Tell a Fairy Tale of the Digital Age
Contribute your short story to a book of mythology for our technological times
We’re living in an age of information, a time in which the best decisions are data-driven. It all sounds quite reasonable, and even progressive, in a clinical sort of way.
There’s just one problem with it all: This data-driven world is making human beings miserable.
Since the advent of the digital revolution, rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide have increased. Income and benefits have gone down while time spent working has risen. The Quantified Self movement has brought us a decrease in both physical and mental health. We’re more isolated lonely than ever before.
A data-driven approach to living, it turns out, only address the factors in our lives that can be easily quantified. So, in the process of digitally optimizing our lives, our most human longings have been dismissed as irrelevant.
It’s time to re-infuse our lives with the qualities of mystique, myth, and meaning. These are the qualities that are expressed, figuratively, in fairy tales. That’s why people are embracing the new holiday, Tell A Fairy Tale Day on February 26, as a way to rebuild meaningful lives after decades of digital disruption.
Tell Your Tale of Digital Mythology
In order to support the fairy tale frame of mind in the midst of our technological society, I’m editing a book of mythic stories that address the challenge of remaining human in a digital world. This anthology, titled Fairy Tales for a Digital Age, will use the medium of fairy tales to explore in an allegorical way the struggles people are going through in our own time.
This book project is now open for submissions - and I encourage you to give it a shot. The full requirements to guide your work are online at the Tell A Fairy Tale Day web site.
The setting may be in the present, the past, or the future. It can address the issues of the human encounter with digital technology in a literal manner, or metaphorically. So, an acceptable story could be a science fiction allegory about digital immortality in the 23th century, a tale about a social media monster set in the present day, or the story of golem set loose hundreds of years ago. Actual fairies are optional. Metaphor is a must.
Everyone who has a story selected for inclusion in Fairy Tales for a Digital Age will receive a free copy of the book. The deadline for submissions is Winter Solstice this year, so don’t rush it. Despite conventional wisdom these days, the best work isn’t done in a sprint. Saunter instead, scribbling a bit here and there to construct your story in the wandering margins of your life. You’ll be surprised what you can come up with when you give yourself the time.
If you’ve got questions, or ideas to add to this project, feel free to get in touch with me. Like a fairy tale, you never know where a good chat might lead.
