Hypercompendia

Just Words

Another marital conversation that has deeper meaning underlying the words. A storm as metaphor. A narrative arc that circles back onto itself, but this time, with a completely new meaning to the words spoken.

The links are specifically geared to allow the reader to choose to follow the story by dialogue alone, or with the interjections of action and scenario.

I think that this, next to #51 Snakes and Snails, is one of my personal favorites. With the simple words “I thought you said it would stop,” from Steve’s story, the implication immediately came to mind of what “it” might be. While there is still some tweaking to do here, I think that even in its simplicity it does use the hypertext form well.

Symbols

A strange little boy, unearthly you might say, and a couple who go about their normal routine. In this case, the couple is visiting a museum as the boy observes them.

The mapping of the story is rather simple, allowing the reader freedom to move about the museum watching the boy watch the couple.

An Enth of A Degree Out of Whack

What inspired me here was the concept of when the best laid plans get messed up by a matter of a decision, or a minute’s delay. How does a sudden change affect what some believe is destiny?

This is another group of short-short stories, three spaces each (although four of the stories of two possible endings) when an extra minute is slipped into the space of time.

Revenge of The Kilobytes

Steve’s story implied computer technology that opens up to questions of more intimacy with the user. This inspired me to going a bit beyond the scenario to a more Hal-like computer personality.

I thought of the Windows De-Fragmentation screen where all those little colored boxes are rearranged and bytes of material are sent back to stand alongside their relatives. I thought of networking. I thought of all kinds of cooperation among the kilobyte community and came up with a few pranksters in the group.

…I’m not completely dead in the water. Guess I’m down below max req for Lunar but won’t be moved until they check again.

In the meantime, with no idea what’s causing the problem still I’ll limp along waiting for approval. Also taking out all enlargements of maps and and I’m not posting any more hypertexts until I figure out a few more things. I do have #67 Revenge of the Kilobytes and #68 An Enth of a Degree Out of Whack and am working on #69 just to keep up with the exercise and the idea of deadlines works well.

We’ll see what happens from here. I’m afraid that even my administration visits to WordPress are using up CPUs.

Hiding Secrets

What’s been taking so long with these stories is a general dissatisfaction with my writing lately. The stories need to sparkle just as much as I can make them and that usually takes me days, weeks, months of editing even on short stories.

The time here is spent on the development into the hypertext format. While I’m getting a little better and faster at having all the tools handy and ready as I write the first draft, there’s still plenty of going back and rereading, rewriting. Today I believe I deleted more words than are contained in the final form. And this still for me is not the final version.

In exploring the hypertext aspect I’ve had all different approaches; different endings, all leading to the same ending, carrying the reader through almost the entire story but in different sequences, and depending on the reader to read the story several times to discover all its meanings by leading him out.

It’s ruining my posture, my frame business, my garden, my social life. But it’s something I have to see through to its logical end.

Voices in Your Head

This one took a long time coming and I even had to kill off a character since she was taking too much of the story for herself and it wasn’t about her at all. What prompted this story from Steve’s was a phone call out of the blue. While he brilliantly tied the past to the present with a connection between the callers, I ended up (as usual) with a wrong number.

The mapping structure is a wayward path of several similar stories of the same central character that all lead to the same ending. But the ending will be interpreted by the reader based upon what he has read. I’ve tried to link semantically as much as possible within the interweaving of the storyspace  (that’s not the Storyspace, since I’m using Tinderbox throughout this project). There’s just so very much you can do with hypertext; different endings, different middles, that the possibilties far outweigh the burden of planning even as one strives for concise story and brevity of narrative–which is likely why, after reading Steve’s entry on this topic, I ground to a halt in intimidation and fear.

Annalee and Jacob

In this piece I’ve let the story take whatever turn it desired and entertained all possibilities that offered themselves up. In other words, the author was left just as blind as the reader as to choice.

While there are several points where the story of Annalee and Jacob can recover and change from the path that was chosen, once we get down to the end the result of their connection is completely random. It might make sense to make a story more planned out and predictable, but here there are six different endings of many more different stories.

Sort of like real life.

When The Wind Blows

I’m having problems with my server so this may be the last of the series. This story started out as a phrase a few weeks ago and I saved it for a better time to develop. When it appeared to tie in with Steve’s daily story I set it up and went to work.

But it didn’t go where I’d expected. It was to be a humorous piece about cloning–what else would you expect when someone’s nose blows off and lands on your forehead? But it soon became a politically charged statement and it dragged out all day.

Finally able to go back and change track to a certain degree, but there’s little humor unless you delight in the macabre.

The Story

Steve’s entire story was like 33 words. Meanwhile, there was a discussion going on at Mary Ellen’s Facebook that has been an ongoing thing since we’ve met, I think, about readerly/writerly, authorly/readerly, and as Mary Ellen appears to be following my own dragmarks in accepting the concept of Barthes, I thought I might use Steve’s story as an example to be interpreted in a classroom discussion.

The linking attempts to cover certain points of the story that are certainly open to interpretation, though only Steve Ersinghaus as the author may know what prompted the story and what meaning he gave to it. And as he taught me, we shouldn’t care about that at all.