Hypercompendia

With the latest piece  for the 100 Hypertexts project I just learned something regarding link color. In most of the other hypertexts I’ve played with all kinds of color combinations and basically followed a theme of the active/hover link color was the same as the border and headlines, and the visited link would pick up the body (full page) color. The links were kept in mind in selecting color themes, and sometimes the link colors would need to be changed because they were too dark and thus too close in tone to the black text to be easily accessible. Likewise, in some cases, i.e., red, they may be too contrasty and thus distracting (okay, so maybe I left them that way but will keep the lesson in mind).

With #16 Imaginings, the active/hover links are a light grey on cream (since the dark grey of the border wouldn’t show up as obvious) and the visited links are the coral of the body. What this does is make the visited links more obvious and therefore more inviting to the reader. In most cases, this isn’t desirable; it would be like spreading out all the read pages of a book instead of merely turning them.

So I was naturally tempted to go back and adjust the colors and stopped, ran through the piece a couple more times and realized that in this story it was a good thing; I actually wanted people to go back to revisit links since most of the pages had several link options available. The story is probably the most non-linear of all the hypertexts (with the exception of #13 Connections) so there isn’t as much a case of the out-of-sequence annoyance that I find in reading and writing in the hypertext format.

I’m learning as I go.

Imaginings

Sure wish I had more time to tweak; or sure wish I could tweak faster. It’s a lesson in meeting deadlines, this one-a-day thing.

This story came from how we perceive ourselves, the possibilites, and the past. It’s short, even shorter if you take a path that sidesteps the few spaces here. Once again, the story should all be there, even in a couple of clicks.

Still, I’m not content with the language, with the capture of the character and there is a single resolution, even as I may have broken the fourth wall.

For goodness’ sake I didn’t realize that I could make different shapes and all kinds of good stuff with the plain little note boxes in Tinderbox.

Hot damn.

These hypertext-a-day stories are going to take me three times as long now; I just had to play with color for the actual finished export before I got down to the business of narrative, linking, and mapping. Looks like I may be running behind.

Cause and Effect

Well this one turned out to be much different than what I imagined. (Which of course means that I’ll likely tinker with it some more until the next story’s due.)

What I absorbed from Steve’s offering today was the theme of cause and effect. Almost immediately after that thought settled in, I had the story concept of three cars traveling a highway in rush hour. From there, I got a feel for their drivers and wrote up the first lexias. Then I couldn’t get to the map fast enough; it had to be a pyramid with the options and outcomes based on split-second decisions.

What came out of this as you can see from the map (don’t be scared, Mary Ellen!) was a whole lot of action and possibilities. I went overboard with linking and just a few minutes ago tried this out for the first time, worried that a reader could get lost in this hypertext and never come out. Somehow, I got out in five or six steps.

Hypertext narrative will always amaze me.

Something…Dark

This was another big change in planning for hypertext story–as well as a new map that allows me to see what the spaces hold, and that’s a big help in this process.

What inspired this story was a change in point of view, making it a two-sided story that gave me a feel for the enemy. I also wanted to keep it short so there are minimal spaces and yet for the easily aggravated, this one can go on for quite a while with repetitious reading that hopefully sheds some moonlight on the characters.

As an aside, while I haven’t done much of the ‘horror’ genre lately, it’s the only thing I wrote when I started writing many years ago. This was a fun attempt to rekindle that dark side of soul.

Connections

How Bad Do You Want It?

This one was the perfect concept for a hypertext with five friends and five objects. It was also a good illustration of character wanting something and needing to give up something in order to gain. Unfortunately, timewise I haven’t been able to plan the elaborate framework of loops and linking that would show off the hypertext format to its greatest possibilities.

So this has been an exercise in concept only for me and will need another attempt with another story perhaps to develop the narrative element of desire and fulfillment and ends up being a rather easy hypertext reading for the initiate and likely a boring one for the involved. The map sort of looks like a boat though, doesn’t it?

Why we now have Tinderbox and Mac laptops:

Alottaplot

Strangely enough, if I find focus on a particular narrative element, I’ve been mapping the notes out in Tinderbox even before the story is formed. Don’tcha love the arc?

This one is for hypertext fraidy-cats; you cannot get lost, you will not be sent directly to jail. If you take a sidetrail you’ll be plopped safely (and more knowledgeably) back onto Main Street until you reach the end of the story. If you do not take a sidetrail, you’ll just miss out on a bit of fun. No problem; it’s a gloomy day here too.