NaNoWriMo Notes

• It’s been a while since I tackled 50,000 words in a month. It’s not nearly as arduous as I’d expected.
• The goal here was to have a big pile of eventful fiction that could be used to explore new hypertext formalisms. I’ve got that, I think, though we’re still shy of the story’s end.
• The length of writing spaces/screens/lexia has a vast influence on the shape of hypertext stories, and influence way out of proportion to the amount of critical discussion this has received. I now suspect that many of the shortcomings of narrative games arise chiefly because there’s too little screen space; writers wind up trying to say too much with too few words and end up falling back on archetypes and cardboard.
• I believe everyone in our electronic cohort made their quota, which is nice as well.
• I’m tempted to recast this – or at least a part of this – in a Storyspace hypertext as well as the planned Card Shark romp. The two projects strike me as quite different, though the media are also very similar; it would be interesting to see the same story addressed in both ways.

• Here’s my dashboard. In retrospect, I ought to have added some agents with summary tables for characters of various sorts – the faculty, the service staff, the nefarious Security police, the Resistance fighters, and the townies.
• Frequently-used Tinderbox tabs included ❧ dashboard ❧ draft ❧ map of the school and its environs ❧ outline of characters with notes about their names, families, and other loose ends ❧ notes about actual places that resemble the setting, which were fun to compile and useful to have seen but which I seldom consulted.