The problem with multiple authors is that you're inevitably going to see some push and pull. Some people want to see the story go one way, and the others think that's crazy talk. I think there's been a bit of that on the wiki this semester. However, I think the thing about electronic literature is that some inconsistency and feral growth is not a bad thing. So maybe every single dot on the wiki doesn't connect perfectly. So what. Fragmentation is inevitable, and we are essentially left with just as many potentialities as consistent eventualities.

What I'm trying to get at here is that the wiki doesn't need to make perfect sense. It is endlessly expandable, so what does it matter if we get two versions of the same story on there, or multiple endings, or unresolved questions, or what have you. Its scope is just as large as people care to expand it, and it can encompass just as much as people care to put in.

Also, I want to reiterate how pleased I am with the way the wiki has turned out. I've showed it to a few friends who are definitely not up on their hypertext literature, and they all liked it quite a bit. Good job, us.

So...a while ago I added a new story to the bottom of the main wiki page that involved (and although it's easy for anyone to see on the wiki, it's a bit embarrassing to post this on the blog) professor (KF) as God. I don't know if people hated my addition or just didn't know what else to put after it (I kept checking and imagining cricket noises in our classroom). Anyway, since it's the last day and I've been itching to add a little more, I did. And I think I've added some sort of closure to the wiki, but I'm not entirely sure. Obviously, please edit or delete or add if you want! If you didn't like my prof=God story-line, then you probably don't like my ending. (Though, honestly I don't intend it as a full and complete ending.)

While working on our wiki over the past few days, I've been thinking back to the Marxwiki we built for KF's course on Marxism & Cultural Studies (I want to say that one or two others of you may also have been in that class, so please put in your two cents if that's the case), which was a traditional wiki modeled along the lines of wikipedia, with encyclopedic, interlinking entries on everything from "Base and superstructure" to "Fanfiction."

Relative to that wiki experience, I do feel authorized to say that our wiki has been quite a success.

I was looking around in the wiki yet again, and I only just really noticed that it presents something of an amusing contradiction. The basic narrative is something torn out of one of those daytime soaps watched by shut-ins and people in hospitals, or maybe out of this Desperate Housewives show I hear so much about. From what I understand, that one's even got a plumber. However, being a class full of English majors, we really can't resist attempting to make it literary. I know I couldn't resist thinking back to Paradise Lost a whole lot and throwing an appropriate, but probably unnecessary Candide reference into a tale of suburban marital angst, although the former probably has something to do with the thesis i'm writing about Satan.

I agree with Oz and Silversprung that our wiki is turning out really well. It seemed to me that while it started out being very promising, it then went through a somewhat dismaying phase of chaos and contradictory lexia. I've been really pleased and excited to see the way various storylines have been tied together. The whole thing makes much more sense as a coherent whole than I ever expected. There are still a few things I hope we can all iron out before the end of tomorrow, but I'm really very happy with our experiment. It's not a small thing to create something this ambitious with this many authors in the mix.

Due to considerable preoccupation with other work, I've been on something of a break from the wiki for the past two or three weeks, so in coming back to it I felt like I needed to completely catch up/reorient myself before I could begin posting again.

Having returned to it, for a time, with an objectivity of absence that made me much more a reader than a collaborating author, I would just like to offer our class a congratulatory pat on the back. This thing is genuinely fun to read. The lexias are frequently witty, well-written, and interesting in their own right, and the linking system really seems like it "works" in the sense that the links mostly lead down worthwhile, often surprising paths, and getting lost in all the linking feels fun, not wildly frustrating.

When I was writing my hypertext for my final project, I couldn't figure out a way to end it. That was because when I usually write anything, I don't go in with a clear plan. I normally just sit in front of my Microsoft Word document and write in a stream-of-consciousness way, letting the ideas rush out as I'm typing. So, when I needed to finish writing my hypertext, I was having a lot of trouble ending it, which was also due to the fact that it IS a hypertext and that format isn't very closure-friendly.

Anyway, I kept asking my friends what I should do to "end" my hypertext, and I got at least half a dozen responses telling me to kill off the main character (which was a problem, because she starts out dead anyway). But anyway, people seem to think killing people is a good way of ending any type of narrative.

Yesterday, I heard murmurs about the end of the wiki project. I was wondering myself if anyone would be brave enough to end the story. I'm not sure what an appropriate end would be, outside of something like the world being destroyed and all the main characters being killed, which would be a major cop-out. Beyond that, the threads seem too distinct for someone to try to bring everything together in a single post, but maybe I'm wrong and someone will be clever and attempt to do so.

In terms of general reflection on the wiki, I thought it was kind of cool. It turned out better than I thought it would. Obviously the degree of investment one would have in such a large collaborative piece of fiction is limited. I definitely felt that way myself. But I think a lot of the entries are pretty interesting/cool/funny.

Wow. Everytime I get back here, something's new.

Marmelade's recent comment on Dandelife has me rethinking my ideas about coherence in text.

Did anyone else visit Dandelife and immediately feel confident that the metatext or megatext produced would be somehow coherent? I suspect that the insistence on dated entries somehow establishes this. For instance, Marmelade seems to have gone back and found things that happened on a birthday. My thought would have run something like "Gee, look at all these things that happened on that given day that seem totally unrelated." And the very difference, discreteness, of the events makes the metanarrative itself extremely coherent just because they are connected in our thought by their historical moments. And that connection is not at all arbitrary.