One of the things peculiar to hypertext is that you never know how close to the end of the story you are at any given point. Having the advantage of the history box and being clever and resourceful, at one point I was able to count the number of text tags in the menu, keep flipping in groups of that number, add the flips until I got the slider at the halfway mark, double what I’d added up, deduct a percentage for the backtracks, and have an estimate. Much easier with a book (three quarters’ done by looking at the closed book or number of pages for better accuracy); a glance at the clock for a movie or tv drama.
So the ending came unexpected. While I felt it answering the questions and approaching what would be a viable ending, I could still imagine the story feasibly going on from there. Even when it ended, it ended at the beginning and even when I thought it had ended, going back to reread I took a right-hand turn and went through a different path that within just a few boxes changed the entire story for me.
Tomorrow at some point I’ll do a wind-up on this and cover the story as well as offer some final thoughts on how the hypertext format influenced the reading of this novel.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology