For centuries, macrame has used for creating designs using knots. Sailors have spent their idle moments at sea making macrame, Victorian ladies made ornaments from it, hippies made jewelry with it, and now author Dana Paxson - Jeddin Laval in Second Life - is using it as the model for a new way of telling stories. He calls it Electronic Literary Macrame, ELM for short, a process that he is patenting.

ELM grew out of his unsuccessful efforts to interest publishers in his 250,000 word science fiction novel Descending Road. Rather than strip it down to a size more acceptable to publishers, Paxson chose instead to look for a new way of telling the story, a way that broke free of the restrictions that limit a traditional novel to a fixed narrative and focus, and allowed the story to evolve. Paxson says, "My purpose is to keep the reader in the text and meaning, but not necessarily the linear form of it. Our minds are not linear ... The book has complete stories that end, and others that cycle back, and some that are unfinished in every sense. It's a work in progress, as we all are." The result was ELM

Descending Road is not a book you read in the traditional sense, although it can be read that way. Paxson describes it as, "a woven fabric of narratives. The stories are threaded, so you can start in one story thread and then veer off to another one, like picking your way through a fabric or a weave, or a knot. If you want to follow one character, you can do that. If you prefer to read the structured story as I wrote it, you can do that too. The threads are kept available at all times, but the story you're reading is always available as Previous scene / Next scene ... The work provides an 'ELMark' to note both your current scene and the thread you are following. You can then bookmark the ELMark for each point you want to locate."

Another difference from a traditional novel: ELM publishing is not modeled on traditional publishing, but on software publishing. Instead of a narrative that's essentially fixed upon publication, it follows the software model of revisions and versions. When the author wants to add a new thread or make other changes, "I just do new releases. I'm about to do another one." The current release as of this writing is DR 090402.

The process uses standard Web technology and can be read in a standard browser. Paxson says proudly, " A friend of mine can read it on his Google Droid phone." One restriction however is that it can't be read using Second Life's built-in browser; to read it in Second Life, you first must edit your SL Preferences to use an external browser.

The Descending Road story takes place in the distant future, 27 light years from Earth on the planet Tarnus. Paxson has created a very miniaturized model in Second Life of a city in which much of the action takes place. It's a complex build, with multiple levels both below and above, and numbers narrow hallways to explore. In some cases, contents of rooms will be different each time you return. In many places, you can read parts of the story, and if you use the self-guided tour, the ball of light tour guide will tell the background of many locations. There is a narrow, twisting walkway you can follow down to the flooded lowest level of the city, and there's a hidden teleporter that will take you to up to the sky levels and a desalinization plant high in the sky.

You can see some of it in the photos that accompany this article. Second Life members can visit the site at any time and follow a self-guided tour by teleporting to slurl.com/secondlife/Palm%20Breezes/122/100/46. The author will personally lead guided tours on Tuesday December 15, 2009 at 6:30 pm SLT and Sunday December 20, 2009 at 1pm SLT. You can download his novel at descendingroad.com, but make sure you can spare room on your hard drive - it's a zip file that will expand to 41 megabytes and a folder containing over 1400 files.