Until my late 30s, I thought I had better than perfect vision. A moment in a Whole Foods grocery store and the blurring of a BBQ sign in the distance. Cover the left eye: blurry. Cover the right eye: sharp. I went to the eye doctor and promptly got my prescription and a pair of glasses.
When I came home with my glasses, I had a powerful ah-ha moment. I was standing in my driveway looking at the wooden fence of my backyard. Through my blurry eye I saw a wood fence, grey, featureless. Through my sharp eye I could start to see the grain of the wood. When I put on my new glasses it was like the entire world came into focus. I could see the patterns in the wood grain. I could see the blades of grass pushed up against the bottom of the fence. Wow.
As I’ve grown older, and my eyes getting even more compromised, I am entertaining the eye of blurring my focus again. In some ways, I am hoping you can blur your eyes just enough, reading my story, to see the overlap, the parts of your story that fit and blend into my own struggles. It’s like those 3D illusions, where you blur you eyes and suddenly you see a horse within the static of fragmentary shapes. I am trying to write something sort of like that. A new way of imagining the unsharpened focus. The lack of boundaries in the narration, traveling across various digital formats, inviting reader participation are all part of my dream of architecting a story with my reader, you.
It’s crazy, I know. Ambitious, perhaps. It all happens or does not happen depending on the reader. Some can’t blur their vision. Some don’t want to. Some will blame AI and my own explorations for something less than literate. I don’t think so. I hope that my own brain-expanding trips, narrative tributaries, and diversive digressions lead you deeper into your own story, and how the mirror of a novel can reflect back what you are thinking, what you are seeing. Perhaps what you cannot see unless you unfocus your vision.
I have a laser focus. But it’s more like a laser pointer. The one my cat nearly destroys himself trying to chase. I flick the story up the hallway, and there we go. Pull back and up the wall to the left of me. Zip. Now, I zag toward a forked timeline that you can nudge one way or another. I want linear storytelling to be broken down, chopped up, reswizzled into something new, unique, and illuminating. I want to illuminate you. Your reading. Your participation. Your following.
I’m building a religion. Architecting something without bounds, with multiple entry points, with a journey map that is co-collaborated with you as you read. Video, audio, text, music, images, drawings, snippets… All types of content are allowable. There’s even an opportunity for you to join in the conversation. Build your own path. Read backwards. Start with book four. Do what you feel.
It comes with the discipline for lightening your focus. Let your own perceptions be filtered or altered by this narrative. Join our narratives together into something unique. You and me. Collaborating. Writing. Talking. Expounding on the concepts of hyperfiction. Hyper – as in above and beyond. Breaking out of the boundaries of printed books, blogs, and videos. Forming a new narrative style. Breaking down the rules we learned in English class. Smashing the concept of the post-modern novel. What is a novel anyway? What is auto-fic? Hybrid memoir? Super-fiction? Meta?
Here we are, dawning on each other. Where would you like to go with this thread?
