I found this task really fun and interesting to complete. My biggest challenge was during the editing process. Twine offers a great platform to play with a new form, but as a novice it was really challenging to edit through my work. For instance, I learned late in the game that there was no spell check. Something to be said about how modern writers are dependent on word processing to generate content (Bolter). The ability to easily outline, move and edit text was a bit lost in Twine for me. I also realized after I was finished that the navigational device I chose (colour coding) might not be accessible for all readers. My story is written in the first person from the perspective of my dog. I stole this idea from the novel Fifteen Dogs by Andre Alexis and the ancient internet joke about a dog’s diary compared to a cat’s diary. My dog is quite clever, but also obsessed with eating crayons so she falls somewhere on the spectrum of these two inspirations.
I initially started to make a “choose your adventure” style story, then decided to start over in a different direction. I was thinking about how hypertexts should ideally remediate printed books (Bolter). I wanted to pull from the class theme for this week that the medium of the text shapes the content and writing style. To be honest I find “choose your own adventure” stories a bit clunky and underwhelming, particularly when the author forces you back to the original story arc. I wanted to try to remediate a traditional printed literary device instead. Depending on the genre authors can employ flashbacks, monologues, footnotes, etc. to add richness and information to printed text. I thought it would be interesting to have a core story arc which can be read at face level, with hypertext to add depth through what I called “tangents”. The reader can choose to go on tangents or can choose just to follow the main story path. I think it would be really interesting to expand on this form to have Xanadu style links between story elements. I imagine one could create an entire web of stories in this form where characters and backstories link in a bidirectional manner rather than in a serial manner as we experience with printed books (Nelson). Popular stories like Game of Thrones or true crime serials seem particularly suited to a hypertext medium.