Day one – Here is some pre-Twine reflection and research that I have done based on my questions. I read some interesting discussion posts about adding ‘agency’ to the decision making in Twine to create games, rather than stories. I wonder if it really turns the narrative into a true game, or if it is just a way of making the story reading process more fun? I’m not sure where to draw the line on my thoughts here, but perhaps it will become more clear once I begin using Twine and see how this unfolds.
I recommend this article by Emily Short.
And now to try and create a game-like? story in Twine….
Day two – I am five hours in, on evening number two, and am learning now that “hot-linking’ images is a bad thing to do. I will now try to find instructions to host images elsewhere? I’m VERY new to coding and this is quite complex! Also, it is almost my bedtime 🙁
Day three – I stayed up way past my bedtime last night and got quite frustrated. Tonight has gone better. I have been saving images into my UBC blog media files – but music in mp3 format still won’t save there. I have now created 8 pages in Twine, learned how to host and resize images. I have changed backgrounds, added buttons, created links and am next wanting to create hypertext that links out of the story/game. I will save this for tomorrow; it is bedtime.
Day four and five – I finally feel like I am making some real headway! I can now link out of the site and have created 20 pages! I have changed text colours, enchanted a word to make it float and have been adding pictures with ease. 
I like the way the story web is shaping up and wonder about using this Software to create a very in-depth Family Tree, where you could link directly to people who are living and collect digital artifacts for those who are not. This could be quite cool!
I’ve finished my twine-based pottery story/lesson. I didn’t succeed in creating “Agency”, but I have learned a lot and revisited a movie that I haven’t seen in years. I chose to base this around a movie theme to help add engagement. I chose pottery as my starting point as it seemed best to start with a least one thing that I know!
Finally, I really appreciated the Hypertext reading this week. When I was in elementary school (in the mid to late 80’s), I was part of a “gifted” program and had the opportunity to work with one of the earliest Hypercard programs. I wasn’t able to create nearly the level of connections with it that I just completed in Twine, but I did work with a partner to make a digital ‘choose your own adventure’ style of story in grade five and remember how fun that had been and how special we had felt. There were only the two computers that we could access and they were on a bus that travelled between schools in our small rural district…
“Although in a printed book it would be intolerably pedantic to write footnotes, in the computer we have already come to regard this layered writing and reading as natural.” (p 27, Bolter).
Bolter, Jay David. (2001). Writing space: computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. New York, NY: Routledge.
Robyn, I was relieved to find out that I wasn’t the only one to find Twine daunting to learn. I somehow got through life never having coded until this project. I appreciated your journal approach to discussing the process.