Hypercompendia

Finally got some time and mental energy today to go back and tackle the Agents feature of Tinderbox. With another bit of help from Steve Ersinghaus, I found the problem that had me stymied for a while this morning in the code string. Right now, I’m working with the current (summer 2010) project for which I’m writing a story each day.

I’d already separated the stories by Adornments into four categories of conflict but there were many more ways I wanted to sort them. So far, I’ve only got 37 stories, but there are a few I know I’d like to submit at some point and one that has already been taken for publication, so “Favorites” and “Published” became necessary Agents. The other obvious sort, geared towards the literary market, are “Word Count” and “Genre” as this would help me narrow down style of story and word count restrictions to the particular magazine.  These Agents will also be integrated into the “Literary Endeavors” Tinderbox file I have nearly complete as far as entries, as well as last year’s 100 hypertext stories from the 100 Days 2009 project.

Okay, so I cheated a lot on getting the agents to work by merely entering the text “Favorites” for example, into the box of the item, above the story, rather than properly create Attributes. That’ll come as soon as I’ve got all Agents set up and working here, and before I use that information in the other two project. I’m psyched!

It’s Day #18 and as you can see, I’ve since added another Adornment labeled “Universe” which is sort of a catchall for stories that either have something to do with the world and nature at large or simply don’t fit real well into the other categories.

I’ve also added a couple of Notes (templates, images) and a couple of Agents (Word Count, Favorites–and I know I’ll want Genre eventually) though I haven’t yet set them up to work properly. All in good time.

This is the first time I’ve actually used Tinderbox as the working form of a project from the beginning. The last 100 Days project I’m still in the process of entering into a Tinderbox file–though the hypertext pieces themselves were all written into individual Tinderbox files. What is obvious is that it’s best to start simple unless the whole project is already laid out in your mind. Things change, things develop, much like hypertext story. You don’t want to be redoing and rearranging once a project is already sprawling out. It’s much easier to let the project ask for its own changes when it senses a modification is necessary. Oh, of course I don’t mean Tinderbox talks (not yet anyway!) but it does present a visual that makes it easier to identify where something can be arranged in a more structured manner, or is growing lopsided and needs division like a lily clump.  It’s obvious here that I seem to be writing more stories on relationships. That may need to be separated into more defined areas of human relationships. Unless that’s not politically correct…

Okay, so there are only five stories written so far but the pattern of themes has already started to establish itself:

In first level writing and literature, we’re taught the dearth of plots and the general concept of “man versus man,” etc. What I think this series of summer stories may be based upon is struggle and the adversary determines the “type” of story, here separated by color and Adornment names of Self, Relationships, and Society.

There may naturally be additions made as time goes on, as a theme such as war, for example, may go under any of these but just might call for a new category such as Event, or Future, etc. Tinderbox allows for building into a cohesive whole and though I’m just beginning, I’m hoping that something doesn’t strike me halfway through as a better organizational layout. Things can always be changed, but not without a bit of effort, so I might just put some more time into planning at this early stage of the game.

Well it seems that I work better under pressure; there are a dozen unfinished stories on my desktop that have sat there for weeks with a sentence, a paragraph added in a fit of creativity. But inspired by both a piece of work from a fellow artist and the concept of deadline, I’m hitting my stride with a story a day.

Here’s where the building blocks of ideas turn into more than just concept into a solid form. Last year I didn’t have the expertise nor the time with Tinderbox to assemble the 100 hypertext pieces into a Tbox file. For this project, I’m starting out with Tbox and already have some general organization in place. The main thought, however, is to allow for various mediums that some of the stories may employ (hypertext, flash, image, audio, etc.) so that I do want that ease of transition that keeping all in Pages would not allow. I may use all html templates. This I can readily do in Tbox. While the link to the stories (100 Days – 100 Stories 2010) is currently a page on Spinning, this too may change with time.

Then again, half the fun of any project is learning how to get from A to B and so on, and raising more interesting paths along the way.

(NOTE: Realized that this will not be published until May so I’m making the images really small so as not to take away from the originals)

It occurred to me during last summer’s 100 Days Project that my tendency to work with Tinderbox in its Map View rather than Outline, Tree, etc. became an integral part of a story as I wrote. The visual effect of a narrative, as a writer, was not something I consider other than for imagery in the writing process whether it be poem or story and yet Dorothee Lang, of the Blue Print Review and Karyn Eisler, whom I’d met on this project, made that link.

Dorothee had emailed me about an idea for a hypertext poem she was working on, and with my Tinderbox program, I showed her how it would look in that format. From there and in working with Karyn, she layered the images and text into a piece that included the Map View and submitted it to the e-zine, otoliths, which accepted and will be publishing it next month in their journal.

This in, a link to what Steve Ersinghaus had spent 24 hours working on at the Tunxis Art Marathon.

Here’s the latest version of Literary Endeavors, with the Poems set up and the Print Journals transferred from a Container to an Adornment. Couple things learned the hard way: If you overlap an Adornment onto another, you’ve got a holy mess on your hands because they become attached and move together, leaving the notes behind. Worked my way out of it, but not a happy sight as you move things around and the situation gets worse. But that’s what the “Save” feature is for.

Obviously, planning ahead for size when you want something that needs to all be displayed at once (another reason for keeping them out of Containers and using Adornments) is an important point. Particularly when you know you will be adding lots of notes on an adornment. I should have minimized the view right away and spread the Adornments to fit at that point, geared towards a horizontal screen.

As far as links, all I have so far is the (blush!) published ones in so far but I’m planning for the submitted and accepted/rejected return links as soon as I resize my layout.

That’s one of the problems with self-teaching: you learn something the wrong way and once you stumble across the right way, you have a lot of changes to make. On the other hand, a lesson learned from trial and error is one that sticks with you–especially if you have quite a bit of work done to date.

Once I realized that the thing I wanted was an Adornment and not another Container Note, I had to transfer a whole lot of notes into different areas. Thankfully, I didn’t have all the stories, hypertext or regular, and only two of the poems so far entered into the program. I do have about 80 of the print journal notes made, but few of the online journals and just a couple of the new media. It was a case of trying to fill in spaces from memory in some cases, just to have a few samples to work with.  At any rate, here’s the first step towards redesigning the Literary Endeavors Tinderbox file.

It was demoralizing. It was one of those questions that your knowledge and experience with the program should have taken you beyond. It was something I felt too embarrassed about not knowing to bring me to ask. Why was everybody else’s map so different from mine? Why wouldn’t my notes show up with titles? Why wouldn’t my links transcend their corrals?

The Answer: I was using Containers, while they were using Adornments. A tweet from Mark Bernstein along with the alert that though it was in German, it was a great visual, led me to this site by Felix Dencker, where I not only noticed that the Germans also knew something I didn’t, I picked up the word “Adornment,” within the article and voila’!

An image of the updated file “Literary Endeavors” (previous post image):

With the generous assistance of Steve Ersinghaus, I finally was able to figure out exactly how to make use of the Tinderbox features of using prototypes and particularly, the agents. This was vital to this project as the different types of works wanted to also be separated for easy identification of word count and eventually, published, in submission process, etc.

Once I learned what to put in the query strings and where to put them into the agent note, I can take it further on my own into the specific areas for whatever purpose I need. I also learned that the prototypes must be specific and no note can serve two masters/prototypes so that if I want a group to follow a chocolate/blue dress (example only) standard, I need to make that a single prototype rather than two; likewise, chocolate/pink dress would be a different prototype entirely.

I’ve made a lot of progress on this particular project, and also can apply that knowledge learned last night into the 100 Hypertext project that I’d started late last year.

Now, I’m having fun.