For my senior project I’d like to find how I can use the medium of web fiction to effectively tell a story. I want the medium of the story to be important to its telling and for my story to use elements of its medium that could not be communicated a short story. These essential questions matter to me because I am very interested in how new forms of media can be used for storytelling and putting the reader in a more active relationship with my work. As this is a big project, I see myself being able to complete the draft of the story over senior project, with notes about the images and links I will include. If I have time I will start working on creating the more multimedia aspects of the story. I think that this is an achievable goal for this project that will allow me to focus in particular on its most difficult part.

My idea is that I want to tell a story about a girl who discovers a book that will grant her omniscience, but only if she finds and reads the other books within a month. Otherwise, her body will rot and die from the inability to handle even a piece of that information. It will be framed as her “going down the rabbit hole” as she discovers more and more about the history of the books and about the nature of the world around her. It will include text as well as images I create meant to mirror the look of both websites and historical documents. I plan to outline the story and complete the draft, and to begin working on the image elements if I have more time, as well as the coding for the story. Some references and inspirations for this work are 17776 by Jon Bois, House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, The Northern Caves, Homestuck by Andrew Hussie, and The Weird and the Eerie by Mark Fisher. I also plan to speak with my aunt’s dad, Bill Bly, who is regarded as a pioneer in hypertext fiction, to give myself more perspective on how I can tell my story and what I can learn from earlier hypertext fiction.