Freccia's Collaborative Fiction Blog

Just a quick site update: today I added The Maltese Bit to the Watch List, and a few days back I added Mur Lafferty's I Should Be Writing podcast to the Collaborative Fiction links. I suppose she might not consider what she does Collaborative Fiction, but, in addition to the help she provides other writers by doing the show, she is exploring the Collaborative Fiction space in her own way by discussing openly the progress (and occasional lack thereof) she is making with her writing projects, and by discussing the ideas related to her writing in an open forum. Heck, she even had a show on "first readers" which is a notion very related to Collaborative Fiction. Besides, her Geek Fu is more powerful than mine.

On another note, if you want to send me an email, shoot it to: lafreccia AT mac.com.

Peace Out, y'all!

Orson Scott Card, in his Characters & Viewpoint, uses the acronym MICE to describe 4 categories of stories: Milieu, Idea, Character, and Event, each of which requires its writer to employ particular strategies to fulfill an implicit contract with her audience.

I believe that the Evil Apprentice requires the fulfillment of the Idea contract. Examples of Idea stories include who-dunnits. A question is posed, the story is the process of assembling the answer. Once the answer is found, the story is over. Importantly, this is different from the Event story, which is about how the world is wrong, and the story narrates the fight to set it right once more, after which things get pretty boring, so you might as well stop.

The original story idea perhaps gives more of an impression that there would be a lot of roaming about, having adventures in the strange land I described. This would be an example of the Milieu story. But this story asks a question: "Who will become Snor's Evil Apprentice?" When we have that answer it is time to stop.

At first it seems that there is an argument for the Character story contract, after all, isn't this a story about "the Evil Assistant"? The expectation the reader would have ... the contract which must be fulfilled would be that the main character, feeling out of place in the beginning, finds a new role for himself as the Evil Apprentice. This obviously is true, but we don't know which character will win.

I think of the central question as being like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory twisted up with some And then there were None. Snor gets his Apprentice not by an outright competition which has clearly defined rules, but by whoever can survive being put in the same dangerous box with the others. Of course the box can be a sequence of boxes, because Snor can still mess with them (like sending them to do dangerous things).

I see that there is a quick write up about Glypho in the India Times. I particularly appreciate the idea that Glypho is yet another way that we are experimenting (through the Internet) with collaboration. I do believe that human beings need to learn better how to work together. To some extent Internet-related technologies are allowing us to blur some of the distinctions between us, so that we can acheive things that were not previously possible, back when we believed that we were each alone.

Ambika Sukla has made some changes to Glypho. I posted my response in the Glypho Forum.

It struck me that one could construct a grid showing the count of 

stories resulting from a 'Sort Criteria', and a 'Genre/Tag' selection. 

Initially I tried to determine the number of stories in the result set, 

by assuming all pages before the last would have 5 stories. This didn't 

turn out to be true. I think it would be helpful to show (on the first 

page of 'Browse Results') the number of stories in the result set. 

Here is the completed table: 

 

Tag              A       B      C 

 ------------------------------------------ 

 All:            48       28       3 

 SciFi:          12        8       1 

 Romance:         5        2       1 

 Mystery:        6         4       1 

 Fantasy:        7         4       1 

 Humor:          3         2       0 

 Adventure:     3         2       0 

 Drama:         15       11       1 

 

 * A = "last updated" 

   B = "character/plot ideas" 

   C = "chapter contributions"

Formal Introduction of the Watch List

I added 'A New Planet?' to my "Glypho Stories to Watch" sidebar, and I thought I would respond to the question, "What qualifies a Glypho story for inclusion on the Watch list?" The short answer: "My personal preference!" :^>

The complete list as of today:

The list is not designed to track the most active stories, or the highest rated stories (both criteria are valid). Looking over the list, one sees that all of my story ideas appear, even though
'The light of the torch betrays' has no submitted character or plot ideas. On the other hand, Contact was particularly added because it was the first story to actually have a submitted chapter.

Likely, as I did today, I will someday add new story projects to the Watch List; possibly there will be a time when I choose to remove stories from the Watch List.

If a story isn't on the Watch List, does that mean I dislike the story? No.
If a story isn't on the Watch List, does that mean I'm not reading it? No.
If a story isn't on the Watch List, does that mean I won't participate? No.

There are many story ideas developing at Glypho, and I think there is a benefit to having a smaller collection of stories assembled, almost as an anthology. One exciting part of this project for me is that someone else could choose to create their own anthology, perhaps with more objective criteria, or perhaps selecting by theme. I would definately enjoy seeing anthologies of Glypho projects by others who stop by the Glypho site, even if it is just to read.

My Watch List is not a list of the best stories Glypho has to offer, If you want that, go to Glypho, and look at the story ratings. Hopefully some day there will be several finished novels available that were created through Glypho. At that time I will be happy to feature those I particularly enjoyed reading.

I thought I would take some time to examine the current situation at Glypho, even if it is only to document where we are as a baseline, so that later we can see how far we have come.

As of now:
There are 42 story ideas that have been submitted.
There are 38 character ideas.
There are 51 plot ideas.
There are 2 chapters that have been submitted so far.
There are 2 story ideas for which chapters have been submitted.

There are currently no story ideas that have multiple chapter submissions.
There are currently no story ideas that have progressed past Chapter 1.
There are currently no stories that have been "finished".

Many thanks to Oracle, for adding a character idea to the Evil Apprentice. I am hoping there will be several more people who contribute characters, and etc. 'cuz that is what Collaborative Fiction is all about.

As for Karna, he looks like a good addition to the team. Snor has only one apprentice candidate and someone is already thinking of offing him, and taking over, LOL. I am intrigued by Karna's name; I just finished reading the Mahabharata (the condensed William Buck translation), and Karna is one of that story's most interesting characters, a noble warrior who sides with evil because (1) he will not desert his friend, even when his friend is wrong, and (2) because warriors were made to fight, even if it means killing family, the destruction of civilization, and certain death. Exactly the kind of companion Snor is going to need if he is going to take over the world. :^)

Again, thanks to Oracle for the very thoughtful addition to the Evil Apprentice!

I stumbled across a referance to a website that purported to be a tool to support Collaborative fiction. Much to my surprise, the website is Glypho. All part of the story of how Glypho coming into being, I guess. It looks like Ambika Sukla (and others?) worked on Collaze enough to open the site up in August 2005, and start promoting it, but something caused them to change the name to Glypho.

By looking for more info on Collaze, I found that Ambika wrote an interesting piece about why Collaze/Glypho was necessary, and some of the design decisions that shaped the results.

Here is another of Ambika's posts explaining his vision for the project that is more recent.

Christian Huang asks: "Are you ready for Social Software?"
Christian emphasizes the spontaneous origin of the group, contrasting it to hierarchical permissions-based corporate-ware. Social Software has a democratic flair, often featuring a community esteem rating, that is a composite of individual ratings.

Hmmm... sounds a bit like Glypho.

I did some research on Astral Projection for the "Private Eyes" story. I agree with the post by Kavi, that the power should not be limitless. My suggestion is to establish some limits in the very first chapter, including the threat that his power might diminish. Basically I was trying to create some urgency.

I think there needs to be some thought put into who did what and why, but I actually think it would be good to write this chapter soon, and defer the sleuthing for Chapter 2. I'm hoping someone either volunteers character sketches for the two principle characters (Mack & Barbara) or submits a Chapter.

Today I published another story idea (The Evil Apprentice). I had not intended to add another story idea at this time, because I think we really need examples of chapter submissions, especially because I am excited to see what happens to the incremental release cycle of Chapter Selection, Character ideas and plot discussion, Chapter submissions, and so on.

But, I wanted to work on an idea just as a draft. I liked the way it came out, so I decided to publish it.

There is only one story on Glypho that already has a chapter submission (at least one that has made it past the censors). Gathering takes the story idea of Contact in a great direction. I hope it is approved because I am looking forward to some interesting discussion about the nature of the Dream World, and the role played by the Deepest Sleeper.

Music versus Literature

Music and Literature stand as contrary examples of the great Art forms that are the legacy of the Nineteenth Century. Music, starting with the Romantic ideal of the Performer as genius, explored extemporaneity, reducing the importance of the "composition" and emphasizing the responsiveness of the performer to changes introduced collaboratively by a "band". Literature, however, found itself stuck making ironic comments on a dead tradition; the time of the masterpiece springing full-grown from the mind of a solitary author is over.
The technology of the Twentieth Century couldn't provide Literature the lift it needed to transcend the solitary author. Many author's sought to use emerging technologies, starting with the Xerox Copier, but not until the Twenty First Century and the emergence of Blog culture and Groupware has the technology started to appear to truly support a Collaborative experience of Literature.

Glypho as a Prototype

I am sure that experiments in Collaborative Fiction will have many forms, from positive, but vague comments on a blog entry, to elaborate book-circle rituals, to specific suggestions of characters emailed from a fan, to truly collaborative "Jam Sessions" where the building blocks of fiction are riffed on by "bands" of authors, before each chapter is written, and alternate takes are compared side by side, with the best take chosen to represent that track.
Glypho is only one example of the form Collaborative fiction will take, but it represents a particularly aggressive example; one that might truly be capable of supporting the "Jam Sessions" mentioned above. Nevertheless Glypho has some particularly attractive properties:

1. Glypho operates on objects from the right domain. People don't just leave comments, as they might on a famous author's website, they can leave character suggestions and plot or story ideas. Some Collaborative Fiction projects use a Bulletin Board with moderated threads. Posts in the threads become contributions to the project, or are deleted by the moderator. The BB software doesn't specifically support the process of character and plot development, but separate threads are sometimes set up to allow a supplemental discussion to take place "Out of Character".
   
2. The Glypho process is quite transparent. If a community of fans were to email character suggestions to the same author, the fans wouldn't be able respond to each other's suggestions. Some authors have explored this area in the past twenty years through the support of Bulletin Boards, perhaps hosted on the Author's website, or sometimes supporting a fan-based effort.
3. Although there are no story ideas with multiple submitted chapter treatments at this time, the aim (as indicated in the help text) is to have all character and plot suggestions be focussed on the current Chapter. Glypho provides support for multiple authors submitting chapter treatments, all knowing the character and plot ideas that were submitted for that particular chapter. Conceivably 'the Public' would be able to vote on which author's treatment they preferred and that would become the official chapter of the story, with multiple authors collaborating on a single novel. All participants would have a stake in the joint ownership of the final product under a Creative Commons license.

I am excited that we have reached the age of Collaborative Fiction. I certainly intend to join the experiment, and I will be documenting some of that activity here in the future.

Welcome. This Blog is to serve as a gathering of data streams associated with Glypho, including Freccia's participation, as well as a source for thoughts inspired by the Glypho feeds.