Then we searched the library for picture books with interesting illustrations. We scanned them into the computer and had Robin’s many followers create photo shopped images with them for us. It was really amazing to see the results from this. We got our first image, a seal for oberon that afternoon. Plus seeing all of the images of the citadel in old photos, vacation photos, and city shots was really fun to look at. The next step was to set out and explore our story locations.
First we went to North Park Produce, which is this world market with all different types of food genres like Asian, Ethiopian, Spanish, and more. But it wasn’t only food that we were looking at, but the people in the market. You were able to see people from all different cultures, wearing all of these different clothes, mixed with everyday people. It wasn’t your typical Vons. It was a really cool to see, though I was slightly disturbed by their meat selection of lamb heart, liver, and such. But we still had more to see, so we moved on to our next location.
Viva Pops, a popsicle shop filled with all of these unique flavors like lavender lemonade or rose pear vanilla. All of which was made of all natural, locally grown fruit and herbs. This turned out to be one of the most important locations for our story. And we were able to meet the owner, who was this really nice woman that told us about the shop, and that we might even make later contact with. It was good to be able to get that opportunity. Sadly we were short on time as usual, and had to move on.
Our final stop was at the Geisel Library at UCSD. The library isn’t just any normal library, but it has this amazing architectural build that gives the visual affect of a spaceship, yet another inspiration for our story. We went inside briefly and saw the different levels of the library. It looked pretty normal inside though. However I did like the bookshelves. Yes, they were basic, really long shelves that were filled with hundreds of books. But I really liked the affect it had when you walked down them, like a never ending tunnel of books. I’m not exactly sure how to describe it. We weren’t able to stay long though, due to other obligations.
There were a couple of out of school trips that were taken with Robin for extra time. That was when we finalized most of our project. I attended one of those trips at Rob’s house. That was a really fun part of Shelldrake. We were discussing project ideas and chatting. It was a great way to not only finish the plot, but to also get to know Robin on a little bit more of a personal level. It would have been nice though if more people were able to participate with that, though I know that sometimes your schedule just won’t allow that. Robin finished the first draft over the weekend.
Monday we did all of our editing and figured out the end of our story. That was another favorite part for me. I loved when we were all throwing out these ideas and building from each others comments. You could just see the progress with every idea. This was a great part though because of its uniqueness. In general, we do work in groups and collaborate together, but its not often that we get a chance to work as such a whole, and I am really pleased with the results.
We were extremely lucky to be given an opportunity like this, and it can definitely lead us to more and more. If we do decide to go to San Francisco for our class trip in the fall, we might be able to have another opportunity like this with Robin. And if not, Rob had said that Robin knows Jane Mcgonigal (creator of superstruct), which may lead us to a whole new project. Who knows. This has been an amazing experience, and I hope that we are able to continue doing writing projects, and making connections with people like Robin.
