I’ve decided to make all of DreamFishery.com a fictional Website, including even the philosophy wiki. Everything on DreamFishery.com, except this blog, will be a part of the digital storytelling that Alice Mountolive is doing as the narrator of The Myth of Merula. Making this decision just feels right to me. As soon as I imagined doing it, I could feel my creative juices start flowing more than ever. Making the whole site fictional feels liberating. It’s like taking a boat out to sea after being landlocked for a while. It’s also fun. It’s like playing pretend. Writing fiction is like playing pretend, in a way, too; but making the whole Website fictional really puts me into character, so to speak. And being in character, as the narrator Alice, helps me create the story. It occurs to me how much writing can have in common with acting, and I wonder why it never occurred to me before.

The philosophy wiki will consist of the philosophical insights that Blackbird recalls from her communion with an alien during her Mars journey. Over time, the wiki will become a sort of science fiction encyclopedia of alien philosophies. This will make sense as the story of The Myth of Merula progresses.

The art gallery will begin as the scans and photographs that Alice makes of Blackbirds’ paintings and drawings. It will become over time a museum of alien art. The way that this will fit into the story will also emerge over time as I go along.

The invention section will consist of interactive Shockwave 3D models that Alice makes of the strange inventions that she finds in Blackbird’s house. Blackbird credits the inspiration for these inventions to her alien communion experience.

The stories section will be where Alice archives the stories that Blackbird tells her. These stories will be in multimedia format. They will contain game, web comic and hypertext narrative elements. I had been planning to use Flash, but now I’m going to use Director instead, to benefit from its 3D capability whenever I want it.

The feeling of work becomes more like the feeling of play, day by day. Only the programming and web design aspects still feel like work. I’m looking forward to finishing the first 3D programming entry in the inventions section. Once I get that done, my imagination will really be set free, even more so than it is now. I’ll concentrate for a while on art and storytelling and put programming aside for the time being. I’m so looking forward to doing that.