Hypercompendia

Haven’t been inspired to work on this piece for a while, yet in the middle of nailing a corner together in the frameshop, I got this:  She ran her hand along the edge of summer…  Which with a bit of coaxing became this:

She ran her hand along the edge of summer, touching the overhead branches that drooped with the weight of the sun. A shiver shook her bones, sent them to sing like a tuning fork plucked by the long reach of September.  Cold wind remembered nibbled away at her skin.  She paused to button the front of her sweater, her fingers melting in the mink coat her mind wore.

I need to read McCarthy, Gay, poetry.  I’m wandering too far from the fountain with the narratives I’m currently reading.  I need to read more hypertext as well.  We are what we eat; what our mind chews on and swallows, what makes us smack our lips with delight.

Once you’ve written in hypertext, particularly using Storyspace, your thinking on links is forever affected by the process.

About an hour ago I linked to one of my own posts on a post I was entering into Spinning. What I wanted to do–and attempted without thinking twice–was to link to a particular phrase within the referenced post.

I was expecting a thread!

Here’s an interesting graphic novel, hypertext, and audio all mixed into one:  nawiz

Been wanting to do another visual poem since screwing around with Recycling a couple years ago. That was worked in Photoshop with drawings and photographs I’d done just to come up with something, and laid out in Windows Movie Maker. 

I’m intrigued by the medium of animation–though since I’d had Albert Einstein toss his head across the courtyard to Socrates in Alice I’d recognized my limitations early on. Really should just take a course in animation or really buckle down to learn the basics on my own but I’m too easy on myself and let the training slide. I did enjoy the manipulation of images though, and maybe there’s a way of fooling around with that as long as I can either take the photos myself or get down again to drawing.

But even as I’m no writer, I’m even less the poet and even less, if possible, the artist.  But poetry is short and simple and filled with imagery and feeling–or should be. Yet I’m a one-man-show here and it’s all just a learning thing rather than some kind of contest.  The challenge is to me; the challenger is only me as well.

Another new project direction and a start: a poem to match with animated graphics:

Thinking
he knew everything of earth
he stole the wings of a butterfly king
and fled

drinking
from rosy cups of peonies and
milky lilies nodding as courtesans waving
him by

lifting
above soft brushing of  the trees
painted emerald green, he spiraled higher
then

crushing
wings against a solid sapphire
sky, a frozen reflection of the sea
he fell

crashing
lying broken as the stones
now streaked blood red with wanting
more

One step forward, three steps back. No doubt about it, for me (and likely only me) the hypertext format of Storyspace forces me to reread and rewrite the writing spaces individually each time I go in to work on a project.  God only knows what the original one was worded as but this is likely not to survive too long either:

John Kellerman’s nights wrapped around him, tucked in by alley walls that held the day’s warmth in a fragile grasp within an hour’s touch of the new sun rising. The faint click of a traffic light, an occasional hailing of a lonesome cab the lullaby to which he slept.

It seems I just can’t bounce ahead blithely spewing story; a spit in every box.  I read and fix and read and fix each box it takes me to get to the end where something new is supposed to happen.  Sometimes I’m so worn out I never reach that point.  But this: I think I’ve left a better trail.

It’s no new wisdom that we grow from what we experience, from the toddler’s first tumble to the failures and successes of adulthood man learns something from every episode of living.  We are what we have been and what has happened to change us along the way.

When we write story, we have a character who comes to us full grown. We throw a few things out there for him and watch to see if he will avoid, stumble over, and face them head-on. We don’t always understand the reactions we get from him, and here’s where backstory comes in handy.  Not to merely set up a situation by event, but by the character’s reaction to that event to more importantly round him out to comprehend him.

That’s what’s happening for me now in my current wip, and likely why it’s taking me so long; each character is being revealed slowly as they walk to the heartbeat of the park; the scenario and setting where they will meet in some manner for just a fraction of a moment but one that changes them each in certain ways forever.

Hypertext is the perfect medium for such strong character development.  We get an idea of who someone is by what they’re doing, and when we ask why? we take that trail and discover an answer.  In hypertext, we can mark that trail for others who are curious enough to follow.   Is it vital information?  Maybe not–to the plot of story anyway.  But to the understanding and enjoyment of the story?  Yes.

…the story grows.  A mapview and a glimpse into a man’s fading world:

Here I was, all nicely balanced map-wise and then a stroke of thought that something I had written in another blog was perfect for and needed as a grounding in this hypertext.  So copy and paste I did, and then went to disconnect and reconnect the links and lo and behold! – It screws the whole thing up!

So delicately I save and move away.  I now have two spaces that both want to be the first and yet only one, the second, can properly branch out to story. 

Major revision #12 to work on today.

I think I’m treating Tinderbox as a software to be learned rather than using it for its purpose, that of organizing notes.  Here’s what I wrote down on today’s list to do (It’s Monday, I feel obligated to write a list):

Laundry
Bills
Graham & Zoee – BD cards & money
Lengthen jeans (I grew!)
Add clarifier to wines
Call: Dr. Ouelette (J)
          Atty. Wall
           Dr. Norberg (S)
Cover couch (this has been here for two years)
Make drapes (this one for five or six)
Paint barn
J’s pc – sound, email, hard drive
Clean cellar for furnace man
Trim bushes
Weed hill garden
Call:  Fran
           Betty
email Ronnie
Ck on IRAs & pension stock distribution
Order chops & supplies

You can see that what started out as a plan for today, became an overambitious plan for the week, and is in truth a plan for the summer and likely into  next spring.  Many of these items have been the lone uncrossed-out task that becomes heavier with guilt as each time it is snuck into a new list.  Sometimes, when I clean off the corner of the table where there’s a stack of "must-do immediately’s" –like this past weekend when friends came for a meal–I find a bunch of old lists while sorting through and tossing out at least half of the "must-do" items–like expired coupons and applications I half-seriously thought about filling in.  Some of these have appeared on each and every list.  Sometimes I find something that’s been forgotten that I really, really want or  should take care of doing.

So I start a less elaborate, a more specific, short  term Tinderbox project besides the slowly growing one that has the higher degree of appeal because it holds my more creative mind.  But this one, I’m sure, will somehow be just as fulfilling and with hope, more actively engaged.