Textual Reflexions

I tried many times to write a novel, but because of many time constraints and a lack of imagination, I never managed to finish one. Hence I’ll try another approach: I’ll write the beginning of a story on my blog and leave it unfinished. Another blogger could post the continuation on his blog and either finish the story or allow others to continue it. The result would be a chain (or better a tree, since there could be more continuations of the same story) of blog posts around the Web.

The idea isn’t surely original. Among the forums of the ENS there is one dedicated to the creation of an interactive story with a much more complicated structure (topology) and on the blog of David Madore you regularly find his “Fragments littéraires”.

This game should have some rules in order not to write several unrelated pieces of the story:

• You should link your story to its father. You should do it both ways: write a two line preface to your story with a link to the father story’s post and write a comment or send a trackback to the ancestor with a link to your story. Many blogging utilities send a trackback to all links in your post, thus saving you some work .
• You should try to smoothen the edges between stories. Even if you don’t like the style of the ancestor, you should try to change it smoothly.
• There is no real restriction on the human language used in your posts. A part in French, a part in English, etc.. could be interesting, but I’d say that avoiding too many changes is better.
• You should ignore these rules if you don’t agree with them.

If you don’t own a blog and don’t want to get one, you can send it to me at piotr DOT karwasz AT iecn DOT u-nancy DOT fr and I’ll post it with the correct recognitions.

I’ll post right after this entry the first part of a story you can continue if you wish. There are other stories that could be continued like:

• One of Fragments littéraires gratuits