The template development has been interesting. I took Mark’s basic-plus Storyspace export template and removed all the embedded style elements and attached a stylesheet with all the required basics. I placed all of the output areas into divs, added footer, wrapper, navigation, and text tags and marked them to spec.

So we have this:

The spaces are 450 px wide. The title, “Road Poetry,” is a convenience just to see how id=title looks when styled 1.5em helvetica.

This is a nice little experiment because the html export in Storyspace is speedy, flexible, and provides for distribution of work into a designed container.

So, we can do IF distribution as well as hypertext for the new media students and Susan and I can move with the story.

I’m slowly moving an experiment Susan Gibb and I began via email into Storyspace. We’ll share the document, build the hypertext, spark up the narrative, and conjoin the parts, then output into a custom html/css template for web distribution.

The above image is a widget capture of the working map view with preliminary structure. The links, paths, and narrative will be edited later, of course, given that at the moment I’ve just wanted to get things entered for template study. Explode was an option but I wanted a little more control.

Another note:

My brother has been able to open a SSP Reader distributed hypertext in Linux using Wine.

This

Okay, so I can use stereotypes and turn ‘girl’ in a flash and change my mind. It just seems that Paths is not only much further along in the hypertext processing plan, but it’s still rather dear to my heart and I want to make this project work because it’s based on a sound theme of story. I’m still getting questions that would like answers from the characters. It’s about them, and about that part of them that is in all the rest of us.

is wonderfully put.

The problem Susan writes about here is interesting: what’s the difference between the right and the best structure. I myself have no idea how to exact the shape, at least in theory.

The problem isn’t limited to hypertext but to any experience or object that demands structural sense, such as a house, a cabinet, a poem or a novel. The problem is that in hypertext it’s demanding to find examples that demonstrate a particular type of structural element and to show it easily. It isn’t like showing someone a poem and identifying a potent use of metaphor.

It’s a different problem for the writer, given that as the idea goes: every poem, while it can learn from its fathers and mothers, is a new poem, and the writer writes from scratch when it’s time to get back to work. I’m going to provide a few examples here of particular hypertextual forms, beginning with Paths, possibly beginning tomorrow.

But there’s also something else to do too. I’ve been reading through lots of work, thinking about a Sequential Art course and in doing so have gotten into trouble with the Sandman series. At this point, the greater arc of the story through eleven volumes is beginning to bug me. The story of The Sandman revolves around the notion of change, the relationships of the Endless, and particularly Morpheus to his mortal and mythical enemies. Each Sandman book is a reference point to some other arc in another text, such as Fables and Reflections’ Desire promising to sick the Furies on Dream because he’s winning a bet. The Furies, of course, will foul up the dreamland later on and lead to the death of one aspect of Dream/Morpheus. So, even though there are references, for the life of me I can’t swallow why the Furies could, did, and were prompted to attack.

Sandman readers to the rescue please!

Susan Gibb writes

One of the reasons that I have taken advantage of the guard fields is the way the narrative is laid out in four main paths. Once a link is made onto another path, if the reader should follow that path through, he’d not only be dropped into a different environment (an entirely new space that both combines and defies simultaneous existence), but he may be dropped somewhere in the middle of a story without at least some clue of what’s going on. I suppose I should allow this, but because the main characters are involved in each of the stories, I’m thinking it might be confusing until the gist of the narrative–choice been concurrent in time–be realized.

This is an interesting creative quandary. Is this about providing freedom to the reader? Providing the possibility for multiple narrative experiences within a contained world? I don’t think its about either even though I may be tipping into the pool of cliche. But the work itself should dictate.

In Paths, I felt compelled to live by the rules of the hypertext, meeting the guard and complying. Mark Bernstein provides interesting suggestions about how hypertexts can behave in given instances of narrative, but living hypertext examples should play major roles, studied as hypertexts, studied as their embodied wholes as poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. The creator has to consider the whole as well as the part and how these two massive notions can be altered by creative decisions. What has troubled me in my own writing is that each hypertext should attempt to redefine hypertext itself. What makes a hypertext a hypertext from the point of view of the author?

If Anne is linked to Jeremy, Jeremy linked to Joyce, then how is Joyce linked to Anne? I don’t like the idea of providing freedom to the reader, even though exploration may matter. I like the idea of allowing the work to decide its possible internal modifications and adjustments. It’s a massive struggle. Add that to the demands of the writing itself and you have wonderfully whopping possibilities. The link itself is an aspect of the tale, a force in the telling and reading, no matter what that link may be doing in its little space. Therefore, every hypertext, as with every poem or story, should be an opportunity to play with opportunities afforded by the link.