Being home alone with a head cold doesn’t leave one with a lot of excuses not to knock off a quick project. I had been mulling over the idea of building a version of the classic “storytime” party game as a webapp for a long time, and since I also wanted to spend a little more time working with jQuery’s AJAX and JSON support, it seemed reasonable to tackle both at the same time.
So, without further ado, I present misfict, the micro-serial-fiction engine. The process is simple: read the last line someone else wrote, then post your own idea for the next sentence in the story. Eventually, we should end up with a lovely stream-of-consciousness story co-authored by anyone who cares to drop a few words into the bucket.
I may build in some sort of cap for the number of sentences before a story is finished, or periodically declare a “chapter break”, but for the time being, the story will keep going as long as anyone is writing.
PS. any perceived relation between the release of this project and the upcoming start of NaNoWriMo is strictly a coincidence.
PPS. If you’re interested, all the code is available on GitHub
PPPS. (last one, I promise) I got the misfict.com domain, so the link above has been corrected to point there. Also, there’s an RSS feed. Now, go write something.