Hypercompendia

The Game

This was the second attempt at a story; the first is neatly filed away for a more focused day to untangle. This is taken more directly from Steve’s story as far as an old man and a game of chess. It is a gentle story, short, and interpreted completely by the reader.

This time I’ve used the hypertext to allow no backtracking via looping. What this in effect does is keep a story to a single thread of five spaces. However, there are at least a dozen different paths by which to follow the story to one or the other ending. What you read then is a version of a single character’s life in the example of a day. I like it.

Names

This one just kind of got away on me. It started with the idea of names and how a person is often prejudiced by prior experience with a person of a particular name and is wary–or enthusiastic–towards meeting new people with that name.

Is it a story? Yes, there’s a single story in here. There are also lots of stories in here.

Just Words

Another marital conversation that has deeper meaning underlying the words. A storm as metaphor. A narrative arc that circles back onto itself, but this time, with a completely new meaning to the words spoken.

The links are specifically geared to allow the reader to choose to follow the story by dialogue alone, or with the interjections of action and scenario.

I think that this, next to #51 Snakes and Snails, is one of my personal favorites. With the simple words “I thought you said it would stop,” from Steve’s story, the implication immediately came to mind of what “it” might be. While there is still some tweaking to do here, I think that even in its simplicity it does use the hypertext form well.

Symbols

A strange little boy, unearthly you might say, and a couple who go about their normal routine. In this case, the couple is visiting a museum as the boy observes them.

The mapping of the story is rather simple, allowing the reader freedom to move about the museum watching the boy watch the couple.

An Enth of A Degree Out of Whack

What inspired me here was the concept of when the best laid plans get messed up by a matter of a decision, or a minute’s delay. How does a sudden change affect what some believe is destiny?

This is another group of short-short stories, three spaces each (although four of the stories of two possible endings) when an extra minute is slipped into the space of time.

Revenge of The Kilobytes

Steve’s story implied computer technology that opens up to questions of more intimacy with the user. This inspired me to going a bit beyond the scenario to a more Hal-like computer personality.

I thought of the Windows De-Fragmentation screen where all those little colored boxes are rearranged and bytes of material are sent back to stand alongside their relatives. I thought of networking. I thought of all kinds of cooperation among the kilobyte community and came up with a few pranksters in the group.

Hiding Secrets

What’s been taking so long with these stories is a general dissatisfaction with my writing lately. The stories need to sparkle just as much as I can make them and that usually takes me days, weeks, months of editing even on short stories.

The time here is spent on the development into the hypertext format. While I’m getting a little better and faster at having all the tools handy and ready as I write the first draft, there’s still plenty of going back and rereading, rewriting. Today I believe I deleted more words than are contained in the final form. And this still for me is not the final version.

In exploring the hypertext aspect I’ve had all different approaches; different endings, all leading to the same ending, carrying the reader through almost the entire story but in different sequences, and depending on the reader to read the story several times to discover all its meanings by leading him out.

It’s ruining my posture, my frame business, my garden, my social life. But it’s something I have to see through to its logical end.

Voices in Your Head

This one took a long time coming and I even had to kill off a character since she was taking too much of the story for herself and it wasn’t about her at all. What prompted this story from Steve’s was a phone call out of the blue. While he brilliantly tied the past to the present with a connection between the callers, I ended up (as usual) with a wrong number.

The mapping structure is a wayward path of several similar stories of the same central character that all lead to the same ending. But the ending will be interpreted by the reader based upon what he has read. I’ve tried to link semantically as much as possible within the interweaving of the storyspace  (that’s not the Storyspace, since I’m using Tinderbox throughout this project). There’s just so very much you can do with hypertext; different endings, different middles, that the possibilties far outweigh the burden of planning even as one strives for concise story and brevity of narrative–which is likely why, after reading Steve’s entry on this topic, I ground to a halt in intimidation and fear.

Annalee and Jacob

In this piece I’ve let the story take whatever turn it desired and entertained all possibilities that offered themselves up. In other words, the author was left just as blind as the reader as to choice.

While there are several points where the story of Annalee and Jacob can recover and change from the path that was chosen, once we get down to the end the result of their connection is completely random. It might make sense to make a story more planned out and predictable, but here there are six different endings of many more different stories.

Sort of like real life.

When The Wind Blows

I’m having problems with my server so this may be the last of the series. This story started out as a phrase a few weeks ago and I saved it for a better time to develop. When it appeared to tie in with Steve’s daily story I set it up and went to work.

But it didn’t go where I’d expected. It was to be a humorous piece about cloning–what else would you expect when someone’s nose blows off and lands on your forehead? But it soon became a politically charged statement and it dragged out all day.

Finally able to go back and change track to a certain degree, but there’s little humor unless you delight in the macabre.