Hypercompendia

It’s so strange for me to be actually planning out the structure of a story beyond the opening line.  Though in some ways, the map as I have it here may be considered dual directional and expanding into whatever areas it claims in its flow.  But it’s pretty obvious from just this rudimentary Map View that it’s a narrative that involves man against man, or us versus them.

I just know that it is not within my nature to keep this freeflow going on beyond too many more spaces.  I will just have to have them lined up somehow in neat rows that I’ll mess and move around a bit just when someone’s looking or when I post an updated view here to make it appear that I’m not quite as regimented as I tend to be.

What the above really represents is more a placeholder for each of the ideas as they come to me–mostly in story form, meaning written as prose–but there are obvious character and setting spaces that will become prime threads or paths.

One thing I’d noticed while doing some final reading and editing in Paths is that there were several ideas or phrases or images that reappeared, i.e., lion, wind, etc., that without conscious planning flowed right into another space that reinforced the theme.  What this tells me is that when you get this entrenched in your story, the clock on the wall is bound to show up in several scenes because you see it in the corner of your mind.  With the Storyspace Writing Spaces, these just happen to come up and tie the idea together whereas in straight text, you’ll find sometimes that you wish the author could come up with a different word because it seems repetitive.  I’m not sure what I’m saying here, but I think it’s a case of hypertext = reinforcement versus traditional linear = repetition.  The reaction, at least as writer, is not “oh shit, I said that already a few pages back,” but rather, “wow, that must be symbolic because I’ve mentioned it twice already.” Maybe just one more of the side benefits of the hypertext environment.

Editing.

It’s inevitable.  Within fifteen minutes of sending off your work for someone else to read–unfortunately, not your copyeditor–you find the typo.

I must have read this particular Writing Space in Paths at least a hundred times (honest, it was a part of the original story) and just found Chloe eating ‘choccolate’ on her porch.

Here’s just one more reason why it’s vital to the hypertext community to establish itself as a major movement in literature; we need more people willing to read for editing purposes.  I’m a pretty damn good copyeditor myself and I’ll miss a few now and then and maybe I’m not so hot on semicolons and tenses but I’ll usually find errors in published books and such.  This e-mail notice from my local TV news last night produced an immediate giggle:  “Obama wins Iowa Republican caucus”.

But you think I’d catch my own?  Particularly at this time of the season when there’s still about four (empty) boxes of chocolates sitting in front of me in the living room?

Big Charlie Brown ‘sigh.’

I’m really antsy to get going on a new story idea that’s really different than anything I’ve written so far, and Storyspace is the ideal medium to bring it to life.

The general idea is of man against man–one of the basic plots in life but this will be grounded in today’s realities that point easily to a possible scenario: a diminishing work force supporting an increasingly long-lived baby boomer population.  I’ve got all kinds of ideas picked up over the last few years, including my own "apple and blanket in the woods" plans for a nice quiet "I’ll get out of the way now" ending.   This necessarily will involve past, present and future points in time, but with hypertext, messing around with that is the fun part.

I’m also interested in playing more with some graphics and sound in Storyspace, but might talk Steve into experimenting together on the Marie narrative we were playing with some time ago.

The neat thing about having already created a Storyspace piece, and particularly in the needing to form and manipulate the story into the software environment is that I’ve learned lots more about solving problems using the medium than just going with the flow.  That opened up a lot of opportunities that I might not have come up against just in building a story suiting the form.

Likely as not I’ll post a couple of the opening writing spaces as soon as they’ve settled into a structure of sorts–and even that’s more easily coming to mind now that I’ve both read some of the information on hypertext fiction and played in it myself.

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.

Well I think I’m at the end of the trail here with this one.  I’ve bottomed out at 300 writing spaces and 386 links and believe that everything that needed to be in the narrative is, and without someone else to read for language and flow, I think it’s just about as done without going nuts over it. 

What I’m spending time on now is proving the links by following them out.  I don’t know that I used hypertext to its full advantage, although perhaps I did while remaining within the constraints of the program (and yes, there are some for me as far as what I might have liked to do with this in a different way).  But more, I don’t think this piece would pass the test of allowing several paths through the story.  There is really but one with the opportunity of taking sidetrips into discovering more about the characters and their relationships and what affected their lives that brought them to this short period of relevant time we focus upon.

I like it for that reason alone–I think it did exactly what I wanted in the narrative.  I’m sick of reading it though since it’s been on the screen display for nearly two months straight.

When I’m done with it, which should be today, I’ve got to decide whether I can somehow get it online to make it available or whether it just lives out its natural life on my hard drive.

New Map View showing the latest addition (now up to 275 Writing Spaces–having started out with 75).

And this, a play on the Berries links that infiltrate one of the character’s pov of the narrative that seemed to flow out from something else he had said, something that brought back a memory to him that reveals a bit more of what brought him to this point in his life and his reflections.

Berries

I remember the little girl who lived downstairs from my grandmother.  I remember watching her jumping rope on the sidewalk in front of the apartment building. She was about my age and I’d tried to talk to her but she made it obvious that she was ignoring me.

Strawberries raspberries huckleberry pie…

At each flip of the rope she’d hop over, her skirt would flit up with the jump. I’d watch because sometimes she’d catch the back of it in the rhythm of her sing-song movements and it would lift up high enough to almost reveal her panties.  She’d look at me then and laugh.

So this side of Jeremy is more vulnerable, and it is sandwiched (to continue the food theme I realized I have going throughout this story–as with much of my writing anyway) between a new sequence of spaces that bring in Jeremy’s interaction with his grandmother and the sequence I’d laid down previously of his philandering.

I suppose this can be done in straight writing but it’s become part of the experience of Storyspace’s hypertext medium and I can only hope that the opportunity becomes habit and incorporates itself in all future writing I do, regardless of the method.

We lost good men to lions and we lost good men to gas.

More to hold us all together, one would think.  Tears the sticky web wrought by an all-knowing spider, pain the exquisite experience of all men at some pinpoint in parallels of time.

I don’t care.  I like it.  It also reveals by a short hop of three Writing Spaces some background of this central relationship, the religious upbringing that can’t help but appear in even the most liberal of thought.

Just as this establishes a place and framework of mind for our heroine, Anne:

But the baby, the youngest of the brood, ah that’s the sweet spot of family life.

I wore the same dress in a different size and just a slightly different style for nine years straight as I grew into them, those swirls of flowers caught up on a bolt, cut out and so lovingly sewn by my mother to save some money.

My sisters still tease and offer hand-me-downs in exchange for last year’s cashmere sweater.

What I’m doing then as I read through what is hopefully one of the finally final times, is polishing words and decorating characters.  I’ve thought about adding more time, but that’s not necessary here.  This really should be a day’s depression, a backache that leaves you low, a snowstorm that cuts off electricity (and your laptop’s battery has run down).   But there’s always room for detail if it shows me one more thing about the characters and their story.

Not by the deadline of the year’s ending, but surely within a day or two this project will be called complete and I will move on to something else of one form or another.

Today I’m blessed with poetry of mind–usually indicative of somber reflection at best; ill will at worst–and find the better word or phrase or lyrical device to say the same thing that was said already but not as well.

Some new characteristics of the characters have come to light as scenes from their pasts–if that is true at all–come to their mind and thus to mine.  Perhaps it is this time of change; the year simmering to a cooling leftover memory.  Perhaps it is my own need to close some books and put them far away upon a shelf I barely reach, but can.

Just nice to have some movement here.  Laying down some lines to offer whoever else may ever read this story.  Strange feelings here too; the audience–if any–would not likely be the type familiar with the form.  Those familiar with the form not likely to care about the story.  This, I suppose, is what is meant by writing for oneself alone.

I think it’s time to run off into new directions and I’m considering a 3-D Animation course that will get me up to par on the Flash a lot quicker than I’ve been able to manage on my own.  It’s also the discipline of a course that, like writing courses, keeps one’s mind from slacking off when times get tough.

Also think it’s time to change the banner here and that’s fun stuff to do.  Maybe open the New Year with new ideas and a logo to reflect that goal.

Needed to get away from this project for a few days because I really want to finish it up and maybe start on something new. 

But have I taken it as far as it can go?  Even if the story sucks it should be complete (suck completely?) before I shelve it and move on.  My concern here has been that in twisting the story to fit into the hypertext environment (not a big problem since it was made for this) I still feel that I haven’t used the concept of hypertext to its full potential.  To do this, however, messes the narrative up–or so I think.  Maybe I just don’t truly understand what I’m doing, or maybe my view of hypertext is not completely faithful to its purpose, I don’t know. 

I think that I’m just going to let this one do what it wants to do naturally, and where the hypertext helps and enhances, it truly does.  But where it’s not going to work to help the story above making it a reader’s choice for paths, I’m going to avoid forcing it to fit the mold.