All’s Fair in Love & War, Texas is now live!

After months of preparation, All’s Fair in Love and War, Texas is finally live. Check it out, tell your friends, tell your friends’ tweens and teens!

I realize it might not look like it to the untrained eye, but this website was a lot of work. (Work which, I have to admit, I mostly enjoyed.) It’s built on Wordpress, but it was my first attempt at building a WP theme from scratch. So I had that learning curve to tackle, which was respectable. (If I had it all to do over again, I would probably start out with the Thematic theme and build a child theme from there. I discovered Thematic when building a website for my husband’s job, and it’s wonderful.)

So I built the theme myself. And then I ran into some coding problems. See, from the beginning I knew I did not want to create just anther blog-based serialized novel. There are TONS of those on the net. Given my penchant for the web and “new media” in general, I wanted to create something that, as far as I was aware, hadn’t really been done elsewhere. Building upon some basic beliefs I have about how web users assimilate information and knowledge (about which I have an article coming out on A List Apart some time this fall) I knew I wanted to create a narrative that had many points of entry and exit. I wanted my readers to choose for themselves which narratives to follow. And moreover, I wanted to take all the work out of it. I wanted choosing a narrative to be intuitive and easy.

So the first thing I needed to do was create metadata for each story. Which characters are involved? Where does this story take place? Which story line does it fall into? And I needed to display this metadata in a way that would make sense to the reader, yet wouldn’t be overwhelming.

Turns out, there’s not a way built into Wordpress to do this. You can tell Wordpress to show you the children of certain categories, but you can’t ask Wordpress to show you the children of X category ONLY if this post belongs to the parent category (an subsequently, only if it belongs to the children categories!) This was a fundamental navigational aspect I needed for this site. I needed to say, “Okay, Wordpress, show me the children of the Characters category that this post belongs to, and then show me the children of the Places category this belongs to, and then show me the children of the Events category this post belongs to.”

I tried to make Wordpress do this. I really did. But Wordpress just stuck its tongue out at me. Real mature.

So I cried. (Yeah, neither mature nor productive, I know, but I’m prone to breakdowns when code fails. This is after the cursing has ended.) I cried because I couldn’t get it to work, and because if I couldn’t get it to work, the entire project was going to fail. Without this aspect, the website would be just like tons of other web novels out there.

Then I posted about my troubles on Twitter where a very kind English bloke offered to help me. And to make a long story short, he fixed my problem. And he’s awesome.

Then I ran into another problem. Each story potentially belongs to several different narratives – certain characters, certain places, certain storylines. I wanted my readers to choose how they read the story, but how was I going to make it possible for them to continue in their narrative seamlessly? I mean, when they got to the end of the story, the “next” button would always point to the next chronological post, but not necessarily the next post in the narrative my reader had chosen. So if they only wanted to read posts featuring the Prime of Darkness, they’d have to locate the POD archive, select a post, read, then go back to the archive, find the next post, read it, and so on.

Unacceptable.

I needed to provide navigation that suited the narrative. But how could I know which narrative they were on? How could I know how to help them get to the next post in their chosen narrative?

I considered a lot of options. I thought about adding navigation for every possible exit point. But even with a healthy dose of Ajax, that seemed clunky (and it wasn’t easy to code, as it turned out.)

Then I stumbled upon a plugin that allowed me to do exactly what I wanted. When you choose a link from an archive, the next/previous navigation remembers what archive you came from, and lets you navigate only that archive. So if you’re looking at the Prime of Darkness archive and you click a post, you will navigate only that story line.

Not only acceptable, but awesome.

And after that, the site took off running.

I ran into other, less technical, problems, too. The fact that I can’t draw was a huge obstacle, so I decided to just include illustrations where I could create something that looked halfway decent. I worked hard on the character avatars, and while certain avatars that I made early on could stand to be redrawn, I am mostly very happy with them.

All in all, I count this project a huge success. It works as intended. (There is one small bug that I still don’t know how to fix, but it’s a bug I can live with for now.) It’s different from the other hundreds of digital narratives out there. I’m proud of the voice, and the character, and what I’ve managed to accomplish, more or less by myself.

It’s a happy day :)

A Timely Raven: the conclusion

If I were any more egocentric, I might be tempted to believe that the phrase about “best laid plans” and mice and all that rot was about me.

My intention was for “A Timely Raven” to be wrapped up just before Halloween. I wanted it to be a period piece, of sorts. But when life got busy (and I fell tragically behind on my prop-making), I resigned myself to the fact that there was only one of me, and I had to prioritize.

Halloween comes but once a year. Trick-or-treaters would not wait for me to finish my story. Hence, the story got pushed to the end of my to-do list.

Setbacks aside, not only is the final vignette of A Timely Raven published, I have begun building a platform for the other spin offs, and for the growth of the central project. It has always been my intention for “A Timely Raven” to grow into more than a singe Halloween tale; I have always intended for it to be an ongoing journal of a raven living in Austin, his adventures, the people he meets, their lives, and ultimately, their deaths.

Those of you following Tatum’s storyline will be pleased to learn that in the next few days, her story will pick up again on the new platform and be carried through to the end. I’ve enjoyed doing this; it has given me something to look forward to.

And those of you reading Emily & Lily–you’ve not been forgotten. Their story picks up again this week as well.

As for the rest of it, we’ll have to see how it goes. We’ll have to see what Raven has in store for the rest of the year. It might be a while in coming – the website has not yet been built and I have other projects eating away my time. But I hope that you will find it all worth the wait. I hope this project will prove a real contribution to the genre of online fiction.

A Timely Raven, episode 2

A Timely Raven, episode 2, is published.

An excerpt:

Sometimes I would come up with outrageous plot twists, like the time I was feeling ornery and told Grandma Flatley that I thought Hazel and Bigwig would be captured and turned into rabbit soup and that would be the end of them. I didn’t like Watership Down because I don’t care for rabbits. I thought Grandma Flatley would get mad, but she hooted and howled and slapped her knee. And she held a finger to her mouth and whispered, “You can’t tell anyone I told you, Benjy, but when I was your age and my brother would make me mad, I would lie in bed at night and imagine that I skinned his cat and fed it to the neighbor’s dog.” And she hooted and howled some more, but I thought that was gross and mean because I like cats, so I never said things like that at story time again.

Enjoy :)

A Timely Raven

For several years I have wanted to write a massive, sprawling story that unfolds over time like a good television drama. I wanted to tell many stories, some which intersect, but all of which sprung from a single focal or entry point. I wanted to tell a tale whose disparate stories were human but also otherworldly, and I wanted to tell it in a way that was engrossing and beautiful.

To that end, and in time for Halloween, I give you A Timely Raven : a serial account of meditating a murder.

This is only the beginning.

Enjoy.

Technicolor Bandits

I always thought it was strange the way he closed his eyes right before he asked a question. It was like he was seeing the question in his mind, seeing where to use inflection, how to curl his lips, whether and how to use his hands for emphasis. But when he opened his eyes and began to speak, I was moved by the ferocity of his words, the tenderness of his sentiment. It was too bad, I suppose, that I was expected to hate him with all my heart for all the things he did to my mother before I was born.

Even so, as I watched this man, this man with the magnetic personality and the clear, blue eyes, I couldn’t help but wonder what he could have done, what this man, this sparkling, wondrous man, could possibly have done to earn my mother’s ire. And, if I’m being honest, I found myself wondering how he, drawn in wild colors and with such broad strokes, could be part of my mother’s monochrome at all. How could her life ever have encompassed his? Was she once brilliant and bright, all technicolor and enchantment, or was he once tranquil and subdued, hiding behind everyone else’s – anyone else’s – glory? I couldn’t picture it, though. I couldn’t picture it for either of them, not her in full color nor him in restraint. They were incompatible figures, and though miraculous in their own ways, it was a study in futility to attempt to imagine them existing in the same palette.