Tales Of Storyspace
I’ve just spent the better part of a day in Storyspace. Not in Xcode building Storyspace, but actually writing new stuff in Storyspace 3. (I did need to bail and do a fresh build to address a bug, but I got all the way to 4PM before that happened. A landmark.)
Right now, I'm working on a way to integrate Storyspace and Card Shark, one of my exotic hypertext systems. The two are very different in form and rhetoric, but I expect they’ll work well together; in particular, Card Shark lets you construct tangles with more easily and more thoughtfully than pure Storyspace allowed, while focusing your concentration (and the map view) on links that participate in more interesting patterns.
For example, a chase lends itself beautifully to the tangle. Lots of stuff happens in the course of a chase. Some of it is indispensable. Some might work tonight but be better left out tomorrow; that’s what hypertext is for. Sometimes, we might keep the point of view in one place, tracking our protagonist. Sometimes, we might intercut the hero’s point of view with the enemy’s. Hypertext can do that, too.