Becoming a Muse
sometime in the morning you wake up and its all a blur.
last night. last week. your entire life.
Enter
Becoming a Muse is the story of the three year period of my life just after I dropped
out of college. It started out as a journal of my travels, soon became a letter to
each of my friends, and finally evolved into some form of book. Although you can
read it from front to back, it's structure lends itself to the form of hypertext.
linear
Becoming a Muse was originally written in 14 parts. Except for the first five
parts which were written together and typed in in five separate sections, each part
represents approximately three to four months of my life. Within each part, time is
distorted. But for the most part, things happening in part seven come after things
in part six.
non-linear
Back in April of 1995, I converted what I had written at the time into HTML using a
combination of manual editing and perl scripting. The idea was to create some sort
of maze out of the book through which people could explore the book non-linearly. A
year later, having finished the book, I reformatted the entire book, adding new
sections for what I had written since and improving the look and feel of the page via
new HTML tags that had come into common use since.
To explore, choose one of the topics at the bottom of each page. The right and left
arrows will take you linearly through the book. And this is the web, so links are imbedded
throughout the text that jump between various sections (more are being added
as I have time to cross-reference the whole thing). An index of various people and topics
may also be appearing soon.
Enter...
publishing
I do have plans to publish Becoming a Muse, but being lazy and hideously bad at
selling myself, I find writing query letters an almost impossible task. Nonetheless,
someday I may get up the time and energy to do so. If anyone reading this happens to
be a publisher or agent, know a publisher or agent, or wants to write query letters
to publishers or agents for me, please e-mail me.
In the meantime it remains 'published' here on the web for you to read in a variety
of formats. As time permits, I may or may not expand the metaphors involved in reading
it. Hope you've enjoyed it...