Electronic Lit & The Curious Case of Edgar Allan Poe

This story also appeared on Big Bang Poetry.

I keep trying to think outside the book and this makes me appreciate books. But also things that aren’t books.
Recently I read two anthologies of Edgar Allan Poe stories that pushed the boundaries of prose on paper. One was an illustrated anthology I bought back when we lived in LA: Tales of Death and Dementia, Illustrated Edgar Allan Poe by Gris Grimly. Grimly also did a similar Mystery and Madness book with other Poe tales.
Edgar Allan Poe stories are perfect candidates for visual remediation in cartoons, comics and animated apps. Poe is famously Gothic and his stories can be dense slogs. These formats open up his stories with a bit with some visuals and sound. His plots are always so inventive but written so, well, gothically, that he’s stayed relevant in probably every medium but probably least of all books. Interestingly, all Poe products seem to use his face as part of their branding. He’s got such a Gothic mug.
The illustrated book included these stories:

The Tell-Tale Heart
The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether
The Oblong Box
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar

As a side note, my brother and father had an argument on a recent visit about whether comics (illustrated novels, etc ) rise to the level of art. My Dad and I were on the side that they did. My brother, who did illustrate pretty well as a kid, believes they do not.
Articles on the topic:

• https://mrlib.org/recognizing-a-literay-art-form-comics-and-graphic-novels/
• NPR’s 100 Favorite Comics and Graphic Novels

I would also recommend for consideration, The Carter Family, Don’t Forget the Song by Frank M. Young and David Lasky which I feel rises to the level and comes with a CD. You could argue that folk music history tracks really well to an illustrated novel, especially to communicate landscape and scenes and for dialogue-heavy storytelling.
There are three apps of Poe stories from iClassics. I read them all on my iPad. This was an even better experience than the comic stories because animations and interactivity brought out the visual beauty of the stories with a full orchestra and rich color. Much of the animation is triggered by interactivity which gave the stories an exciting feeling of suspense you wouldn’t get from even page turning. In fact, the apps were kind of really scary. Stories were interspersed with poems.
iClassics also had a great feature where you could scan through the pages at any time to see how much more reading was ahead. You could flip through them and go backwards to find parts of the story behind you.
My only complaint with these beautifully created experiences is the overly fetishistic cartoon boobs on all the Gothic gals. Firstly, kids are reading these. Secondly, it indicated these apps were created by a bunch of immature boys considering none of the men in the stories got the same hyper-sexed treatment.
App 1:

The Mask of the Red Death
Annabel Lee
The Oval Portrait
The Tell-Tale Heart

App 2:

The Black Cat
The Raven
Hop-Frog

App 2:

The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
Alone
The Cask of Amontillado
Eldorado

Here are some screenshots to compare the drawings from the comic and the app.
The Tell Tale Heart Comic Book

The Tell Tale Heart App

The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar Comic Book vs. App

Here's a video sample from the app.

I also read iClassics’ The Legend of Sleepy Hollow which is very wordy for a short story but the app made it finally readable for me. For someone who loves The Headless Horseman story, especially the Scooby Doo episode which scared the beejesus out of me when I was a kid  and the TV movie where I developed a preteen crush on Paul Sand. However, I’ve never been able to get through the original short story.

One interesting thing was the reference of the word “cowboy” in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. I was surprised by this considering the story was written so early, in 1820. Was this an app translation issue or was that word really in the story? Through Project Guttenberg site, I was able to do an online text search to see if indeed it was in the source. It was.

Unrelated to this project, I’ve been reading a great book about digital literature (more on that later). Anyway, the book talks about all the uses of Google’s Ngram viewer (a tool that uses Google Books to search word usage throughout time. So I searched for the word “cowboy” and found the big spike of usage in 1880 (as expected, post Civil War, during the western expansion and the great cattle drives). So where did Washington Irving pick it up in 1820?

With the ngram viewer I could see there were no usages in 1797 and then a few in 1798:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=cowboy&year_start=1775&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ccowboy%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Ccowboy%3B%2Cc0

The first appearance was 1798 according to the Ngram viewer but cowboy history tells of a much-earlier reference. Jonathan Swift coined the word in 1725 while simply referring to the boy who tends cows. So Washington Irving was using a very boutique word for the time.

Over the weekend I also read Oscar Wilde’s The Cantefield Ghost, which I had never read. I also watched the 1940s movie which was silly and I really struggle watching Margaret O’Brien for some reason. The app was a much better experience of the original story.  I also love the sound of pages turning, which has the sound of really good parchment paper. This was my favorite iClassics app so far.

iClassics also have apps on other writers like Charles Dickins, Jack London, Lovecraft…the scary stuff mostly.

I’m also reading Inkle’s choose-your-own-adventure version of Frankenstein retold by Dave Morris. This version takes place in France after the Revolution. So far this format hasn’t been very engaging. Although I do love the visual of having scraps of paper stitched into scrolls for each choice you make. This app requires much more reading and the choose your own adventure format isn’t as satisfying when you already kind of know the ending, such as with autobiographies (sorry Neil Patrick Harris) stories you already know even if they’ve been retweaked.  It’s also hard in the Inkle book to tell how long each section will take to read. Turns out, this is a major feature of the paper book. I’m sleepy and I want to know how much more of a section I’m in for.

Experimenting with the Platform

Mayan Codices

It seems to me that every story is meta in regards to the platform the author uses to tell the story. The platform will influence how readers interact with it. And you disregard this at your own peril.

Are you telling stories around a campfire or using a blog or a video or a game or telling a story in a bunch of bound paper? In each case, you will need to research how readers interact with the platform you've chosen.

Digital stories aren't just paper stories cut and pasted into a blog or recited in front of a camera. I guess they could be. We could call an e-book a digital story but think of all the opportunities we're missing when we do that?

I tried my first (and maybe only) Twitter poem. Writing your first story or poem on any platform will teach you how that platform works. For instance, blog stories need lots of spacing and content chunking to make reading them palatable. Large blocks of text look too intimidating to online readers. Brains process online content differently than offline content and you may need to compensate for the tendency for skimming.

You will also learn by making mistakes. Twitter poems come with many challenges as well and I feel my poem was worth doing just to discover the pitfalls. There were problems setting up multiple accounts due to recent political events. Posting also presented a challenge as I was creating conversations between all of my accounts. How to do this with one browser? I tried opening various browsers, going incognito in browser tabs, and opening and closing accounts after each comment.

I also needed to learn about posting order on Twitter for both main posts and comment post seen from various accounts (all which required testing) and to consider how Twitter was created to be consumed (most recent content on top, lesser on the bottom) and how readers are actually reading Twitter (from top to bottom, not starting with the first Tweet) and how I might misuse Twitter to display a vertical poem (by posting it backwards). All the idiosyncrasies had to be tested and planned for.

These learning curves probably existed for the earliest manuscript and book makers as well. They probably wondered how people would interact with a physical storytelling device? Would they know how to turn the pages? How would they learn to read? Think of that almost insurmountable challenge! Wide-spread literacy!

Challenges create layers of difficulty and timing to execute (even in traditional publishing).

I've always wanted to do a project in a codex format, like the picture above. All the same challenges and problems apply. Will readers know how to read it, centuries after this format was a popular form of story telling? Will readers of the future know how to read our blogs?

It's all fascinating. So, what should we experiment with next?


Works Cited

McCray, Mary. "For Whom the Bells Troll." https://twitter.com/BellsTroll. Accessed 27 April 2019.

"How Chunking Helps Content Processing." Nielsen Norman Group,
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/chunking/. Accessed 27 April 2019.

"Digital Texts and Reading Strategies." Association of College and Research Libraries,
https://acrl.ala.org/IS/wp-content/uploads/Tips-and-Trends-Sp18.pdf. Accessed 27 April 2019.

For Whom the Bells Troll

First sad note

I finished the poem over a week ago and I noticed Twitter has already deleted some of the posts from my TrollGuy character, even though the insults were just nonsensical. Luckily I archived it in full already. But what a bummer.

The Jist of It

This is a collage poem about media history, trolling culture and pundit's soft-alarm-isms. Trolling is mostly between the authors William Blake, Wordsworth, T.S. Eliot and Hart Crane, an idea seeded in my head from Dorian Block's first class piece: https://dorianblockportfolio.wixsite.com/blog/blog/gothic-microblogging-for-digital-storytelling/ and the tweets he quoted from https://twitter.com/oscarwilde. The Oscar Wilde tweets blew my mind!

Ways to Read It

1. Interactively on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BellsTroll

Pros: You can play all the fun videos, animated gifs, click on the links and discover the hidden comment threads.

Cons: You might miss the hidden comment threads and all that multimedia in your haste to read it. Clues for hidden conversations are under these symbols at the bottom of each tweet:

Sometimes there are many more comments than one. Also, click anything that says “more replies.”


2. The archived, static version on my website: https://www.marymccray.com/bell-trolls.html

Pros: You won't miss any of the comment threads or profiles. And you'll see the comments Twitter has removed already.

Cons: You will miss all the fun videos and links. Boo!


3. The most comprehensive way would be to read the static poem (https://www.marymccray.com/bell-trolls.html) and then try to find the interactions in the live version (https://twitter.com/BellsTroll).

Project Planning a Twitter Poem

About five weeks ago I stared thinking about the new things I've been learning in this class and deciding on how I would use Twitter to do some kind of online poem. I really liked Witch Court Reporter and wanted to do something similar but not automated or ongoing. There was just something about Twitter that seemed poem like to me, probably the vertical length and straight left edge. Modernist and contemporary poems also include a lot of parataxis and non sequitur and Twitter does this so naturally.

So I'm recreating my creative process here.

The Originating Idea

I had the vague idea that I wanted to do something commenting on vague, alarmist language in political discourse, how flat the components of this language are and how it drains the power of the words being so over used, which is all very scary because the intent of this language is to be ringing alarm bells. 

I also knew I wanted somehow to look back to see how we got here with alarmist language and why it isn't working effectively, which led me to think about Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death which blew my mind when I read it two years ago. The book went all the way back to the telegraph and early photography up through 1980s television news (and you can see all its predictions playing out now in internet culture).

The Inputs

My early research took the form of a mind map. I wish I had the original piece of paper because it looked like tracks or lists of the following:

• Internet history
• Early Internet memes
• Early media history (telegraphs, photos)
• Internet trolls (which came from the research above). This was a handy element to the eventual poem because it added the element of conflict. 
• This element of trolling led me to research another layer, past poets who might conceivably have trolled each other had they the resource of an internet. I had been reading and watching some movies about T.S. Eliot and Hart Crane and also reading an essay by Howard Nemerov pitting William Blake and William Wordsworth against each other so those were the four poets I chose and I had to locate indicative poems and read those for possible argumentative quotes. While I was doing that I located some really juicy stuff that could be read to predict our modern narcissistic social media tendencies. Research score! 

It's a good place to note that most of this stuff I was investigating anyway and it just all coalesced into this collage of a poem, the tone of which ended up being heavily influenced the gloom and doom of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," even though I've never liked that poem at all so you could say I'm being ghostly trolled by T.S. Eliot in this poem.

Building the Layers

My research didn't stop there. Layers were added as I researched online (like associating hoodies with the vague language statements). Adding images to statements changes their tone. I had to be cognizant of that.

I also knew the Twitter platform required that the poem be visual so I researched possible posts in the following areas:

• videos
• images
• links
• quotes to retweet
• comment digressions

I also started thinking about how these various memes and media could be read figuratively in the poem. Some work as filler; some are more meaningful.

Ordering the Poem

Then I took all that mishmash and typed it up. I ordered the poem to spread out all the elements and tried to build some tension toward the end. One of the early memes I discovered in research was the Bitterroot National Fire photograph (an early popular photo on the internet) and that got me on the track of the gradually more alarmist fire-related posts at the end of the poem.

With all the material spread out, I could see I would need 19 days to pull it off. It took me almost a full day to set up all the accounts and test the platform. Not fun.

Scheduling Deployment

After the problems setting up the whole Twitter poem universe, I tried to give myself time every day to problem solve with the technology of commenting and discovering how those would display and also deploying the conversations. This meant I tried not to over-schedule the work for each day.

No Editing!

I had to do the best I could editing before posts were added because I couldn't go back and edit them later. That would screw up the deployment performance. This caused (and still causes) anxiety for me.

Archiving

I didn't have an archive plan until day one of deployment when I realized how vulnerable a live Twitter poem would be.

Storytelling in Podcasts

I got hooked on Serial 1 (the crime story of the murder of Hae Min Lee). I skipped the second season and then doubled down on my love for Serial 3 (S-Town). I loved the artwork of the site, the topic of clocks and a man's struggles living in a small town. I even wrote a poem about it.

I've been thinking this last week about why I loved those podcasts. And I think it was all the great sound effects added in so you could really imagine the stories. Like novels, podcasts depend mostly on words and insist that you create visuals entirely with your imagination. It's always shocking later to Google pictures of the real people and modify your imagined versions of them. 

The Serial writers also piece-apart their stories well, segmenting them into different points of view and angles of meaning. Both stories illustrate the difficulty of digging out truths from tragedies. 

My Dad and I are always having philosophical arguments about technology and modern life over the phone. I live in Albuquerque and he lives in Cleveland. I usually put him on speaker phone so I can hear him better. One day my husband confided that he listens along and that we should have been recording podcasts of our conversations all this time. This is a strange idea to me. But someday I'll wish I had done it. Family story podcast might be very helpful for tracking our histories. Who cares if the audience right now is just your family. 

Two people talking is another type of podcast I enjoy, especially etymology podcasts like Way with Words and the older episodes of Lexicon Valley with Bob Garfield and Mike Vuolo. But those aren't really stories outside of the longest story of our culture: the way language evolves. Those types seem easier to produce though. Story podcasts seem to require more effort and ambiance of sound.

Video Story Yum Yum

This week we looked at some video storytelling and it was delicious. An additional set of options are available to readers engaging with recorded film: staging, lighting, ambient sound. So much can be done without words.

I like the rough, observational Cinéma vérité of these blog stories, although you wonder if for all the roughness and bad angles, the shots were meticulously story-boarded and scenes set up to provide that feeling.

If I were to do anything like these video blogs, I would particularly try to imitate the imperfect, accidental-seeming, abstract camera angels of Marble Hornets and the ambient sounds of Connect with I. They both work subliminally to make you curious about what’s going on. They’re also beautiful abstractions of image and sound on their own. And they can be seen as a commentary on bad camera work and editing, like the 15-min show spoofing bad cable access, Check It Out! with Dr. Steve Brule. Some ugly, discontinuous things can be reframed to look interesting or beautiful.

These blog segments are addictively small (just one more potato chip…), like commercial-break segments, which is odd considering as a culture we’ve always proclaimed to hate those time slots of storytelling. Internet culture has maybe converted our brains into liking information being served up in this way. If our attentions were so short, we wouldn’t be able to binge watch TV shows and video blogs. But we don’t mind the segments being smaller sized for our convenience. When you think about it, there’s a lot more time involved in clicking the play button over and over again every two minutes. These stories demand that we commit to them again and again like needy friends.

Works Cited

Check It Out! with Dr. Steve Brule. Adult Swim, Accessed 21 March  2019.

The Best Part of Digital Stories

My fascination with digital literature is curious considering I love physical books. I think a book is an amazing piece of technology, indestructible unless you rip it, water it or set it on fire. And stories in books can last thousands of years and still be accessed (give or take an evolution of a language), unlike their computerized counterparts which struggle to last longer than a decade.

But that’s part of the fascination for me: what can books do that computer stories can’t do and visa versa. So the most important element about a digital story for me is how the story uses its affordances, or the unique properties of its machine, to tell a story in a way that a book could not. And related, how digital stories fail in ways that books do not. As C.T. Funkhouser says, "When people read a book, they never receive a message that a page doesn't work" (193).

So point of view, tone, theme, setting, plot, and conflict: all these are all important to a story, but for me the device is everything, how does it work to unveil setting, conflict, tone and plot with branching choices, interactivity and all the baggage of online culture.

For example, the story "De Baron" by Victor Gijsbers (2006), (view Mark Sample’s walk through video, 48 minutes, warning: very difficult content), uses gameplay format to force the moral decisions of the “hero” on to you. This is something a book cannot do very well. Readers of books are given the distance of non-participation. Readers are allowed to feel like witnesses rather than participants. In gameplay however, readers suddenly become culpable for their choices and the results of those choices feel very visceral. Suddenly, all the dangerous choices in this game become a metaphor for very tragic choices in a human life. The medium gives the story a startling and tragic affordance, just by offering (or forcing) the reader to deal with the responsibilities of choice.

Of the stories I've read in class, I still appreciate how “The Dionea House” used its mechanisms and all the functionality of blogging to tell its tale. This story would not work the same way on paper. The characters, plot and conflict all evolved over multiple blog posts and a plethora of comments where sub-plots unfolded. Transformation and point of view unfolded over multiple blogs:

This is the original display of the main story, a blog of emails compiled by the character Eric to tell friends and family about the tragic disappearance of their friend Mark. The blog format provides assumed implications of a community readership because of the fact that multiple readers can access a web page at the same time, unlike readers of a book.

The author uses the date stamp functionality of blogs, which works to build suspense over time. 

The inserted emails also make use of email affordances (subject lines, date stamps and uncanny, undeliverable messages).

Eric also starts a personal blog when the public blog garners too much attention. This illustrates how easy it is to jump to other channels for storytelling (starting a new blog is usually free, after all). His thoughts turn much more personal here and so the blogs contrast each other in tone. His last comment attracts hundreds of comments, both real and fake, which work to increase the uncanny ambiance of the story. Everyone else is alarmed about Eric, so we should be too.

Jenny’s blog is a great example of an abandoned blog, started with the best intentions but left like so much Internet debris. However, a fascinating thread of comments lies beneath its surface. The author uses hidden comments like Easter eggs.

The babysitter Dani gives us our first glimpse into a first-hand account of someone operating from inside the house! Her blog is a good example of characterization through blog functionality (the mood barometer and her ASCII character emotive faces and teen-speak).

In contrast, Loreen’s blog is a first hand account of the house but from a tough-talking, gritty homeless woman.

All the blogs hide story elements within the functionality allowed within the blogging platform and Internet machinery, which provide experiences in reading unavailable from a book.

As a reader you can choose to read only part of the story or follow every comment trail and link to the sub-blogs and creative blogger profiles. Or you could choose to read only the surface story. It’s very similar to "Infinite Jest" readers who refuse to read the nine-hundred plus footnotes in the back of that book. You can do that but you miss plot points that way. The blog format allows an author the opportunity to explore all the options of date stamps, comments, html and blogger culture and David Foster Wallace, likewise, was exploring the limits of what a physical book’s footnotes could do. Because a book is a machine, too.


Works Cited

Funkhouser, C.T. "New Directions in Digital Poetry." Continuum International. 2012.

Gijsbers, Victor. "De Baron" walkthrough video by Mark Sample, YouTube,  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-iuO6gq0tk&feature=youtu.be,  Accessed 9 March  2019.

Heisserer, Eric. “The Dionaea House.” Creepypasta, http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/The_Dionaea_House. Accessed 9 March 2019.

Heisserer, Eric. “A Quiet Space.” Blogger, http://dionaeahouse.blogspot.com/. Accessed 9 March 2019.

Ohdanigirl. Adventures in Babysitting, LiveJournal, https://ohdanigirl.livejournal.com/.  Accessed 9 March 2019.

Levin, Jennifer. Missing Since Sept, Blogger, http://jennylevin.blogspot.com/.  Accessed 9 March 2019.

Mathers, Loreen. loreenmathers, LiveJournal, https://loreenmathers.livejournal.com/. Accessed 9 March 2019.

Wallace, David Foster. “Infinite Jest.”  Back Bay Books. 1997.

Game Play Stories: The Joys and Frustrations

I was unexpectedly out-of-town this week and spent a while trying to download [text] A Summer Story by Ayu Sakata. I was tech-blocked by my work Mac, my husbands iPad and our two Androids. But this pretty much maps to my prior experiences trying to get Wallpaper by Dreaming Methods to work. It's a visual story I've been trying to read for years. I even bought a game stick to use with it. But none of the computers at my disposal (work or home) are powerful enough to play it.

This is very frustrating. I really want to experience these stories. They do read like stories to me because there is so much text, enough to qualify as a read. And the walkthroughs I've seen, including this one for [text] (warning: the narrator is a teen/young kid and some may find his irreverent comments offensive) make the stories seem very appealing in an immersive way.

For instance, the immediacy of the choices put to the reader (whether by clicking link options of a branching plot or making decisions on movement through a space) place a sense of anxiety in the hearts of readers. This enhances the conflict, makes you part of the conflict. You're culpable in the outcome, after all. By literally putting the plot in your hands, a reader takes on a feeling of responsibility.

The effects of the image and sound don't make it any easier on you. You are primed to feel fear or happiness when sounds and images are presented to you.

[text] felt overwritten to me and there were five to ten minutes of reading that would go by before any choices were to be made. The editor in me says this could have been tightened up by half.  Walk throughs don't let you explore all the different endings either so I'm hoping to get another chance at this story when I'm back at a PC.

I did enjoy how the story had two fields of reading: the phone text itself and the running interior monologue to the right. Sounds and pictures are also "read" in a sense and it would be interesting to know how others chose to order their approach to "reading" each available element. Did you notice the picture and sound first or consider those after reading the text?

Miscommunication in Interactive Fictions

Bryan Alexander (19) explains interactive fiction as similar to hypertext fiction, but designed to be used with simple prompts like "walk" and "get." In this way readers feel more entangled in the created environment.

My Struggle with Struggle
The balance tips from any kind of plot points toward struggling through an environment. There are many gamers who love this kind of ergodic fiction just as many readers love deciphering Emily Dickinson poems or reading Ulysses by James Joyce. I love a challenge at first, but I'm not very adept at the language of games so I usually end up stuck in a dead end, which occurred for me here reading Colossal Cave Adventure by Willie Crowther (converted, adapted, standardized and essentially preserved by six other people). I got stuck in the cave unable to figure out what to do between a snake and a dwarf.  In my final minutes I tried every word I could think of to further the story. I kept encountering obstacles in communication, such as,

And my heart sank every time I read that. And I read that a lot. My words cannot be applied. So sad. Game stories seem more attractive to closed system thinkers versus open system thinkers. Closed system thinkers are really good at working within systems, memorizing the rules and figuring out how the virtual world works very quickly. It's a valuable skill. I don't have it. These folks tend to be good at math, music and science. Open system thinkers struggle with limited parameters and prefer to make endless synonym guesses and proposing preposterous actions like "bottle the mist" and "cage the snake" which seemed reasonable to me but I simply received an explanation about what mist was and the admonishment, "You can't be serious."

Differences from Traditional Paper Novels
Interactive fictions like this are very literal versus figurative. Navigating the story requires very literal descriptions of the environment, which you would never read in a paper novel. Imagine a trip to intercept a network of spies that began, "Reilly woke up in a bedroom. Reilly got out of bed and walked to the door. There was a door to the kitchen and a door to the outside. Reilly went outside." Interactive fiction is more in-the-moment and so there is less time or room for much more than grabbing, moving around and encountering things. So normally this kind of reader has a higher tolerance for piles of physical detail.

Differences from Hypertext
I know it limits my choices, but for branching stories I prefer hypertext stories like Quing's Quest, The Death of Videogames. 

I have a sense that all branching stories (hypertext or prompt-based) are finitely limited by design. Programmers must anticipate and write scenarios for each possibility. Prompt-based fictions just give us the illusion of endless choice. I know there are only a few real options at the end of each prompt of text. Why should I have to guess what those options are?

Works Cited

Alexander, Bryan. The New Digital Storytelling. Santa Barbara, Praeger, 2017.

Crowther, Willie. “Colossal Cave Adventure.” Halt and Catch Fire, https://www.amc.com/shows/halt-and-catch-fire/exclusives/colossal-cave-adventure. Accessed 21 February 2019.

"Open vs. Closed Thinking Systems." 11 November 2014. Unidentified author. uBeme Blog, https://ubeme.com/brainstormcafe/2014/11/11/open-vs-closed-thinking-modes. Accessed 21 February 2019.

Squinkifer, Dietrich. "Quing's Quest, The Death of Videogames." Electric Literature Organization, http://collection.eliterature.org/3/work.html?work=quings-quest-vii. Accessed 21 February 2019.

Handling Suspense in Blog Stories

Scary Stories & Conflict

I’ll be comparing two online blog stories, The Dionea House, a haunted house story by Eric Heisserer, and The Sick Land, a science fiction horror story by Jon Hills. Both use the blogging medium for their tales. In The Dionea House, a group of individuals fall prey to an evil house and their stories are told either through postings of emails in blog format or on blogs themselves. Each post builds up tension as characters, one by one, decide to enter the evil house(es). As each blogger succumbs to the house, they either stop posting or the house takes over their missives. Various comments are left on posts by various interested parties, some possibly some by the evil house itself.

The Sick Land is the story of one single blogger on a field study to a remote and abandoned area consumed by illness, destruction, and gory ends for many researchers. You follow one blog writer, Alex, for the entire story and his blog presumably ends with his death after a series of adventures out in the field and in various research facilities.

While reading the second story, I started to think about the use of suspense in the blog format. Suspense is a literary sub-concept of conflict. Conflict can be defined as the challenge or struggles characters face against other characters, situations, or nature. Suspense is an element of a story that introduces anxiety or uncertainty pertaining to that conflict. Suspense brings conflict to life and entices the reader to keep going, to resolve the anxiety. Suspense works on our natural desire to reach conclusion and equilibrium from the ongoing conflict.

In both of these stories, the conflict involves characters struggling against the supernatural. Suspense is created around irrational behaviors, unexplainable events, plot points where a character is about to do something risky or brave.

Here are two examples form The Dionea House. In this first example, Eric ends his first post by saying "I am profoundly sorry." That simple statement is meant to create anxiety for the reader.

What is he so "profoundly sorry" about? What could possibly have happened to warrant such a dire tone? The next example occurs at the end of a post and is stated much more matter-of-factly:

from post 9.20.2004

"I have to go to the police now, don't I" is presented as an uncomfortable statement, not a question. We can feel the anxiety in the character's voice and we're also primed to want to find out what will happen when police get involved. This is a classic cliff hanger: "tomorrow I will do something risky."

In The Sick Land. Hills leads many of his blog posts with a suspense sentence, like the one below:

"Something killed Saul." Very understated but a very alarming way to begin a daily post. What killed Saul! You are compelled to read on to find out.

Suspense in a Blog versus a Physical Book

In online blogs it would seem most logical to place cliff hangers at the beginning and ends of blog posts. Or in the case of The Sick Land, at the end of a grouping of blog posts, the final post in a monthly roll up.

But there are challenges to pacing suspense in a blog versus a physical book. In a physical book, ends of chapters are logical stopping points for readers. Rarely will someone stop in the middle of a chapter. So you place your cliff hangers at the ends of chapters. But in blog posts, there are no logical places to stop reading, other than at the ends of posts. So it's very difficult to predict where suspense is needed. It's a new structural paradigm and might take a reconsideration of narrative timing. For example, you can't overload a reader with suspense in every single post. That would be too fatiguing and your tactics would lose their effectiveness. 

Hills used segments of months (see right) like chapters and created suspense in the posts at the end of months. Alternatively, Heisserer's story was a collection of multiple blogs and suspense was created in the final posts of each blog, where characters had a climactic encounter with the haunted house.

Blogs do have affordances that work to aid suspense. Both authors here used common blog functionality to place uncanny tension in their post titles or late-night date stamps. Blogs also seem more real and immediate due to their accessibility online. You make assumptions that blog writers are out there in the real world self publishing their scary experiences in the here and now. Whereas, once you start reading a physical book, the fact of that book's production, having been vetted through a publisher, creates more emotional distance. You assume that story already has a resolution, the writer probably isn't dead or they couldn't have published this book. None of those assurances are available to a blog story.

Ultimately, whether or not the suspenseful tactics of these two stories works on you will depend on your particular threshold of fear. Both authors created multiple suspenseful moments within the allowances of the blogging form. Real cliffhangers were placed in logical locations but you would still encounter them somewhat randomly due to the structure of blogs. However, the form does have an inherent aura of suddenly encountering a "lost diary" and that works well for creating general suspense in a story.  


Works Cited 
Heisserer, Eric. “The Dionaea House.” Creepypasta, http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/The_Dionaea_House. Accessed 2 February 2019.

Ohdanigirl. Adventures in Babysitting, LiveJournal, https://ohdanigirl.livejournal.com/. Accessed 2 February 2019.

Levin, Jennifer. Missing Since Sept, Blogger, http://jennylevin.blogspot.com/. Accessed 2 February 2019.

Mathers, Loreen. loreenmathers, LiveJournal, https://loreenmathers.livejournal.com/. Accessed 2 February 2019.

u/HIGHzurrer. “Information I'm dumping here for safekeeping.” Reddit, https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/2hi7e6/information_im_dumping_here_for_safekeeping/. Accessed 2 February 2019.

Hills, Jon. “The Sick Land.” Blogger, http://thesickland.blogspot.com/. Accessed 10 February 2019.

Point of View in "The Dionaea House"

I just spent two days reading The Dionaea House by Eric Heisserer and loved it! Here’s some of my thoughts around Point of View:

There are Many Interlocking POVs

This novel contains a large cast of characters, especially if you count the real and fake comment profiles. There’s some disagreement around which is which. I believe most are fiction. When you click profiles links, most have very meta profiles and even though some blogs seem open for comments (I didn’t take the plunge), those on Eric’s blog, A Quiet Space, are missing date stamps and in general sound too eloquent even when trying to be colloquial. Even the trolling comments seem too kind (considering modern vitriol). Characters (and commenters) interlock throughout the blogs by links and communities surrounding posts.

Most of the main characters have distinct points of view but in one comment board from Eric’s final post in A Quiet Space, hundreds of comments including spam posts become a cacophony of noise, sprinkled with real plot points. There are also POV variations with the moniker Anonymous.

Eric's blog

Some characters are even suppressed on boards where posts have been removed. On Jennifer Levin’s blog, posts have been removed by “the author,” but on Eric’s blog, posts have been removed by “a blog administrator.” And since this is a ghost story and Eric is purportedly dead, his postmortem comments allude to either the meta nature of the novel's real author commenting on his own fiction or the house itself serving as the administrator.

Technology is a Vehicle for POV

There are various mediums where characters tell their stories: emails, mobile texts, various brands and styles of blogs, comment posts and online profiles. Some stories are pithy and strung over multiple comments posts (example: the anonymous troll posting cynicism that gradually turns into belief and aggression), and some stories are long diatribes within one comment.

In fact, complications occur with point of view where various commenters choose to identify as anonymous or, as online communication allows, misrepresent who they are. However, not all anonymous commenters are created equally. At least one of them is a recurring troll and you have to pay attention to each message to identify them.

Characters also present their point of view with the style of their blogs and the functionality they enable, for example the babysitter’s use of emoticons to express her mood after every post. Blog themes, font styles, subject lines, blog titles, what time of day they create posts all reveal possible character traits and POV. Some of this has been compromised now that parts of the novel has been taken down from the original domain and archived on Creepy Pasta (with part(s) missing).

The babysitter's blog

The journaling functionality of the blog elicits very confessional and intimate thoughts from the characters to varying degrees, the teen babysitter being the most divulging and Loreen the most guarded.

Loreen's blog

Blogs Are Naturally Meta

Characters comment on the medium as they email, text or blog. Bryan Alexander calls

this self-awareness (50). Point of view is also revealed as the characters reveal their comfort levels with the technologies they use to tell their stories. Their distancing from technology also places their view points within an earlier era of the Internet when people were still acclimating to the internet’s tools. “I don't know how to do HTML,” Connie says. Not something someone says with easy WYSYWG interfaces today.

POV is also confused by the fact that the character of Eric, who disappears in the story, has the same name as the author of the novel and the author uses his public persona years later to continue commenting on Reddit about this fictional house, as if it was true but not alluding to the complication of his own disappearance.

To Blog or Not to Blog

Some people blog to communicate their existence in a noisy world. This story takes that idea to the extreme: once these characters stop blogging, this indicates they have disappeared and might really have ceased to exist.

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Note: I found an error in the Alexander text on page 52. The last post on the babysitter’s blog, “found you,” does not link to Eric’s A Quiet Place blog, but instead to Jennifer Levin’s blog (empty except for a treasure of comments).

Jennifer's blog

Works Cited

The Novel (websites and blogs):

Heisserer, Eric. “The Dionaea House.” Creepypasta, http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/The_Dionaea_House. Accessed 2 February 2019.

Ohdanigirl. Adventures in Babysitting, LiveJournal, https://ohdanigirl.livejournal.com/.  Accessed 2 February 2019.

Levin, Jennifer. Missing Since Sept, Blogger, http://jennylevin.blogspot.com/.  Accessed 2 February 2019.

Mathers, Loreen. loreenmathers, LiveJournal, https://loreenmathers.livejournal.com/. Accessed 2 February 2019.

u/HIGHzurrer. “Information I'm dumping here for safekeeping.” Reddit, https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/2hi7e6/information_im_dumping_here_for_safekeeping/. Accessed 2 February 2019.

Commentary:

Alexander, Bryan. The New Digital Storytelling. Santa Barbara, Praeger, 2017.

Tone and Witch Court Reporter

screen capture of @witchcourt

I assumed the microblog (and Twitter feed) Witch Court Reporter dealt with the Salem Witch Trials but soon realized this blogger, ("poet & forager" Richard Osmond), was from Yorkshire, England and probably spoofing quotes about the England trials, not the New England trials. Immediately I was struck by the tone of project, as evidenced in the About statement: 'Live' tweeting historical witch trials. Modern English, period sources." The character as blogger is a reporter 'on the scene' and yet ' supposedly using historical accounts. The project began in 2016 so there must be a treasure trove of possible tweets. 

But the tone is not grave and reporterly, as you would assume the historical coverage was, but instead comes across as gossipy with a touch of surrealism as young girls report alleged fantastical transformations. The platform itself transforms and bewitches its tweets, giving them a teen-girl gossip quality using words like "bewitched," and talking about so many cats, bedsides, and mentions of girls with their fathers and witch-like mother figures.

screen capture of @witchcourt tweet

Osmond's own website mentions that he "curates" these tweets with the sensational tagline, "all the accusations, all the time" again inserting a backward glance of satire and undercutting the melodramatic, historical reporting that once existed. This may be to say that if such an event were to occur today, the press would take a much more sensational tone with their coverage.

Works cited:

@witchcourt. Twitter, https://twitter.com/witchcourt. Accessed 24 January 2019.  

@witchcourt. "A cat put something in a girl's ears and made her deaf. She also forgot what day of the week it was. This angered the cat." Twitter, 11 January 2019. https://twitter.com/witchcourt/status/1083898905400668160.

Richard Osmond. http://www.richardosmond.com/witches/. Accessed 24 January 2019.

About Mary McCray

Christmas 1974

My name is Mary and I'm a digital content editor at CNM and a poet and blogger. I love digital literature and hope someday to create some digital poems and short stories.

My education is in English and Creative Writing. But I've been building websites since my friend and I created a pop-culture zine called Ape Culture back in 1998. We also created a Blogger blog for the site years later.

I've published a few books of poetry (one science fiction themed and one a Zen Cowboy tale along New Mexico's Goodnight-Loving trail) and I have a website for those at https://www.marymccray.com/.

I've also been blogging about poetry at Big Bang Poetry  since about 2013.

And my alter ego is Cher Scholar because I blog about Cher at https://cherscholar.typepad.com/.

I became interested in Digital Literature a few years ago and have been tracking my favorite pieces here: https://www.marymccray.com/elit-reading-list.html.

I've only dabbled in online works over the last few years but I started a list of projects I've done including some videos, a mesotic poem and some 1990s celebrity hypertext "choose your own adventures."

Looking forward to learning more in this class.