Hypercompendia

Maude Nichols

Another could be long, could be short, could be fun–even though the opening doesn’t sound like it.

This is an odd one; it wanted to be a multiple choice and I was able to simulate that effect though it wanted structure and did require a loosening of the narrative bonding in order to create it effectively in such a short time.

The map for these is definitely a rigid structure of charting; odd, since that is a contradictory notion to the freedom of multiple choice.

Alice in Asunderland

This is a then what? type of story–all of them are. There is one beginning, two ends, and a zillion middles–Don’t complain, I could have made more just by linking. There are, as I mentioned in the previous post, 38 writing spaces, but none of the stories are that long. The shortest path is complete in 7 steps. Still don’t know about the longest.

We have a character, a crisis, and a series of possibilities. You can read through just once and if you’re satisfied with that scenario, then you’re done. If you’re not, you can go around and take a different path. I would think that there is no possibility–short of writing down the choices–that one can go through this and hit the same exact story again.

I’ve chosen not to provide clues by size-coding the boxes; it’s too complex to place that restriction. Still, it’s a very very simple story and how it ends and how you get there is entirely up to you.

I’m about halfway through the writing of yesterday’s story, having decided to make it a bit of a text adventure though not a mystery as I did with #30 Dark Moves. These generate definitely from mapping over plot. But as noted in Steve’s offering, it all starts with character.

What’s happening here looks to be complicated (though not as complicated as it’s going to get) and with 38 writing spaces, I know that the shortest story can be a path of only 7 spaces. Don’t know what the longest will be, but the additional linking options that I’m planning over and beyond the more organized structure should be interesting. And that’s what’s taking so long: planning for the returns and loops that will open the story of Alice up to a whole bunch of possibilities.

The Magician

This was another concept that I’d had stored away in the back of my mind for a few years and saved in a couple paragraphs on the hard drive.

Steve’s story today was a wonderfully entertaining story about a proposed sitcom with a very odd family. That brought me into the mood of magical realism and suspension of disbelief and families and “The Magician’s Rabbit” (original title–I used to start stories from titles back then) came up. In looking it over I was disappointed to see that I really hadn’t laid out any train of thought (plot) but I figured that’s what this exercise in writing is for.

The map went back to a semi-organized pattern as the characters interplayed to build to the final concept. I sort of like it, though I think that it might not be a bad idea on this one to flesh it out into a longer length via episodes and events.

The Apple Song

This is a story that’s been hiding from me for a while because it didn’t have all the pieces in one place. I think what kicked it to life was the wild wedding crowd of Steve’s story and in particular, the ‘blindness’ of the people to what they obviously were seeing.

The character of Jasper has been rambling around in my mind picking up parts of himself from people that have left those parts in my soul.

The mapping of this piece might need some reworking as the reader can easily miss a good half of the story even as I thought I’d offered a couple of crossover avenues of accessiblity. But then, I never really leave any story left alone for the first twenty four hours after posting it. Meanwhile, this particular map can be enlarged to find your way.

Lies and Liars

What inspired me this morning was the interaction between a couple when there’s something not quite normal going on. It’s a fairly simple story with a couple of oddities tossed in.

The map here wanted as well to be simple: the current event or conflict, the two characters, some background to flesh out the characters in their own enviroments so that we can speculate on how they’ll get together to discover and resolve the quirks that come naturally along with us all.

In looking for a particular image in my files this morning this greeted me–a whole buncha Tinderbox maps for the project. For one thing, you can tell I’m a person that is pretty rigid with structure, at least in mapping. I like symmetry. Oh, I have round days and rectangle days, but there seems to be a good balance between them.

There appears to be a pattern of growth in the sophistication of the mapping as far as number of lexias and links. Maybe by #7 I got my act together and the maps took on a geometric form. Stories and maps elaborated into an attempt at visual as well as textual art. These are short short stories though, and I doubt I could get away with these maps in a larger piece without nesting them into a hierarchy. To the writer unfamiliar with hypertext the mapping of each story might look a bit scary; to the hypertextually experienced, these are child’s play. To me, it’s a nice visual to convince me that all this effort’s been worth some accomplishment.

Evilution 2

Following today’s lead, I tried to go back to my first story, #8 Evilution and to my horror discovered it was poetics and for heaven’s sake, I’m in Susie Realist mode today so it took some doing. But I pulled out one of the writing spaces from #8 and went from there. It also happened to be one that I blatantly stole from Steve and Cormac in style if not text, that is the repetition of the verb phrase to intensify the mood or follow the movement of the whale in this case.

From there, I had decided to practice again with images in hypertext and besides, it gave me some Photoshop playtime. Since I didn’t have any images of plains or the sea, I figured I’d take a very contemporary path and simply used gradient, flipping it upside down for land or sea, threw in some filter effects and color changes and voila! A modernist view of the sea at sunset and the plains at high noon.

What I was most involved in here was a testing of yet another mapping structure; there are four paths, but they all doubleback to the point of origin where two branched off into another two. Or something like that. (NOTE: There’s a “Click to enlarge Map” here)

There are some paragraph breaks that didn’t seem to export properly into html so I’ll be poking in here to fix those plus work on the text on top of image code.

Because I’ve put the hypertexts used in the 100 Days Project into my ongoing Hypercompendia weblog, these posts that are the usual are interspersed with the actual pieces but there’s nothing for it since ‘business’ goes on as usual.

The image above is Hypertext Story #40 Evilution 2 and as I’m working with it, I noticed that I had it sort of laid out as you would a garden, peas here where they’ll be over and done and pulled out of the way as the tomatoes take over; yet this “plot” was tilled and marked out before the story was more than a blip of idea.

The story is working itself into the form–which I might blushingly add, is against my theory that I’ve so adamantly expounded.

Weird, eh? Just when you’re thinkin’ you got a handle on it.

The maps are now clickable to get to the story, as is the title headline of each piece. What I’d like to do is make the maps “click to enlarge” as well, but that probably could most easily be achieved by a separate byline “Click here to enlarge.” The other thing I need to consider is that with 100 stories, my server space would be filling up pretty fast. Remember, with my other weblog, Spinning, there are close to 5500 entries over five and a half years along with loads of images that take up bytes.

A reminder again to new hypertext users (and nobody is really a new user–you hypertexted to get here!) the colored text is a link to another path in the story (don’t worry, I’ll get you safely back home), the next time you come upon that writing space the visited link will be a different color. Rereading is usually an invitation rather a duh moment in hypertext. And going back via browser backbutton is perfectly acceptable.

Hope this helps!