Electronic fiction by ladyhildegarde

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Preface

March 29, 2007
                t's a gray, misty spring afternoon as I make further revisions to The Castle of the Seventh Moon. I am integrating Dark Virtue, a photo-journal describing the character Lady Hildegarde with black and white images and text. Thus I bring this site, begun in 1998, into Web 2.0.
               I may have first conceived Hildegarde in Violet, a character in pre-writing only, a dark-haired heroine opposite the blond villainess Eden. Very quickly their roles reversed, and immediately each character began to take on powerful life. Eden became Mary Anne/Gisela, and Violet became Hildegarde. Hildegarde became black-haired, exciting, wicked and sexual. It was through Hildegarde I exercized a love of evil for its own sake. Hildegarde became, in my adolescence, my alter ego, everything I was not and wanted to be. She developed as a pale-skinned, black-haired gothic beauty who was as wonderful, and perhaps more wonderful, to me, collapsed at a scene of violent death, or laid arranged in a coffin; this before I was at all familiar with gothic culture.
               Initially I followed an impulse to create a web site that was like a gothic novel. I worked on this website almost every day after my college classes in the computer lab, hand-coding my pages and previewing them in Geocities' Advanced Editor. My site was in a frames-style format much as now; the text was Times New Roman, and the decorative text was created using The Banner Generator.
               The web is scarcely recognizeable compared to that time, and my site, long since deleted, exists only in scanned copies. As I revise it I realize how much of myself I put into the web, and what a human place it has become to me. I have recreated this site using Dreamweaver MX 2004. Instead of frames, I am creating each page from a template.
               It seems fitting then that I include many classic links that I enjoyed so much at the time, though I am doing my best to offer current information about gothic writing and sites as well. I hope you will find my website an amusing folly that you can return to for valuable gothic writing links and inspiration.
               The Castle of the Seventh Moon has a sequel, The Summerhouse, an in-depth interactive fiction about some of the characters you will find in this site. At this time, The Summerhouse is still a work-in-progress.

xox     Lady Hildegarde


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Last update Monday, July 2, 2007 5:08 PM