Are you familiar with the communication innovations of Deena Larsen? New ways of writing, linking, and gesturing seem to fly from her brain and fingers.
Since her childhood Deena has experimented with adding additional meaning to characters in handwritten English. (Valences? Inflections? Here's her explanation.) These characters are sprinkled throughout her forthcoming work Chronic, and for one magical summer I used them in my own writing, to see what effect they had on my brain.
Now Deena is sharing her characters, and the ideas behind them, through The Rose Project. There is a related Kickstarter that could be described as its own evolving literary work, perhaps a new genre; see for yourself. Read the updates (in order, earliest at the bottom) for a new story, "The Thorn of the Rose", in which characters communicate using the characters.
Virginia Woolf said (paraphrased) that English words had been so over-used and mis-used that writing in English was like playing on a piano with half the keys broken. When I share this I often use the word love as an example of a word that has lost its juice. But Deena is re-charging words such as love with multiple possible meanings.
How am I using Rose? I have started calling myself "Jules" in certain contexts. (I'm branded online as "juliannechat" and unlikely to change that.) To help me think about the possible implications, Deena wrote both of my current names in Rose characters, as shown below.
What adventures could Rose have in store for you?
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