DESCENDING ROAD AND ITS WORLD:
The Living Book
You can get all of Descending Road and its world just by buying the Kindle version. But there’s another way to try it, right here, online.
It’s fun. It makes reading quicker and easier – like surfing. All the story backgrounds and references are close at hand for easy use at a touch. Get lost in the stories and their world!. Wander around, follow a story thread, find out how to switch to another thread, enjoy the world. Eventually you'll settle on some track to follow, and then you can read the straight-ahead way.
Want to try it? Make sure your browser enables JavaScript and the opening of windows, and then you can enter the world of Descending Road immediately, on the first page, right here. You'll follow through the scenes and pages as you link to them using the little arrows at the left corners. Here you go.
Suppose you're a surfer, a sampler, or just a crazy person? Instead of starting at the beginning, you can dive straight into a random story and scene, right here. You'll be totally lost, but you'll have a wild time.
Living Details
Descending Road is too big, too tangled, and too rich to be just a novel. You can navigate any one of a large number of story threads. The languages, technologies, cultures, and customs of Tarnus appear in instantly-accessible encyclopedia references that stay conveniently out of your way unless and until you need them.
Using the little arrows at the top and bottom left corners pages you back and forth through a story. But this living book has special features tucked in. Move your mouse pointer just to the left of the story text, and a vertical bar appears. Click on it, and now you’re in the Encyclopedia, a list of different articles about the world of the stories. Click on that left vertical bar again, and now you’re in the Glossary of terms. Click on the left bar a third time, and you’re back in the story scene you were reading. You can go in the opposite order using the right-side vertical bar too.
You can poke around in the Encyclopedia and Glossary pages and get back to your story page any time. The Encyclopedia is a great place to browse. You’ll find all kinds of goodies about Tarnus, its peoples, and its lands.
The Glossary is rich. Click on a term anywhere when you’re reading a story, and up comes an index of all the appearances of term term in every scene, with a list of all the scene titles, in alphabetic order. Click on “Scene Term Index” to get there as well. Click on “Scene Title Index” to find a scene directly. Click on “Glossary Index to navigate the Glossary itself. To get back to the scene and story you were reading, use the vertical bars.
There’s more. If you scroll your story page to the last line, down on the bottom right corner is a small tree-like icon. Click on that, and three new icons appear at the bottom center of the story page. There’s another small tree-like icon up at the top right corner, and if you want to ger rid of the three icons, use that one.
Clicking on the top icon of the three in the middle gives you a way to shift from one story to another starting from the scene you are reading. Choose one, and you’ll go forward through whichever thread you choose. Clicking on the second icon lets you select another story, jump to a random scene in the book, garble up the text you are reading, see the author page, and more. Clicking on the third icon lets you change the way the story page looks.
Notes
This work of fiction is copyrighted. The rights to the work remain mine. The only way we will to develop the true power of electronic literature is to get it to those who will read it and write it.
Please be advised: Descending Road can be strong stuff in places. It contains scenes of sex, war, violence, brutality, and horror. Not everything I write is as strong as Descending Road.
