Blackout: A Choose Your Own Adventure Story

Last time, I posted about starting to do our writing group's Holiday Project.  This year we came up with a Bingo Card filled with story elements. We each had to use a row, column, or diagonal's worth of story elements into our story.  Yesterday, after four weeks away, we all reconvened to present our writings.  It's always fun to see how eight people with different sensibilities tackle the same problem. Our group has a pretty strong sci-fi/fantasy bent, and the story prompt "A forgotten god who has gone into hiding" attracted four people to use it, two horizontally and two vertically.  The exercise was kind to people. Everyone submitted something at least solid, and mostly complete.

For my entry, I decided to go a little bit over the top. Here's a little hint how:

The Holiday Project - Writer's Bingo

Every year my writing group has a holiday project, a writing exercise that we come up with and do during the holiday season as we typically miss a meeting or two due to people being out of town.  The exercises typically have us each bring in some sort of prompt that we each need to use in our piece.  My favorite projects from past year's projects was when we each brought in a short piece of music to inspire our pieces, and the year we each were assigned a day of the week and came up with a prompt associated with that day of the week. We then had to use every day's prompt in order to write something that spanned the course of the week, beginning and ending with your day.

This year, our writing project uses a Bingo Card as a prompt.  Not just any Bingo Card, but one filled with writing prompts. Each writer will have to use all of the prompts in a row, column, or diagonal in their piece. Each member of the writing group (there are 8), contributed prompts for three of the available 24 spaces with the middle space being "Free".  Two of the prompts required a bit of explanation, so I put in footnotes at the bottom.

We will be unveiling our finished Holiday Projects in January.  If you'd like to play along at home, try seeing what you'd do with it: Holiday Project Bingo Card

My piece?  As always, I'm having a lot of fun with playing with the criteria. I'll post it after it's done. It's... different.

The Big Crossover: The evolution of a story

I've been in a small, informal regular writing group since 2001, meeting once every two weeks in Somerville.  People have come and gone from the group, but it's just kept on going for a decade now.

The great thing about the group, aside from the feedback and commentary, is that it forces you to have a deadline. When your turn comes up, you need to pass something in.  Often you turn towards things you've done in the past, either revising or reimagining it over and over.

The following is one such story idea, which was to imagine a comic book universe in which the superheroes become aware that they are in a fictional universe.  Of course, since some superheroes are geniuses, they figure out a way to cross over into the real world, with unforeseen consequences.  This idea was one I had in 2003, and I'm now working on the third iteration of it.