Congratulations to Mary Ellen Molski. She has been accepted into Trinity. It’s been fun having her in class. At Trinity, in English, she will expand on her knowledge of Beowulf and the habits of writers. Hopefully someone at Trinity knows something about hypertext.
Nailed
Boy did I get nailed with a cold this weekend. When that happens everything stops and I’m right in the middle of something too.
Oh well.
Network Novels
I came to this by a variety of wefts, and it will be interesting to watch how things develop with Flight Paths.
But I’m not quite sure what is meant by networked novel in actuality. The second section under How to Participate goes:
Feel free to join in our conversations by adding comments to anything on this website. You are also encouraged to submit your own material to this site, including photos, memories, ideas, stories, music, video, or anything else you think might be interesting.
What are people meant to contribute and why? Forster clocked the novel at over 50,000 words, but the notion of novel and length is linked to apparatus, so novel could apply here as an intension. I see no problem with contributory fictions, but have never read anything of this sort that held my interest in a narrative sense, not that my interest is any great shakes.
When I’ve heard people talk about providing the environment for participatory fictions, the first question I ask is “why do this?” At the moment, I want to work on a team generated hypertext, but this is more about a merging of eyes on a few tightly drawn characters.
The Terms and Conditions would seem to suggest that ownership of contributions belongs to Pullinger and Joseph, The Writers. Why?
Hypertext Schema
Susan Gibb writes
Storyspace has indeed opened up Paths into much more than it started out being, and I’ve posted several times on its methods of accomplishing this. However, in this particular project, in changing the narrative structure–rerouting I guess you’d call it–I find any creative force squelched by the need to find connecting words that build bridges between the threads of story to make the whole thing work.
This sounds like a question or problem of schema. How do links in a fiction work naturally or as naturally as possible given the work, characters, conflict, and tendencies of stylistics. It’s not just a question on link, but maybe even several in their sequence as relationships.
fire
water
stone
and
air
or is it
fire water earth and mist
The other day it struck me that Blummer loved death. That’s right, death. He lives in a fantasy world, of course, where he’s caught just clips of black in windows, halls, and bathrooms. It doesn’t have to be a fantasy world. Death, of course, doesn’t mean death at all. This is a question of POV.
Hypertext, CSS, and Templates
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.
Hypertext Developments
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.
Sally Terrell Travels
Congratulations to Sally Terrell, our wonderful talent, for her inclusion in For Keeps, a collection of memoir edited by Victoria Zackheim. Over the course of the next few days, Sally will be reading from her work. She’ll be at Community Book Store in Brooklyn tonight at 7:30 PM, December 8th at Bluestockings in Manhattan at 7 PM, and East Haddam’s Burgundy Books on Sunday at 12:30 PM.
Sally’s work is yet another effort in the creative production going on at Tunxis. We’re proud to have her among our numbers.
From the book:
In FOR KEEPS: Women Tell the Truth About Their Bodies, Growing Older, and Acceptance, twenty-seven gifted authors write personal essays about how body image has colored, changed or enriched their lives…or how life’s events have changed their body image. Many of these authors have experienced some transformative moment when they thought Aha! and life was never the same. Whether the focus is illness, depression, our mothers, or growing older, the writing is profound, sometimes hilarious, and always engaging. What better than humor and the naked truth to celebrate and flaunt our bodies…and our attitudes toward them? Whoever we are, the way we feel about our bodies profoundly affects the way we live our lives.
Good Nights
I had one of those late nights a few days back. My son called out at about 2am when the cold air drowses and grabs at your ankles and I went in to find him sitting up near the foot of his bed. I smelled the smell and new exactly what and why: corn chunks with cheese, pinked by dinner-time tomato soup.
It took some time to clean him up. I removed the shorts, shirt, and thin, Skywalker sweater he likes to wear under the sheets. Bits and pieces of corn chunks scattered on the carpet, soft stomach cheese. He was cold and shaking and obviously feeling horrible. I dry washed him best as possible, wrapped him in my big shower towel and lay him down for a moment while I stripped the bed down to the pad and made a nice pile on the floor. Then I gave him a warm shower and soupdown and stored him in my bed and made the trip down to the basement and plopped the wetstuffs on the concrete floor. It took a while to scrub the carpet and freshen things back upstairs. I remade the bed, pulled every thing tight, rearranged the pillows. I lead S back into his room and slipped him into the covers, making sure he was aware of the big blue bowl I’d put on the bookcase.
Downstairs, I unpeeled and rinsed the sheets, towel, shirt, shorts and sweater under hot water. Sure, you have to use your hands a lot. The washer began soon after with a little bleach for good measure. I was back in bed by about 3:30 and then up a few times after that to dump and clean the blue bowl.
It was a wonderful night, really. Because we want to make them comfortable and to express care while they rest and have their eyes closed. They will remember this. As I did. I know exactly what a new bed feels like in those young hours after heaving up dinner.
Hypertext and Character
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.
Chart Views
A chart view with open text window in Storyspace on the PC from Susan Gibb’s developing hypertext, Paths.
