THE RATTLESNAKE TOUR,

Desert Encounters.

Preface

The Rattlesnake Tour is an autobiographical novel in hypertext. When I began this work in 1991, it was intended to be a novel in footnotes. When I was introduced to the Internet and began writing HTML in 1995, I immediately recognized the fit between the HTML formatting language and the new associative medium I was trying to create.

The seeds for this book came during my 1991 and 1992 tours of the Southwestern United States. I had quit my job to become a full-time musician, and was trying to drum up name recognition. When I came close to finishing the first trip, I realized that my entire life could be summed up in the three months I spent on the road - through my associations to people, places, things, and events encountered on the trip, and through my associations to those associations. The footnotes follow my train of thought from association to deeper association. I believe that Hypertext links make it easier to follow the threads of thought than is possible with footnotes set upon footnotes.

This book is a work in progress. As of this writing, only the first section of the book is fully realized. The remainder of the text you see here is the base document, a fairly dry narrative of the tour, which is separated into four sections which tell the story of the trip in terms of first my and others' dreams (psyche), then my body and my physical contact with others (materia), then my music career (anima), and finally my obsession with rattlesnakes (symbol). James Joyce's novel A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, which I was reading when I began the narrative in Boulder Colorado, seemed to mirror my own psychological life at the time. That book is used to tie together the present-tense sections of the narrative, which follow the day-to-day writing of the narrative between Boulder and my home in Port Townsend, Washington. The remainder of the narrative is told in past tense from that perspective.

No personal or place names have been changed. The people and places I mention are as I remember them and are not embroidered in any way.

Publishers interested in publishing the book in physical form, either as a traditional book or on CD-ROM, may contact me at the email link above.

This book is © copyright 1992 by Nick Dallett. Individual sections may be downloaded or printed for personal use only. Persons interested in a complete copy of the novel in printed form may contact me as provided above. No complete copies will be distributed prior to completion of the novel except to qualified publishers or reviewers who have established a need to see and possess the document in progress.