1) Online Spy Game
Interactive story chapter for "Spychaser," an award winning marketing web site by Phoenix Pop Productions for Foote, Cone & Belding to sell a line of notebook networking hardware by 3Com Corp. It was online between January and June 1999. From these 14 short pieces and surrounding notes, the design team built all necessary screens.
2) CD-ROM Reference Title
Six samples from the award winning 1998 CD-ROM "James Cameron's Titanic Explorer" by CircumStance Design for Fox Interactive. The first three pieces are excerpts from the voiceover script, and the other three are text links.
3) CD-ROM Educational Title
Excerpts from the 1999 CD-ROM "Arthur's Kindergarten: Trouble with Arthur's Treehouse" by Presage Software/Human Code for The Learning Company. These samples trace the logical path (with all possible choices) through a spelling exercise.
4) Daily Horoscopes
A random sampling of 12 horoscopes. These brief forecasts appeared daily at Astrology.com between 1997 and 2004.
5) Monthly Horoscopes
Excerpts from four sets of monthly horoscopes written to appear at Astrology.com between April 2000 and June 2001. The first is an Overview, and the other three follow the themes of Romance, Career and Fitness. All four pieces were written for the same sign in the same month.
6) Marketing Newsletter
Sample weekly newsletter for Mondo Media, informing subscribers of the latest Mondo Mini Shows. I had the pleasure to describe these humorous online animations from November 2000 to February 2001.
7) Presentation Script
Excerpt from a software demo for Macromedia. I successfully edited a rambling presentation into a concise tour without having any real hands-on familiarity with the subject matter.
8) Social Agent Soap Opera
Story excerpts from Healthy U of Delmarva's "The Diet and Exercise Private Tutor," a daily drama created in June and July 2004 to bring more life and depth to an already successful software personality.
9) Connected Info Bites
"AKL Model 1.02: Eyes in the Back of My Head" is a series of logical extrapolations from that classic figure of speech and the bizarre images that it evokes.
10) Character Creation
Each of the "Three Characters" is built from a one-sentence observation collected on an evening of wandering around and spying on strangers.
11) Characterization through Dialogue, Scene Setting & Writing for Audio
"Cyberpunk Exercise" establishes the sonic landscape of a high-tech urban future. This is a second draft of an audio scripting exercise, and by no means a finished work.
12) Short Radio Comedy Script (Complete)
"Fiscal Violence" is a series of ten paid political announcements for the election of a fictional Comptroller in San Francisco. It was conceived as a set of commercial interludes to a sitcom (in fact, borrowing a peripheral character from that context). Although each episode is self-contained and could work as a thematic interlude in a longer production, it's also possible to play them as a single comic piece in ten short scenes.
13) Young Adult Fiction & Collaborative Ability
"The Boy in the Picture" is an early chapter from Butterbean's Cafe, a novel co-written with Sandy Greenberg for readers age 12 and up.
14) Serial Fiction
"The Magic Toys, 1991-1995: A Media Scrapbook" compiles related sections culled from Information Sickness, a many-threaded novel-in-progress, disguised as a news journal reporting on the events of parallel universes, and self-published as a print zine.
15) Dialogue
After a contextual setup, the multiple characters of "Prismatic Prison Interview" tell an entire story through pure dialogue. This piece unites characters from several ongoing story threads in Information Sickness.
16) Film Review (Fictional)
The three films discussed in "Parallel Universes and How to Get There" were never made, and probably never will be. This is yet another device to summarize three unrelated story threads in Information Sickness.
17) Music Review (Actual)
A real band called Mighty John Henry released an actual CD called "Hot Air Head," and this review of their effort was published in Information Sickness. Presumably, they were pleased.