The seeds of Dreaming Methods began in the early 1990s on the Commodore Amiga. A group of young writers, including myself, Andy Campbell, formed a series of on-floppy-disk e-zines and anthologies which were then distributed for free through the Amiga Public Domain (PD).
These programs auto-loaded into specially designed interfaces which presented short fiction for immediate reading from the screen. Font size, colour-changing and printing options were often accompanied by atmospheric graphics, short animation sequences and musical theme tunes.
Many of these electronic anthologies were picked up and reviewed in popular Amiga magazines such as CU Amiga, Amiga Format and Amiga Power. One particular collection, Magnetic Fiction, was submitted to a software company F1 Licenceware and accepted for sale and distribution at the cost of £3.99 per copy. Hybrid versions of anthologies were developed using early hyperlink software such as Amiga Guide (originally designed to assist in the production of "help" documents) and a handful of these - most notably Forbidden made it onto the coverdisks of mainstream Amiga magazines.
When the Amiga finally lost popularity and everything became completely PC-focused, there was little communication between the original group of writers and no plans to try to emulate a similar electronic fiction "scene" on the PC. As a result of this, I lost direction and attempted a number of failed approaches. These included the production of Cluster, an on-disk SF anthology edited by Eileen Shaw which had UK Arts Council funding, strong graphical presentation and attracted a number of highly regarded writers, but ceased to exist after the second issue due to lack of reader interest.
Following a number of experimental print publications and javascript-enhanced narratives, I started to learn Flash and explore its potential for getting beyond the restrictions of HTML. This eventually resulted in 2000 in the production of "Fractured" a dark and brooding piece which mixed text with other media.
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