Yesterday a very good friend, who is a poet and works for a big publisher, mailed me the hypertext-novel “afternoon, a story”. When I replied to thank him I found I had a lot to say, so I moved most of it here.
OK. First, we are all writing hypertext these days. Some try do it well, and others just don’t care.
But (some of you may remember), before the Web hypertext was just a hot but rather obscure concept in academic circles. Everyone was writing about hypertext-writing – but almost no one did any. Just like programmers ocasionally go astray: writing tools for writing tools for writing tools…
One of the exceptions was Michael Joyce – in 1989 he used his own hypertext-tool to actually write a novel. Is it good? Well, there are good reviews – and bad: “The amazing thing about the dancing bear is not that it dances well, but that it can dance at all”. To each his own.
Today the homepage of Joyce’s company says they are “the primary source of serious hypertext”. This an interesting attempt to define a market, but doomed: today the unwashed masses on the web are the primary source for any kind of hypertext, “serious” or not.
To be fair, the site has lots of useful resources about hypertext and the web. And StorySpace is used for many intesting things, from discussing films to presenting complex documentation.
But I rarely feel good about tools with one-way links to the web. Sure, you can live in your authoring envionment and occasionally export finished things – but that’s just not the way the Web works!
Personally, I have always been a sucker for nice ways to visualize complex writing – but I’ll trade that any day to be part of something bigger than myself.
And some day, I may not have to choose. Meanwhile, I’ll just write and see what happens.
Took a long walk in the warm afternoon sun with an old friend today – she took time off from the play she is directing.
She made me buy a new swedish magazine I hadn’t noticed. Good reporting and a mix of real and made-up ads: very young, very rude and very funny. Now me and Aila are reading and laughing together. Too bad there is nothing on their site yet.
Soon it will be time to leave – I’ll catch a train first thing in the morning and spend the weekend at Badhotellet i Tranås. By the way, Happy Easter!