Hypercompendia

In the process of preparing an event covering the changes required in thinking as a writer of hypertext, there’s a barrier that I somehow keep brushing up against: a lot of people hate hypertext.

You, faithful readers, gasp and clutch your chest as if I’ve uttered some impossible theory of evolution such as man’s descent from elephants instead of apes. (Though think about it; don’t you know someone who is hairier than you’d like to think about with canines reminiscent of Nosferatu?)

But there it is, the facts of life, the bias of the masses for traditional book-form narrative and against the somewhat mazelike hedge of story in a map. (Though think about this too; there are outlines made for traditional novel-writing too and I just saw one the other day at a speaker’s slideshow presentation at the Tunxis Writers Festival that made me bounce up and down to keep from shouting, "Have you never heard of Tinderbox?")

So concurrent with my study I’ll be working on this prejudice problem we "cool" folk like to forget (or maybe feel a touch of elitist pride in taking) is there against the format of our stories.  It’s all well and good to cluster in groups discussing the latest hypertext offering and yet, unless you don’t have friends within your circle who’ve never read Joyce’s Afternoon, it’s a hard sell even to your very closest literary comrades.  Even to those, I find, who may have been exposed to such in campuses across the nation but will never ever think of ordering the latest greatest output in hypertext again.

This may get mean and dirty, but I intend to dig.