4 ms·

A few author friends and I have been using a "collaborative branching fiction" site I wrote 25 years ago. Took it out of mothballs when Covid hit, spruced it up

A few author friends and I have been using a "collaborative branching fiction" site I wrote 25 years ago. Took it out of mothballs when Covid hit, spruced it up in some ways. Now it has a react component that graphs the DAG of the stories (threads can merge together, loops are not allowed), lets you filter by un-concluded threads with some nice animation. I wrote some software that will project how big the story will be based off of average chapter length and choices per chapter. I'm also trying to make the site "guide" the authors in terms of how many choices to add, to keep the overall size of the story within certain guidelines. Since we're mostly third-person past-tense, we're trying to maintain a somewhat literary focus so that all threads have pleasing narratives that eventually end. Our most active story, Story of a Stone, currently has 318 chapters, 1,064 pages, and a total word count of 265,964, or about the size of Ulysses by James Joyce. It has 4 unwritten choices, and a sprawl of 1.35 choices per non-concluding chapter.

kej 4y ago
Is this publicly available at all? I totally understand if it's just something fun for you and your writer pals, but it sounds amazing and I'd love to see it if possible.
- tunesmith 4y ago
  We're semi-open to new writers but it's one of those things where we'd have to get to know you. :) We're just a handful of folks in their 40s and 50s that use it as a low-key writing group, some of us attend a weekly discord video chat to read aloud our chapters, make comments, and joke around. New authors would need to submit a chapter to one of the junk stories so we can get a sense of writing style and then figure out which of the invite-only stories they could collaborate in. Submissions are technically owned by the site but authorship credit is retained. If anyone's interested feel free to contact me through my profile.
samcgraw 4y ago
This is awesome! I had a similar thought with my own site I got started on at the beginning of Covid: Storylocks [https://storylocks.com https://storylocks.com]. It has nowhere near the level of intricacy that your site has it seems, but really cool to see other folks experiment in a similar way!

kej 4y ago

Is this publicly available at all? I totally understand if it's just something fun for you and your writer pals, but it sounds amazing and I'd love to see it if possible.

tunesmith 4y ago
We're semi-open to new writers but it's one of those things where we'd have to get to know you. :) We're just a handful of folks in their 40s and 50s that use it as a low-key writing group, some of us attend a weekly discord video chat to read aloud our chapters, make comments, and joke around. New authors would need to submit a chapter to one of the junk stories so we can get a sense of writing style and then figure out which of the invite-only stories they could collaborate in. Submissions are technically owned by the site but authorship credit is retained. If anyone's interested feel free to contact me through my profile.

samcgraw 4y ago

This is awesome! I had a similar thought with my own site I got started on at the beginning of Covid: Storylocks [https://storylocks.com https://storylocks.com]. It has nowhere near the level of intricacy that your site has it seems, but really cool to see other folks experiment in a similar way!