Newspoem.

23 June 2002

20 WRITERS COMPOSE HYPERTEXT NOVELLA IN 40 MINUTES.
NEW WORLD RECORD?

In a laboratory school in America last month, the results of a bizarre writing experiment yielded 476 kilobytes of narrative information in an astonishing 40 minutes. By comparison, Shakespeare's Hamlet is only 193 kilobytes and, scholars speculate, took several hours to write.

"I am euphoric. This must be what it felt like for those scientists who created life in a beaker of synthesized primordial soup!" exclaimed Spineless Books Chief Scientist Q. Synopsis. "These people had no idea that, within an hour, they would all be hypertext novellaists. If this experiment yields consistently reproducible results, this could mean a cure for writers' block in our lifetime!"

The implications go deeper than that, however, in an information-saturated world in which literature, increasingly, must compete for attention against voluminous amounts of news, advertising, television, video games, and pornography. This discovery suggests that teams of writers working in intensive bursts might turn the information tides, flooding the media with writing that sells nothing and is devoid of fact.

"We've attempted this feat only once before, at SPCA in Cincinnati. However, due to an error in the experimental procedure, the data was lost. We have been waiting for a chance to reenact the experiment, and are grateful to Elizabeth Majerus for letting us use her creative writing class as our experimental subject," added a breathless Synopsis.

Read the results of this revolutionary experimental method at:

http://spinelessbooks.com/waters/


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