Hypercompendia

Funny how a few comments and suggestions that make you go back and rework, rewrite a piece focuses the writer on the process to the point of noticing things he (she) hadn’t even realized were there.  This happens in traditional straight text as well, but the patterns are so much more useful and possible in hypertext form.

While Mark sent me back to Blueberries for specifics that he’d noticed, in answering his points I began to notice threads of themes. There is a little boy of storytelling brought up in one path of the story that I now have come to see may be the same character that haunts the protagonist after the death of her father. The character signifies adventure and change, something that the protagonist appears to need to depend upon others to achieve.

I’m still tweaking and will for a while, but one little change of wording in one of the endings revealed Mark’s catch on the religious thread that I hadn’t really seen.

ORIGINAL: I don’t answer, just stare back into black eyes that have eaten my soul. That night he finishes the rest of me.

NEW:  I don’t answer, just stare back into black eyes that have eaten my soul. Later that night he takes my hand and we go home where he swallows me whole.

With the new version that came from tweaking for language and intent rather than any particular need to tie in the image, I see a relationship with the priest, the Sunday dress, etc., and in the above, the swallowing of the Host. The words “swallow me whole” while metaphorical, are now more open to interpretation both sexual and religious, and another possibility which is what I think I felt it was, of emotional damage overtaking a mind.

Interesting. I just love the way hypertext makes you see these things.