INTRODUCTION:

The hypertext ‘Winter Break’ was created by the American blogger Adrienne Roston, who has been writing this kind of works since 1993 and has some masterpieces such as ‘Considering a Baby?’, ’Making Scenes’, ‘The Interview’, ‘What fits’ and ‘Six Sex Scenes’.

I will focus on the spatial aspects of this text, not only its internal ones but also its externals. As internal spaces I mean the main places where the actions occur or all those places which are referred to by the characters in the text. Moreover, as external spaces, how the information is structured on each link, where you should click in order to get more information, to get the story continued…

I have already started to read it and it seems an interesting, very easy to read work, at least at first sight! But I have already found some subtleties which I cannot easily interpret as my English language is very poor. I hope I will have no difficulties in understanding the whole hypertext.

By the way, I find amazing the fact that I can ‘choose’ which way I want to take, which path I want to follow. And I put ‘choose’ in quotation marks because I think that having only two possible ways is not choosing but ruling out one of the ways…I wish I had more links to make an extensive analysis and could truly have my own experience with the hypertext, a completely different experience from that which had those who have already read it and have taken only one way. Only by adding an extra link on each node the possibilities of reading the story would triple.

Anyway, I was saying it was amazing as you can interact with the text by choosing your own progress through the story from a given start and given possible directions and focus on an end for that story.

Academic year 2008/2009

laupons2@alumni.uv.es

Universitat de València Press