Part Two: Behind the Screen of "Greetings from Kenosha"

If you stand on the corner of 56th Street and 6th Avenue in downtown Kenosha, the street signs only tell part of the story. Long before any code was written or pages were filled, I learned that for me, wandering was writing—that every step taken through the city's changing landscape was directly shaping my creative process.

To your left, the weathered industrial brick of a century-old factory town survives. To your right, the morning light hits the fresh steel of new construction. I walk these blocks every morning. I listen to the lake wind cut through the street grid and watch the colors shift against the shoreline. In my last post, I talked about how wandering these sidewalks with an iPhone turned into the starting point for a new project. Here's what happened when I sat down at the keyboard to actually build it.

A view through the window on the top floor of the Karrick in downtown Kenosha.

Making an interactive map was just like plotting a novel—mostly false starts and dead ends. I knew the stories I wanted to tell, but keeping them organized without the whole thing falling apart was exhausting. There were weeks I almost gave up. I had to teach myself just enough code to keep the interface from breaking.

Architectural scaffolding: I spent weeks locked inside the Antigravity development environment.

If you’ve ever been stuck in the middle of a messy manuscript, you know how unglamorous it is. It’s not romantic inspiration; it’s just brute-force organization. Instead of wrestling with physical binders, I was dealing with thousands of invisible files: vector graphics, archival research folders, and daily photos—all trapped inside one machine.

Digital anchor: I built the visual interactive map because I needed a way to harness and organize that digital chaos.

It looks pretty tidy, but click on any of those files, and a spiderweb of data will spew forth!

Antigravity forced me to engineer a rigid physical structure for my workspace. I anchored the master file directly on the desktop and nested the necessary subfolders securely beneath it. It looks perfectly tidy on the surface. Click that main folder, and the subfolders spill out. It works exactly like pulling open a heavy book cover to reveal the chaotic stories hiding inside.

This interface used to terrify me, sort of like the idea of writing my first novel. And now, when I look at it, I see the bones and the structure that supports something truly amazing!

I did not want a flat blog index where old essays decay under new timestamps. The map turned into a living table of contents that grew as I learned more about the town. Click a pin, and a vintage postcard pops up. Click the card, and it flips over with a sharp click to reveal field notes, audio clips, and history. It is a continuous loop of discovery. You pull the reader in, give them a piece of art, and then drop them directly into the history.

Living table of contents: The map became a dynamic visual spine that expands as my understanding of this footprint deepens.

When an explorer enters the map, they are presented with a collection of map pins that they can choose.

Here is the truth I want to leave with fellow writers. You do not need to write a line of code or build a custom web interface to steal this concept for your own work. The tool does not matter. Your visual table of contents might be an oversized corkboard pinned with index cards and thick yarn. It might be a dedicated sketchbook filled with hand-drawn floor plans or a nested digital folder of character dossiers.

What matters is the physical act of pinning your world down in space. When you build a dedicated container for your curiosity, you force your research, your setting, and your narrative arcs to talk to one another on the same plane. It gives your story a bedrock to stand on. It ensures you understand the world before you ask a reader to step inside.

What does your visual table of contents look like? How do you map the architecture of your stories when the draft gets messy?

If this project intrigues you, tap on the logo and explore the Greetings from Kenosha Project. Maybe it will inspire your next project!