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 apply only to a story crafted to be read via mediation by computer and will not arise when crafted to be read in a paper medium. Yet, both creative works will share whatever traditional elements apply to story telling, such as scene and dramatic tension.

This goes to the context of the term “e-book,” which I’ve commented on in a post entitled ebooks and the new media paradigm some years back. A work written as literary hypertext (or any genre for that matter) is created within the context of forces, limitations, modes, and computational frameworks of the surface environment. This is either an elaboration on or exposition of a stipulated Nelson’s First Law of Hypertext: a text built to be read on the computer.

If a hypertext is reproduced on paper, it’s no longer a hypertext.

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 on his tongue.

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 kill thousands in one desperate act of spite.

Management called Brimmer in. “Brimmer,” they said, “you’re a miracle worker, although it is a mystery, a great mystery. That millimeter mistake of yours saved ten thousand people from being crushed and burned.”

“He’s with me now, Brimmer,” Death said. “And boy is he sorry he tried to sabotage the whole business just to ruin you.”

“I never took him for an evil man,” Brimmer responded to Death. “Horrible craftsman, yes. He didn’t become you.”

The space is comprised of four paragraphs and three links to separate paths that will all meet at a common space where the story will proceed. The reader wont need to follow all three paths to find continuity or context because each path, while offering different takes on Max Splunt’s sabotage and death, covers enough information, yet each path colors the experience of the narrative in different ways.

Management is a collective noun here. It speaks in one royal voice. It doesn’t matter where they called him in and what was on the office walls. And what is the relation between Managements and Death’s conversations? What are the times? Are they sequentially related? This shouldn’t matter. Both conversations happened and are intrinsically important not important because they follow one another. In this way, they become like objects or images in Brimmer’s experience: memories.

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 which a hypertext would be constructed: another sort of editor, for example, say Flash, Fireworks, Literatronica, or something else. Does anybody really ask about how MS Word or another word processor influences a story published in Storyquarterly? The machine, in these cases, is assumed or forgotten. It’s a hidden arbiter.

Since Storyspace generates a self-contained work, then the editor must be be considered as integral to a fiction written in Storyspace. Hypertext fiction, in this context, seems a little generic in my view. Fiction in hypertext: doesn’t this carry a little different meaning?

Aesthetics to come.

Susan Gibb has a bit up on Brimmer and Death that covers stuff written into a space called “Rooms.”

Here’s the revision:

Hand in hand, they walked through rooms, some cluttered with books and furniture, others punched through with holes that opened onto instances of existence.

“I opened these for you,” she said. “I’m about scope. I thought you’d like some.”

He watched stars burst. He observed a multitude of births. He saw mountains crumble on worlds other than Earth, masses wander alien streets gasping for disease-less air, small forms fall from windows, avalanches smoking toward the wide-eyed, until he had to turn away. He follow her onto a checkerboard floor that coiled out into blackness like the strand of a gene.

“Everywhere,” she said.

She led him over the edge and onto the opposite side where they found themselves hemmed by a crowd of blue sheep. He followed her over a hill and she offered him coffee from a black cup in a kitchen with an avocado green stove.

“Have you decided where you’ll, what did you say, bunk up?”

She notes something I hadn’t thought of, too.

Brimmer and Death is being edited via its paths or two major narratives. I read and write following one narrative path, finish it, then go back and read/rewrite through the next, then I do it all over again (and over again). This means that at some point the editing pen is going to meet ground already covered but from a different frame of reference repeatedly. The map image below of a few text spaces represents how this editing technique can change the plot and the pace.

Define plot? I mean plot in its most general sense: causality as it matters to decisions. In a later section of the story, Brimmer has shacked up with Death and is going through an acclimation period in her “realm.” I felt that I had rushed through this section and really hadn’t set up the push toward the end, and thus had to add some scenes to slow things down, establish some grounding in the new digs, and ease Brimmer into some cause: how to get him out of a place he’s wanted to enter for quite some time.

Above, “Observation” used to link to “Windows.” The box titled “Plot” simply identifies for me where the new sub arc needed to begin. It ends with “Aches.” The pacing here matters to both narrative instances of the story.