Hypercompendia

I’ll betcha it’s the excitement of colored titles on the Writing Spaces, or the grand expanse of the widescreen.  It’s gotta be something like that that’s got me writing more on Paths instead of cutting the ribbons holding the story together.

I’m beginning to formulate a pattern in my mind though that will be a better route for the piece as a whole unit.  It is almost as if the four trails are themselves writing this linear fifth that will set each of the others free to wander and roam and collide  as they should.

So I’m flying high on creative story; the engineering grunt work of laying down tracks which I set myself up for today, may work out easier with the help of a plot.

Weird, man.  I was just posting and went to make a link to another site and had both windows open.  Clicked on one, went to find the key that allows a link to be drawn like a thread to the other. 

Then I realized that after a few hours into it, I was out of Storyspace.

The reorganization of the mapping out of Paths seemed overwhelming but it’s something that has to be done.  To assist in the relayout, I abashedly state that I have come to depend upon the use of paper supplementation to the Storyspace technology.

There is a print feature in Storyspace, but it was more coherent a picture if I copy and pasted the stories space by space, with child spaces into Word and printed it out from there.  Not do-able with a larger piece, and this has 235 spaces.

While I almost thought I’d have to cut the paragraphs apart and put them back together like a puzzle, with the Chart View that I’ve reopened a version into I find that all I need to use the hard copy for is a guideline, or script, as I move the boxes around in the Storyspace program.  It’s a bit dangerous to just clip all the linking threads and set the packages (spaces) free without some manner of direction, so the "script" comes in handy to see what’s happening and what lays ahead since it is necessary to work with the text of the spaces more than just the titles.

I’m into it now.  Up to my eyebrows.

So part of the appearance of Storyspace is related to what is set up as the Win XP preferences.  On the new pc, I just have  a more exciting color scheme selected:

I’m thinking more intelligently–or at the very least, more informed–about narrative presented in hypertext format.  It’s not all about giving the reader free tickets to roam the park at will without guidance of some sort, but rather to lay down the trail through the rides, the petting zoos, and the concession stands in a logical order so that as the sun sets in the western sky, he’ll have eaten fried pizza dough, thrown up on the roller coaster, and just missed getting pissed on by the nubian goats.

As writer, you’ll want him to experience all the loopty-loops you’ve so poetically entered into those Writing Spaces off the main track.  Not only that, he’ll get a different, possibly clearer, possibly more questionable view of the characters with each extra bit of insight that information allows.  But, if he’s determined to race straight through past the monkeys and toss-a-balls-to-win a cheap stuffed purple gorilla just to get sick on the fried dough, than you just have to let him.

Is that a plan or what?

Okay, so I can use stereotypes and turn ‘girl’ in a flash and change my mind.  It just seems that Paths is not only much further along in the hypertext processing plan, but it’s still rather dear to my heart and I want to make this project work because it’s based on a sound theme of story.  I’m still getting questions that would like answers from the characters.  It’s about them, and about that part of them that is in all the rest of us.

It’s also about choices.  And what ifs.  So I think  my own decisions are in keeping with the plot.

In continuing on Mark Bernstein’s essay, I’m getting a different feeling about linking.  In jumping in blindly, I naturally understood the plot linkage, managed to get creative with some side trails, but ran into unrecognized trouble with the interlinking of the stories.  Then and there, I came to depend heavily on guard fields to avoid the stories running into each other without reason or purpose. 

This, from Mark:

It is therefore interesting to note that Storyspace writers use them sparingly.  In the 28 hypertexts examined, 7 used guard field ubiquitously (in more than 20% of all links).  In eight hypertexts, guard fields are used occasionalaly, while in 13, the guard fields are completely absent.  Guard fields rarely require more than one clause: the mean guard field in "Afternoon" has 1.63, but few other hypertexts approach this number.  "Lust," a notoriously complex network, averages only 1.04 guard fields. 

What this tells me is that I need to set up the original structure as the main device for the hypertext flow and foregoe the dependence upon guard fields to make the connections.

These days find me in study mode and my current reading is an essay by Mark Bernstein titled Storyspace 1 that I found and printed out but for the life of me, cannot find the source except that it’s a link somewhere on Eastgate’s or Mark’s site.

What he does here is examine the beginnings and progression of the Storyspace program and gets into the structure of some of the twenty-eight works available at the time.  This is interesting reading as to the hypertext thought process and the efforts to accomodate the notions of reading and writing in a more flexible method.  It also shows me, without having to buy all the fiction available, some of the mapping the writers used and what may be the reasoning behind it.  This, after reading Patterns and Garden, is giving me a clearer picture of the software and what it can do.  I was going to say ‘should" do, but then I’ll once again be certain that not only would it not offer something new, but that it is likely to paralyze me further from action.

More on this later, then it’ll be on to Hypertext Now.

I’m starting on a new project in Storyspace, although this one also is a basis of a short story already written so I have to be careful as to how I approach the transition into multilinear narrative.  The good thing is that I do not have it trailed out, and it is a story that’s been a favorite of mine for years.  The trails are ideas only and I think that this is the best way to work in the Storyspace medium, allowing the imagination to act as a machete to cut new paths.

I’m admittedly stalled here on Paths.  Can’t seem to clearly see my way of structuring and maybe this is the part I’m not so good at doing.  I open the program up several times a day, fiddle a bit, then close it without resolution.  I suppose one could look at the story of this project as hitting several points of conflict and heading towards resolution.  The only thing is, is that in hypertext, there are many paths to take and that’s where I don’t seem to be able to settle upon the right resolution.  Or at least one or a few.

Soon as I’ve got my head out of the main pc and have that all set up with all the programs back in place and the network for sharing replaced, I’ll get back into this with fuller focus.

Or maybe sooner.  Maybe tonight.  Depends on the weather and what else I find that needs to be done that doesn’t draw me in or presents more of a quandry than Paths.