News

Old media and new media collided this week in England. One blogger was hurt in the crash, but her injuries do not appear to be life-threatening.

The blogger is known as Abby Lee. For two years, she has written a confessional on-line journal called Girl With a One-Track Mind. It offers a candid, explicit trip through the thirtysomething's life. There are play-by-play accounts of her erotic adventures, but also general observations about sex and modern life that ring true.

The blog has attracted a large audience -- more than two million total visitors and about 100,000 readers each month -- and it has won awards for its writing.

Inevitably book publishers came calling and Girl With a One-Track Mind: Confessions of the Seductress Next Door was released this month by Ebury Press. It quickly became a hit -- sex sells, especially when it can be ordered discreetly over the Internet -- but the author did not make any public appearances to promote the best-selling book. Abby Lee is not her real name, and she had not told anybody about her extracurricular writing activities. Her friends and family had no idea.

Then her doorbell rang. She answered and signed her real name for flowers, which the delivery person said were from her publisher. But suddenly old media, from a hiding place in her garden, snapped her picture. That photo and a story outing her appeared in the Sunday Times newspaper under the headline "By day she worked on Harry Potter. But by night . . ."

Turns out Abby Lee is actually -- if you must know -- Zoe Margolis, a 33-year-old film assistant who lives in London. According to her Internet Movie Database entry, she is the third assistant director on the next Harry Potter film, but that headline -- and the story generally -- makes her out to be a threat to children and goodness everywhere.

Margolis, according to Abby Lee's blog, was devastated. Her latest entry talks about having to tell the people close to her about her secret life: "Of all the difficult discussions to have," she writes, "divulging to your parents that you have a book out featuring your most intimate sexual experiences and thoughts pretty much comes top of my list.

Imagine: on the one hand, trying to emphasize the positive -- 'But my book's doing really well on Amazon!' -- contrasted with: 'My identity is about to be revealed, and you might be embarrassed because the book is, er, very explicit.'

"My parents (professional, liberal, thank goodness) were wonderfully supportive though."

Since the news broke, Margolis has given an interview to another British paper, The Guardian, in which she makes the good point that the mainstream media have more important truths to uncover in this world than the identity of a sexually active young woman who can write. She is also receiving a huge amount of support from her on-line brethren in condemning the Times.

I think somebody talking openly about sex is newsworthy, but only because we don't do enough of it. There has been much discussion here this week about how shame and community censure get in the way of preventing the spread of diseases such as AIDS.

Anonymity grants a writer a certain amount of power -- it is easier to be honest about some things if you're not completely open about others -- and the newspaper may have short-circuited that power in this case.

The real shame would be Margolis feeling she has to silence her inner Abby just because of a little cross-media jealousy.

And the Elan goes to . . .

Genies. Geminis. Junos. Elans.

It doesn't slip all that trippingly off the tongue, this nickname for the brand new Canadian Awards for the Electronic and Animated Arts.

The "El," according to the organizers of this year's inaugural event, takes the first two letters from electronic and represents the "God of Electronic Gaming." On the statue, unveiled last week along with the first batch of nominees, El is the male figure holding up a globe encased in a monitor. Helping him and attached to his hip is the "Goddess of Animation, An."

Very classical, but I think I'm going to pronounce the new name like this: the Elaines. I'm a Seinfeld fan and if you squint, the An on the statue does bear a slight resemblance to Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

However you say them, a month from now in Vancouver William Shatner will hand out Elans to the winners in 37 categories split up between video games and animation, and many of those co-ed statues will go to students.

After looking through the nomination lists this week, it is these academic projects that interest me most. The nominees in the professional categories show off the technical excellence of the Canadian animation and video-game industries, but these products rarely say anything about Canada or being Canadian. Most of the end users and viewers probably have no idea where these works originated.

The students, on the other hand, represent institutions such as Sheridan College and the Vancouver Film School, and their submissions could turn out to be the highlight of the event, especially from a Canadian-content perspective.

pluggedin@globeandmail.com