Juiced On Writing

Electronic Publishing – the forms of electronic novels took yet another path with my discovery of a mammoth, multi-threaded novel called Descending Road – written, developed and published by Dana W. Paxson.

The novel itself is free as a demo for this format, and is readable on any device with a decent web browser. It utilises multiple screens and threads through a large new world.

Getting and Running “Descending Road”, the Novel

I first came across Descending Road from within Second Life, the virtual world which I’m currently exploring. The author has a shop on Second Life’s Book Island, and from there a notecard leads you to his website for downloading the entire book.

Although Second Life itself does have an internal web browser system, you would be best in downloading and reading the novel externally, and with more room to spread out. The author provides the full book from within his website also, and you work through this scene by scene from the website. This is dependent on the speed of your connection, naturally.

Or to have the novel available immediately when you want it, it can be downloaded as a 15mb zipped package. Once you extract it, you will find a folder full of html files, image files, and several PDF files explaining the background behind the project.

You will need to find the “demo.html” file and run this, opening into your web browser to start. Once there, click on the large cover image to open the novel itself – your browser will open two other windows depending on the size of your device. One window will be opened for smaller devices. The author suggests he has successfully run Descending Road on portable Playstations before, presumably on the one window.

Your browser must be setup with javascript capabilities, and optioned to allow the browser to open multiple windows. Behind the scenes, Dana Paxson has developed technology to create the novel in this format, and suggests a patent is pending on this technology. He offers for anyone interested in publishing like this to contact him.

Descending Road Format

Scenes and Threads

What makes ELM fiction so powerful is the ability to hyperlink scenes to multiple other scenes. In this way, a reader can follow a threaded story for one character and arrive at the scene, then deviate onto another character’s viewpoint and follow that character through their own story, to arrive at the scene again (possibly) and see it in a totally different perspective than when first read.

Multiple Windows

Once into the novel, you will find three windows. The central one holds the novel narrative, told scene by scene, for one character point of view. You move onto the next scene with a simple next or previous link. This window also has an option to choose a different character point of view and story thread which leads to this scene, and two vertical bars on either side of the text. These bars will bring the left or right windows on top. Normally the central narrative window will be on top, calling the others when supplementary information is required.

The right-hand window holds glossaries, character appearance indexes, and scene title lists.

The left-hand window holds reference links to several subjects for further reading. Within the story, this left-hand side contains the Tarnus Encyclopedia (Tarnus is the world the stories are set in) and calendars, organisation, language, culture and technology reference notes for the world you are about to read about.

All windows are interlinked. For instance, the narrative text of the stories contain key terms which are linked to open up the glossary in the correct place.

What is an ELM (Apart from a Tree)?

ELM stands for Electronic Literary Macramé, according to Dana Paxson. It appears to be a term coined by this author for the format he has developed. Electronic novels are not, as we know, totally new to the world. Only recently this blog covered another format in the Wovel (web novel) – a serial format published electronically onto a website, and before that, a format called a Visual Novel, which is a graphical novel including text and graphics, and a partially interactive nature as it has a few threads to choose from.

I’m personally not sure if the “ELM” term will ever catch on, but perhaps novels in an html and scripted format such as Descending Road do have a real future, especially given the additional tools and resources such novels can provide for the storyline itself.

Using html and javascripting, the ELM novel allows for numerous text linking, the inclusion of side glossaries, and images, aside background text, reference links, footnotes and endnotes, and in the case of Descending Road, multiple story threads, led by different characters found in the Descending Road world. For large fictional bodies of work such as an entire new fantastic world, the format could be one solution to providing on-the-hand information when you need it without losing emphasis on the story being read.

Descending Road’s ELM environment is visually quite stark – although you could use such a format to make graphically intensive works – good for educational resources and text books perhaps – the novel in this format is confined to only a couple of colours and this makes the textual centre window a much more immersive environment. You are drawn into reading the narrative text and discovering the plight and fortunes of the characters in this format.

As a format, the ELM Fictional work sits between the linear confined electronic structure of a normal e-book, the threaded graphical visual novel – both of which don’t provide supporting mateiral;  and on the other end -the broad spectrum uncontrolled references found in something like an online encyclopedia. Think of it as something like a combination of all seven Harry Potter books, and the Harry Potter lexicon website, all wound up into the same document. It makes for a rich and huge narrative work.

Descending Road, The Novel

One of the PDF files which comes in the zipped package for Descending Road explains in some part why the ELM format was created. The novel is set in a large fantastic world called Tarnus, a human world displaced in time and space from Earth by an interstellar coldsleep migration and millennia of cyclic history. The story itself centres around several main characters, with the main thread held by Andrew. It contains many adult-themed elements, and browsing through, can still make for some hefty reading.

There are a lot of stories in this 200,000 word novel – some are short, some much longer. Some connect with each other, others do not.

Written as a large multi-threaded novel with all kinds of elements (enough to populate an entire world), the original manuscript was rejected by many publishers and reviewers, as the author suggests -

“In the original novel there were simply too many ideas and people presented to the bewildered reader from the outset; even the most caring, able, and sympathetic of reviewers of the manuscript couldn’t figure out what the hell to do with the thing.”

Over time, the novel was re-written into independent threads of stories, to “strip away some of the complexity” and then developed into the ELM format.

If you enjoy exploring a new speculative world, and many stories set within it, or you are intrigued by this new format, take a look at Dana Paxson’s website (link below) and download Descending Road.

LinkMes:

• Dana Paxson Studios – download Descending Road, and read the website for further explanations.
• Defining : The Wovel (Web Series Novel)
• Visual and Interactive Novels

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