Steve Ersinghaus

Seriously itching for the new novel.
Where are you Wally?

I agree with this entirely, especially on the theme of editing for compressed intensity. The only difference with Sandoval was that the amount of text spaces made editing a several years process. There’s still much to do with novel, too. The editing never ends.

I’d always been bothered by something in Brimmer and Death. Names. I’ve been through many of them and finally hit on a core but nuanced issue: Death herself. There’s a relationship here between a problem with linking in the story and their slow developing syntactical interference (which is a good thing). In the story, [...]

Deadwood is amazing. But for the background. Dan Dority, for example, played by W. Earl Brown, is totally realized. On screen, his manner, style of speech, habits and shape fit into Deadwood’s world without seam.
Last week we saw Dan streetfight with Captain Turner (Allan Graf). Dan is getting it pretty good. He reaches [...]

Finding time for Brimmer at this moment is tough even though he keeps tapping me on the shoulder and telling me to clean him up and get him up into reading space.
That photograph at the end and in the middle is important. Julia calls him back after eight hundred years. A thread that runs through [...]

I’m back into Dreamweaver as my code editor. But I still like hand-coding for some reason, though Dw just makes it easier to figure out why I screwed it up.
We also have somewhat of a bead on a Flash or SVG generated Storyspace file rendering machine. This will take some time though and it will [...]

This imagery is real core stuff. The text box’s contexts are compressed and vivid.

Find the local dealer and walk into the section of choice and you’ll possibly be overwhelmed, unless you’re Charles and Charles has a thing for dusty stacks, the deep and penetrating pains from bumping into the corners of close-drawn furniture, and he enjoys following young men and women. He backs into the shadows and watches [...]

Stories haunt the writer.
The rhythm of the language takes over, too, such that the the normal way of observing and expressing an object takes the color of that speed and temperament. Being inside the world is a way to express this metaphorically. Consider writing a large space. “writing a large space” isn’t writing a [...]

The following screen shots illustrate a creative problem in hypertext having to do with the content of writing spaces, closure, and links. I’ve highlighted the second link in the space called Burdens. The link in question is “like you.” In the context of the writing space, “like you” implies a lot: association, metaphor, difference, [...]

Mark Bernstein’s comment in a previous post reminds me of something I forgot to come back to. One of the reasons I’m tracking certain aspects of the Brimmer hypertext is to explore questions of aesthetics in the art form of hypertext fiction. Certain editing and creative problems arise in the crafting of hypertext that [...]

As I’d written about earlier, the imagery must be compressed.
So, let’s say you were weighted down under a stone on the floor of a sea. Could happen.
He opened his eyes to a dead fire. He blew coughs out of his lungs. He rose to his feet with the grit of seasalt [...]

For Brimmer, who has the gift of long life, time is an interesting phenomenon. In this section of the story, things are about to move in a different direction:
Brimmer never figured that a miscalculation in arch width would lead to the incineration of Max Splunt. He hadn’t suspected Max for a man likely to [...]

In a note to this post on hypertext and effects Juan writes:
It can be argued that most pieces of electronic literature could be reproduced in paper, thus the question about essential innovation seems valid. What cannot be reproduced on paper is the processing capacity of a computer. Storyspace offers some basic processing. Literatronic offers a [...]

A force driving Brimmer and Death is an aesthetic that has to do with Storyspace writing spaces. I call this an aesthetic because the force has to do with effects to the reader. I’ll get into more detail in a second.
But are Storyspace writing spaces all that different from any other space in [...]