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This is going to longwinded and probably annoying, but I trust input from Barbelithic types over just about anywhere else. It's funny, I've signed in here under a number of aliases, but never posted, only to lose the alias when a friend takes it over or I just disappear too long. Any and all advice is appreciated though, I assure, so go wild with it. I've been given almost free-reign to complexify, mutilate, and explode as necessary.
So, I've been swindled into acting as editor (without the befitting psychotgeometric Cthuloid island and inbred cult, unfortunately) for a kind of shared-world anthology of text, music, visuals, and the like all meshed together. For the most part, every contributor is taking a singular perspective (writing from/for a specific character, say; in one case, someone's writing fiction as a character who appears elswhere, but never writes the character itself), though the project remains open for someone to generate material for/through more than one character. The main conceit, is that, for every segment (sound, text, whatever), whoever's character/focus is utilized, has the (strongly encouraged) choice of branching from that into a new segment, and so on. General continuity is ignored through a bit of in-story magickal excuse-making and wordy BSing, so absolute fracturing isn't just likely, it's ought to be mandatory.
And, so far, so good. Nice musicians doing everything from classical violin solos to garage noise bands, beautiful artists (and their art's nice too), and writers doing everything from broad comedy, to sweaty sex and magick, high-angst heart-throbby romance, and even a strain of PoMo, mad, mod posturing. Characters from magickal French seamstresses to nuclear-brained hamsters. Sade and Jesus at a bar in the middle of everything, sex clubs on living islands of judgment, and a God playing sax for a drag prog-rock group.
And, I've almost convinced the higher-ups (read: Suits Trying to be Creative) to actually pay contributor's, through some sort of percentage-of-sales breakdown. So, that's good.
Now, the problems. One, would be getting a lot more folks in on this. Correction: weird, creative, not afraid of experimental, think/feel/survive type narrative, folks in on this. Secondly, how to lay it out. Was thinking, start with a central introductory segment, and allow the reader to select segments as they branch, with maybe a wild-card-button that throws you off to leftfield somewhere in the greater whole, and just let them explore. The suits think this might be too complicated. Thirdly (why do 'secondly' and 'fourthly' look fine but 'thirdly' seems wrong?), synch the music to specific parts, or let it run randomly in the background? The illustrations: in places they might portray, a separate section, or randomly disperse?
Personally, I'd love it to be some insane post-apocalyptic party, like Felini directing a BS barscene with the cast of Soft Machine and Killer in Drag smacking each other around with green bottles of the supercontext to a doppler-rippling Beatles soundtrack. I think the company (which, to be fair, though having dealing with Disney, Iwerks, and so on, is fairly low-level, LA stuff) wants a more marketabe, more communicative product.
Really, this just serves to remind me why I usually stick to the other side of the creative process and just bang on a keyboard for money. This business stuff is just depressing. |
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