What Are You Working On?

Please leave a note in this thread describing the hypertext narrative project you’re working on right now – even if it’s just in the planning stages.

I recently finished (or abandoned) a long hypertext fiction, Those Trojan Girls.

Next up, I’d like to try a narrative carried entirely through spatial hypertext. I’m greatly intrigued, too, by Alexis Kennedy’s recent work on narrative and crafting mechanics. And Those Trojan Girls was told in third-person present; I’m eager to get back to historical third person.

And I’m working on a story that pits a couple of young people against the global Gamergate/alt-right terror, on the trail of a cache of lost manuscripts stolen by the original Nazis. Including Hemingway’s suitcase.

I am currently working on an hypertext that must accompany a series of paintings I made for an exhibition to come, in january 2017. That hypertext is inspired by Howard Oakley’s works on history of art and consists in some statements about how I think practising painting: the idea is to connect every thought to the picture of a painting and let the reader come, go and dream as if he/she was in an English garden.

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Long tale. I’m working on what’s turned into a lifelong project, a hypertext narrative whose full title is We Descend: Archives Pertaining to Egderus Scriptor. Eventually it will comprise three ~50K-word volumes.

The story begins when an unnamed Scholar comes across an obscure scribe named Egderus, whose work contains fragmentary documents that the Scholar believes originate in an ancient civilization. He attempts to present this find to his community of learning, hoping it will make his reputation, but instead it destroys him, and the gathering of writings disappears, only to resurface again and again — ultimately, in one way or another, finding its way to us, in a process which itself becomes part of the tale this archive of archives has to tell.

Eastgate published Volume One of We Descend in 1997 as a standalone Storyspace 1 application; Volume Two appeared in 2015 on the web at wedescend.net; I want to finish the text of Volume Three by November of this year. Right now I’m working in TinderboxSix (v6.6.5), but am timidly considering the leap to Tinderbox 7.

I’ve studied two versions of Mark Bernstein’s Trojan Girls and also read Howard Oakley’s The Salome Story. And I’ve performed a few experiments in Storyspace 3 with We Descend in mind, but don’t feel confident enough to move the whole operation over there until the writing part is stable.

I have to admit that even after more than two years, I still feel rather awkward in TinderboxSix, especially in working the two-window interface (old Explorer View) which I rarely used, preferring the huge pile of notes scattered all over my desktop and each other, a happy mess I could make in TBX vv 4 & 5. I’ve tried porting my workFiles from those older versions, but disaster ensued, and so I have two older computers from which to retrieve (via SneakerNet!) any antient passages I need for present work on Vol3 in TBXv6x.

I love Tinderbox: nothing else does what it does, and I really can’t do this work without it (believe me — I’ve tried!). Shortly I’ll post some specific questions & how-do-I’s here and elsewhere in the forum, but this is my answer to this thread’s question!

BBly

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