“Summit Ten” is an episodic story told in ten parts via new media technology. Unlike stories like Afternoon and Patchwork Girl, it will incorporate, not Storyspace or a separate program, but online flash media tools. It will be interactive in that each portion of the story is accessed by “finding” the important word that will link one to the next portion; the reader will be required to keep tabs on these words as they work their way through the story, in order to input the code for the “boss level” or the end of the story. In addition, in the tradition of video gaming, ten “easter eggs” of story particles will be available to enhance the experience, if one can find them.

My dissatisfaction with works like Pax, Fidget, and Patchwork Girl was the obsession with the media itself and a lack of character and conventional story elements. It struck me that simply because the medium was different did not necessarily mean that all elements of storytelling were obsolete. These works often felt onanistic for the writer and thus othered the audience significantly; the lack of character vehicle and development and instead a focus on the medium made me ask “so what?” The story “Summit Ten” will utilize Web 2.0, which emphasizes communication between people—readers will have free, public access to the story, and will be able to comment on the easter egg pages and in other places. Free and public access as well as reader feedback should democratize the space of new media literature and utilize the philosophy used in fanfiction communities as well as keeping true to the spirit of virtual play and interactivity felt in the older pieces of E-lit.

More important than this, though, is the character and plot of “Summit Ten.” Based at UCLA, the story will explore alienation, isolation, and various underlying problems on and around campus as turn-of-the-century students, from the somewhat surrealistic standpoint of a character who, for all intents and purposes, seems to be more haunting the school than inhabiting it. A meditation on female camaraderie and sisterhood, sacrifice for education’s sake, leaving one’s home behind and facing feelings of new personhood and identity away from one’s paradigm, “Summit Ten” will hopefully encapsulate some of my feelings about my UCLA experience before I graduate, and I invite my fellow students to enjoy it with me, through the character of “Ashe,” her partner-in-crime, and her train rides through liminal spaces to a home which she also no longer seems to inhabit, while a strange doppelganger self haunts the margins.

Due to space storage restrictions, Summit Ten remains to some extent a work in progress, as it was very ambitious to begin with. The first two floors are complete with all links in place, while the remaining floors remain under construction, with some pages complete but not yet published. In creating the project I found that the freedom of the Flash interface allowed me to make points with the visual medium that I haven’t been allowed to do since my days as an Art Major. I was able to create the scrap and notebook feeling of pieces and personal articles coming together, and I hope I have begun to develop the characters as avatars people can relate to and want to chase through the halls of Summit Ten. It has been a challenging and time-consuming project but is and continues to be worth it. I encourage both Dr. Stefans and any other interested students to stay with the project and stay tuned as the new floors are constructed. It is not remiss to say that I may have done these floors as a project for a class–but in the fashion of true learning they have brought me a long way as an artist and extend beyond the boundaries of the classroom.

Thank you Dr. Stefans for encouraging this kind of work. I will continue the floors and the graphics even from grad school in London next year.

“Summit Ten” can be found at http://www.wix.com/Aubretia/Summit-Ten-by-TA-Leederman.

1.) In 2004 Stephen Colbert coined the term “Wikiality” on his hit pundit show, The Colbert Report, in a section called The Word. In this segment, he spurred his viewers to change reality through democratic opinion, by changing the Wikipedia articles for African Elephants. The change he requested was to state that through the efforts of Stephen Colbert, 10,000 endangered African elephants have been saved. Some weeks later he came back to report that his viewers indeed did this, changing the page in such numbers that to this day Wikipedia has had to keep the elephant article closed to editing.

2.) The Konami Code, which is up up down down left right left right a b enter, was once a popular code in video games from Japanese company Konami. Online it has spread to be a secret code input at various sites that have had their base code tampered with in order to display some easter egg. As the list site of Konami codes can only be accessed by those who are in the know and know the code already, the code increases a sense of in-group out-group hacktivism.

Project Name: “Summit Ten”

“Summit Ten” is an episodic story told in ten parts via new media technology. Unlike stories like Afternoon and Patchwork Girl, it will utilize, not Storyspace or a separate program, but online blogging tools. It will be interactive in that each portion of the story is accessed by “finding” the important word that will link one to the next portion; the reader will be required to keep tabs on these words as they work their way through the story. In addition, in the tradition of video gaming, ten “easter eggs” of story particles will be available to enhance the experience, if one can find them.

My dissatisfaction with works like Pax, Fidget, and Patchwork Girl was the obsession with the media itself and a lack of character and conventional story elements. It struck me that simply because the medium was different did not necessarily mean that all elements of storytelling were obsolete. These works often felt onanistic for the writer and thus othered the audience significantly; the lack of character vehicle and development and instead a focus on the medium made me ask “so what?” The story “Summit Ten” will utilize Web 2.0, which emphasizes communication between people—readers will have free, public access to the story, and will be able to comment on the easter egg pages and in other places. Free and public access as well as reader feedback should democratize the space of new media literature and utilize the philosophy used in fanfiction communities as well as keeping true to the spirit of virtual play and interactivity felt in the older pieces of E-lit.

More important than this, though, is the character and plot of “Summit Ten.” Based at UCLA, the story will explore alienation, isolation, and various underlying problems on and around campus as turn-of-the-century students, from the somewhat surrealistic standpoint of a character who, for all intents and purposes, seems to be more haunting the school than inhabiting it. A meditation on female camaraderie and sisterhood, sacrifice for education’s sake, leaving one’s home behind and facing feelings of new personhood and identity away from one’s paradigm, “Summit Ten” will hopefully encapsulate some of my feelings about my UCLA experience before I graduate, and I invite my fellow students to enjoy it with me, through the character of “Ashe,” her partner-in-crime, and her train rides through liminal spaces to a home which she also no longer seems to inhabit, while a strange doppelganger self haunts the margins.

Note: Michigan J. Frog originally appeared in One Froggy Evening, one of the best and most classical of the Warner Brothers cartoons. Watch it!

* No matter how often I click their eyes do not open.

* The text is sentences, building on one another.

*”MM” Her eyes open and follow me. They’re somehow bulbous. Frightening, like a hungry frog.

* A clock appears and there are the faintest words under the bodies; I cannot read them all at once.

* Not entirely sure how I got her eyes to open. Clicking doesn’t work. Some appear with eyes opened. Perhaps I need to catch them more than once.

*The text is lighter or darker, impression or no impression.

*They’re falling down now, and much more rapidly; I can’t catch them anymore and there are too many.

* “What game never ends?” This one, obviously. Ack, falling faster. I need a net.

* “Only you can defy reality–GODSPEED” and sends me off. I am either the voyeuristic domestic terrorist or a person watching from the sidelines and I am falling too–it would certainly understand why I could catch no one myself.

* Overall, actually rather fun, but a bit like an intellectual Tetris with higher stakes. By its very nature it must be cycled more than once because a single playing cannot reveal everything. I know video games of this kind, where an “end” is not the right “end” unless one plays through more than once; Silent Hill by Konami is the best example offhand, but the Fallout games also work.

*”does not enjoy the high-culture entitlement of literature” yet often seems to pose itself as such in the form of “classical” texts archived for limited audience. Moreover, video games have market appeal for a number of reasons that e-lit could perhaps learn from, not the least of which is the audience’s ability to truly emotionally engage with them and insert themselves via character.

* “Most who move in this edgy space are amateurs, obsessives, and/or academics, people driven by, if not to, distraction.” I do not see it as edgy, and I resist the idea that this is in any way different from those who produce text literature (and I mean this broadly) or any other media. The difference is lack of market, but fanfiction also accepts lack of market and is driven by the amateur and the obsessed; yet it is to be excluded from this category as well. E-Lit authors seem to be self-glorifying as misunderstood geniuses, the misunderstood “Monk” character as it were. If only their plots were so interesting.

* “It is tempting to say, always of course with a fortifying dose of postmodern irony, that we have reached the end of a certain literary history, if indeed we do not stand outside it altogether.” No, they really don’t. The point of fact here is that the E-Lit I’ve seen tends to take elements of Modernist literature (only an elite few can or will bother to understand elements of maths and programming necessary, and dissemination is small; character is also difficult to chart and not for the average person to consume) and relfect on it in a postmodern fashion–i.e. the medium is the message, and unfortunately the largest message. These authors do not and cannot stand outside this certain literary history because they perpetuate the same models of exclusion known to the largest chunk of that very history.

* “It was hard enough to be a writer in the old century, when cinema, radio, and television controlled the cultural agenda. Then, literary people could at least invoke a purity of critical detachment, lampooning the world of broadcast media…” Cinema, radio, and television are obviously not of literary value, but movement to the computer screen is? Pardon me if I see a plain undercutting of the point, not to mention a certain bathos. Poor, misunderstood, educated writers, bewailing the lose of hegemonic purity.

* “this Puritanism seems harder to sustain, at least in my neck of the marches”–what is this purity? Am I going to be ethnically cleansed for writing fanfic about mass-consumed media events and Japanese B-movies? This person should lead a cult.

* “…we may find ourselves looking longingly into the machine, embracing its profane possibilities, choosing to defect from the Elect.” Um. See above point. Moreover, I do not see a separation from an Elect–just the creation of an even more select society that perpetuates the same models.

* “Lawrence Lessig describes the threshold of a new order in communication, one that might revise the balance between reception and production to create a new common ground for creativity, a “read-write” culture.” THIS I can get behind–literature (like culture, family, and government) should be a discourse, not a room full of people shouting monologues and never listening.

*”At the same time, recall that al Qaeda means the base, as in database. One man’s rhizome, another’s tool for militant jihad.” Wait, what? This is very much a stab in the guts, an incindiary comment without warning, and an unnecessary analogy. Made for obvious, and rather cheap, effect, rather than for furthering the argument, as the author has not yet so much as mentioned Pax or its themes.

* The writing becomes much more sincere and palatable when the author switches to personal experience. He is showing and doing rather than telling from lofty literary points.

*”Still, if presidents can sideline the literal in search of a deeper truth, why not writers?” I was rather under the impression that writers have been in the business of this for centuries.

* The author then highlights what makes Pax, on some levels, more impressive than previous E-Lit texts we’ve encountered, though it continues to fall short as it does not stick with the introduced characters and thus they are difficult to relate to. While it is not necessary for literature to be beholden to the trope of character, it does seem to be lacking from this particular medium.

* “the player may either let that character go or hold for further questioning.” I like this detective interrogative–it reminds me of certain Sierra games from the 1990s, such as Colonel’s Bequest, when the object of the game was to solve a mystery as it spirals out of control around you. In this case, one plays within the mystery instead of approaching it afterwards, which is what play allows us to do in Pax.

Me at fanfiction.net. You can also find my sisters Sara and Kristen, and my friends April and Elaine.