Hypercompendia

Gone are the days when a Photoshopped Happy New Year! greeting will do on a weblog this last day of the year. Everyone seems to be listing achievements, successes, plans for the year ahead that will be both a challenge and an inspiration to bother working even harder next year.

2010 was a great year for me in the area of my writing. About 30 pieces published, including a hypertext and some images among the fiction. Might’ve even done better had I been organized enough to submit more work to more places. But the satisfaction of realizing a hope that you’re good enough to be published is both a blessing and a curse. You really need to keep up on it, not sit back and relax.

The highlight of the year has to be the coming-in-close in the Bartleby Snopes Dialogue Contest. No, wait–here’s the real thrill, winning the Eighth Glass Woman prize for “Wanderer.” Knowing so much more through Fictionaut about the writers I’m humbled to be alongside may be the biggest compliment and stamp of approval yet. These are writers, real writers. I feel like maybe I snuck in through the side door.

Anyway, my “list of literary accomplishments” is as always, on the “My Work” link. Beyond that, I wrote a story and made up an image every day for 100 days through the summer. I found myself listed in the Electronic Literature Organization Directory for the 100 Days Project of 100 hypertexts done in 2009. I’ve written a story each week for the 52/250 project since May, and will continue on that through May of this year. I wrote another 24 stories for another month-long project. All in all, I likely wrote about 150 stories this past year. Oh, and at the Tunxis 24-hour marathon in April, I produced a new hypertext piece.

Aside from writing, my other endeavors have not been as fruitful. I’ll learn, I suppose (and that’ll be a New Year’s resolution) not to keep knocking on doors that are closed to me. I’ve applied so many times for openings at a local college that they likely fear I’m a stalker.  Same thing with writing; I’m learning that no, my work doesn’t “fit” at all at some venues, and why don’t I believe them? Rejections are never happy things, but it’s senseless to set yourself up for a fall when your style of writing is not only not what they want, but their literary tastes simply aren’t yours either. That’s diversity. That’s a good thing. Focus and research is the key, as every writer is told and for some reason, it doesn’t get through until the bright light pops on with the newsflash.

So there will be some dedicated focus this new year so not as much time and effort is wasted. I won’t send my resume out to places I wouldn’t want to work just to punish myself nor hit on places I’ve been turned down at a dozen times. Same thing with the writing. Organization, whether by Tinderbox software or by Duotrope Digest, will be the very first thing I do.

Projects, yes, I’m planning some projects. Personally, a new business of sorts. In writing, learning–no really, spending the time and finally learning–to more easily understand and implement HTML5, CSS3, JQuery, audio, and visuals into my work. Not written in stone, but somewhat man-made concrete: a hypertext novel; a traditional novel; putting together and marketing an anthology of short stories; an online new media magazine; and work that I love to do, am good at, and will produce some bit of income–in that order of importance. In addition, getting back into reading and reviewing my literature collection of classics on a regular basis. Though I’ve in truth spent more time reading than writing this year; hundreds and hundreds of flash and short fiction and poetry over at Fictionaut and 52/250 and many online zines. They’re really what has honed my own edge of writing as well as offered hours of delight in reading.

So I close the old year with some successes, many failures, but knowledge that promises. I will make time for old friends, make myself try some new things, spend less time on social networks and give reality more.

Best wishes for a happy, healthy, successfully satisfying New Year.

I’m honored and thrilled to have been named as the winner of the 8th Glass Woman Prize and am deeply grateful to Beate Sigriddaughter for offering this chance to women writers to give voice to women everywhere. I’m saddened by the inspiration for this story, Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, who is still facing the possibility of a horrid death under Iranian law. I hope my story, and the reputation of the Glass Woman Prize will bring attention to her plight and maybe help her in her fight for survival. http://www.sigriddaughter.com/GlassWomanPrize.htm

Glass Woman Prize

www.sigriddaughter.com

“The winning story for the Eighth Glass Woman Prize (US$500) is “Wanderer” by Susan Gibb. Congratulations, Susan, on a moving and important story. May it open eyes.”

Was really happy to come upon a review of my work in the 100 Days Project of 2009, that is, the 100 hypertext stories.

While the review is in Polish by Mariusz Pisarski of korporacja ha!art and while I won’t make an attempt at translation here, running it through an online translator gave me the general drift of it. It’s complimentary and thoughtful and I truly appreciate the effort and time that Mr. Pisarski put into the article. It seems that he too writes in hypertext and that is something I’ll be checking out further.

Meanwhile, while I’m of Polish descent–my grandparents on both sides came to America in the early 1900s–I’m going to ask a friend of mine to translate into Polish my thank you note. I knew how to say thank you in Polish, but had to look up the spelling: Pan Pisarski, dziękuję.

A Bottle of Beer has been one of my most worked-on, revamped, and favorite hypertext stories and it’s great to have it in its most technologically advanced form yet. As I was all set now to wish it luck and wave it out the door I realized with surprise that it’s already made the rounds for submission  in its earliest forms to the few places that accept and present new media work.

Whoa. The years have flown by. There are a couple places where I haven’t sent it out but they are sites where it’s not really a good fit–even I know it before the editor’s gentle explanation returns it to my doorstep.

So while I’m still glad I’ve done all the work to bring it to this level since all writing and learning procedure is a step up on the next piece, it’s sort of sad that it’s just going to sit here unseen. So on to the next, I guess.

So I jumped ahead looking through the jQuery book to find something in particular and ran across a note on animation of the backgrounds along with a link to Cats Who Code for a tutorial and had to do it: words

Course I sort of cheated in that while I didn’t copy & paste or use their template, I did type from their example. So the one thing I do want to do is revamp it figuring out how to call the jQuery from the header rather than depend on Google.

Soon after posting this, and in a bout of free time filled with all sorts of moving ideas, I once more went into Photoshop and made a new heading–one that makes my sentences dance! Not exactly a paso doble just yet, but a quickstep across the page will do for now.

In trying to solve my image problem (not my personal image; that I’ve come to gradually accept) I of course found a round-about more difficult and time-consuming solution.

Since I wanted the images to be centered within the boxes, and since they are linked out of text or stretchtext, changing the margin edge by the code I showed in the previous post didn’t work unless the image was the only stretchTarget. Otherwise, the new margin set changed the text as well. Soooooo…

I worked around the code problem by making the images the smaller size of 400 pixels in Photoshop, made up a new file in Photoshop with a 550 width (as the images were marked, to give a 25 px each side border), painted it black (the background color of the piece, both column and body in A Bottle of Beer), and dragged the Photoshop image onto the black background and centered it, figuring in advance based on the resized image to leave a 10 px top and bottom margin and resulting in 75 px side margins. And, it works.

Of course as usual, I’ve solved an immediate problem for a particular piece of work rather than learning the right way of doing things by taking the time to look up the code scenario. It just seems that if I sit and figure things out logically, play with the code or find a way around it, it not only produces an answer, it’s a lot more fun. Somewhere in the future I’ll need to do this again, only it won’t work with the particulars and elements of the new piece.

That’s when I hope to have learned the right way of doing things.

So far, Safari has been able to point out various HTML errors that Firefox automatically appears to override and fix.  I’ve used Firefox and like it, but when working on a hypertext piece that’s going to go online, it’s become obvious that you need to pick one of the pickier browsers to work with.

What worked beautifully in Firefox didn’t work with all browsers. I have FF and Safari on the Mac–which is naturally where I’m working since I use Tinderbox to start the piece out. On my PC, which I rarely use but have for backup and to hold all the years’ worth of stuff pre-Mac, I use Internet Explorer as the default browser and have since downloaded Chrome and Opera. That gives me two operating systems and five browsers to check the work. Also, I might add, different screen resolutions because of the various monitor sizes. This led to the last problem I need to deal with, the background images which looked great on my Mac, but fell a couple hundred pixels short on the PCs.

Safari’s refusal to accept font color tags unless they were posted before each paragraph of hidden or stretch text (in a group of three paragraphs, the middle one would return to the main text color) was similar to one of the other browsers that would only take the first paragraph and then return. I’m sure there’s a more professional way of doing this–which is why I wish I’d learned coding from the basics instead of jumping into the middle–but I did manage to fix by tagging each paragraph.

The problem of an uncentered image on the first page, where I inserted a 400px wide image instead of the 550px, I had used the proper code within the head:

<style type=”text/css”>

.stretchTarget {
margin: none;
margin-left: 100px;
}

</style>

It wasn’t until I studied another page where I’d done the same thing in stretchtext that I discovered I had changed a headline size from h1 to h2 but hadn’t changed the closing tag. (The image came from the linked headline) and so even though the headline was okay, it messed up what followed–the image.

So while I’ll likely still work in Firefox, I’ll know enough to doublecheck immediately each page in Safari as I work. Of course the best way would be to run the pages through the W3C Validation Service, but that shows me that my pages really have no right to be working at all and just makes me feel bad.

Have finally spent some time yesterday on finishing up A Bottle of Beer. I’ve included images I’ve taken myself and Photoshopped into more artistically (some, not all are done well–I’ve gotten some confidence since several of my graphics have now been accepted for publication!) suitable visuals and managed to get them to “hide” and “unhide” via stretchtext.

It’s likely the “flashiest” piece I’ve done, and likely that is because it was first written into Hyptertextopia and that was their basic color choice–black background and brightly colored links. But it suits this piece, and while I’m tempted to explain that the colored text that is revealed via links are the themes and separate from the main (white text) narrative, I suppose I’ll have to “Barthesize” and let the reader figure that out. And love it or hate it.

I’m still working on the problem of the hidden text not remaining consistent in color in Safari and Internet Explorer. I’ve solved it by adding the font tags to each paragraph. I’ve still to check if the stretchtext works in IE and Chrome. It works properly in Firefox (which is what I use) and in Safari so far. (UPDATE: Chrome showed up two open font tags but everything else was okay–odd that Safari and Firefox automatically closed them. Also, in working on the other PC with a larger screen, didn’t realize my background images set at 1280 x 800 weren’t sufficient. Have to work on that so that not too much relevant stuff is cut out on the right hand side. Maybe need to float or code to fit screen?) (UPDATE #2: Downloaded and tried Opera and everything works.)

Learned a lot, and am happy that this piece–aside from the tweaks and maybe some image changes–is finally displayed at its best.

I don’t have the kinks worked out yet about hidden images linked from hidden text, nor the different browser display of any images at all, but I’m giving myself a break and playing in Photoshop with some of my photos I’ve selected for A Bottle of Beer.

Still playing around with size and placement, but this is the fun part: