Hypercompendia

Have you ever gone back and read something you’ve written a while ago and you find yourself surprised by your own words?

In preparing a presentation on a writer’s experience with hypertext, I’ve been going back through the posts in the Storyspace category here. I’m copying & pasting the portions of the posts into a Pages program to sort of give myself a timeline of events in learning the hypertext environment as well as highlighting the major points in writing into it.  Then I’ll edit, edit, edit, leaving just some form of outline upon which to base my talk.  But oh, how I wish I could just print out the posts into a book format and hand it out; I’d almost forgotten how exciting a trip it was!

But I did find a gem of an opening line (and as we all know, if I have my opening line then I usually can run from there) and this may even be duplicated in slide show format in case I get too nervous to do more than mumble.  It’s the very first post I wrote on beginning the Storyspace project, and it foretells exactly what was to come, and what I had oddly enough planned as my topic of this talk:

Opening Post, originally on Spinning, 10/27/07:

STORYSPACE: Something New

Got it.  Downloaded and registered and ready to go.  I check out the manual and am almost intimidated: 317 pages.  I don’t like anything that takes 317 pages to learn.

But I’d already played in this and now I’m ready.  The manual’s just a look-see.  There in case I need it while the story’s getting laid.

I am not me and nothing I have written to this time will ever be the same.  It brings out poetics.  It brings ideas.  It is a map that’s ready to be designed into a story.