Hypercompendia

Schematica

This one was highly influenced by Calvino’s if on a winter’s night a traveler since Steve served up his story with the very traditional elements of arc, conflicts, complications, change, et al and for me, Calvino’s novel is as much a how-to on good writing as it is an entertaining piece of fiction. It was a good time to relearn the rules, actually make a diagram of the entire hypertext before a word of story was written. Good practice; great fun. There were some css maneuverings I wanted to do with this piece, i.e., changing background color in the boxes, but I’ll have to work on that tonight since the code insertion point is something I’ve forgotten but have elsewhere. For me, this project will help in many arenas of creative learning.

While I’ve started creating new color schemes for the individual pieces via css sheets and have overhauled the old into some of the new themes, there are questions and trails of thoughts popping up every hour. Maybe that’s why I only got three hours’ sleep last night.

This is where Tinderbox may be the answer; while I couldn’t seem to work with a single file covering all the separate hypertext stories–I’m sure that there’s a way around this, but for now, each story is a separate file–I can see where the story files, which now include the Tinderbox rendition, an .html, a css, and the hypertext itself with each lexia in an .html file–may need to be linked at some point.

The other connection is the css sheets, which are pat except for the color themes. Right now, I have a separate CSS Folder which holds an individual folder for each different color stylesheet (this enables me to maintain the file name of ‘main100.css’ so that the main100.html does not need to be changed for each hypertext; just copied.

While it would seem to make sense to start with the program and grow outward, it appears that in my own assbackwards way I’ve created the child before the parent. So in between hypertexts, I’ll be working on structure by exploring the Tinderbox Way.

Impressions

There was an extraordinary appeal in the idea of weightlessness having such weight; the incongruity of the situation coupled with the reactions of others to the protagonist’s plight revealed a sense of self that is too often affected by others.

Shadows – (Marley 2)

In this continuation of “The Rabbit” scenario, I played with the cause and effect of changes made consciously in order to pursue a more desired form of ourselves. There is, however, that shadow we cast that touches others and influences their own lives.

It’s the butterfly effect on a small scale, limited by borders of lexias.

Commitment – (Marley)

What struck me in “The Rabbit” series of Steve’s stories was the action of the main character in responding to other people’s direction, even as he retained his own sense of self. I liked the idea of throwing a curve ball into his plans.

It’s such a human thing to do; live according to others’ needs, anxious to please. Sometimes it produces a cauldron of resentment, sometimes the light strikes and we do a complete turnaround. Sometimes it just doesn’t matter.

Humankind

Steve’s story brought to mind the commonness of our plights and yet our conflicts in seeking individualism while at the same time needing to fit in with society. The life and death elements brought me to the two players on stage, a surgeon and a man and his heart.

It’s a very simple piece, with the balance of protagonist and antagonist each choosing their own paths and borders.

Hands

For no good reason I related instantly to “Tinkerton had always felt somewhat sore at the unfairness of his hands.” This led me into the mind games we play in balancing one choice against another, always seeking a sense of fair play by measuring ourselves against others.

I’ve admittedly broken point of view rules here, but the three women and the possibilities were too much to resist.

Backups

When I first read Steve’s story on data backup, Norman Rockwell’s “The Gossips” came to mind and the old fashioned manner of maintaining history through verbal storytelling. And of course, the details that change with each telling.

So this became a study in family history that shows the paths that history takes when man and not machine are the recorders.

Well, I know what I’ve been doing wrong with the story exports and it was the case of the duplication of the story file name, or else the lack of entering it into the Tinderbox html instructions for the URL.

So I’ve now gotten two stories into Tinderbox and out onto the Flash Fiction Page and am halfway through the third. Though I’m not participating in the 100 Stories Project, I’ve found that if I can follow along I can learn much, much more that I need to know about story written in hypertext and the thought process behind the linking, as well as the workings of the Tinderbox program that instead of being afraid, I can begin to settle into it.

Hey Mark–I did it!

I’m not sure what was causing the problem in exporting, but it was obviously something I was doing wrong in the html URL that I was putting in there. First I went back through all my files and deleted all the duplications and test files to keep one clean copy. Then I emptied out all the folders except the very basics: story title folder under the project folder, and put only the css sheet, the tinderbox hypertext, and the html. In Tinderbox, I took each story out of the Projects and working with one, gave it its own separate file. Then exporting the program to its own folder worked.

From there it was just a matter of keeping the URL correct for the export process, and I found a duplication of “backups” in the /uploads/100stories/backups/1backups/file.