Magical realism. Love it, want to get more used to writing it.
Became enamored with Octavio Paz’s My Life With the Wave and fell into Marquez with a passion.
This is what I pulled out of Steve’s story today though he has a practiced hand and an open mind to the freedom of making unreality real in narrative writing. It takes a certain amount of naivete much as a child’s trust in whatever is told him as truth.
Two of them actually. It happened long ago when I made up my own main .html template out of the Tinderbox or Storyspace basic template. I missed two of ^’s on each side of the title within tags.
My life with code has been try, hunt and search for the error and voila! It’s almost always some niggley little character or unit of type.
No, I’m not going back to redo all the other hypertext stories I’ve produced, but from now on I’ll have the damn thing right.
With this one I was going to keep it down to three lexias and two links but it went a little further than expected, mainly because of its theme of discriminatory practices. It’s my first and only story of any social or political import and likely my last.
I took the title from the concept of whichever group or whatever thing is the trend or hot topic of the moment, and the proposal of one of the seven (or so) basic plots.
You can see from the map that it’s fairly simply set up as to linking, but do bring a coffee and danish into this one in case you get caught in the one loopy looped area. This is for emphasis and not done merely to drive you crackers. And trust me, there is a way out.
Also note that I’ve included the writing space titles that should show up at the top of your browser, and two links at the end of the piece to either run you around again or to bring you back to the Hypercompendia page and an exit out of that story. Doing the titles manually on the templates until I get a chance to see why Tinderbox isn’t exporting that piece of information. There are lots of things I’m likely doing manually until I have the time to find the right and already coded-in easy way of doing it. It is a learning process of story and software after all.
Thought it would be a good idea for anyone really interested in learning more about hypertext, maybe needing some encouragement in reading it, to link to Eastgate’s resources. Hypertext Resources is a page full of links to just about anything you’d want to know about hypertext workings, plannings, purpose. Hypertext Now is a more focused and likely less scary page for the newcomer.
As a matter of fact, I’m currently rereading Hypertext Gardens (for the umpteenth time) to reacquaint myself with structure and purpose of links. This will help me in my hypertext flash pieces that I’m currently working on and will likely result in some less aggravated potential hypertext viewers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology