Hypercompendia

Not exactly flying fingers whipping up story here today.  At first I thought that maybe it was the pressure of filling and stacking Storyspace boxes that is preventing a real flow of writing on what I thought was an exciting idea. 

Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m as excited about the story line as I thought I was and it seems I’m forcing myself to focus on it rather than joyfully skipping along leaving a trail of dust in my wake.

Already, a different story is forming and that may be the way to go.  All I need is to get that first paragraph down that leads me onward.

It’s so strange for me to be actually planning out the structure of a story beyond the opening line.  Though in some ways, the map as I have it here may be considered dual directional and expanding into whatever areas it claims in its flow.  But it’s pretty obvious from just this rudimentary Map View that it’s a narrative that involves man against man, or us versus them.

I just know that it is not within my nature to keep this freeflow going on beyond too many more spaces.  I will just have to have them lined up somehow in neat rows that I’ll mess and move around a bit just when someone’s looking or when I post an updated view here to make it appear that I’m not quite as regimented as I tend to be.

What the above really represents is more a placeholder for each of the ideas as they come to me–mostly in story form, meaning written as prose–but there are obvious character and setting spaces that will become prime threads or paths.

One thing I’d noticed while doing some final reading and editing in Paths is that there were several ideas or phrases or images that reappeared, i.e., lion, wind, etc., that without conscious planning flowed right into another space that reinforced the theme.  What this tells me is that when you get this entrenched in your story, the clock on the wall is bound to show up in several scenes because you see it in the corner of your mind.  With the Storyspace Writing Spaces, these just happen to come up and tie the idea together whereas in straight text, you’ll find sometimes that you wish the author could come up with a different word because it seems repetitive.  I’m not sure what I’m saying here, but I think it’s a case of hypertext = reinforcement versus traditional linear = repetition.  The reaction, at least as writer, is not “oh shit, I said that already a few pages back,” but rather, “wow, that must be symbolic because I’ve mentioned it twice already.” Maybe just one more of the side benefits of the hypertext environment.

Editing.

It’s inevitable.  Within fifteen minutes of sending off your work for someone else to read–unfortunately, not your copyeditor–you find the typo.

I must have read this particular Writing Space in Paths at least a hundred times (honest, it was a part of the original story) and just found Chloe eating ‘choccolate’ on her porch.

Here’s just one more reason why it’s vital to the hypertext community to establish itself as a major movement in literature; we need more people willing to read for editing purposes.  I’m a pretty damn good copyeditor myself and I’ll miss a few now and then and maybe I’m not so hot on semicolons and tenses but I’ll usually find errors in published books and such.  This e-mail notice from my local TV news last night produced an immediate giggle:  “Obama wins Iowa Republican caucus”.

But you think I’d catch my own?  Particularly at this time of the season when there’s still about four (empty) boxes of chocolates sitting in front of me in the living room?

Big Charlie Brown ‘sigh.’

I’m really antsy to get going on a new story idea that’s really different than anything I’ve written so far, and Storyspace is the ideal medium to bring it to life.

The general idea is of man against man–one of the basic plots in life but this will be grounded in today’s realities that point easily to a possible scenario: a diminishing work force supporting an increasingly long-lived baby boomer population.  I’ve got all kinds of ideas picked up over the last few years, including my own "apple and blanket in the woods" plans for a nice quiet "I’ll get out of the way now" ending.   This necessarily will involve past, present and future points in time, but with hypertext, messing around with that is the fun part.

I’m also interested in playing more with some graphics and sound in Storyspace, but might talk Steve into experimenting together on the Marie narrative we were playing with some time ago.

The neat thing about having already created a Storyspace piece, and particularly in the needing to form and manipulate the story into the software environment is that I’ve learned lots more about solving problems using the medium than just going with the flow.  That opened up a lot of opportunities that I might not have come up against just in building a story suiting the form.

Likely as not I’ll post a couple of the opening writing spaces as soon as they’ve settled into a structure of sorts–and even that’s more easily coming to mind now that I’ve both read some of the information on hypertext fiction and played in it myself.

Good post at if:books this morning regarding creating a perfectly sustainable book.

I’ve long fought against the notion of a disposeable society starting with appliances that can’t be fixed up through age discrimination in the workplace.  It takes me maybe an average of five years to reluctantly toss some odd-shaped bit of plastic that came as part of packaging because I just knew I’d be looking for something just like it someday.  Don’t laugh.  My absolute best method of keeping the turkey stuffing in the bird and his/her legs neatly crossed at the ankles includes a couple of thin wire ‘safety pin’ thingies that I used to get at the drycleaners that held a group of five hangers together.

The writer of this post, Kim White, tried unsuccessfully to donate slightly used toys to the Salvation Army:

On principle, I try (really hard) to give away anything that is not completely worn out. But it is getting harder and harder to do. Nobody wants my old furniture or clothes or books. And they especially don’t want used children’s toys.

So, I’m hoping to stir up some interesting discussion and serious contemplation of the perfectly sustainable book: one that is constantly revised, but never needs to be reprinted (or repurchased); one that is lean and simple and doesn’t require a small server farm or a special device; one that makes an enormous impact, but leaves a teeny tiny carbon footprint; one we can live with for ever and ever without getting bored or satiated.

A long time coming, but a dedicated effort in the past two months on completing the Paths project has pretty much come to a finish today.  (And no, I’m not changing the name–I both started and finished first.)

I’d love to be able to share it, but I’ll have to look into how it can be made available online and if it’s worth the trouble if I can’t do it myself. 

The story is sort of tame and reflective, perhaps it even limits itself to a generation that remembers the 70s and is now facing middle age and seeking answers for questions they asked decades ago.  But it also is relevant to every age group as–with luck–we all go through the different stages in life and make choices based on where we are and where we want to be.

There’s no question that even with the small amount of preplanning for hypertext when I wrote these stories a couple years ago, they have bloomed and hybridized into something I couldn’t imagine at the time.  The Storyspace hypertext medium allowed for deeper penetration into areas of the characters that didn’t create havoc with timelines and point of views.  Or at least, it didn’t get in my way any, and I may have taken liberties with the story under the guise of hypertext opportunity.

I’m anxious to get back into Storyspace and create from scratch, being more aware now of how it works and how it frees the storyteller to enter all phases of narrative, to cross borders with a link.  I wonder if the environment will provide enough of an impetus to carry me forward as it did with Paths.  I wonder what the base of the framework will be. 

In the meantime, if there’s a way of making Paths available to interested readers, I’ll do so.

Well I think I’m at the end of the trail here with this one.  I’ve bottomed out at 300 writing spaces and 386 links and believe that everything that needed to be in the narrative is, and without someone else to read for language and flow, I think it’s just about as done without going nuts over it. 

What I’m spending time on now is proving the links by following them out.  I don’t know that I used hypertext to its full advantage, although perhaps I did while remaining within the constraints of the program (and yes, there are some for me as far as what I might have liked to do with this in a different way).  But more, I don’t think this piece would pass the test of allowing several paths through the story.  There is really but one with the opportunity of taking sidetrips into discovering more about the characters and their relationships and what affected their lives that brought them to this short period of relevant time we focus upon.

I like it for that reason alone–I think it did exactly what I wanted in the narrative.  I’m sick of reading it though since it’s been on the screen display for nearly two months straight.

When I’m done with it, which should be today, I’ve got to decide whether I can somehow get it online to make it available or whether it just lives out its natural life on my hard drive.

Not by me, but by one who knows.  Check out Steve Ersinghaus’ post on a new project he’s working on.  There’s a map view included in the post so that those of us who don’t really understand what we’re doing can gain additional insight into this medium.

With Steve’s talent for story, as evidenced by many projects but in particular the hypertext The Life of Geronimo Sandoval, I’ll be looking forward to reading this as soon as he’s ready to share.

New Map View showing the latest addition (now up to 275 Writing Spaces–having started out with 75).

And this, a play on the Berries links that infiltrate one of the character’s pov of the narrative that seemed to flow out from something else he had said, something that brought back a memory to him that reveals a bit more of what brought him to this point in his life and his reflections.

Berries

I remember the little girl who lived downstairs from my grandmother.  I remember watching her jumping rope on the sidewalk in front of the apartment building. She was about my age and I’d tried to talk to her but she made it obvious that she was ignoring me.

Strawberries raspberries huckleberry pie…

At each flip of the rope she’d hop over, her skirt would flit up with the jump. I’d watch because sometimes she’d catch the back of it in the rhythm of her sing-song movements and it would lift up high enough to almost reveal her panties.  She’d look at me then and laugh.

So this side of Jeremy is more vulnerable, and it is sandwiched (to continue the food theme I realized I have going throughout this story–as with much of my writing anyway) between a new sequence of spaces that bring in Jeremy’s interaction with his grandmother and the sequence I’d laid down previously of his philandering.

I suppose this can be done in straight writing but it’s become part of the experience of Storyspace’s hypertext medium and I can only hope that the opportunity becomes habit and incorporates itself in all future writing I do, regardless of the method.

Had fun yesterday making up the New Year Greeting both here and at Spinning.  I do love playing with Photoshop and while I’d like to take the Animation Course that teaches Flash, there’s really no justification for what can be learned by just dipping in and doing when there’s nothing on the line such as career or project or some such stake in the knowledge.  So I’d enjoy it, yes, but I’d enjoy the CW  course or screenwriting or a semester of philosophy too. 

So I’m still on a seesaw with all this, and even considering retaking that final Algebra course to bring my GPA up to 4.0 because I walked out on the final exam (for a good reason). 

Or maybe I’ll just plod along with Storyspace and Alice and diddle around in Adobe at my own tortoise pace.