What the hell - let's do a chain story...

[TheRedChamber]

The 'New Chain Stories Published in the Last Seven Days' section still has stories from 2014. AHers, this will not stand. Who is with me?

That said, I've actually got no idea how to arrange a Chain Story, but here are some rules off the top of my head.

1) Let's have 5 or 6 relatively established authors/contributors to the AH, so the story has some kind of end in sight. If, by a miracle, we get more volunteers than that, they can spin off a seperate Chain Story with another runner.
2) Each chapter to have roughly 3000-9000 words.
3) Once the contributors are set, I'll put them in a random order and announce. Writers can horsetrade for a better position between themselves and on the thread.
4) Whoever goes first gets to establish the title, basic scenario and characters.
5) We'll try and set a monthly release schedule. In principle, writers have 30 days from the publication of the previous entry to get theirs done. This can be flexible, but if someone drops out or ghosts it goes onto the next person on the list. I'll organize and keep poking people.
6) I'm not going to interfere much with what people write UNLESS I feel that a writer is maliciously messing with the story and setting up the next writer to fail (killing half the characters in a nuclear war, castrating the male MC whatever). That said, I expect chaos to be part of the processes - people should try to make each chapter their own rather than attempting to tell a particularly coherent and stylistically consistent story.

This will of course be a complete train wreck, but hopefully a fun train wreck. Who is with me?

Current Volunteers:
1. The RedChamber
2. AlinaX
3. StillStunned
4. Omenainen
5. Devinter
6. Erozetta
7. Kelliezgirl
8. Joy_of_Cooking
9. Pink_Silk_Glove
10. MrsMackenzie
11. KumquatQueen
12. WhiteTailDarkTip

Bench:
1. Comshaw
2. Tio_Narratore

 

[mildlyaroused]

Sounds great, and I'd love to read what people come up with! I personally will not put my name forward for consideration, however; for my sake and yours. 3000 words = 18 months minimum.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Sounds great, and I'd love to read what people come up with! I personally will not put my name forward for consideration, however; for my sake and yours. 3000 words = 18 months minimum.

What, a jail sentence? What on earth are you writing about?

 

[AlinaX]

Could be fun. Sign me up.

 

[StillStunned]

Sounds great! How about "A year in months": twelve writers each do a month (or an event during a particular month) in the lives of a person/group/community?

Or a relay theme: write about a character the previous author's character had sex with.

 

[TheRedChamber]

Sounds great!

Is 'Sounds great' another way of saying 'I'm in'?

How about "A year in months": twelve writers each do a month (or an event during a particular month) in the lives of a person/group/community?

Or a relay theme: write about a character the previous author's character had sex with.

We can potentially firm up rules once we have the six. I think I'm going to keep pushing for just six as that sounds like enough that we can consider it a real chain story but also few enough that it might actually be achievable to produce a finished story. I'm not sure how much we want to set a firm theme. We may need to discuss a few squicks and general themes (we probably don't want a rogue contributer turning things into a non-consent story half-way through) but equally I don't know if we want to set up too firm rules. A baton pass character to character set-up could work, but it also forces the next author to focus on a character they might not like too much.

 

[Omenainen]

I’m in!

Maybe worth checking with Laurel if it’s even possible to do chain stories anymore.

 

[StillStunned]

Is 'Sounds great' another way of saying 'I'm in'?

I remember having the same discussion with my wife shortly before we got engaged...

ETA: By which I mean, "Of course I'm in, darling, with all my heart!"

 

[TheRedChamber]

I remember having the same discussion with my wife shortly before we got engaged...

I feel that should clarify things and yet...I'm going to risk writing you name down on the list. If it's wrong, your wife can come over and shout at me for being dense.

I'm going to keep a running list of who has signed up on the OP.

 

[TheRedChamber]

I’m in!

Maybe worth checking with Laurel if it’s even possible to do chain stories anymore.

I presume it is. The was one story released in 2022 and there's still a section on Chain Stories on the FAQ. There's some sort of submission we have to do with a plan (or pointing to this thread). I will email her just to check once we have the numbers.

 

[mildlyaroused]

What, a jail sentence? What on earth are you writing about?

 

[Omenainen]

I presume it is. The was one story released in 2022 and there's still a section on Chain Stories on the FAQ. There's some sort of submission we have to do with a plan (or pointing to this thread). I will email her just to check once we have the numbers.

I was boldly assuming I’m “relatively established”

This sounds so fun. Thank you for organizing this.

 

[TheRedChamber]

I was boldly assuming I’m “relatively established”

I would say so. To be clear to all, my rules weren't intended to be cliquey - just an 'established author' of at least a handful of stories is likely to be able to write something for this thing and 'contributors to the AH', if they're here daily, are less likely to completely ghost us.

This sounds so fun. Thank you for organizing this.

We'll see...

 

[Devinter]

A chance to derail not just a thread, but an entire collaborative story!?

... I'm in.

 

[TheRedChamber]

A chance to derail not just a thread, but an entire collaborative story!?

Hmmm, I fear this post will come back to haunt me, but okay...

... I'm in.

...you're in.

 

[Bamagan]

I'm provisionally interested. I presume there will be some upfront discussion about themes and do-not-fly zones, so I might have to recuse if my quirky/absurdist style makes things difficult for others to potentially play off of.
So, count me in, as long as I don't have to be too serious, tonally speaking.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

I'll take a stab at it, if you still need one more and I qualify as "established".

 

[TheRedChamber]

We've got seven at the moment. I'm going to leave it open for another 24 hours, see what number we end up with and then we can talk about how we divide things and who goes when.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

Ok, I might do this.

 

[joy_of_cooking]

Me, please!

 

[Rob_Royale]

I'm looking forward to reading this.

 

[RejectReality]

Since RedHairedAndFriendly and virtually anyone else who's ever run a chain before isn't around, I'll chime in with some experience as a participant in several.

Make sure you establish content ground rules. You have a group of writers here who are going to have to deal with characters created by others. We had an issue in A Royal Sacrifice where one author went Game of Thrones and tossed an incest relationship in there. It didn't derail the chain, but it made some authors uncomfortable, and they more or less sidelined those characters in any chapter they wrote.

Somebody needs to be in charge. One person has to establish contact with Laurel and announce the intention to create a chain story and who's participating before the first chapter is submitted. If you put all that in the thread, you can just link to it when you contact her. That person should also be the one with the final say on each chapter before the author submits it. That person should also be ready to make reports to the moderator if outsiders gum up the thread with tangents. Traditionally, the person running the show also writes and submits the first chapter.

Use this thread. It's a good place to workshop ideas where everyone can easily access it. PMs are a little easier to do that with now than they were back in the day, and you'll certainly want to go that route with anything that will be a spoiler, but the thread is still a great place to bounce ideas off each other. People who aren't in the chain but are interested in the project can also be a source of inspiration, and that's impossible when it's entirely done through PM. Getting people here excited about the project is probably going to have a huge impact on readership as well. Even when the Chain category was active, the core of the readership was from the AH.

Don't be too rigid with wordcount and such. Let the individual authors have as much leeway to contribute as is reasonable. The more tightly constrained the guidelines are, the more likely it is that authors will fail to deliver their chapter in a reasonable amount of time or the whole chain just peters out.

Either have a schedule for when the chapters should be finished and released, or even better, wait until you finish the story so you can structure the releases as consistently as the Lit queue will allow.

SAVE THE CHAPTERS EVERYONE WRITES. We had an author leave the site and take down all her stories long after ARS had finished. Red and I had to try to remember what happened in those chapters and connect the ones on either side to replace those missing chapters so there would still be a complete story without holes on the site. If we'd had the originals, that would have been a fuck-ton easier.

Off the top o' my head.

 

[TheRedChamber]

Since RedHairedAndFriendly and virtually anyone else who's ever run a chain before isn't around, I'll chime in with some experience as a participant in several.

Thanks, lots of good points here.

Make sure you establish content ground rules. You have a group of writers here who are going to have to deal with characters created by others. We had an issue in A Royal Sacrifice where one author went Game of Thrones and tossed an incest relationship in there. It didn't derail the chain, but it made some authors uncomfortable, and they more or less sidelined those characters in any chapter they wrote.

Yes, we'll discuss this once the group(s) are fixed. I'll suggest nixing Incest and Non-Consent and maybe some others, but we'll see what people want to do.

Somebody needs to be in charge. One person has to establish contact with Laurel and announce the intention to create a chain story and who's participating before the first chapter is submitted. If you put all that in the thread, you can just link to it when you contact her. That person should also be the one with the final say on each chapter before the author submits it. That person should also be ready to make reports to the moderator if outsiders gum up the thread with tangents. Traditionally, the person running the show also writes and submits the first chapter.

I'm planning to be 'the benevolent dictator'. I'll certainly be involved in poking people for the (generous and flexible) deadlines. I'm not going to try and control what people write *unless* I feel that someone is not entering into the spirit of things or being deliberately malicious. I will ask that I get to see each chapter before it is submitted. I'm not sure about writing the first chapter myself - I can do if people convince me it's the way to go - more to discuss later.

Use this thread. It's a good place to workshop ideas where everyone can easily access it. PMs are a little easier to do that with now than they were back in the day, and you'll certainly want to go that route with anything that will be a spoiler, but the thread is still a great place to bounce ideas off each other. People who aren't in the chain but are interested in the project can also be a source of inspiration, and that's impossible when it's entirely done through PM. Getting people here excited about the project is probably going to have a huge impact on readership as well. Even when the Chain category was active, the core of the readership was from the AH.

Again, I'll listen to the group about how much gets discussed prior/during any particular participants writing process. We could adopt a complete 'suprise me' approach or else require synopsis before or somewhere in between. I'm leaning more towards the suprise me end.

Don't be too rigid with wordcount and such. Let the individual authors have as much leeway to contribute as is reasonable. The more tightly constrained the guidelines are, the more likely it is that authors will fail to deliver their chapter in a reasonable amount of time or the whole chain just peters out.

Yes, I agree. I think there needs to be some guidance at the extreme. Someone submitting 750 words is not going to be contributing much to the story. On the other hand, if the first four authors submit 4k words each and the fifth submits 40k, that's going to cause issues. I've gone with 3k-9k as a nice range for starting a discussion. I can especially see a situation where the last author in the chain says something like 'I can land this but it's going to take 15k words to do it' and that's probably fine.

Either have a schedule for when the chapters should be finished and released, or even better, wait until you finish the story so you can structure the releases as consistently as the Lit queue will allow.

I'm imagining something like 30 days from the publication of the last chapter. At which point I start to nudge you and if you've got say 4.5k of a 6k planned total, there'll be some leeway, but if you've got (next to) nothing then it moves onto the next person. I think we publish as we go - it's not like the Chain Story section is bustling with content that's going to push us off the front page.

SAVE THE CHAPTERS EVERYONE WRITES. We had an author leave the site and take down all her stories long after ARS had finished. Red and I had to try to remember what happened in those chapters and connect the ones on either side to replace those missing chapters so there would still be a complete story without holes on the site. If we'd had the originals, that would have been a fuck-ton easier.

Good point. Will do.

Off the top o' my head.

Ta.

 

[RejectReality]

If you want a peek into the past, here's the threads for Laresa's World and A Royal Sacrifice. The first post being an updated index for released chapters is a particularly useful thing.

https://forum.literotica.com/threads/sci-fi-fantasy-chain-story-idea.452991/

https://forum.literotica.com/threads/sappy-romantic-chain-story-idea-medieval-theme.512576/

 

[Bamagan]

Even though there might be a few more people who raise their hands, it might be a good idea to start discussing some of the most basic generalities.
For example, I usually write in generic contemporary settings with some degree of sci-fi/fantasy intrusion. Unless we want to go full SF/F, we should probably decide if there should be any such elements. We also might want to avoid historical time periods or highly specific locations, to avoid the need for a lot of research or, failing at research, a lot of anachronisms and other errors. Either that, or we write about an off-brand Dr. Who that bounces around time and space willy-nilly, or a Quantum Leap protagonist that does basically the same but changes bodies more often. Then it won't matter if Chapter 2 is 1960s London and Chapter 3 is on a lunar colony.
I also think we should aim for a quicker turnaround than 30 days, or it'll be next year before the chain ends, and anyone toward the back of the queue will be waiting until Christmas to see what they're working with. If everyone else feels they need that much lead time, I'll just ask to be placed in the earlier part of the story.