The entire text of the left scroll field (Virginia Anderson): 11/23 I added more at the end of this yesterday. I am finding it hard to concentrate and think about what's wrong with this scene in this environment. Too many people coming and going. I need to go somewhere and wait for some new words to come. I want this scene to be more evocative and apocalyptic. Now it's pretty ordinary and it doesn't convey what I think it would have been like on the island with a storm lying just offshore and the water opaque the color of ? There would have been whitecaps. The strand line. Gulls. Pelicans. Gulls getting swept up and down yet riding the wind in place like ? Clouds looking like they had foamed up out of the black sea itself. And the mud flats. Briny water thick with algae spreading across red algaecoated sand, shells and driftwood and organic trash scattered like burnt, like ash, debris from an explosion, and under the mud are oyster shells. This is not really how I write well. I wait and listen, and things come. This forcing doesn't work. 11/22: I have become a third person again.

The entire text of the right scrolling field (Susan Romano): not whining but thoughts: Now I realize, although you have surely told me many times before, that you are using the stack as an invention tool and if you so conceive it then I have to rework my sense of what I am supposed to do. If I think of you as the writer, then I go into this supportive, feedback mode, whereby I believe I"m supposed to think up questions that stimulate you as well as provide soothing support for your efforts. Maybe it's good that I recognize this mode, a very traditional peer feedback mode for writing teachers during which the focus is always on you and your needs. BUT If I wrench away from that supportive Virginia-is-in-charge sense of my role (which Virginia herself has firmly declared to be THE WAY THINGS ARE DON'T TOUCH MY TEXT) then I can read very differently or at least try to read differently appropriating her text for my own purposes and NOT listening to her whine at all and not being supportive and not caring what SHE is trying to do but only being the radical reader. This is the way we theorize interactive fiction/writing but its' so difficult to let go of the support thing. I'm going to try hard to ignore her or my construction of her as the struggling modernist writer, the construction she herself has made and asked me to affirm.

I like support, but I am also interested in your radicalizing actions BUT why is it not okay to make copies to play with and have two versions, mine and yours? Are these concepts somehow fascist? Should we not keep records, which is what I am really asking? Isn't there something of interest in comparisons which are not possible once the originals have been altered? We can after all look back at criticism to see records of readings, even if our readings of those readings are new readings. What will happen to me if you ignore my or your construction of me? What construction of me will replace it? Do you envision, then, a fourth construction, your construction of you as radical reader, which cannot exist alongside the other constructions? What happens if we try to keep them all functioning in related spaces? I am not sure why this has to be agonistic. You know, you can make your fields bigger than mine, and then I can change them back. I only made mine bigger to start with because I was being fascist. Here, I'll fix it. 11/25: I was thinking this morning (as I was supposed to be reading about cultural politics, about the COMPETITION in this situation. Perhaps that is too strong a word. Perhaps it is a struggle to maintain individual integrity even in the face of radical assaults on that possibility, assaults we are both aware of. Indeed, if you as reader efface what I have previously done, where is the dividing line between collaboration and usurpation (which implies, of course, that I originally owned something, which is what I assume you would deny). So I will choose another verb. Where is the dividing line between collaboration, in which both parties negotiate, I assume, what gets changed, and erasure in which one party gets to wipe out what the other has done? I was thinking about metynomic ethics. About an ethics in which different versions stand beside each other rather than in front of each other. It has always seemed to me that the beauty of this ethic is that it allows both versions to speak, even if the choice is still limited, confined to whatever gets put in, or whoever chooses to add to it. While writers previously have not suffered anyone to stand in front of them, they have seldom been totally able to prevent others from erecting structures beside theirs (sometimes called parody, perhaps). I see that as a fruitful kind of comparison for both and all. It would be interesting if two or more parties were to start out with the same characters, same concerns, and write side by side stories and then hypertext link them. A project for next time?