Dear friend of the blog A Teacher (I’m sure you remember him from his work on Fantasti*con) is currently working on another interesting project.
His latest piece of fiction is a collaborative work, of a sort. Here’s from his FAQ:
Imagine reading your favorite novel. The main character is a cross roads. She can side with her lover and turn against her friend, or she can push him away and reaffirm that some friendships create bonds worth dying for. You read on knowing in your heart that the best thing to do is to stand with her friend.
And instead, she chooses love.
And you’re left wondering, “What if the author had listened to me?”
Well, his latest will give you, dear reader, an opportunity to, proverbially, yell at the screen. “Don’t go in there! He’s no good for you!!!” I’ve read his first chapter and I laughed out loud before I hit the third paragraph. No real spoilers here but I will say that we begin with a young woman who wakes up in her own coffin and has a thing or two to say about that… and it hits the ground running from there.
It’ll be interesting to see how folks respond to the story and more interesting to see how Teach responds to the folks. I read through the chapter, thought about it a second, and cast my vote. You should check it out and give it a read yourself!
So that’s my recommendation for you this week.
And you’re left wondering, what if she goes out for a walk to think it over and gets hit by a truck? It would never happen, of course. Fiction isn’t necessarily believable, but it does have rules.
This is true and I’m not planning to end the story just because the majority vote is to do something that’s not my first choice. I’m trying to end each chapter with an honest set of choices that make sense for both the situation and the character.
And there’s some of the challenge. I can define the character a lot my self or I can let the popular vote define her actions which themselves define the character.
Fiction is always, always more believable than reality.
789chan.org/L/res/20910-100.html
Relatedly, that’s why the first 20 minutes or so of The Crying Game is one of my favorite movies of all time.
I desperately wanted the credits to just roll after that.
Thanks for the plug. I’m really quite curious if I can make this work or not. A lot comes down to finding the following to make it worth the voting process. The one assured plus is that I know myself enough to know I write best with a deadline. Tell me a story is due on Friday and I’ll have it done by Friday. Give me an entire summer to “write” and I’ll have nothing until the 3rd week of August.
Which… for what it costs to stay at home and write for a summer… isn’t an option.