I’m enamored with the idea of hyperlinked web fiction, a form of publishing that really only works on the Web and has been under-explored.
An example is, Building a Town that Doesn’t Exist | Dan Sinker which tells a mystery story, set in the fictional town of Question Mark, Ohio, sprawled across 40 websites. Each site is a chapter in that story. (Links to everything are at the URL above.)
Each site is a puzzle for the audience to solve, but also a puzzle for Joe and I as the creators. How to tell the story the right way, how to make it work across multiple screen sizes, and how to do it in a turnaround time measured in days or sometimes hours.
We talk a lot about creating personal websites, well this man and his co-author just created 40 websites to tell one story! It this kind of webmastering and story telling that helps create a Web that doesn’t suck and I’d like to see more of it because it breaks the print and ebook publishing silos and expands the indieweb. Building all those websites to tell a story is time consuming, but it sure looks like fun.
