Hypercompendia

A long time coming, but a dedicated effort in the past two months on completing the Paths project has pretty much come to a finish today.  (And no, I’m not changing the name–I both started and finished first.)

I’d love to be able to share it, but I’ll have to look into how it can be made available online and if it’s worth the trouble if I can’t do it myself. 

The story is sort of tame and reflective, perhaps it even limits itself to a generation that remembers the 70s and is now facing middle age and seeking answers for questions they asked decades ago.  But it also is relevant to every age group as–with luck–we all go through the different stages in life and make choices based on where we are and where we want to be.

There’s no question that even with the small amount of preplanning for hypertext when I wrote these stories a couple years ago, they have bloomed and hybridized into something I couldn’t imagine at the time.  The Storyspace hypertext medium allowed for deeper penetration into areas of the characters that didn’t create havoc with timelines and point of views.  Or at least, it didn’t get in my way any, and I may have taken liberties with the story under the guise of hypertext opportunity.

I’m anxious to get back into Storyspace and create from scratch, being more aware now of how it works and how it frees the storyteller to enter all phases of narrative, to cross borders with a link.  I wonder if the environment will provide enough of an impetus to carry me forward as it did with Paths.  I wonder what the base of the framework will be. 

In the meantime, if there’s a way of making Paths available to interested readers, I’ll do so.