Hypercompendia

After cutting about 30% of the story out, I’m wondering if I’ve possibly cut not too much, but the wrong things.  I’m just not getting that warm fuzzy feeling from the story, the empathy with the character.

Maybe the imagery and language were hiding a rather blah plot beneath them.  There is some depth to the story beyond the simplicity of the linear and the intricate Shards that enhance and provide balance.  The protagonist of this story has been abused emotionally and physically by not just her husbands, but by the traditions of her society.  She has survived.  This story is one of the few I’ve written that goes beyond personal trials to be more representative of a portion of the population, and it’s certainly not a frivolous problem.  But I may have lost the drama, even as I’ve attempted to focus it, by cutting some of the emotion out of it.

It could also be that I’m just sort of sick of reading it by now.

Some neat new pieces up at Hypertextopia, though some are just in the beginning stages.  One of the things about Hypertextopia is that at some point in writing and editing, it is easier to read as a reader sees the piece presented, rather than as the writer, opening and closing the writing text boxes.  This means that it need be ‘published’ and though it’s easy enough to toggle between published and unpublished, the writer in you sorta makes it hard to turn off…

While there are a few there that are evidently abandoned–and that’s just an indication of writer choice in developing an affinity for writing within the hypertext environment.  Some love it, some just don’t, and that’s fine.  But some of the new pieces are really intriguing.

Jeremy, the creator of Hypertextopia has a piece entitled Saint EMC2 that has some lovely language:

Silver like this:

Like the thousand fishes’ skin.
Like smiling through tears.
Like staring at the spotlight, your first night on stage.
Like gunmetal.

Rebecca Bland has a first piece up titled The Possibilities of No, and I was surprised and flattered to see the second Fragment box titled "A Bottle of Beer."  There’s some nice stuff here:

The cigarette she held between her fingers continued to burn down. She
watched as the ash was whisked away by a quick breeze, wishing that she
could do the same.

I’m glad to see more folks trying their skills out on the hypertext medium. All the published pieces can be viewed at the Hypercompendia Grand Library.

Okay, this is another one of my fav’s that’s ending up on the cutting room floor.  I’m sure Yolanda will be grateful, since it’s in the very first Fragment, by way of introducing her to the readership:

Wind whistled out of her in a long, low moan.

Yolanda lives alone.  She’s drinking beer.  It’s natural for flatulence to occur, especially in older folks and especially when they’re drinking beer.  But was it necessary for the narrator to tell us about it? No.  Not unless this hits the big screen and helps for audio effects.

Sometimes you just go with the flow.  After stalling on four different pieces started in Storyspace including one that is quite developed in content if not settled into story, this new work has appeared simply when I went to check out the color capabilities of the program.

This happened a couple weeks ago with Hypertextopia and ended up in a complete story, A Bottle of Beer. Just diddlin’ around with the format, seeing what the program does by filling in boxes with whatever came off the top of my head and something begins to form all by itself–very different than when I sit down to write something off a preconceived notion of story.

Don’t know if this is really going to go the length, if it’ll even develop an arc of sorts (or many, seeings that this is Storyspace), but I’ll give it some attention over the next couple of days.

Well now, ever since I realized that I could make Writing Spaces in exciting colors I’ve been antsy to work back in the friendly environment of Storyspace.  It’s the inspirational WOW factor I suppose, my muse likely being a hot-pink sequined queen.  The space is an appetizer, a platter to be filled with tasty words that build to the main meal and all the sweet potatoes and artichoke and chick peas side dishes.

Food shows up in my writing a lot.  Mostly as metaphor; I don’t sit a family down to a meal, particularly in that odd tv sitcom manner where seven people crowd three sides of the table to leave room for the cameraman’s plate.  Though eggs at breakfast were a very important part of one of the storylines of Paths, and corn tied the five narrative threads together.

Before I can start or restart something in Storyspace (I have four or five so-called ‘concepts’ awaiting me) I need to wring our the Hypercompendia A Bottle of Beer  till it’s dry as a pretzel (see?) and then take out all the embarrassing excess in Paths.

So inspiration is the beginning of story, perspiration is the writing, and dedication, well that’s gotta be all the rewrites.

Looking for something else, I stumbled upon Montfort’s hypertext The Girl and the Wolf and just thoroughly enjoyed it, particularly for its simplicity in options and choice of story according to the degree of sex or violence you want in your reading.  Love the concept.  Enjoyed the stories.

No secret really, since it’s right there in the menu preferences and Eastgate’s Storyspace Manual is one of the best how-to’s I have ever read in my life, but yes, I’ve just discovered something about Storyspace as well as myself.

I’m a sucker for media glitz.  I bought the Mac because I should’ve bought the super screen for the Dell and didn’t.  I love the graphics on computers.  I love the Mac for Storyspace because it just looks too cool for words.  And now, this:

And you can’t see it because I can’t get an image of it but the text links are in bright red and blue.  Neat, eh?  Oddly enough, it’s suited to the newest piece because I just started writing and the black background just produced an apocalyptic tone.  Wonder what the red, white, and blue text foreshadows?

From Spinning regarding a trip to the CPA with our files: "he sends me out with all the backup papers, checkstubs, inventory
sheets, etc. that he doesn’t need to focus on the single sheet I’ve
given him for our personal tax info, and one on the business…"

Perfect metaphor for the editing process.

Steve Ersinghaus is doing a series on the reading of hypertext and it’s going to be one helluvan interesting indepth look at the form of hypertext and its literary composition. 

A Higher Power  has brought to my attention the need to take the knife, dig deeper, and cut out the cankers from this hypertext.  He’s right. 

It’s tough to look at your own work and yet, with all the reading and studying I’ve done, particularly in the last few years at an intense level, I should be better at it than I am.  To recognize what I’d see in the work of others and even if I can’t prevent myself from writing them in, at least know enough to take them out in editing.

My writing used to be very unimaginative and stiff.  After several classes and kicks I began to shed the Poe influence (here I refer to the grammatical style of structure rather than the positive Poe influence) and become a little more willing to share in writing the pictures of story that only I saw in my head.  Appropriately titled, Reflections in Imagery was a story that just about sunk under a woman’s thoughts as she viewed her naked body in a full length mirror.  Okay, so I overdosed.  It’s a habit of mine as a Scorpio to be one way or the other, God forbid I should walk the middle of the road.

So I go back and read and decide and cut out the waste.  And once it’s gone, it’s gone (honest, I used to save these things!) so for its final appearance, here is the first of the fallen, and rather appropriately contains the metaphor of the blade:

Balanced on the horizon, it flamed red in its agonies, sinking slow and low on the sharp blade of highway.