Brimmer and Death began with these few sentences.

On the first evening of a two-day hike through the desert, Brimmer met Death seated on a flat-topped stone. On her head she wore a black bandanna. Silver rivets studded her belt, and she cooled herself with a paper fan imprinted with the shape of the universe.

This little bit is supposed to do a couple of simple things: set the scene, establish POV, provide some information about who’s around to do something, and provide context.

After all, the two requirements of fiction are easy: tell a story and make it interesting. In that first round above, something is suggested, there’s a start to context, place, and character, but yuck what’s with that fan?

Right. Here’s the revision:

On the first evening of a two-day hike through the desert, Brimmer met Death seated on a flat-topped stone. She wore a plain black bandanna on her head. Silver rivets studded her belt, and she waved the heat away with a bone-handled fan.

Let’s say that Death indeed has a picture of the universe on her fan. I like that idea. Brimmer and Death, after all, is a story that deals with the fantastic. If Neil Gaiman could invent a pleasant character named Death, who’s to say that a hand fan she may be carrying couldn’t have a painting of the universe on it. But it just doesn’t work. The syntax is tortured to force the image into place, and it doesn’t sound right either. Another issue has to do with the relationship between sentence lengths, which has a lot to do with noun verb structure. “with a paper fan imprinted” makes for a dull, over-technical sentence. So, why not just lose the problematic image (it could come back in somewhere else, maybe, or not all) and just give the fan a bone handle. It makes the encounter more concrete and doesn’t turn Brimmer or the narrator into these incredibly observant people who, when confronted with an image, immediately recognize it as the universe.

In addition, “cooled herself” is abstract, so “waved” was added to provide a little movement and the suggestion of humor. There are a lot of “a” sounds to exploit just for kicks.

To finish, I don’t like the word fan in relation to “rivets studded.” Fan is just not a very good word.

. . . and she waved at the heat with a bone-webbed flyswatter/paper airplane/running shoe.

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.