Hypercompendia

On the 100 Days Project, Steve Ersinghaus is writing a fiction a day to match John Timmons’ videos. His pieces aren’t all necessarily stories but rather concepts and scenes and characters that pop in and out. Today’s piece is a visual map of a hypertext and it really is cool: the generic path protocol

I first became aware of the Electronic Literature Organization either in a Contemporary Literature class or New Media and have visited it now and then, mostly to find some new pieces along with the classics. There hadn’t been a lot of new input added in the resources or the literary works in the last few years but that seems to have changed lately, with a more concerted effort to find and add new work to the ELO Directory.

Scene II: I’ve got a hundred hypertext pieces on my hands from last summer’s 100 Days Project and while the whole thing was a learning process and some still would benefit from some editing, I would like to have them read. That is, after all, the reason we writers write. I’d considered publishing the body of work as a whole, either on an updated, dedicated site or on DVD and for the past years, I’ve submitted a few of them that I thought were particularly good whether for story or form, reworked with images or presentation but had little success. It’s a hard sell, despite the fact that most literary journals are online these days and if ever the time is right for hypertext, it’s now. Hypertext demands a reader’s attention; not all editors trust their readers I guess.

Scene III: I realized today that this body of work has been reviewed and listed at the ELO Directory and this just made the whole project and the work and time involved more than a creative exercise and hypertext learning process. I am positively thrilled, knowing that there is a permanent spot for my work on the ELO bookshelf and that the stories have a good chance at being read over the years by new media enthusiasts.

Another of my pieces, Blueberries which was published by The New River Review, is at the Directory and I’m in the company of some great talent and great friends like Steve Ersinghaus, Diane Greco, Alan Bigelow, Dorothee Lang and of course, the writers I studied, Montfort, Joyce, Moulthrop, Jackson and more. I’m honored and just plain happy.

Added note: Mark Bernstein has an excellent post on the Directory and makes some good points about some classic hypertext pieces that should be there. I’d say that his collaboration with Greco, Reading Hypertext, would be a welcome if not necessary addition as well.

Finally got some time and mental energy today to go back and tackle the Agents feature of Tinderbox. With another bit of help from Steve Ersinghaus, I found the problem that had me stymied for a while this morning in the code string. Right now, I’m working with the current (summer 2010) project for which I’m writing a story each day.

I’d already separated the stories by Adornments into four categories of conflict but there were many more ways I wanted to sort them. So far, I’ve only got 37 stories, but there are a few I know I’d like to submit at some point and one that has already been taken for publication, so “Favorites” and “Published” became necessary Agents. The other obvious sort, geared towards the literary market, are “Word Count” and “Genre” as this would help me narrow down style of story and word count restrictions to the particular magazine.  These Agents will also be integrated into the “Literary Endeavors” Tinderbox file I have nearly complete as far as entries, as well as last year’s 100 hypertext stories from the 100 Days 2009 project.

Okay, so I cheated a lot on getting the agents to work by merely entering the text “Favorites” for example, into the box of the item, above the story, rather than properly create Attributes. That’ll come as soon as I’ve got all Agents set up and working here, and before I use that information in the other two project. I’m psyched!

It’s Day #18 and as you can see, I’ve since added another Adornment labeled “Universe” which is sort of a catchall for stories that either have something to do with the world and nature at large or simply don’t fit real well into the other categories.

I’ve also added a couple of Notes (templates, images) and a couple of Agents (Word Count, Favorites–and I know I’ll want Genre eventually) though I haven’t yet set them up to work properly. All in good time.

This is the first time I’ve actually used Tinderbox as the working form of a project from the beginning. The last 100 Days project I’m still in the process of entering into a Tinderbox file–though the hypertext pieces themselves were all written into individual Tinderbox files. What is obvious is that it’s best to start simple unless the whole project is already laid out in your mind. Things change, things develop, much like hypertext story. You don’t want to be redoing and rearranging once a project is already sprawling out. It’s much easier to let the project ask for its own changes when it senses a modification is necessary. Oh, of course I don’t mean Tinderbox talks (not yet anyway!) but it does present a visual that makes it easier to identify where something can be arranged in a more structured manner, or is growing lopsided and needs division like a lily clump.  It’s obvious here that I seem to be writing more stories on relationships. That may need to be separated into more defined areas of human relationships. Unless that’s not politically correct…

Okay, so there are only five stories written so far but the pattern of themes has already started to establish itself:

In first level writing and literature, we’re taught the dearth of plots and the general concept of “man versus man,” etc. What I think this series of summer stories may be based upon is struggle and the adversary determines the “type” of story, here separated by color and Adornment names of Self, Relationships, and Society.

There may naturally be additions made as time goes on, as a theme such as war, for example, may go under any of these but just might call for a new category such as Event, or Future, etc. Tinderbox allows for building into a cohesive whole and though I’m just beginning, I’m hoping that something doesn’t strike me halfway through as a better organizational layout. Things can always be changed, but not without a bit of effort, so I might just put some more time into planning at this early stage of the game.

Well it seems that I work better under pressure; there are a dozen unfinished stories on my desktop that have sat there for weeks with a sentence, a paragraph added in a fit of creativity. But inspired by both a piece of work from a fellow artist and the concept of deadline, I’m hitting my stride with a story a day.

Here’s where the building blocks of ideas turn into more than just concept into a solid form. Last year I didn’t have the expertise nor the time with Tinderbox to assemble the 100 hypertext pieces into a Tbox file. For this project, I’m starting out with Tbox and already have some general organization in place. The main thought, however, is to allow for various mediums that some of the stories may employ (hypertext, flash, image, audio, etc.) so that I do want that ease of transition that keeping all in Pages would not allow. I may use all html templates. This I can readily do in Tbox. While the link to the stories (100 Days – 100 Stories 2010) is currently a page on Spinning, this too may change with time.

Then again, half the fun of any project is learning how to get from A to B and so on, and raising more interesting paths along the way.

Sometime last week or so I posted about a man I knew years ago who did panoramic photography. Well in reading around today I found an article on Wired called “Do It Yourself 3D” and that brought back memories too.

I worked/lived with a photographer a couple decades ago and so ran into folks seeking special photographic printing which my partner did very well (I did the picture framing and tried to learn photography on field trips taking rolls of film of a turtle on a stump). One of our customers did manage to rig up a camera system that took images in stereoscope (?) that produced a 3D effect.

Some things come through and stick. Some things come as a trend and fade away. And some things drift in and out like clouds, better each time for the passing.

Been playing in Tinderbox the last few days, trying to update the Literary Endeavors file with all current submissions–both straight and hypertext, stories and poetry–and it’s intensive. This is only because I’m backtracking with hundreds of bits of data from emails, spreadsheets, bookmarks and their websites, that have accumulated over the past maybe six months actively, though some of the info is on older stories and such that were sent out in spurts of ambition over the past few years, with years in between.

I’m caught up to a point that tells me a few things. One, the design of the Tinderbox file changes with the input; while I loved the threads of links from work to venue and luckily, was smart enough not to put return trails for all replies, a pattern established itself that proved itself to be the best way of keeping track of things at a glance at the mapview. This set a new method of linking submission to publisher.

What I’ve decided on now is to link from the story box to the venue via the publisher’s name, and including the name of the story within the publisher’s box. Doing it this way, I can see exactly how many and which stories are out there awaiting replies. When a reply comes in, the link is either deleted (with the date entered within the boxes) or turned into a happy bold red acceptance link from publisher to story.

Another thing this mapview tells me at a glance is that I don’t currently have much in the pipeline!

So here comes the next project on the agenda: to write, rewrite, throw away into the black hole, or send out, some stuff. The most important will be rewriting–and this includes the hypertext pieces that were done over last summer. It’s hard to find a home for a hypertext; so until these have been placed somewhere in some form, I discounted the initial idea of writing a hundred more this summer for the 100 Days Project. On the other hand, the discipline of a deadline worked for me…

Which means that while not a part of it, I’ll possibly be setting up a goal for myself to do X every day (for a grand total of 100 Xs) alongside the project–just outside the fence. What I’m thinking of now is either a hypertext poem (short and easy) or a short story a day, just enough to leave time for two other concepts I’ve been putting off–stretchtext and another flash piece or a movie.

And, of course, the garden, reading, and sitting around drinking wine.

Gosh, these are getting better and better in their attempts to slide past the spam filters (they don’t make it). Can you imagine, the following comment was left on a Tinderbox post from a dog food place (which I’m visiting and warning that he’s gotta quit spamming people or I’ll give him some real bad press about it):

I hate to sound like a nitpick, but your grammar is just…deplorable.  I want to be interested in this, I really do.  But it seems you spent so much time on the design (which, I will say, is amazing) that you forgot that people actually have to read your blog.  Clean this up…PLEASE.  It could be so much bigger if you just did some work.

A new digital story from one of my favorite writers of new media, Alan Bigelow, is now available at Webyarns.

It’s a flash piece, and as with all of Alan’s work, it is thought-provoking and contemporary in this day of wondering what the world is all about and how and where we happen to fit in. The carnival effect which is one of the backgrounds of the visual is so telling of what we often feel inside our brains, the whirl of movement, the noise of a crowd that surrounds us, the focus inward despite the blur that represents the world of people pacing at a different speed. I like the opening of military stringency that places a burden on the mind and body and the coughing that may indicate that we just don’t measure up–perhaps hinting at fatal flaw of smoking, or dependency that helps yet hinders our achievement of our goals.

I love the simple statements that are relevant to us all and yet reach beyond the norm: “My brain is in the past, present and future tense” and my favorite: “My brain is the last place I look for my keys.”Meanwhile, relevant facts of more physical reference float by as if secondary to the revelations of self-analysis.

But each opening space offers something else. Entering via a different path of “The Metaphor Room,” we are given a different pace, a dreamlike spot in the brain that oddly is more of a reality as it expands away from self to the interaction with others. with a seemingly more empirical knowledge of the world.

More of Alan’s work can be viewed at Webyarns, as well as archived at the ELO Directory.