February 01, 2005

Yay Hooray Let's Have Some Fun

As I mentioned in passing a few days ago, I'm in the mood to futz around with a bit of creativity, stretch out the atrophied writing muscles, compose some potentially awful prose.

Who's with me?

(updates below)

OK, so here's the plan. I need four other people to play along.

I'm thinking of a character. I need one other person to come up with a character, another person to come up with a setting, another person to come up with a situation, and another person to come up with an opening line to kick off the story of all of the above. Once that is done, each of us take the information provided and craft a shortish or longish or inbetweenish story from it.

What is going to make it truly awful is that I don't want anyone to know what else has been submitted until everything is in; I'll then post and e-mail the ideas out to those playing and the writing begins - say we'll give it 48 hours or so.

At that point, either send the resulting poop to me, or post it on your own blog and I'll linky love over to it (and vice versa). Some editor will read it all, and then offer a book deal to someone else.

Instrucciones: If you want to play along, just e-mail me one of the above (character, situation, setting, or opening line). As my office is now blocking POP3 mail (boo hiss), send it over to andybud(remove)(at)gmail(remove)(dot)com. Then drop a note in the comments to this post telling me whether you submitted a character, setting, etc - this will prevent others, possibly, from duplicating your fine work with their own.

Be sure to remove the (remove)s and replace the (at) and (dot) with their respective symbols. You know this, of course, but just in case.

First come, first served - if I already have a character, I'll write you back and ask for something else. If enough people commit, then perhaps there can be multiple instances, each with its own combinations of creative genius.

If no one commits, then I'll just go back to writing about monkeys.

Ook ook.

Eep.

Update: Just to be clear, everyone who submits an idea will be using all of them to assemble some sort of story. Not just yours truly. This is about shaming all of us!

And I've also decided that I won't submit a character because the temptation to change/tweak/alter it/him/her would be too great as the other ideas roll in. I'd rather leave it all up to the twisted minds that reside inside your skulls.

Amen.

So, who else? Rae? Michele? Anyone? Bueller?

Update 2: OK, I've got one character, two opening lines (first one wins - if enough people play along, then the second one can come into play as well), so we're still looking for a situation, a setting, and another character... go crazy nutty kids.

Update 3: OK, got two characters now - still need situation and setting.

Update 4: Yay hooray we have all the necessary components now. I've set a Saturday deadline for the completed works, with cross-linking sometime on Sunday for a huge, celebratory Monday launch which is bound to generate two, maybe three, comments.