VAGABOND MIND: A Visual Tour
A Sample
Keeping track is hard when writing. Some of the basic ideas become visible in the log notes, such as threading of multiple stories and inclusion of background sidebars. A lot of big novels have appendices and viewpoint switching in them. At the time of these asides (the log entries), the organizing spreadsheet had been up for at least a year or two. It wasn’t at all apparent how deep this rabbit-hole was going to be. By this point a name for the product emerged: the ELM, or Electronic Literary Macramé. A terrible name. It stuck anyway. An ELM was two things at that stage: the new e-book product, and the processing components that produced it. That name ambiguity hung on for a while. By 2005, there were many innovations in the work that most authors never confront, along with some questions:
How does one promote brand-new ways of writing and reading?
How does one protect one's software-and-text creations?
Promotion came down to immersion of the reader. If the author could keep the reader immersed in the work, the immersion could attract and hold readers, and exploit the power of the software to ease the writer's burdens. How naive this attractive idea turned out to be.