In Search of a Shell's Spiracles

My thesis, the first two parts of a hypertext novel, is one of several high-water marks in my journeys in creating and reading interactive fiction. For me, there are three different ways of thinking about this project: the narrative, the technical, and how the narrative meets the technical, which I refer to as the embodied. Narrative: A nautical bildungsroman about post-school listlessness, choices and restrictions, sea monsters, and contradictory women. Technical: An investigation in creating a relatively linear story that feels variable and evokes different feelings in the reader in separate playthroughs. Embodied: A series of experiments in bringing certain elements and emotions to the surface on both the levels of narrative and interactivity. The project was coded in Twine, an HTML based software with a rich history of use by marginalized creators. I hope you enjoy playing through it as much as I did creating it.