Every summer as a kid, my dad took me and my younger sister to a couple of new US states for a short vacation. After ten years of doing that, plus some school and personal trips, I’d covered 48 states.

Now that Jey’s here, I want him to see all of the amazing vistas and interesting spots around this massive country, so we’ve started doing a fair bit of traveling ourselves. But we ran into a couple of problems: first, what’s the best way to keep the memories of those trips alive in our home, so that we can enjoy them, and share them with others? Second, how can we display our digital photos, and further, still tell a story about where we’ve been and what we’ve seen?

We eventually landed on a solution…

Creating a giant canvas map to be displayed in our home to be a constantly-evolving piece of artwork ties our first problem together neatly: as we travel to new places, we’ll paint on the names of the cities we visit along with landmarks, city emblems, whatever strikes our fancy and triggers memories of the trip.

Unfortunately, nobody manufactures canvases in the size we really wanted, so we bought canvas stretchers and custom-cut braces, along with a massive roll of canvas.

Once that was assembled, we made a gridded map of the country, then taped off the canvas to make sure the lines were accurate.

We wanted the look of the finished piece to be personal and informal, so once the lines were on, we drew in all the state shapes by hand. This is a lot harder than you might imagine, particularly on states that hit the northern and eastern borders of the country.

(Here, you can see that we started drawing in all the states with the tape still on. That got pretty complicated, so it didn’t last long, and we eventually got all the grids down, removed the tape, and finished up the rest of the states.)

The entire thing is drawn now, and the grid lines are erased. The next step will be painting it, and then adding all of the city art for places we’ve been, like San Francisco, Boulder, Colorado, Dallas, Austin, New York…

Then, we have to deal with the second part of the problem: how can we connect all of our trip photos from those places to this large, physical record? We’ve had an idea that shouldn’t be too hard to execute. But for now, stay tuned.

This is what the hypertext project looks like so far, but it should easily have four to five times that number of segments to be considered bare-bones-complete. The only work I’m able to do on it currently is to think very hard about what exactly I’d like to say through each character, but that’s sufficient til things calm down a little.

I have learned, however, that if I want to limit each project to a single month I’ll need to either set a much smaller end goal and/or try to get them done in sprints. I’d been considering using an Inform interactive fiction project I’d already started for the month of July, but maybe instead a digital comic, created in a single day a la 24 Hour Comics Day?

As part of this new hustle, all of my recreational game playing has also come to a complete standstill, because I have to hold on very tight to what little free time I have. I’ve been “playing” Tiny Tower, which isn’t a game as much as a tower/business management sim with cute graphics.

The game itself is built on the model that Nimblebit discovered is the most effective, which is to release a free game and offer in-app purchases; people who wouldn’t be willing to shell out that initial .99 are more than happy to pay $20 to speed things along using “Tower Bux”. It’s possible to play without buying bux, but things move more slowly the higher the tower climbs (restocking, new residents moving in, etc). And it’s perpetual, with businesses constantly selling and needing restocking and selling again.

Perhaps it’s a combination of my own gamer classification and my extreme wariness of the Zynga performance-reward dynamic, but I can’t decide how I feel about it. There’s no specific goal in Tiny Tower other than “build the biggest tower ever” and nothing to really do except tap floors to restock things or build new businesses.

What I’m wondering is, is it worth investing my time in a diversion with no tangible reward? (Not to suggest it isn’t fun – as a kid, I hated spending quarters on arcade games that didn’t shell out a prize, like a bouncy ball or piece of gum and I guess I’m still kind of the same way. Weirdo!) Tiny Tower works well enough right now, when I don’t have time to invest in games that require more active participation. But I know that when I do figure out that balance in my life and reclaim some of my free time, 1) I will eventually abandon my tower, and 2) I don’t really mind that outcome.

Still, I’m accepting that it’s okay to just be idle sometimes, so I’m not too fussed. But my next problem is, when do I stop playing this thing? Do I wait until I’ve hit 30 floors, or 50? Is it fair to ply me emotionally with the lives of the tower residents (who post their funny thoughts to their own “Bitbook” feed), if I’m just going to resign them to the darkness when all the businesses run out of stock for the final time?

Kind of like my work situation, in which I have multiple options but don’t know what direction I’m going to be taking in a few months, with Tiny Tower I’m learning to function in a kind of enforced here and now, with no known reward to look forward to, and only the checking-over of my work at the end of each day to mark my progress. Not a bad thing, but different.

I wrote hypertext fiction for a creative writing class in high school, but my first formal exposure to this type of literature was during a college class on Latin American literature, when a teacher described “Hopscotch” by Juilo Cortazar. It’s a stream-of-consciousness novel with 99 chapters of “expendable” content, which can be read with an alternate table of contents provided by the author to supplement the main story. The final two chapters loop together, allowing the reader to choose which ending to the story they prefer.

This type of fiction inhabits an interesting narrative space, one in which the reader is both creating the work of fiction for themselves, but also participating as one single element in a work that’s larger than and which incorporates them. The author is both completely in control of the world, and also relinquishes control of the reader’s experience.

It’s easiest to think of this duality in the context of a video game; a game maker creates the world, sets up the story and characters and so on, and can either force the player down a particular path of play, or leave the world open to exploring and molding to their own preferred method of gameplay. But this can also apply to books (or at least written, printed works of fiction that may be loosely defined as books), and that’s what I’m specifically interested in today.

My reading list is as follows:

(The Unfortunates, via)

• House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski – a novel with multiple layered stories told in footnotes by an unrelated, unreliable narrator on an academic study of a nonexistent documentary film about a transdimensional house. The layout, colors and presence of the type itself is also related to the narrative experience.
• Hopscotch (Rayuela) by Julio Cortazar – described above, this book can be read in order as presented or in a pattern provided by the author, with the reader choosing their own ending.
• Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words – presented as an alphabetically-arranged dictionary, this book is the fictional historical record of an Indo-European tribe who vanished in the 10th century. It can be browsed and read in any order, there are lots of cross-references between sections, and there are two versions, “male” and “female”, with minute differences.
• The Mixquiahuala Letters by Ana Castillo – an homage to Hopscotch, this book has three ways to read the letters in this episolary novel about two female artists: “one for the conformist, one for the cynic, and one for the quixotic.”
• 253 by Geoff Ryman – a hypernext novel presented online, describing the seven carriages on a Bakerloo Line train, each with 36 seats filled with passengers, as it travels from Embankment to Elephant and Castle. I’ll be starting with the driver.
• The Castle of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino – two groups of travelers have lost their voices and must tell their stories using tarot cards; “A narrator at each place interprets the cards for the reader, but since the tarot cards are subject to multiple interpretations, the stories the narrators offer are not necessarily the stories intended by the mute storytellers.”
• Heart Suit (McSweeney’s Issue 16) by Robert Coover – a story told on thirteen interchangeable playing cards (shown below)

• Life: A User’s Manual by Georges Perec – this book uses a 10×10 grid (and is meant to be similar to a chess board) to dissect and reassemble the inhabitants and contents of a Parisian apartment building, playing with collage-style art, word games and acrostics to create a “completed jigsaw puzzle”
• The Unfortunates by B.S. Johnson – published in 1969, this is a box that contains a collection of loose and gathered books of printed pages, making 27 chapters total; the first and last chapters are marked as such, and the order of the others is left to the reader. As one Amazon review says, “It’s a story told as chapters that appear as flashbacks, or real events depending on where they fall in your random sequence.” (shown at the top of this post)
• McSweeney’s Issue 22 – this issue is “a three-part exercise in inspired restriction — of author, of content, and of form.” My specific interest is in the Oulipo writing in the third section. Oulipo is a French movement from the 60s which “seeks to create works using constrained writing techniques”; the repertoire includes both The Castle of Crossed Destinies and Life: A User’s Manual, listed above. It’s also responsible for “A Void”, Perec’s novel written entirely without the letter “e”.
• The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne – written in the 18th century and described today as “the first hypertext novel” due to its meandering plotlines, branching stories and stylistic flourishes. It’s also supposed to be very funny to boot.
• Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges – a dense collection of puzzle box stories, essays, book reviews for books that haven’t been written, obituaries for people that never lived. Frequently described as “dense”, “intensely cerebral” and “influential”, which I generally take to mean it’s often assigned in literature classes to give context to later, easier works.
• Webcomics by Scott McCloud – McCloud has long been at the forefront of explaining the how and why of comic making and reading, and he’s also done a lot of playing around with comic form using the internet, making the argument that online, comics aren’t limited to the prescribed dimensions of the printed paper pages; works include an infinite canvas comic and a “zooming” comic (clicked to reveal the next panel from within the current one).
• Meanwhile: Pick Any Path. 3,856 Story Possibilities. by Jason Shiga – like choose-your-own-adventure/chutes and ladders (or snakes and ladders, if you’re in the UK) in graphic novel form.
• Interactive Audio Novel on Spotify by Hurts and Joe Stretch – a choose-your-own adventure that takes advantage of the Spotify file system

And some cut-up/fold-in/assemblage/collage art books:

• The Ticket That Exploded by William S. Burroughs – Oulipo/Dadaist book examining language of a virus and social revolution through technology
• Diary of An Amateur Photographer by Graham Rawle – collage-style mystery with a very unreliable narrator
• Woman’s World: A Novel by Graham Rawle – a pulp noir constructed from 40,000 text fragments cut from 1960s women’s magazines

And of course, the more I research the more books I find to add to the list. This is the core, though, and it’s inspired me to try and create one work of hypertext/interactive/experimental fiction each month or so, so I’m sticking to it for now.