Hypercompendia

I want to thank Steve Ersinghaus for some time spent yesterday on discussion of the current Storyspace project and the Storyspace program itself.  He’s given me some ideas that will take me away from my clinging to a somewhat organized layout as well as the impetus to play with some of the guard links and maybe allow the reader more freedom.

We also discussed the idea of the combination of Storyspace and traditional Interactive Fiction–games or narrative requiring reader input to move forward, but input via typing in words that are coded into the program to progress the narrative.  There’s a possibility that we can offer options (well, idiot, of course we can!) in Storyspace that respond via clicks taking the place of the actual typing of word choice.  An e-mail story we’ve been playing with may be the perfect choice to explore this possibility.

I’m really having fun–though it’s the satisfying, serious kind of fun–with Storyspace and while it opens the story and characters so much more to the writer (or maybe it’s just the key that fit for this particular writer), I think that Steve has shown me even more options that I haven’t taken advantage of yet.

I fell asleep last night on an idea and now it’s lost because it was too cold to get out of bed and shuffle to the laptop and write it down.

But this morning I started reading and realized why Anne in Story 1 is so bitter.  Where her life was being led because she was too weak to swim against the tide, and where and when that silly notion had been put into her head.

Paths is becoming more than what it was.  I think the difference is the hypertext atmosphere.  It’s like looking under leaves in autumn woods.  Or landing on Mars without a map.

To better explain by example, though I don’t show the take-off points–the source links, here’s just some random bits of the writing I’ve done in the past couple of days on a story that to me, had been complete long ago:

I mean really, when your child asks you for anything, anything at all, in that sweet lyrical language, well, how cool is that?

"I looked down and saw it–for that was all I could bear to call its name.  But I will know it forever by its body and  its  face though never in my life see it again.

Only the wind.  Moving life on.  What don’t get sucked down into the earth should move on.

Or like the stripped down morning bed you catch sight of when walking down the hall of nursing homes.  An empty chair at evening pinochle.

Now how long can I resist the temptation on that?

I never would have thought that I’d fall so quickly and so thoroughly into the hypertext writing style.  Frankly, wasn’t nuts about reading hypertext novels but then read The Life of Geronimo Sandoval and enjoyed the reading of it as much as reading it.

I’m not sure I’d be as enthusiastic if I didn’t start with a story already pretty much laid out.  I don’t know if facing a blank Writing Space–and the first one at that–is going to be quite as inspirational and freeing as working on this current project.  Even so, I have a hard drive loaded with anything from just titles to opening lines to flash fiction to complete stories, any of which can be starting points and grown from there if they have the potential.  And much can be eliminated from linear story.  White space and explanations such as "she remembered when she was little and this strange man grabbed her…" needed as lead-ins for much of straight narrative aren’t as vital here.  If you feel this might have happened, you drop it in on a path all its own.

I think I love this.

… you call the guy’s eyes deep as chocolate when just a few writing spaces back you compared them to the icy Arctic sea.

This is one of those things that you reread and edit for because the two descriptions were written years apart.  The chocolate being added this morning.

But boyohboy, it’s kind of necessary for his eyes to be dark for both this spot of story and another I’ve put in just beyond it. 

So the sea ice blue may have to go–but not before I’ve checked all the the stories since I know that the word "eyes" was used as a link in some areas.  This is where Storyspace shines:  All I need do is put in "eyes" which is on the list of keywords, and it’ll show me where the word comes up.  Then I’ll assess damages one way or the other and adjust.

Neat, eh? Almost makes you want to screw up just so you can have the fun of fiddling some more. 

Some writers do enjoy the editing and rewriting process.  I’m one of them.  I tinker and tinker until I can’t come up with a better way of saying something, although at some point in the future I most definitely would and will.  When immersed in a story however, one is looking more for language and clarity rather than any real additional data needed in the story–as long as it does indeed contain the story.

With Storyspace it’s a different story–and that’s not just a play on words.  From the original repositioning of the stories I’m playing with from text into hypertext, I’ve gone from 75 writing spaces to 130.  Each time I go through it I can see something more, another bit of information that is not necessarily imperative to the story, but very interesting nevertheless.  Too, how do I know it’s not imperative–I thought the stories were complete as they originally stood but in fact, what I found was so much more behind the characters, so much more that told how they got where they are (or may be) that enriches the story. 

This would not have been noticed except for the Storyspace format, and in particular (for me), the Storyspace Map View.  That doesn’t mean that I see spots where I can throw in some boxes (writing spaces) but rather in seeing the story laid out showing a bit of the text or going by the titles of the boxes I can drill down into them and explore.  And discover new things.  And then write about them.

Gave myself a bit of a break this morning from the Storyspace side, though everything seems to be working well in it and I’ve even had fun writing a couple of sidetracks into the story.  Took the opportunity to remove the page references within the text, and when needing a breather from the intense work on link-checking, I did some editing on the writing itself.

But the fun I needed was with finding four photo images and Photoshopping them in preparation for possible use as title pages.  This gave a rest to one part of my brain and woke up the other, the one that goes in a different path from the alphabetical language.

Story 3 Chloe and The Corn, color and special effects, and B&W: 

Been boring down on the individual link kinks I’ve been having and another fix I’ve found is going from text to text rather than text to writing space and having problems with the guard links in this particular layout.  The proper writing space is selected and I link directly to the word I want so the effect is the same, without the danger of…

Oops.  I forgot to make sure I can’t go further.

Checked and it didn’t fix it.  It’s going to be up to setting stiffer parameters.

Running into problems today and I’ve got to stop and go back before I can go ahead.  I’m running into spaces where I can’t go forward with clicking even though it’s the main narrative thread and guard fields that specify that a prior space must have been visited shouldn’t be the problem because if I’m following that narrative line, I have indeed visited it.

Back to the manual and figure out what I’m doing wrong before I make a mess of it.

Having a much harder time getting through the second story and I suspect that it’ll get harder as I get through three and four.  Likely it’s because of the guard links, and I’m wondering if perhaps I shouldn’t stop and reconsider exactly what I’m doing here.  So far I’ve only used the simple "if you haven’t been here, then you can’t go on" method, but then again, as I get to the four stories in the order I’m reading them, it’s a case of I’ve already read them by the fourth story, so link guard fields may be breached.

Hmmph.  Scrambled eggs and spider webs.