The bound galleys of Reading Hypertext are here, ready to pack for the launch party in Torino. They look great.

OK: typo on the cover. Six words, one wrong. Bright side, it keeps the galleys from wandering into bookstores. And of course they’ll be collectors items someday.

Anyway, the producer comes into your office and says,

We’ve got to shoot the third act in Buenos Aires. Or Paris. Either one.

You demur. “He’s the governor of South Carolina. How are we going to get him to Argentina?"

We can’t afford to shoot this in California. And Max says he’ll only go to Argentina. So, we gotta get him down under.

"How?"

A junket. Trade delegation!

"We did that last year, with Sarah Palin."

A girl. He can be in love.

"But we’ve already established…"

Madly in love. Crazy.

"But he’s the governor of South Carolina. Max pops down to South America on a whim, everyone thinks he’s on a bender. I pop down to South America for a couple of days, who's gonna notice. You think they won’t notice that the governor isn’t governing? Or there?"

"He’s a politician. He’s spent his entire life being a politician. People talk about him as president. Who is going to elect a president that vanishes? And you think he doesn’t know? Sure, all the sexes from Maine to Texas have never known such love before, but who is going to give nukes to a guy who throws his entire life away for five days in Buenos Aires."

Wash 4 apricots. Slice in half, discard the pits. Don’t worry about the skin.

Throw them in a small saucepan with a splash of olive oil, a small cup of white wine. a bay leaf, some thyme, some ground ancho (or cayenne, or whatever hot pepper you like), and a bit of honey. Cover, cook for about 20 minutes.

Drop in the blender. Puree. Back into the saucepan. Add a spoon of good mustard, a little salt maybe. My apricots weren’t very ripe, so I added a bit more honey. Heat. Serve.

It’s a nice color, and it’s rich and creamy without much fat.

The very short answer:

• It should be easy!
• It’s actually quite tricky, because off-the-rack version control tools care about the order of things to which XML is indifferent.
• There aren’t great solution for version control of XML files.

The catch is that XML doesn’t care — in fact is required not to care — about the order of XML attributes: <item Name="..." ID="..."> is equivalent to code><itemID="..." Name="..." >. If you code by hand, the sequence doesn’t change, and version control works fine; if you’re generating the XML from a program, the program is free to use any order it likes and you get the same results.

The good news: starting with Tinderbox 4.7.0, Tinderbox files will be saved with consistent attribute ordering, and so now version control will work the way you’d want it to. The post is the first in an exciting series that will discuss how teams can share one Tinderbox file across the office or across the world.

Map of Idle Conversation

I sense real opportunities in small dramatic hypertexts composed entirely, or primarily, of dialogue. (Indeed, I think “Idle Conversation” would start stronger if it omitted “she said” and “he said.”) On the one hand, I’m thinking of short dramatic sketches like Mamet’s The Duck Variations. On the other hand, think of Frost’s wonderful setpieces, “Death of the Hired Man” and “Four Hundred Collars”. There’s lots you could do — opening into interior dialogue is just one of the moves you might make.

Imagine, for example, a variation on “Idle Conversation” where one of the characters withholds some crucial information from the other. “She” is actually the governor of a region of Argentina. “He” is married. Or “She” has just learned that she has Parkinson’s, or HIV. Or “He” is transgendered but — for reasons we can’t talk about right now — is wearing clothes from her former life. We could quickly be anywhere from “Casino Royale” to “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”.

One of my hopes for Reading Hypertext is to advance discussion of craft, and to promote real criticism of real hypertexts. I think a session — or maybe a track — of Tinderbox Weekend SF this fall (November 21-22) ought to be devoted to writerly topics. Ideas? Email me.