Uncle Roger begins as a "governess" novel in the tradition of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. The narrator, a young woman named Jenny, has come to California from the East Coast as a babysitter for the family of Tom Broadthrow, who owns semiconductor-related industries both on route 128 outside of Boston and in Silicon Valley, California. It is the mid seventies in the little-documented era before the advent of Internet biz, when the chip industry ruled the Valley. The Broadthrow family live in Woodside, a small town in a wooded area South of San Francisco where other wealthy Silicon Valley CEOs also live.

Several threads -- a love story; the California chip culture; contrasts between the East and West coasts; and the activities of Jenny's Uncle Roger, an eccentric semiconductor market analyst -- weave in and out of the narrative.

In A Party in Woodside, during the course of a dream-laced night after, Jenny remembers a party at the Broadthrow's house. Because nights of insomnia often follow unsettling experiences -- and replay them as dream and memory fragments -- such long and sleepless nights can approximate nonlinear narratives.

The party, as parties usually are, is experienced in fragmented scenes. The reader may see some occurrences but not others; may meet some of the people but not others. Yet as the reader explores the database, an individual picture of the party emerges.

The original version was a database which was searched by keywords, resulting in chains of links -- ie, the reader folowed a link chain of lexias about "Uncle Roger" or any other phrase of his or her choice. The web version incorporates the keywords as links at the bottom of the screen. (but does not produce an entire sequence of linked lexias) The reader can also page through the work by clicking on a graphic icon to the left of the text.

In Silicon Valley, things do not happen simply and clearly. In File 2 of Uncle Roger, The Blue Notebook, five parallel yet intertwining narratives advance the story in sometimes conflicting ways -- reflecting the increasing complexity of Jenny's life.

The story is framed by a formal birthday party for Tom Broadthrow in an elegant hotel dining room. It is punctuated by an encounter with Uncle Roger in an unlikely place. While Jenny sits at the banquet table, other narrative threads -- a car trip with an old lover, a visit to a semiconductor house in San Jose -- come and go in her mind. Parts of the story are taken from Jenny's notebook where reality is difficult to separate from fiction and dream. As Jenny herself says: "The things I wrote in the blue notebook didn't happen in exactly the way I wrote them."

The original version was a database which was searched by keywords resulting in chains of links -- ie, the reader folowed a link chain of lexias about "Uncle Roger" or any other phrase of his or her choice. The web version visualizes the links as a choice of graphic icons. To read the story, the reader chooses an icon and clicks on it to produce another lexia. Continuing to click on the same icon approximates the trail that the reader followed by selecting keywords in the original version.

Terminals was written shortly after the time when computers had replaced typewriters in corporate offices. In this File, the narrator, Jenny, has left the Broadthrow family and started working for a market research firm in San Francisco. As she sits at in front of her her computer at a desk on the eighth floor of an office building in Embarcadero Square, memories of a Christmas party in Woodside, a trip back East for the holidays, and other things that happened in the last month, come and go in her mind at random.

In the telling of the story, computer-mediated narrative is used to satirize the way technology both complicates and enhances our lives. In the original version, this was done through a random display of lexias that replicated the diffuse, unsettling quality of contemporary life. In Terminals, as in its name was Penelope, the links are implicit, ie the writer has written the lexias in such a way that that there are conceptual links that enable the lexias to work collectively as literature in any way in which they are combined.

In the web version, the time-dependent random number generator used in the original version is simulated by a set of unlabeled computer keys. To read the story, click on any key. The story can also be paged through by clicking on the "typewriter bar" at the bottom of the screen.