No, these aren’t weird pictures of galaxies, they’re Storyspace maps of Brimmer and Death at separate stages of development.

The first is an older rendering of the map. The colored hub at the center demonstrates how the story developed and grew from an early conception of several paths. Basically, the reader would click on a letter in the word “Miracle” and proceed from there. Thus, I began the work by writing an “m” path, an “i” path, and so forth. While this idea worked okay as a generator, I quickly found that the 7 path requirement was unnatural and arbitrary.

The second map shows a much better picture of how things eventually shook out. Two major paths, one of them happening a little later than the first, another linking out at the opener. The two major narrative expanses join at a common reference point, a sort of Second Act, and sprints to the end from there. The two views show how the Storyspace map functions as an editing tool, providing opportunities for managing structure and solving creative riddles.

Let’s say a question about plot surfaced: say, what prompted Brimmer to take a particular action. The structural hypertext view provided information about “when” and “where” the action was happening in relation to another. In Brimmer and Death, the initial space isn’t all that important to plot, but it does supply a space for context and conflict, laying out what Brimmer desires. It happens at some undisclosed future relevant to the narrative. Later parts of the story will reference what happens in the initial scene in important ways, but I didn’t realize this when the initial space was arbitrarily located in an arbitrary path on the old map. It was merely another lexia. If I could “see” it as a place to begin, then I could “see” a much more efficient narrative ordering.

The narrative structure of Brimmer and Death is pretty much complete. I’m gearing up for the final push to the engame, which, of course, came as a surprise. Also, the organizational theme has been adjusted from a wheel to an entry into two separate paths.

One question though: let’s say your family had a fallout shelter in the backyard. You live in the desert, say somewhere near Alamogordo, New Mexico. How easy would the shelter be to find after about eight hundred years of moving sand and a slight change to landscape? Because the key is getting Brimmer back into the shelter after an eight hundred year absence.

Is this a science question?

P.S. There’s a metaphor here somewhere and an image.

At Hypercompendia, Susan Gibb writes on building method:

Today’s a bit of a turning point in this new project since I’ve decided to continue with the story but am approaching it in a different way so that I don’t feel lost because I’m not filling out Writing Spaces as fluidly as I did with Paths. The greatest thing about Storyspace is that if I peter out on one path, there are many others that may be taken further if my mind is onto them.

The question of what to do when the wall goes up is true of Brimmer and Death, a short story project I’m deep into at the moment. It began with an image about which I knew nothing: a conversation, a mountain, and a deer’s eye. A few steps later I had Brimmer’s voice. And while it’s a long way from over, the organization finally led to what I’d call the story’s arc.

The story began with links from the word “miracle.” As begun, each letter of he word would lead to a separate thread of the story as it concerned Brimmer’s relationship with Death. It took me until the letter “e”–called the Star Thread–to find the key, after logging several plot skeletons driven by intuition.

For example, as Brimmer worked his way through the future, say a few hundred years into it, Brimmer’s realationship to Death was up for grabs. Why would she have a relationship with him in the first place and how would this potentiality assist in Brimmer’s decisions and ideas, and, importantly, when would it come into play? Relationships are complicated forces, after all, and they don’t come cheap.

So it’s 2008. In the midst of a conviction that I need a new snow thrower, I’ve been working on a new hypertext called preliminarily Brimmer and Death, which traces the relationship between Brimmer, a carpenter, and Death, a character based on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman DC comics universe.

This is not a new concept, elaborating on the character of Death in story. She’s appeared in numerous comics, from the Sandman series to spin offs, such as Death: The High Cost of Living, Death: The Time of Your Life, and others, such as Jill Thompson’s manga Death at Death’s Door. What complicates the project, is the fact that Death will be delivered inside the DC universe, which could include a variety of story elements, but Brimmer himself is the focus.

In the story he lives with death in her “realm” for a while and it’s interesting to try and figure out the nature of Death as a character with whom a mortal human could have a relationship (Morpheus can, why not Death?). Part of the concept from the storyline that develops draws from the “Men of Good Fortune” chapter of The Doll’s House in which Morpheus and Death provide for Robert “Hob” Gadling’s life to persist. Morpheus asks Hob to meet with him at the White Horse Tavern in a hundred years time, interested, primarily, as we are, in what happens “if.” In this chapter, while Chaucer discusses English versus French in the background, Hob says to a table-crowd: “The only reason people die, is because everyone does it. You all just go along with it. It’s rubbish, Death. It’s stupid. I don’t want nothing to do with it.” And so Hob resolves to live and his state through the centuries is treated throughout the Sandman series. Thus, the concept is set as are the thematic consequences of such a choice, and, of course, this sets the potential for interesting plot keys, such as Brimmer’s choice or desire to live, a chaining tension, how do the two unify, and what key closes Brimmer’s initial opening in the narrative.

Hob’s story begins in the 14th Century. Brimmer’s begins in the contemporary. Thus the majority of the hypertext takes place in the future with two important actions, though these will occur only in one out of 7 paths. I will be leaked in every path in some way that Brimmer rides life without dying in 7 settings. Every path may develop a separate and conclusive trail that, with slight variations, pushes Brimmer closer to the principle key.

This is just fascinating reading on the development of Paths in hypertext. If we go back to the original version of the story and compare it the new rendering in Storyspace, we see lots of new developments. This is important to the notion of the environment and its relation to character and character as an aspect of knowledge, and Susan’s work has inspired me to go back to our email rounds with the characters we developed there.

Here’s the idea. We go with the notion that character in fiction is a form of knowledge dependent on the narrative space in which the persona is situated. Paths in hypertext was able to draw out that which went unknown before. Such possibility then.

More to come.

Susan’s link structure is interesting. In the following grab of the hypertext, “Sunday” and the two women of concern–Joyce and Anne–anchor the link, but Sunday Morning is guarded and thus untraversable until another space is hit, although I don’t know which and really don’t want to know, although I would like to continue because of the suggested relationship between Anne and her husband.

The link that joins the spaces is “mornings.” In Paths, mornings could form a bridge from character to character, plot point to plot point, if this were an aspect of the link structure concept.

Another element that binds the spaces here is the previously-mentioned relationship issue. Jeremy and Joyce, the husband and Anne. Jeremy’s stomach is in a pretty good spot but nevertheless he “hates” the life, while Anne may indeed be in a position much the same, but will the paths connect? I think the energy and this tension is made possible by the structure, the choice through which the author makes closure work for the reader who must be thinking: what’s up with Anne, what’s up with Jeremy?

Susan Gibb has let me in on Paths.

I’m starting with “I Would Have Told You.” In this “path,” the reader begins with a speaker whose voice is reflective.

We have:

How the years race once the mysteries of life transition to the common and known. Taste is tasted only once, yet the memory would have us believe it better.

Impossible. The most evil of all masqueraders is memory.

“Taste” is interesting and so is “memory” because of the prior box. It goes like this:

I’ve lain here for the past hour, maybe two, thinking about the last few years with Joyce. Did I stop loving her before then? Had I ever loved her, really, with the passion and unquestioned needs of youth? The way I’d loved Anne?

Reflections on Luella play with ghosts and time. At the moment of reflection, the hands clench as they had clenched.

She took my hands and placed one on each. My palms grow warm with the feel of them still, my fingers curl with the memory of touch. The conflict of soft yielding and hard resistance. The smell of musk.

Susan builds the tension between the speaker and his reflectiveness not by moving to past and present but by interjoining its experience. Memory can be thought of as different moment of the present. Ugliness and Ugliness 2 bring back in the voices and provide a rhythm of the narrative. In Ugliness, we get a peek at a discussion with Anne:

“You slept with her, didn’t you!”

“Yes, but it wasn’t love, Anne. It wasn’t like it is with you and me.”

“How could you?”

“I thought we were free. I thought our love was above all the sins of jealousy and the conventions of monogamy.”

“But why do you need her?’

“Not her. It’s nothing to do with her beyond a moment of sharing and fulfilling a need for another human being that touched me within that moment. You’re free as well, Anne. If you slept with someone else it would not diminish what we have together.”

Anne has obviously learned something about freedom here. Sex does not diminish love. Spring will become Summer in Ugliness 2 as Anne takes Jeremy’s advice. I wonder about the speaker; what’s happened to the women and his life with them. How does he weigh love, as in weighing the scales. “It isn’t like it is with you and me,” he claims. (And so I avoid moving too deeply into another aspect, the aspect of Chloe rocking and use the “loop.”)

I get the sense from the text that Jeremy, the narrator, sees life in Anne and “deadness” in Joyce, which is a wonderful irony.

Finally a new hypertext to read.