Alternate Works and Public Response

• "The Experimental Fiction That Imagines Football-Obsessed Americans in the Extremely Distant Future" from The New Yorker (review of "17776")
  

• "This SB Nation story has everything: Robots, football and 2.3 million pageviews" from Poynter (review of "17776")

"Two things that make “17776” so immersive and engaging are its infinite scroll and dynamic loading aspects. Each installment of the storyline is contained on one web page, with new graphics, videos and GIFs loading in real-time as you scroll, à la “Snow Fall” by The New York Times."

• "The 2014 Readers' Poll" from Strange Horizons ("You Are Here / Was: Blue Line to Memorial Park", 1st place in Poetry category)
  

• "Fireside #64" from Quick Sip Reviews (review of "Choose Wisely")

"Told as a Choose Your Own Adventure, the piece follows a wizard trying to get recognized as disabled. But of course magic doesn’t make navigating the system any easier. Indeed, the story exposes how difficult it is for everyone, how seemingly purposefully these systems are built to make it so that disabled people cannot get the recognition that would make their lives easier. The form plays with that to great effect, building up that illusion that there is a choice that will make it easy, that this must just be the case of having made one mistake and then having to fix it. Only there is no 'right' choice. And while there are always choices, what it ultimately comes down to is luck, and hope, and maybe a bit of trickery. (This is also a piece that’s extra fun in the print Fireside Quarterly, because of how it spreads through the entire book, requiring lots of flipping and finding)"

• "Stet, a gorgeous, intricate, tiny story of sociopathic automotive vehicles" from BoingBoing (review of "STET")

"Sarah Gailey's micro-short-story STET is a beautiful piece of innovative storytelling [...] in a 'story' that consists of a single paragraph of text, its footnotes, and a series of annotations documenting the requested changes made by the piece's fictional author's editor and her responses."

• Graham MacAree, design and development lead for SB Nation, about "17776":

Via the Poynter review:

While Bois created the story and illustrations for "17776," [...] Graham MacAree did most of the work on the back end. He told Poynter in an email that, in order to give Bois the creative room to release the story in parts and to accommodate its massive weight on the website, he used a Vox Media tool that allows publishers to create custom packages from standard article sets. But it wasn’t easy.

“I got asked to make a standard Chorus page melt, and I made it melt,” he said. “The internet offered little guidance into how to create a fake website and melt it into the actual destination, which was upsetting.”

• Bogi Takács, about "You Are Here / Was: Blue Line to Memorial Park":
  
  Via twitter.com:
  

"I coded it (I remember I had trouble with a for loop, so I wrote some other code in something else with a for loop that just generated the output of the loop 😭 it wasn't beautiful) and sent it in as a zip file. I did query beforehand!" (1)

[Do you think it would've been more/less useful to you if there'd been a defined submission process for that kind of work, rather than going through a query step first?] (2)

"Yes definitely :) it always saves time if I don't need to ask about submission specifics!" (3)

Via eir website, referring to "You Are Here" as an "animated poem":

"I originally wanted to program the animation in Twee (a command-line version of Twine) - I have quite an amount of Twee experience, gathered on personal non-public projects, so this was a natural first choice. But the resultant code was incredibly resource-intensive and kept on crashing browsers.

"So I used JS and MooTools; I'd never used MooTools before. I was writing the poem on a very tight deadline (not for [Strange Horizons]) and I couldn't figure out the syntax of the for loop in it, so I just ended up generating repeated instructions with something else and pasting them in. A very ugly solution, I know. I do actually know what for loops are and I'm happy to use them.

"The published version has a proper for loop, I'm happy [Strange Horizons] has a more clueful programmer than me!"

• Fran Wilde, via twitter.com, about "Choose Wisely":

"[T]he Fireside fiction editors for [coded] my story so beautifully!" (1)

• Sabrina Vourvoulias,via Apex Magazine, about "Las Girlfriends Guide to Subversive Eating":

"I started writing this story the conventional way, and I think I was about 400-500 words in when I realized I wanted it to include non-text elements, and then decided it would be a fun challenge to make it interactive. [...]

"I’m not sure it could have been written before the internet. Its form and structure are informed by the way websites function, and both character development and some of the plot hinges (in places) on the sort of information sharing that is only possible thanks to the web.

"[Interviewer: The opening screen offers a number of paths the reader can take; they can interact with this story in any order they choose. Typically, an author has full control over the order in which their readers gain information about what’s going on in the story (provided the reader doesn’t jump to the last page, of course!). What was it like to write and present a story in which you give up complete control of the order in which the story is presented?]

"I thought of it as a website—albeit a long-winded and talky website—so I wasn’t super concerned about the order. I trust readers. If they jump “ahead” and encounter some reference they don’t understand, they’ll jump back to look for it (or do without). Sort of the same way you do if you encounter a word you don’t recognize, or a word in a language you don’t know.

"I was more concerned with finding ways to keep them engaged through each jump—that’s really why there are links, different kinds of embedded audio, a map and photos, the option to flip text from Greek or Spanish into English. In an earlier draft of the story there were even jigsaw puzzles the reader could put together … A linear read of the story was always optional to me, reader engagement was not."

• "Kenneth: A User's Manual" by Sam J. Miller

Some ancillary linked material now goes to a 401 page -- demonstrates issue of longevity of works, loss of context, loss of data.

"It's hard to figure out what to excerpt here because this isn't a strictly linear story. It's hypertext, and so you should definitely follow all the links you see on the page to get the full story." --io9 review