Hypercompendia

You beg, plead, piss and moan for readers of your work and then the moment comes and drags the stones of doubt behind it. 

It’s good/it sucks/it’s good/it sucks/it’s good/it sucks and sucks and sucks.

And that is the second hurdle that stands in the way of good writing.

Well, semi-final anyway.  I finally wrote the ending.  I’ve seen where this was heading–unusual for me, though with this story, there’s only about an hour of time passed in the narrative–but didn’t want to throw it out there until it kind of happened as I brought Yolanda back to her chair on the porch.  I love how it did come about, and though it may be a bit sparse, I think it should be fairly evident to a reader as to what has happened.  Then again, I’m the one who had a protagonist live through a split, bled-out head wound in my interpretation of a story I recently read.

There is much to be done in rewriting and editing; for one thing, there’s some south of the border weather and architecture and terms to research and confirm or come up with a viable alternate.  There are names in Spanish, as well as terms and and the tilde for n’s and other symbols that I’ve not been able to figure out yet in Mac’s iPage program. 

As the story winds up to its close, I’ve much fewer ‘shards’ (Hypertextopia’s dangling enhancements of story) and while the map looks like I ran out of ’em, I think that if the story has been told fully to this point, that the pace would be slowed by their inclusion in these last few ‘fragments’ of narrative.  Though I might bring back the proud little scorpion just as a sign of some sort to close out the blue threads.

Totally, totally enjoyed this project and am embarrassed to say that I dropped everything else to work on it.  Deadlines meant nothing, promises will still be met; when the muse in my head speaks I must listen.  Though frankly, my language use in this story is not as lyrical as normal; yet more importantly, the story, for once, has been told.

First of all, a new mapview, though it doesn’t include all the ending boxes at the bottom of the screen:

And this, in filling out story with tidbits of information:

Herve was not only a selfish cabron,
he was stingy and stupid as well. The beautiful furniture he had made
for their home was only done because he refused to buy any at all.  God
had blessed his hands with great talent in carpentry and for that,
Yolanda was grateful.

Such sensitive hands, she thought,
that could feel the beauty of grain and of texture and shape, yet never
learned how to pleasure a woman.

I just love it.  I love working in this and I love developing story via the hypertext form and structure.  It doesn’t ask for the whole thing at once; which is good because I never know what that is.  It tweaks and teases it out of me, much as a teacher with student.

Going back and changing, rewriting, shining things up a bit, but more just to stay in the flavor of story since Yolanda’s story is about to come to an end.

Tried to get an alternate path thing going here, mainly because I had seen a similar go around in one of the other published pieces and wondered how it works.  Well, for me, it doesn’t; not if I want all the information to be read.  It appears that a reader could slip through the loops and move onward without reading both sides of this particular knot of information.  Now that would be fine too; as long as the information is not vital to the story and in this form of hypertext, for me, for this story, it is.  Now I can untie this particular knot and thread it out in linear structure, and I can put some ”enhancement” information in a knot such as this, but…why? While that my be rewarding the picky reader, wouldn’t it be penalizing the more relaxed, click onward reader for missing that one chance? (referenced ‘knot’ is in lower left–right by my smiling face which I am too lazy to put into Photoshop to crop out).

Here’s the latest, and I’m just getting used to the manipulations of the text boxes and what I can and cannot do.  For one thing, I’m thinking differently than in the Storyspace world.  Though I want to tie things together, I seem to be forced to do so with the lines of narrative, rather than planning on depending on links to bring it all to a conclusion.  It’s just different.  But as I learn, I’m approaching story (or rolling it out) in a manner that is agreeable to the medium.