Sunday, October 10, 2010

The Amazing Brick

This is my cellphone. I call it The Brick. It was born long before Noah even got a twinkle in his eye about building that ark of his.  


The Brick in its fulsome awesomeness

I use The Brick for making calls, sending and receiving messages and it also wakes me up in the morning. What more can a person want from a cellphone?

Then Mr Steve Vosloo of the Shuttleworth Foundation came along and asked me to write an m-book which young adults could read off their cellphones. It seems that young adults like doing all sorts of stuff on their cellphones, apart from texting and calling.

Mr Steve Vosloo also asked writers Fiona Snyckers and Charlie Human to write a story for the young adults, so they could have three m-books to read.

Confessions of a Virgin Loser is the twenty chapter story I wrote for Mr Steve Vosloo. He put it on the cellphone in the month of September along with Charlie and Fiona’s stories.

Last week Mr Steve Vosloo sent me an email containing the presentation he made at a conference in Barcelona about how much the cellphone junkies liked the stories. Barcelona is a nice city. I wish I could have been there to hear Mr Steve Vosloo talk, and not just get the presentation via email.

If I had been at the conference in Barcelona listening to Mr Steve Vosloo telling the conference delegates about his project to encourage reading among young cellphone addicts, I would have heard that Confessions of a Virgin Loser got 18 000 reads. This means that a lot of young adults read the story.

They seemed to like it too because there were about 15 000 comments about Confessions of a Virgin Loser in that month of September. One of the comments said: "This story is da B.O.M.B." Which  is a good thing, I am told.

I think that’s great. But I wish these readers would take their noses out of their cellphones and get out and buy real books – especially the ones I have displayed down the side of this blog.
Then maybe I could go on holiday, to Barcelona. And Madrid. Or buy a real cellphone and send The Brick on holiday.
Mr Steve Vosloo’s presentation can be downloaded here: http://m4lit.wordpress.com/2010/10/07/statistics-of-the-last-year/.

2 comments:

  1. This is legendary. You should make that 15 001 hits because I was in London with my nephew, Steven, (12) last week and he and I snuggled up on the couch and read confessions out loud alternating reading the chapters. And every ten minutes his mom walked past and said, come on steven it's time for bed and
    He said awwww one more chapter, one more chapter.

    It's the perfect story for it's place and time.

    Can we beg for a sequel?

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  2. So glad Steven liked it. And thanks that you liked it too. Yes, beg for a sequel. Go on!

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