Laying the Groundwork
Over the past couple of days, I’ve removed the original posts regarding the Apple’s Worm and Destiny’s Bond stories from their various on-line places. I’ve removed them from this site and Kim, one of the admins at Wondrous Stories, has removed them from there. Thanks Kim!
The stories are still on Barscape, but that’s only b/c I want at least one place to keep a backup. Never put all your eggs on one hard drive, so the saying goes.
Why the deletions? First, I’m going to be doing massive re-editing and reworking of the stories and I don’t want the old chaff floating around the cybersphere. Second, I’m not happy with the current crop of on-line tools that I use to write these things. I’ve said it before: the forum paradigm is not a good tool for writing or reading fiction. It’s great for discussion groups, chatting and for bulletin board purposes. It’s not a good medium for storytelling. Well, not optimal anyway.
I was going to modify the phpBB code base that supports Barscape, but the code is less then stellar. I mean, it’s fine if you want a pre-packaged forum that just works. In that light, it does work and quite well enough. However, it does not lend itself to modification/customization well. I did a few unholy edits to the code in order to support Barscape’s current layout as well as add 3 new database fields to each user’s records, but it’s not fully supported throughout all areas of the code.
So, for the past month or so, I’ve been working with a couple of people on a new web services project, a new site. It will support the typical forum style of interaction, pseudo-bars for chatting, discussion groups, polls and the like, but it will also support new, custom methods of interaction. Among the various ideas that I’ve been mulling over, I’ve been looking at building subfora dedicated to writing and game playing.
The writing subfora would be dedicated to providing tools to enable the development and publication of works which would include the ability for readers and editors to attach comments to the work directly. There would also be enhanced development tools that would allow the author to do major re-edits outside of the sequential stream of the typical forum-based paradigm.
The gaming subfora would be composed of various types of games, from boardgames to role-playing games. Game playing is a completely different form of interaction than a discussion group and the hurdles are going to be quite high, but, if we can accomplish it, it will be something pretty damn worthwhile.