Hypercompendia

Last night I took part in a panel discussion at Tunxis Community College (Farmington, CT) on the creative process along with five other participants in the 100 Days Project.

While I focused on the creative process of hypertext rather than my work, I probably inadvertently did a disservice to the medium. In showing the underpinnings of Tinderbox and the technical process of export templates, css, etc., I likely made it look more intimidating rather than a welcoming way of writing. The final stories, with their color and drama may have been more impressive and inviting than highlighting the html or the mapping–despite the fact that I personally find beauty in the symmetry and freedom of the process.

At any rate, being a writer not a speaker, I had my talk all written out and complete with the few visuals, have it available here and as a permanent link in the sidebar: The Creative Process: A Blend of Skills

While I’ve still not recovered from the 100-Day project to get back on track with reading and reviewing literature here, tonight along with five of the 14 participants I will be presenting a brief talk on the creative process.

Horror had been my most favorite reading for a couple decades in my younger days. It still attracts me, both in reading and in writing. The last of the 100 hypertexts was actually a horror story.

So that’s what’s coming through to me today, unbidden, and frankly, with a pile of picture framing to do, unwanted. But we’ll see who’s mistress and servant in my mind. Hypertext, by its nature of hidden rooms and dusty corners, is exquisitely designed to hold haunted houses and double-edged people.

In reworking and reorganizing the project I sometime stop and read some of the early ones I don’t even remember writing.

#28 Dreamers came to this and I laughed out loud:

In this story, there are five different endings. In real life, there are hundreds, maybe thousands more.

In hypertext story, we often allow ourselves choices, ways to return and rechoose. In this story, you are committed to the ending you chose just by the turns you have taken. Mayhaps you feel some regret.

Grow up. Just as in real life, some races cannot be rerun.

(Back to Home)

One of the projects I’m working on is getting the 100 Hypertexts Project into a Tinderbox File. Each individual story was created in an individual Tinderbox file, then sent out to a regular Document folder in a folder called Summer Project 09 on my Mac. Within each separate story folder was the Tbox file, the column100.html export template, the column100.css stylesheet with the color coding reflecting the particular story’s theme, an image of the Tbox map in .jpg, and the story page html files.

It worked well and I made it through without having time to learn how to properly use Tinderbox to create the entire project of 100 hypertext stories within a single file. Now I want to put them in there. With a bit of help, I’ve been able to drag the individual story Tbox files into containers in a new Tbox file.

I’ve just put in twenty of the stories so far, since this whole thing may not work in exporting yet as I would like it to. Meanwhile, there are some things that need to be cleaned up so that I’ve got all working in the same manner. Here’s the list of to do’s before I take it further:

1. Change hypertexts #1 through #25 from main100.html and main100.css to column100.html and column100.css. This involves changing the template choice in the Tinderbox program, changing the color codes into the new css, changing the individual pages to point to the new html and css. I could just let it go and play with it in the new Tbox file that I’m creating but I’m meticulous enough to want it right everywhere. (Though I’m not sure what I’ll do about the online versions which reflect the old styles!)

2. Add in the title writing space for all 100 hypertexts. I left the title separate in each folder just to play with colors and so it was never a part of the Tbox file. I am now putting in a title lexia and linking it in to each Tbox story file. Hopefully I won’t run into problems with a duplicate file on this later.

3. Find out whether the work I’m doing with the column100.css is the proper way of doing this; perhaps it will be better in a prototype to refer to the css and rename it to match the story, i.e., 1001.css or story1.css, story2.css, etc., so that Tbox doesn’t get confused with 100 really individual stylesheets all named the same. Come to think of it, the same problem may occur with the writing space called “title” or any other duplicated named spaces within the whole 100 stories. Something to think about.

4. Figure out or request a feature if necessary from Eastgate that would allow me to export just a story at a time, particularly if it’s all kept within a container. This is something that will need to be ironed out before I go and put the other eighty stories into this.

Now I don’t need to make this whole move, the project’s done and over with. And, I doubt I’d ever do it again next summer or whenever. But there are reasons to move forward on the concept. Personally, I may do something similar on a website where stories, poetry, and articles etc. on hypertext will be added on a weekly or monthly basis; an online hypertext literary journal so to speak. In that case, of course I’d like to use Tinderbox as the brain behind it all. I’m sure others do this with ease so there must be a way of exporting just portions of a file without exporting the whole thing.

This, I suppose, will be my autumnal project.

Prepping a talk on the creative process and it’s been fun looking back at some of the stories of the 100 Days Project. In particular, I love these maps:

(Click here to enlarge map)

(Click here to enlarge map)

I think that a good part of the creative spirit of this project went into the visuals as well as the text. When speaking of creative process, one cannot discount the tools: the software, the mechanics, the technical.

Funny how a few comments and suggestions that make you go back and rework, rewrite a piece focuses the writer on the process to the point of noticing things he (she) hadn’t even realized were there.  This happens in traditional straight text as well, but the patterns are so much more useful and possible in hypertext form.

While Mark sent me back to Blueberries for specifics that he’d noticed, in answering his points I began to notice threads of themes. There is a little boy of storytelling brought up in one path of the story that I now have come to see may be the same character that haunts the protagonist after the death of her father. The character signifies adventure and change, something that the protagonist appears to need to depend upon others to achieve.

I’m still tweaking and will for a while, but one little change of wording in one of the endings revealed Mark’s catch on the religious thread that I hadn’t really seen.

ORIGINAL: I don’t answer, just stare back into black eyes that have eaten my soul. That night he finishes the rest of me.

NEW:  I don’t answer, just stare back into black eyes that have eaten my soul. Later that night he takes my hand and we go home where he swallows me whole.

With the new version that came from tweaking for language and intent rather than any particular need to tie in the image, I see a relationship with the priest, the Sunday dress, etc., and in the above, the swallowing of the Host. The words “swallow me whole” while metaphorical, are now more open to interpretation both sexual and religious, and another possibility which is what I think I felt it was, of emotional damage overtaking a mind.

Interesting. I just love the way hypertext makes you see these things.

Ah, one would have thought that a summer spent daily in hypertexting would have been enough to run the well dry both narratively and fingerclickingkey coding. That overdose helped along by peeling barn paint, irate out-of-patience framing clients, and a spouse reduced down to a starved 90-lb weakling. So the end of summer promised hours of reading and getting things done.

However, life doesn’t follow linearity if you consider string theory and warp speeds. Life is hypertext. With four little words, a caret and apostrophe, Steve Ersinghaus set me back on the trail of the elusive specialized html export template. And I got a wonderful surprise email from Mark Bernstein with an extremely valuable critique on my latest Blueberry hypertext. Which means that I’m back to writing and coding.

And I am trying to get some time into reading. The book? Reading Hypertext.

Jeepers, just an itty-bit of mangled code on an export template and you too can create this:

Mark Bernstein counters my post with the very viable “But leading the reader to an unexpected dinner at Grandma’s is exactly what writers do…” and goes on to praise the remarkable Mary-kim Arnold  and her hypertext classic, “Lust”.