About This GEK1049 Project

Summary: What if people could choose the names of the characters in a narrative? I took a short story I completed two years ago, and then wrote some code to handle the dynamic naming you now see. You may choose the names for all the major characters in this short narrative, and the name-change persists even after you leave the site. This means that each reading of this narrative will change the experience for the reader that comes after.

How This Site Was Built

This site uses custom PHP code to validate and maintain character names. It lives on a server with a MySQL backend. Design is custom, but images are all taken from the Open Clipart archive.

Narrative Concepts Explored

This project is an exercise in character. I have no control over the names each reader may choose to use for their reading of the story — or, indeed, should they choose not to set names of their own and read the story with names chosen by the reader before them.

This naturally makes it tricky for a reader to refer to the characters of the story — for instance, how might I talk of the protagonist if her name changes with every reading? How am I to talk about the Evil Cat (the antagonist in this piece) when his name changes according to the whims of a reader?

The Cat's Chair, written under the pseudonym Eli James in 2009, has been edited no less than five times, and once more in preparation for this project. It has an off-beat, quirky tone to it; something that I have attempted to maintain despite the change in medium.

My hope is that your reading of this narrative would be truly unique, small as these differences may be. For we do know that names do change our perception of character; The Cat's Chair is written to be geographically neutral, and it doesn't take much imagination for the story to change, should one enterprising reader switch all the names to Russian!

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