sugary serial

you've probably played that game before, where one person starts the drawing or the story and everyone takes turns adding things. on halloween we had a few rounds of a version where one person starts with a picture, the next adds a caption, the next re-draws the picture (looking only at the caption), and so forth. it was hilarious and I loved it.

blind collaboration. it's such an interesting idea. and as it turns out, they have a name for these types of games: exquisite corpses. what a fabulous name, wouldn't you agree? we should play them more often. apparently, the technique was invented by a party of surrealists trying to see just how weird they could be. I'm not sure if these people have the same goal or not, but what I've read so far of their exquisite corpse seems intriguing. there are seven episodes so far. you have to wait til Friday for the eighth.

this making-people-wait for the next piece of the story is a whole separate technique. I guess in some cases you just have to do it that way, to give people time to write their bit. and then you might think you just have to spread out the greatness and glory of your masterpiece, so regular folk are not overwhelmed by it all. or maybe you only have weekends to work on getting your story up and going. and of course, there's the beautiful sense of anticipation for your loving fans. they have weeks or months or however long to imagine the brilliant possibilities.

or, perhaps, to find something else to read and forget all about your story-in-progress.

but hopefully not.

PS. chapter ten of Starcustard will be arriving any day now. promise. in the meanwhile, you can read this interesting bit of serial craziness.