HYPERTEXT: Poetry

Posted on July 8, 2009 by susan

In the middle of this 100 Days Project I’d like to point out that our chief storyteller here has just been published in the latest issue of the literary journal online,  #10 Drunken Boat.

Steve Ersinghaus‘ piece titled That Night, is hypertext poetry. Steve’s hypertext is a beautifully spun piece of eloquence and imagery and employs beyond the usual hypertext format the element of stretchtext which enhances the interpretation of the piece through visual effects. Kudos as well to James Revillini for his work in jQuery on this.

I’m hoping that more and more people realize the abilities of hypertext and overcome their fear and preconceived notions of seeing hypertext in narrative poetry and story as distractive elements and take the time to enjoy this exciting new trend in reading.

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REALITY?: Last Year’s Harvest This Year

Posted on July 1, 2009 by susan

img_0001Last year the chives looked like lawn grass. I left them in and this year they’ve blossomed and filled out like pudgy toddlers. Twice this year I pulled out a handful thinking they were the wild garlic I made a huge mistake in planting somewhere on the property. On my behalf I might add that the garden’s been pretty static through all these rainy days and cold nights so whatever’s standing tall is looked at suspiciously. Especially when you’re bending over from the waist and the blood’s all pooled in your brain.

Between rain bouts this afternoon I cut them down.  They’ll be chopped and dried and be a good year’s supply of chives for potatoes, soups, and stews.

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WRITING & HYPERTEXT: Story Determines Form

Posted on June 27, 2009 by susan

I did a whole presentation on this at Hypertext 2008 in Pittsburgh last year: story wants to be laid out not according to the writer’s whim, but rather where it wants to go on its own. Of course, before the web and hyperlinks, we didn’t have the choice of hypertext versus traditional linear story. There were the options of form however in prose, poetry, etc.

With the 100 Days Project I am writing a story a day in hypertext form. Neha is doing story in poetry. Mary Ellen is doing writing character sketches, others are contributing photography, watercolor, script, and meals.  Steve is doing linear text story.

Now there are many times I’m writing something that seems to want a straight linear–and it’s hard to use the term linear here because non-hypertexted story needn’t be linear–and I either have to stop and think about it or squeeze it out as best I can. This is forcing it into a form which the story doesn’t necessarily need to be.  There is a third option that I’ve taken a couple times: dump the story and start a new one.

I’m guessing that just as I come upon stories that want to be straight, Steve imagines a few that want to be hypertext. He’s proficient at either and once you have the tools, it’s always a part of the initial conception of story. One thing that’s helped me keep in a hypertext frame of mind is creating a base map of story in Tinderbox with writing spaces based on the average (about 16 with a half dozen smaller links to inspire intersections). This serves as a blank piece of paper or monitor in the hypertext version of writing.

It does get easier as one becomes immersed in the style to maintain that style of story; I find myself reading a paperback novel looking for links.

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WRITING & HYPERTEXT: The Muse and I

Posted on June 25, 2009 by susan

Been spending most of my waking hours writing hypertext short stories and often there’s a need to remind myself I’m a writer–or at lease I’m supposed to be writing down stories. There are several methods I use to bring myself back into the black depths of writing, but one of them is to read one of the previous hypertext stories–up to #34 done out of 100 planned–and get myself back in the mood as well as copyedit what I may have missed before. I’m noticing a lot of double “a” or “the” and I laugh because it usually comes prior to an adjective or an action verb where I either don’t know what’s coming or I’m trying to think of a better way of saying it. Then when it hits, the fingers automatically type the article before the word.

In going back over yesterday’s story and comments, I realized that in rereading I had completely forgotten a line of the story and thus didn’t even answer the question of what was in the pastrami. So I came upon this, and maybe found out:

He went home not wanting to believe she’d been taken. He would never be able to eat anything again.”

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LITERATURE: The English Patient – Opening Thoughts

Posted on June 23, 2009 by susan

This is embarrassing; I haven’t read except for short stories and poetry in almost a month. And I call myself a literary weblog? But the excuse for not reading is one of the best–I’ve been writing a short story a day in hypertext format on Hypercompendia (linked so there’s proof!).

But you can’t eat soup for lunch and type on a laptop at the same time, though God know I’ve tried. So it was finally time to stop carrying the book around with me and actually open it up and start reading.

First, some lovely imagery: “a buckle of noise in the air,” “a wedge of light,” “the lowest rib, its cliff of skin,” “I had broken the spareness of the desert,” and of course, “the penis sleeping like a sea horse.”  This is all within the first couple of pages and these images are separated by direct and concise movement of character and story. So no, it’s not an overdose of flowery prose.

And this caught my attention:

He whispers again, dragging the listening heart of the young nurse beside him to wherever his mind is, into that well of memory he kept plunging into during those months before he died. (p. 4)

Yes, page 4! I recall a story I wrote a few year ago that killed off the main character by the second paragraph (short story versus novel here) and was berated by a critique group who said that killing off the main character at the beginning was a big no-no in writing; that the reader had no more reason now to read the book if the ending is known. I, of course, ignored them.

Many, many novels reveal the end before the tale; it is a writing tool, no more and no less than that. There is just as much reason to know the story of a character–in fiction or non-fiction–whether he’s alive or dead. After all, death is the understood ending even for Cinderella and Prince Charming. In other words, they live “happily ever after” only for x number of years. Then they die, just like everyone else.

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REALITY?: Entitlement

Posted on June 21, 2009 by susan

Very strange world today, where if someone wants something that other people have, they seem to think that the government or their friends and neighbors owe it to them to provide it. Ran into a couple items on Twitter and weblogs today that caused me to just shake my head in amazement.

I come from a background of do-it-yourselfers or do-without. I remember a few years back when my sister gave my dad a book of paid-for gift coupons for Stop & Shop, where my dad always went to do grocery shopping. He wouldn’t use them and I bought the $35.00 book from him when I realized what stopped him: he was worried that someone would see him using them and think they were food stamps.

My folks went through some hard times and I remember an 8-oz tin of corned beef being used to feed a family of five. The three of us girls shared a single banana. Yes, we had Madame Alexander dolls for Christmas, but my mother somehow managed to buy just the dolls and make their outfits herself. I recall my own short period of unemployment–a few months when I was 28 after working since I was 16–when I fed sandwich steaks to my cat because I couldn’t afford cat food but found these in my freezer.

It’s a different world and a different mentality, and I’m not so sure all the changes are good.

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REALITY?: Happy Father’s Day!

Posted on June 21, 2009 by susan

And a remembrance of my own dad, gone five years now.

Dad

Memories live within the senses.
The sight of baby bluest eyes and wrinkled smiles.
I hear the roars of every kind of engine, mowers, drills
and the chainsaw that we tried hard not to fix;
the gentle voice heard reading Golden Books to little girls.
Smells of sawdust, fresh paint
and the seasonal burning of the lawns will live forever.
Tasting still the swordfish sticks, his favorite pineapple upside-down cake,
the hard candy snuck to children in a goodnight kiss.
Reaching out to touch him when he’s gone away
is the hardest one to feel through emptiness and summer air that chills me,
till I can close my eyes and ears and breath the silence for a while.
Then warmth returns and covers me in a father’s arms again.

12/12/11 – 07/23/04

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REALITY?: More Dumbing Down

Posted on June 19, 2009 by susan

A couple decades ago, the engineer who designed it would have been fired. Nowadays, it passes and is sold to a wearily accepting public:  Can you tell me why anyone would use metal parts that rust in a toilet tank?

Maybe it looked good on paper–excuse me, screen–but the computer didn’t happen to mention that the choice of metal RUSTS!

I’m thinking that the concept behind something like Chris Crawford’s Storytron where attributes and possibilties are selected to approximate an accurate reaction or result might be a good thing to plug into all those CAD software programs if people these days are ignoring their own common sense.

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REALITY?: Borders of Good Taste

Posted on June 17, 2009 by susan

Ran across this headline in the MSNBC online this morning: Three’s company in racy Calvin Klein Billboard – Massive NYC billboard shows woman on top of man kissing another man. The article states there are some people who think this goes too far and sends the wrong message to young people.

Remember, you saw it first here. I posted my reaction to this ad when I saw it in a magazine in the waiting room of a doctor’s office back in early May.

Glad that I’m not alone in this. As I said before, it may be a beautiful image but it’s certainly not saying anything good about women and relationships and love.

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WRITING: Process

Posted on June 16, 2009 by susan

After fiddling with a new theme and layout in css, I finally am getting down to the business of writing out today’s flash fiction hypertext. There’s a pretty specific starting point for the story because in this case (for the 100 Day Project) we read Steve’s story and float away in different directions from there. I read the story once quickly and note down what might get me going, from today’s story:

PLOT
Pushing the envelope
Gullibility
Mob mentality
Social Networking communication methods
Morality/social norms
Protagonist changes in facing 1st conflict

Plot made the biggest impression on me in this since one thing led to another in the typical cause and effect manner. But this guy was outrageous, and his actions escalated until someone questioned him–the hair being a metaphor certainly for more meaningful actions.

It would seem that the underlying themes of the story might also be mob mentality, and the public’s willingness to believe any b.s. they read or perhaps just how the media influences us, the ignorant public. How mistakes are forgotten, how far we can be pushed. So it may be a moralistic tale as well. One meant to provoke into looking at one’s own reality as pointed out in fiction.

I may read the story a couple of more times if something doesn’t scream out at me to be written. Then I find it and go from there.

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WRITING & HYPERTEXT: Tinderbox Fun

Posted on June 12, 2009 by susan

In the 100 Days Project, Steve Ersinghaus generously shared two versions of a story to show how the writing process works to sometimes show us when we get bogged down and how to turn the story around by approaching it in a different way. Some of the other participants showed us dual examples as well as to what works and what doesn’t.

In my own hypertexts, I don’t edit the way I do in straight text, although I have dumped a couple of stories, I usually play with what I have since the structure is a large part of the work and a lot of the effort in creating the narrative. So I don’t have a way of showing a story that didn’t make it.

But I thought about it in between bouts of inspired moments and played with Tinderbox to show a visual of a story that doesn’t work:

badwriting

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POETRY: Communication

Posted on June 11, 2009 by susan

Talking into space
I watch my words like race cars on the track
negotiate the curve of coiled pavement-colored wires
to reach the finish line, an ear

or letter by letter
pop up like weeds upon a garden page
click the ‘send’ or ‘publish’ hypertexted word
to reach a reader’s eye

then wait
as for an echo’s traveling time
to reach its destination, to touch the soul
or return unwanted to its sender

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HYPERTEXT & WRITING: Comic Relief in Magical Realism

Posted on June 11, 2009 by susan

I’ve been having some fun within the frame of intense work in writing a hypertext story each day for a grand total of one hundred through the summer if I can manage to keep it up. Even if I don’t, I’ve been forced to learn and relearn elements of story through the deadlines and the desire to come up with something new, something fresh and different than whatever I’ve been doing before.

The real roadblocks for me here are the inexperience with working within the hypertext format so each story needs double duty thinking. On top of that is the process of exporting each work into .html form and ensure that’s it’s working online. Sometimes in changing the titles, colors, etc. from one story to the next, a simple semi-colon goes missing, or a link has lost a character and it ends up pointing mid-story to an Error 404 page. Then there’s a lot of detective effort and time in tracking it down. The final kicker: I get to read it online in presention form and get itchy to edit. That takes several clicks to open the server page for the files and wait- we’re not done–make the changes to the hard drive .html file and the Tinderbox version as well.

So in the last couple of days, just when I was about to throw in the towel, inspiration came in the form of magical realism; a fun thing to do when story gets too serious and too formal. I tend to get “Byzantine” with words sometimes and overly explanatory and magical realism lets you cut that off at the pass. It’s a “because I say so” tool for the writer, somewhat like freeform poetry where the creative force negates most (not all) stringent and smothering restrictions on writing. It makes it more fun.

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WRITING: Poetics

Posted on June 8, 2009 by susan

Was writing hypertext stories for the past couple of weeks and now I’m going to take the time to do some editing. Still my favorite line though from the last one: “I paint my lips with cherries, my eyes with  the horizon of the sky.”

Reading Neruda again, and an anthology of diverse poetry. It keeps me in the right frame of mind to deal with writing and life.

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EDUCATION: Too Expensive or Free, one or the other

Posted on June 8, 2009 by susan

There is greed in all sectors: Will Higher Education Be the Next Bubble to Burst?

I feel that same old song playing as the middle class gets the short end of the stick.

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