"Mass": simultaneity experiment

I've taken a brief section of my first published story, "Mass", and converted it into hypertext to take a look at how to render the external and internal simultaneously. [Note: for context, the full story is here. Briefly, the story follows the protagonist Kythryn through a day at a family reunion. There are a lot of unattributed snatches of dialogue thrown at her (and the reader), and also, intermittently, streams of her thoughts. The experiment is only partially satisfactory--mainly, I think, because I originally conceived the story for print; thus, the thoughts of hers that I record are often not simultaneous but sequential, since they are in reaction to someone's words. However, there are enough that occur as she is doing something--looking, talking, listening--that it occasionally gives the feel of events occuring simultaneously on different levels. The other conversion problem is that the continuity of the story lay mainly in the external, whereas the thoughts only appear intermittently. Thus, you can't quite get the sense of her day by following the internal path alone.

The section narrates a portion of the story where she comes back into the house just before the dinner is about to begin. You may:

  1. Read the section as it appeared in print
  2. Begin by following Kythryn's thoughts
  3. Begin by following the action and dialogue
Numbers 2 and 3 are interlinked in many places; number 1 is off by itself. For those of you using text-only browsers, please note that the [IMAGE] [IMAGE] links appearing at the bottom of each page are not anything interesting to see but merely left and right arrows, respectively, i.e. links to the previous and next pages.

Last updated June 5 1995