STORYSPACE: Purposeful Linkage and Guard Fields
Spent some time last night going through the links from one main path to another and I think I may have gotten overzealous in cutting them.
One of the reasons that I have taken advantage of the guard fields is the way the narrative is laid out in four main paths. Once a link is made onto another path, if the reader should follow that path through, he’d not only be dropped into a different environment (an entirely new space that both combines and defies simultaneous existence), but he may be dropped somewhere in the middle of a story without at least some clue of what’s going on. I suppose I should allow this, but because the main characters are involved in each of the stories, I’m thinking it might be confusing until the gist of the narrative–choice being concurrent in time–be realized.
But I do want to allow as much traveling between stories as possible, so that’s something I’m going to be focusing on in the next few days. I suspect that at this point I may also break down and read some of the valuable information at Eastgate’s Hypertext Now and Patterns, etc. that while it may be too late to consider for this project, may at the very least help me in making link decisions.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology