As The Doctor so recently said, that is not the question. The question is… what is this NOT?
My hope is that this will not be boring.
PROJECT GENESIS
In one sense, this blog will be a companion piece to mathtans.blogspot.ca, my Personification of Mathematics web serial. That was the beginning. It ran for almost three years, to a very mixed reception. However, for now I’d like to keep that site focused on those characters, or at least on mathematics.
In another sense, this blog will be a companion piece to mathiex.blogspot.ca, my Non-Fiction site for blogging about Writing and Education. That was my second blog. I continue to post there, where have included snippets of my fiction writing, primarily pieces of “Time Trippers”… which is my 1,000 page, four book story that had it’s genesis in the late 1990s. (Unpublished as of yet, not sure if I want to publish, and don’t really have the time to work out the logistics either way.) However, I don’t want to post a serial on that site, as it may get periodically interrupted by posts about real life.
So really, this blog will be it’s own beast. The goal: “Creativity. Fantasy. Wordplay.” In the format of a serial, at least to start.
SPACE SEED
What will I publish here first? I considered a follow-up I’ve been working on to “Time Trippers”… but I haven’t gotten near as far with it as I might have hoped, and suspect the time travel aspect is going to make serial posts something of a logistical nightmare. I then considered beginning with my JulNoWriMo of 2012, “Balancing Act”, about a college girl who acts as a supernatural detective… but that wouldn’t be me writing, that would be me posting something already written. There is also no incentive for you to read it, unless you happen to know me, or the characters, and odds are, you don’t.
So I’m going to try something different.
I have created a number of different characters over the years, both for my stories and for role-play purposes. What I did for “Personification of Mathematics” was come up with plots for the characters as driven by the underlying mathematics. What I plan to do here is come up with plots as driven by YOU.
I’ve got 12% of a plan. I’ll be relying on my readers and my Twitter followers (@mathtans) aka YOU for the rest.
RELIANT
Every Sunday, I’m going to write a segment of the story, and then offer up a couple choices for what can happen next. Whichever option gets the most votes in, let’s say 24 hours, that’s how the story will continue. (If no one votes, I’ll decide myself.) Don’t feel constrained by my options either - if you have a much better suggestion, feel free to put it in the comments! If there’s additional grassroots support (or no other votes), I’ll try to run with it. After writing the new segment, it will post the following Sunday, I will present a couple more options, and so on.
I have NO idea how well this will work, if at all, but I’m willing to give it a try if you are.
A few things to bear in mind. First, in comments, keep the language clean. I’m a mathematics teacher, my students may well end up reading this. Related to that, I tend to be busy from September to June, so the writing segments are not likely to be terribly long, in particular during busy weeks. Finally, part of the reason I’ll be using characters of my own creation is because I have a tendency to parody characters in existing media already. But they are not based on anyone I know in real life, and I don’t want any future suggestions that involve real people. Given that anything can happen, that might end badly.
With that said, here we go. The first things I’m going to need are which of my characters to include, and what the evil villain is going to be up to. Those postings will follow later tonight.
