Hypercompendia

Working with "guard fields" — what serves as fencing to prevent a reader from going further along the natural path provided by a writing space and force him to back up to either a main path of story different from where you’ve led him or onto a new trail.

Sort of inconsistent with the idea of hypertext, but it’s a necessary evil or there may be no method to his reading pattern and all your patient work on story will be wasted on a wanderer to whom your story will make little sense.

Besides, it gives me the control I crave.

It would seem to me that if you placed a guard field on every writing space so that link 2-B cannot be followed until 2-A has been read, and 2-C not until 2-B, etc., then likely you’ll have covered all bases.  Particularly in this piece, Paths, there being 4 stories, whenever I’m interlinking them, say 1-A to 3-F, then most likely I’ll want to return to either 1-A or 1-B and so on the link to 3-F, the guard field would be "3-E".

Now I’m sensing that this could work more creatively if I didn’t already have four fairly linear narratives, where backstory references and the characters themselves are the connections.  It might also be a consideration to allow the reader to go a few writing spaces into another story, say three or four links’ worth, but without serious rewriting on this particular project, I’ll hold that thought for the next.

Another thought: As big a PITA as going through and doing all the guard fields after the main work has been mostly complete (I’m still getting vibes so I’m still filling writing spaces–love the little baby boxes you can make so easily–the same ones I complained about as breeding rabbits in a prior post), I’m wondering how the guard fields are created concurrently with the writing process–wouldn’t that be rather restrictive since so much is still unknown?  But going through 1000 plus links (as in Ersinghaus’ The Life of Geronimo Sandoval) as a one-time editing deal would have to be a monumentous task of concentration, patience, and an inherent sense of direction.