For the first time I’ve come across a link that seems to have brought me into a different story altogether. As Ham and Pen drive cross country, there is a bridge to Ham’s past relevant to their conversation. But from there I seem to have entered a time in Ham’s life somewhere in the future with a cast of characters I do not know.
Thankfully I’ve learned to save, go back, jot down questionable intersections where I feel I want to wander, to know more.
This has always been one of my main concerns with hypertext, how important is choice when choice is only to go this way or that, not what I want to find out next since that is something the reader does not know. This must also be a challenge in writing story in this form. There are pros and cons to every medium; books, it has been proven, cannot be read in the dark.
So with a murmured excuse me, I back out, back out and return to a place that looks familiar.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology