Hypercompendia

It seems that I’m constantly updating Tinderbox to the latest version and this time I noticed that-ohmygosh!–I only have a month remaining on my free upgrades.

It’s taken me a while to warm up to Tinderbox and yet I can see that it will serve as one of my most valuable programs over the long haul. Right now I’m creating some short-short hypertexts in it just to get used to the basics and to feel out some of the possibilities. The visual display of containers and colors, as I’ve mentioned before, will prove to be very handy in tying in a group such as a series of hypertext stories that are separate yet related in some way. This is what I’m experimenting with right now and I’ve already gone back and changed things around a bit as new situations develop. But Tinderbox is flexible that way, and no motions are wasted as the arrangements are changed to suit a different scenario.

In a few days, I hope to upload and link these examples.

Learning for me has always been easiest in the doing. Instructions are held aside and come into play when a need arises that can’t be figured out by clicking buttons, turning screws, guessing, or the real motive of comprehension as to how something would logically work. But I’m also hampered by a stubborn resistance to change.

That said, when I fell in love with Storyspace as a means to write hypertext story, it was a pita to relearn and rewrite into Tinderbox even though the two are very similar in many ways in the processing and theory of linking. Tinderbox offers a world more of capabilities and the visuals of mapping and layout are more open and yet precise in the graphics. I’ve been fiddling around with several projects in Tinderbox, starting from placing a few short hypertext stories into a project space and from there transferring a much larger Storyspace piece into the medium, and progressing to a new project for a longer novel to make use of the research and note-making spaces that would act as an outline or rough plotting structure for the narrative. Even though I don’t know if this is going to in fact be a hypertext work, the concept of having it take shape in a more cohesive manner than pages of scribbled notes (I’ve never been an outline person, except to make the required one for teachers’ purposes after a story or essay was finished) is something that at this stage of my life offers invaluable assistance in saving time alone.

What’s nice about technology and the tools that software offers is that even with manuals and thick text of instructions, a user can always maneuver within the simplest form that suits his own needs, knowing that should more arenas of possibility open up, the field is there.

While focusing what brain power I had available in the last two weeks on linear story in another attempt to meet deadlines of lit journals, I’ve done little in the hypertext department except to put a story or two into the Tinderbox environment to compare it to the way I’ve done the same with Storyspace. I have found a funner way to work in Tinderbox, by using the colored box changes as a visual allure. Something I’ve always liked about Storyspace–particularly the Mac version–is the crisp graphics of the screens that you write into. It inspires by enhancing the tone. Tinderbox can work similarly, though I’ve not yet found the connection between Notes besides as they might contain a single story within and those Notes connected as lexias in typical hypertext narrative form. The individual stories themselves right now do not seem to have a connection but I can easily see how Tinderbox would be the more useful program in which to both make the connections, and yet provide the containers to separate them into their individual selves.

Twiddling a little with it then, but won’t be able to put more time into it until the lit journals have closed for the summer and I’ve no rational excuse to put it off.

Paths sort of stopped me cold from exporting it not only because of its unsophisticated structure but more because of its poor writing. But I do like the story concept a lot and so I’m going to spend some time on editing that and no doubt, will mess with the links and story hypertextwise as well. In other words, this is going to take some work before I present it properly.

Also looking into The Pigeon and The Shoe which I started last year, inspired by the Pittsburgh trip and Hypertext 2008. That’s got a nice idea behind it as well, all from an hour spent sitting in the park.

But there are other things that draw me too; short stories that may or may not be submitted before the lit mags close for the summer (shall I bother?); and for the first time in ten years, an idea for a novel that needs to be in that form. So there’s plenty to do, just have to get my enthusiasm for writing back into the driver’s seat.

It’s no good; I can’t just transfer the damn thing into html and make it any better with color and fancy design. It’d be like putting the cardboard back behind a work of art in a frame. Just don’t have it in me to cut the wrong corners when it counts.

So that’s what’s holding me up right now–as well as keeping me busy while I wait for more hypertext story–editing the somewhat sloppy language in Paths that I thought was so great at the time. That, and trying to figure out how to get the image of Jesus Christ from showing up as the representative frame of Recycling on You-Tube. No offense or sacrilegious intent meant, but He’s scaring readers away.

Even as I settle myself in for a nice hypertext write, I wonder where it all is going. Even I still have some dislikes of the medium in the reading of it, but then, there’ve been quite a few changes incorporated into hypertext work now. Even as I write in it I need these ‘changes’ to keep the groove, namely, to see the visual presentation and that for me usually means some color if not graphics.

This is also likely why I’ve still not bothered to master interactive fiction, as in the old text-interplay of Photopia, et al. It’s not visually exciting. Particularly when seeing “There’s no such thing” a few zillion times (I happen to be certified directionally dysfunctional). When I first got into IF and then hypertext via Storyspace, my mind zoomed ahead to a combination of the two–never the concept of IF alone–and with images and sound as well.

Now I’m not quite a senior citizen but I’ve been raised in the era of television at least, so I’m used to the visual saturation of the senses–though books were still a big, big part of my list to Santa. It makes one wonder how the younger generations, brought up on laptops rather than mere laps in a rocking chair, feel about these forms of story when they can get film clips on their phones for goodness’ sake.

A couple of years ago I played around a bit with Chris Crawford’s Storytron, in beta form, more on the authoring side of things than on the reading and playing of the prepared story.  At that time, unless my mind is deceiving me, there was a very promising graphical interface that was highly sophisticated to go along with the program. When I checked out Storytron in the last couple of days after its launch of a fully useable program, I was surprised to see the same old Sponge Bob Square Pants figures (faces?) in the play areas.  While Storytron is sort of halfway between IF in its decisions and hypertext in its manual use of clicking menus, it doesn’t do much in the way of eye-appeal. Same thing with the promise of Facade, which hasn’t progressed any from its intial output and primitive visuals.  Why are some of these great concepts not really accepted by a much wider audience?  Somehow I believe it has something to do with needing to look as exciting and interesting as the content should certainly be.

Like I said, I may often opt for the classics in their physical text and creamy-paged form and a quiet corner with a soft-cushioned curl-up-type chair, but I still have come to expect some visual stimulation when it’s just my Mac and me. In this hungry-eyed era I would think that aside from story and good solid writing another major consideration needs to be presentation.

Who’da thunk that I’d ever have gotten into the underlying structure of composing and presenting hypertext narrative? I loved Storyspace because it didn’t require much of me aside from twiddling a few dials to set up a very elegant looking hypertext so that I could concentrate on writing story. The drive to present that story online, however, led me into the whole code thing. It meant setting up a weblog that could allow for offering the pieces online, and that meant moving from Typepad to WordPress and setting up two new homes. Then learning css and html to export from Storyspace into the sites. From there, the imagination goes wild but it’s a fun learning process and each baby step I make (or elderly shuffle) is both an accomplishment as well as a treat.

Obviously, when one adds another element into the equation there naturally comes a need for variables.  With the major step of background image comes consideration of text color. On the last image, while I Photoshopped to make a dark text readable, there are other things to consider such as the links.

So I grabbed another image out of my garden files, one that in reality was hot coral California poppies and sun-drenched green leaves. I was going for composition knowing that the color was a big no-no. Ended up with this (below) and still, the original link color of cream is not going to work. But that’s fine. All I have to do is work out how to change that in a working narrative for the future.

This may not mean much to anyone but me, but I’ve just learned a lot:

Once I was placed on the right trail by a friend, I’ve been able to work some of my wants and needs into the process of exporting a hypertext written in Storyspace into html with css that for the most part covers all bases–at least of the necessity element. Wouldn’t have thought that html could be entered right into the SSP writing spaces to cover attributes of those particular spaces, i.e., #left, #center, #right, etc. and while each has to be individually put in, it’s better to do it in SSP when the links and relationships are easy to see via the map view.

Couple of things that I haven’t done yet that I think would be interesting is to integrate stretchtext into Paths. Because of its nature of appearing dreamlike and fading, stretchtext mimics the nature of this particular narrative because it is basically reflections on ‘what if’s?’ by the characters, and the possibility of different futures based on the choices. I like the idea of the text appearing on a different portion of the same page, and that might be one way to go.

Another effect I need to work on is bringing in images and maybe film clips as well as audio. I’m guessing however that my skill and knowledge is still a long way off for this kind of stuff (since I still haven’t discovered the trick to the background image) and there is a need to accomplish something before moving on to the more elaborate manipulations.

So maybe Paths is on the front burner for this week, with a good look at improving link relationships, discovering what impact if any that the different positions will have on the work, and of course, editing the text itself since I just can’t help myself.

One of the fun things about learning something new on a self-taught-but-an occasional-question-to-a-wiser-friend-basis is that you come up with some weird stuff:

What I’m trying to do is put some more information directly into the Storyspace template so that I needn’t go through all the files when the writing spaces have become .html files arranged in alphabetical order with no way (so far–I’m working on it) of knowing what links to what at a glance.

The image left has taught me that you shouldn’t use a 14 pt font unless you’ve already made arrangements in the css stylesheet for the headlines. For some reason, the export turned all the text into headline size. That’s okay, I’m working on a limited-lexia’ed piece as a test first.

This next little beauty is the result of trying to put the code into the writing space while in Storyspace to move a lexia’s eventual position on a web page. Evidently what I did didn’t work (okay, okay, so I’m working on this too) but it did make me laugh when thinking of the reason and possibility of hypertext and here I’ve got text escaping the boundaries of even that freeing element.