Will kind of illustrate this in the next few slides

Will kind of illustrate this in the next few slides. Multiple authors. First person thoughts in mid action

End of a scene early on. Sometimes it’s obvious what choice is, sometimes less so. This scene splits into two paths—pretty basic example. Could read through one; curious go back & read both. Never NEED to know both. But extra foreshadowing (ex, expand what it can do. Think this out: like in this case--) color coded. General end-scene straighthrough links. Note about memories.

fix

The City and the Sea A Brief Overview

What is Hypertext? Writing with undefined structure Interactive to some degree Examples: Wikipedia, Goosebumps Choose-Your-Own-Ending Books, Text-based Adventure games Like a complex labyrinth: winding paths

This is Cool Because: Readers are engaged on an extra level—allows for reader driven experience Variety of content: central text can be prose, but link to: poems, pictures, videos, fake ‘encylopedia’ entries Broader detail, more *variety* of detail, but most of it ‘optional’ Could read straight through central plot, or lose yourself exploring nuances and tangents Can have “mirror plots”—same scenes written from different perspectives…more depth, follow favorite character, etc.

The world split into pieces and blurred outside the window. A few minutes of pastoral nowhere; browning grass and crisp blue lakes, then abruptly cluttered forest. That gave way to rows of identical warehouses, utilitarian and drab. Occasionally Klavier saw people. He felt like a deity, or maybe just intrusive: peering into to all these worlds, lives, moments only to rush away just as quick. Somewhere in there was in image; something metaphorical, almost meaningful, the kind of creative fuel he could refine into the idea for a new song if he put enough though into it. But the motion of the train, the metronome click-chug-clack, the blurred scenery; it made for a potent sedative when you tossed four hours of sleep the night before into the mix. The woman in the next seat said something pointed, and Klavier drifted off to sleep. He awoke abruptly, frequently, finally gave up and stared out his window at the thickening twilight. The woman had fallen asleep: this meant no more squawking complaints, the trade-off being saural snores and a wayward elbow that kept jabbing into Klavier’s side. He put his headphones back on, loaded an evocative, somber song, and watched night push the sun past the horizon. At some point he fell back asleep and dreamed. This is the end of a scene from early in The City and the Sea. Hover over the hyperlinks for brief explanations, then try and click through.

A struggling musician feels called to the sea and sets off on a journey. A woman without a name wakes up in a nowhere landscape. Somebody only half-real begins to cohere. This is what the first page of ‘The City and the Sea’ looks like: you pick your character, click, and start reading. Go ahead and try out all three—they link to short selections from each intial scene.

A short visual representing the possible sceneflow from part of ‘The City and the Sea’—think of it as a hypertext cross-section.

(After this is just the physical location of the stuff you hyperlinked to earlier, so hooray: you’re done. Thanks for checking out.)

On a schoolbus, age 16, caveman hair and an outfit that tries to argue grunge isn’t dead. Klavier’s cranking something crunchy and furious on a dollar-store CD player. “Hey,” says the kid next to him, some dweeby jackass with Grandpa glasses. “Hey.” Klavier can hear him—cheap headphones—but pretends he doesn’t. “HEY.” The kid jabs Klavier in the shoulder. “Could you turn it down?” Klavier pauses the music. He musters the most withering glare he can. Then he shakes his head and presses play. “Hey hey.” The poke is back, jabbing into Klavier like the beak of some pernicious bird. “Listen man, please. At least change the song, I hate these guys…” Klavier pulls off a headphone. He makes his eyes flat and apathetic—something he’s mastered the past few months. “Only CD I have.” “Here.” Poindexter rifles around in his backpack. He pulls out a thick CD case with a broken zipper. “You can listen to one of mine, you can even borrow it, just please, I hate those guys, they’re so whiny.” Disaffected Klavier wants to shrug and press play again; musical Klavier is too insatiably curious to pass this up. “Sure,” he says coolly. “I guess.” He flips through, ends up picking a some burned CD with ‘Dream mix” scrawled across it in slapdash handwriting. (“That’s a good one,” the nerdy kid advises nasally.) Klavier throw it in, presses play and: It’s like setting sail on an unknown ocean. Stepping into a pool on the first day of summer. Closing your eyes after hours of laying back and staring at the clouds. He ends up borrowing the kid’s entire CD collection, burning copies of all of it.

Klavier’s dream plays out something like this: It’s not even clear it’s a dream at first: he’s still on the train. Everything is silent and tombstone still. The light is sepulchral and evanescent. It smells like ancient brine from the bottom of the ocean and, if he inhales deeply enough, ash. All the seats are crooked, fluorescent, broken: littered with coats, skulls, empty suitcases. In the seat across the aisle, a silhouette floats—not black, but a sort of puddle drab off-brown. Klavier stares, trying to will himself awake.

The scene plays out something like this: On a train, so everything’s shaky and off-balance. The light is utilitarian and unflattering. It smells like dust from a dozen different cities and, if you inhale deeper, pseudofloral cleaning solution. Everybody’s slumped and plugged-in: to phones, music, laptops, movies. A bold few stare out the window; maybe they’re thinking, because there’s nothing to look at, only so much night. Or maybe they’re just staring, trying to slip into some sort of meditative in-between mode of consciousness.

Later on, hard to remember that last day. Friday night DJ set meant Klavier was roaring eardrums, gummy eyelids, sin-graph delirium and heavy limbs only barely pinned together into a person. Friday night DJ set meant: start with hedonistic fuck-it-all crowd pleaser, swap in some avant stuff, drift into autopilot while he slammed down coffee and pills and whatever else, keep this up until somewhere outside the sun started to rise, the spell broke, reality woke up, everyone drifted away and Klavier was left reassembling himself into something coherent in the held-breath vacuum abandoned by the music. Friday night DJ set meant still awake at 6 am Saturday morning, fumbling with thirty year old buttons and joysticks on the ancient arcade machine they kept by the bar. Klaiver pumped in another quarter and narrowed his world to the screen, fluorescent and pixelated. Gua-gua-gua beeped his character, chasing ghosts. Köhler twitched at the controls, caffeine quick. Gua-gua-gua. Time blinked. His head jerked up. GAME OVER flashed loud and absolute on the screen. Shit. Must have nodded off. More tired than he thought. Onscreen his avatar devoured itself over and over, something to nothing, GAME OVER still superimposed over it all. Palm sweat slicked the buttons. One more game, then he’d stagger home and go to bed. He reached in his pocket.

Finally. Looks like she’s waking up. Stretch, yawn, bleary shake of the head: everyday normal stuff you’d expect from anybody. She sits up. She’s very pretty. Long black hair, and a dress that looks like it was ripped straight from the fabric of the cosmos (you might even look for stars the first time you see it). Between the hair and the dress being so dark it almost looks like she’s not really there, or at least not completely, just a face and arms floating in space. She’s on a shore. Or maybe you’d call it an island, because it wraps around in a circle. She’s sprawled in the middle of it. All around is—no, not the sea. There’s nothing at all. Nothing. Ink? No, ink wouldn’t be this lusterless. Empty space wouldn’t look this heavy. Darkness wouldn’t be so restless. There’s nothing, okay? It’s worth noting that the shore, island, whatever you want to call it—is more or less just as black, only difference is that it’s dead and motionless, while the stuff out there—well, it doesn’t quite writhe but it at least makes a lazy pass at it. Stagnant gray light sits in the air like a bad smell. She observes all of this with cautious first time wonder. What’s her name? Well. She doesn’t remember. Or maybe she doesn’t have one. Or maybe she did and she lost it. Does it matter? What it boils down to is: she’s nameless.

He spent a lifetime walking down nameless streets in a nowhere city, himself a faceless nobody, an eternity of this dream until he woke hot and sweating and realized he was Nemo. Everything changed after that. He’d always been aware of the world, in a vague, impressionistic way. Once he realized he had a name, though, other things started to stick: he started to remember. Today he woke like any other day: at the top of a dark, rolling hill, staring up at an empty black sky. He was in a bed, which didn’t always happen. A pile of clocks was mounded disorderdly to one side; some ticking, some spinning, some sitting still for indeterminate stretches and then lurching drunkenly forward. A record spun soundlessly on a wood-paneled gramophone. Portraits of finely dressed strangers were strewn to about halfway down the hill. Farther along he could make out a dozen or so televisions with cracked screens. This would all be gone by the time he went to sleep—the bed, the clocks, all of it. Besides the landscape itself, everything here was temporary. Before, when he’d barely been here himself, before he had a name, this hadn’t bothered Nemo. Now, in his more speculative moments, it made him wonder—where it came from, where it went. Perhaps most importantly—why it went.