INTERACTIVE FICTION: A Course in Writing

As part of our writing group, we are particularly interested in new media methods of narrative as well as working in the old fashioned (computerized text, which still crosses several boundaries) methods of writing and story telling. To get a jump on a planned summer course, Professor John Timmons is starting to publish the basics and I naturally want to fulfill one of my 15 resolutions so I’m jumping right in there and trying to build a house. I’ve spent most of the past two hours trying to build a house in some of the programs that I’ve had available for when we had the money to put on a real addition and I blew it in the stock market instead (1999-2001, remember?). I’ve lost or given away the simplest of design programs which was an old Expert Software version for Win 95, and the latest are just too damned unwieldy to maneuver for the simple needs in Interactive Fiction mapping. I finally went to Paintbrush, but I think I’ll just download the Tools John mentions on his site and quit being so stubborn about making a rambling English manor type with angles and extra rooms that make you still feel wonderfully lost after staying there a month. Guess I’ll stick to simple and save the creative for the story line.