m. c. de marco

Via Daring Fireball: the most technical and beautiful analysis of Choose Your Own Adventure books yet was created by Christian Swinehart. Be sure to try the menu at the top, which leads to more images, animations and an online book.

Via twitter: the new HTLit blog seems to be a handy clearinghouse for information about “literary hypertext.” It is itself on twitter; hypertext has always been a high-tech genre so nobody in the community is complaining about how pointless or incomprehensible twitter is.

A couple of weeks back Chris at Gimcrack’d linked an interview with ChooseCo founder Shannon Gilligan, and also kicked off a series on his own process for writing hyperfiction:

I’m going to try documenting my own process, as I work. It’s a little scary because a) it feels awfully narcissistic — but then this is the Internet b) what if I fail? What if I give up? How embarrassing would that be?

Via Stan Carey on twitter: Visualizing a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book at Boing Boing features a pretty map of Journey Under the Sea.

This is far from the first such map online. You can find The Cave of Time, The Third Planet from Altair, Sugarcane Island, and probably more out there if you look.

I’ve been reading Aftershock & Others: 19 Oddities by F. Paul Wilson. I’m enjoying the short stories, especially “Offshore”, but the unique part of the anthology is the description of his career scattered between the stories, and especially his largely unsuccessful attempts to sell interactive fiction back in the 1990’s.

Via gamebooks.org: Twine is a free graphical gamebook editor for Windows and OS X, with a command-line version called twee. It looks polished enough to save me the trouble of writing my own.

See the main page for examples of twee-generated hypertext fiction.

Interactive fiction came up briefly at the panel about online fiction markets at Readercon today. The one title mentioned was 253 by Geoff Ryman. With the help of someone else’s tweet about it, I looked it up once I got home. While certainly non-linear, it turned out to be less interactive than I expected. (This is not a Choose Your Own Adventure story.)

On the other hand, there’s an interesting drabble aspect to the story, with each page being exactly 253 words long.