*Egypt, The Book of Going Forth by Day* - is my second long narrative work.  The title comes from the literal translation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead.  The story takes place in Egypt:  Egypt in the present, the past, and in infinity - a weaving of ancient Egyptian mythology and texts, burial practices in the historic Middle Kingdom, and a contemporary story of loss and re-discovery.

The present-day story begins when Jeanette, a middle-aged college professor, receives a letter from her long-estranged brother, Ross, inviting her to Egypt for a visit.  She arrives in Egypt to find that her brother is engaged in some shady dealings in antiquities – and, before long, Ross disappears.  Like Isis before her, Jeanette spends the month following her brother’s mysterious trail down the Nile.  On the journey, secrets are revealed, and a reunification takes place during the days on the river, in the tombs of the past beneath the earth, and in the spells encoded in the skies. 

In the hand-made First Editions, each copy was individually recorded and is unique. Each version had a specially selected “Papyrus Spell” for the owner.  This is a virtual "book of the dead" to guide the reader through the journey through the underworld.  Now, of course, those first 100 copies are a catalogue of participants in e-literature about 2006.

I began the narrative in Toolbook and later moved to Director as the authoring program.  Director is a time-based program; essentially attuned to video; every element is incorporated as a movie time frame.  Within these constraints, I endeavored to interweave time, mythology, history, and individual narrative points of view into a mapped, navigable world space, but experienced as “infinite” slices of time.  I thought of these units as ‘infinite manuscripts’ – but manuscripts that had run-time loop. 

Each screen is organized with the same features - and each of these features has a timed appearance as the narrative progresses.

The narrative is told in three voices (representing various versions of the ancient Egyptian ideas of the soul), the Ba voice of Jeanette – the Ka voice, which consists of Jeanette’s letters to her sister, Nancy (Nepthys – the night, the tomb, the truth), and the Akh voice, which is the spiritual guide/voice of the eternal heavenly cycles and the spells of the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

Each of these voices is represented in "registers" on the screen (registers like this are common in ancient tomb paintings). 

Thus, Jeanette's narrative runs in the scrolling frame in the center with the little walking foot.  She tells the contemporary story of her journey down the Nile tracking her brother, Ross. 

 In the course of her travels down the Nile, Jeanette also writes to her sister, Nancy.  This narrative is revealed by clicking on the Ka figure (with hands up) - and appears in the register across the middle-top.  Jeanette's missals to Nancy relate to events in the present - but they also recap the historic relationship between Jeanette and Ross (and Isis and Osiris, as well).

In the third regisyter that runs down the middle-left side of the screen, we follow the Ack voice.  This tracks Osiris (or the deceased) through the night journey toward the dawn – a journey using the spells of “The Egyptian Book of the Dead.”

More About Aegypt

When most people think of story, they think of either texts or movies.  In both media, the story can have several time elements – real time, narrative time, mythic time.  But the actual, material printed text is frozen in space (unless you skip pages), and the movie is anchored in time (that is, when a movie is running, one cannot simply choose to enter another, simultaneous space).  With interactive, hypertext fiction, a whole new world of time/space opens up.  The challenge of coding an interactive, time/space fiction is particularly tricky because, when the programming is decoded by the machine to produce the work of art, most of the coded elements disappear from view.  [In the case of authoring systems, often they disappear from view, as well.]  It was to explore the possibilities of a time/space medium that I wrote both *Califia* and *Egypt:  The Book of Going Forth by Day.*

The challenge, here, then, was to use a time-based authoring system to represent three time modalities as reflected in time, static space (both visual and conceptual), and most importantly, moving space.  The eternal, the legendary, and the contemporary – the sky, the tomb, and the flowing river.  It is for this reason that I began to think of each programmed file as an “infinite page” in the sense that Scott McCloud described it in *Understanding Comics*  – or, to be more accurate – an infinite, looped manuscript page.

The Book of Going Forth by Day is a contemporary/ancient account of Egypt that draws upon legend and myth to tell a story of death and rebirth on the Nile. It explores the interface between image and text - the ways, in hypermedia, that narrative information is not only contained in the text, but also coded into graphics, music, structure, and navigation elements. Going Forth celebrates the natural materiality of both hieroglyphic writing and electronic literature. Egyptian hieroglyphic writing is inherently hypertextual and hypermedial. In ancient times, the surfaces of temples and tombs were covered with a narrative writing/art that was a complex linkage of the literal, metaphorical, and schematic aspects of the culture. The connections between a glyph as an image and between the hieroglyphic word and wall painting, sculpture, or object of the culture reveal a system in which writing and art deeply interpenetrate. The Book of Going Forth by Day is distinguished by a single narrator with multiple forms. A longstanding feature of Egyptian thought was the ability to continually absorb and re-integrate concepts, especially those concerning the persistence of the soul after death. The voices of the narrator are modeled on the akh, ka, and ba concepts. As we follow these manifestations of the narrator in a search for a missing brother, readers familiar with the Isis/Osiris myth will recognize the echoes of the mythological material that informs the passage through the underworld to rebirth. Since the story requires that the reader have access to present and past, three states of consciousness, and the fixed and the moving, I needed to devise a structure that would allow fluid access to each element. Going Forth, then, depends upon a structured choreography of movement--a continually-transforming "hieroglyph" of kinetic symbolism and an evolving syntax of naviagation. To meet this challenge I draw on recent techniques in electronic writing, new software technologies, and the following specific media elements:

*Text: the hypertext is a multilinear narrative. Links are available to the reader through hot words, text selections, menu choices. Readers can also consult glossaries, dictionaries, maps, and timelines. *Hieroglyphs: hieroglyphic writing is used throughout as narrative guide, plot vehicle, and exposition device. The overall structure is organized in the form of hieroglyphic representations, with horizontal and vertical registers that form channels of movement.

*Images: digitized photos, sketches, maps, the grammar of Egyptian design and ornament are part of an extensive visual language.

*Sound: voice narration, percussion, Egyptian instruments, and contemporary music function as part of the text of the work.

*Kinetic effects: Flash animations, JavaScript, Java Applets and video clips emphasize movement; nested windows, status-bar messages, changing backgrounds, transition effects, floating menus, and other web-enabled technologies, assist the reader throughout. Because the web is, itself, a medium in transitory movement, I have made this work available as it evolves.