What inspired me here was the concept of when the best laid plans get messed up by a matter of a decision, or a minute’s delay. How does a sudden change affect what some believe is destiny?
This is another group of short-short stories, three spaces each (although four of the stories of two possible endings) when an extra minute is slipped into the space of time.
Steve’s story implied computer technology that opens up to questions of more intimacy with the user. This inspired me to going a bit beyond the scenario to a more Hal-like computer personality.
I thought of the Windows De-Fragmentation screen where all those little colored boxes are rearranged and bytes of material are sent back to stand alongside their relatives. I thought of networking. I thought of all kinds of cooperation among the kilobyte community and came up with a few pranksters in the group.
…I’m not completely dead in the water. Guess I’m down below max req for Lunar but won’t be moved until they check again.
In the meantime, with no idea what’s causing the problem still I’ll limp along waiting for approval. Also taking out all enlargements of maps and and I’m not posting any more hypertexts until I figure out a few more things. I do have #67 Revenge of the Kilobytes and #68 An Enth of a Degree Out of Whack and am working on #69 just to keep up with the exercise and the idea of deadlines works well.
We’ll see what happens from here. I’m afraid that even my administration visits to WordPress are using up CPUs.
Well, I’ve stripped down to the minimum here and on Spinning, and Lunar still claims I’m exceeding resources and there’s nothing else I can do. The php script they’re saying thats using too high an average is what loads the opening page. Here, I’ve eliminated the K2 theme and gone to default, cut back to 10 posts displayed, and eliminated (or am about to) the “Click to Enlarge” for the maps.
Don’t know what else I can do, but I won’t be posting any more on the 100 Days Project and may be off the air anyway.
What’s been taking so long with these stories is a general dissatisfaction with my writing lately. The stories need to sparkle just as much as I can make them and that usually takes me days, weeks, months of editing even on short stories.
The time here is spent on the development into the hypertext format. While I’m getting a little better and faster at having all the tools handy and ready as I write the first draft, there’s still plenty of going back and rereading, rewriting. Today I believe I deleted more words than are contained in the final form. And this still for me is not the final version.
In exploring the hypertext aspect I’ve had all different approaches; different endings, all leading to the same ending, carrying the reader through almost the entire story but in different sequences, and depending on the reader to read the story several times to discover all its meanings by leading him out.
It’s ruining my posture, my frame business, my garden, my social life. But it’s something I have to see through to its logical end.
This one took a long time coming and I even had to kill off a character since she was taking too much of the story for herself and it wasn’t about her at all. What prompted this story from Steve’s was a phone call out of the blue. While he brilliantly tied the past to the present with a connection between the callers, I ended up (as usual) with a wrong number.
The mapping structure is a wayward path of several similar stories of the same central character that all lead to the same ending. But the ending will be interpreted by the reader based upon what he has read. I’ve tried to link semantically as much as possible within the interweaving of the storyspace (that’s not the Storyspace, since I’m using Tinderbox throughout this project). There’s just so very much you can do with hypertext; different endings, different middles, that the possibilties far outweigh the burden of planning even as one strives for concise story and brevity of narrative–which is likely why, after reading Steve’s entry on this topic, I ground to a halt in intimidation and fear.
In this piece I’ve let the story take whatever turn it desired and entertained all possibilities that offered themselves up. In other words, the author was left just as blind as the reader as to choice.
While there are several points where the story of Annalee and Jacob can recover and change from the path that was chosen, once we get down to the end the result of their connection is completely random. It might make sense to make a story more planned out and predictable, but here there are six different endings of many more different stories.
Sort of like real life.
I’m having problems with my server so this may be the last of the series. This story started out as a phrase a few weeks ago and I saved it for a better time to develop. When it appeared to tie in with Steve’s daily story I set it up and went to work.
But it didn’t go where I’d expected. It was to be a humorous piece about cloning–what else would you expect when someone’s nose blows off and lands on your forehead? But it soon became a politically charged statement and it dragged out all day.
Finally able to go back and change track to a certain degree, but there’s little humor unless you delight in the macabre.
Steve’s entire story was like 33 words. Meanwhile, there was a discussion going on at Mary Ellen’s Facebook that has been an ongoing thing since we’ve met, I think, about readerly/writerly, authorly/readerly, and as Mary Ellen appears to be following my own dragmarks in accepting the concept of Barthes, I thought I might use Steve’s story as an example to be interpreted in a classroom discussion.
The linking attempts to cover certain points of the story that are certainly open to interpretation, though only Steve Ersinghaus as the author may know what prompted the story and what meaning he gave to it. And as he taught me, we shouldn’t care about that at all.
In the name of brevity, I’ve tried to follow the concept of short, short story and yet with the hypertext possibilities I expanded the stories into sixteen. While none are earth-shattering story they are dramatic and complete.
As the map shows, all stories start with the same sentence, then branch from there, each writing space a sentence that takes the story into a slightly different direction. The initial branching from the first sentence to the second represents a major difference in story, characters, etc., the first sentence having established two things: narrative pov and setting. Then, in pyramid fashion, the story is refined by its plot and finally, by the fourth sentence, its ending.
While I could see this as a more elaborate concept, with some of the stories connecting to the endings of others to form a huge network of changing stories, I preferred to stop here to keep them all under 100 words each (most run about 85) and in just four sentences exactly.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology