Hi there everyone, I'm darkliquid and I've decided to hold a kind of unofficial competition of my own here.

I've started up a collaborative story called Ten. You can find out more about it here: http://www.protagonize.com/story/ten

However, the short version is that there are ten characters and unbeknownst to each other they are offered something amazing and life changing if they play a game. They need to find the others, wherever they are in the world, and with only their names to go by. And when they find them?

They have to kill them.

Now, I want this to be a really good, well thought out piece of writing and more than that, I want this to be a story that actually gets finished. With that in mind, I'm holding auditions for each of the ten characters, more information about that is in the authors guidance for the story.

At the end of the story, we can go over it and edit it and polish it until we are happy that it's perfect and then I want to self-publish it or, if we are really lucky and want to go don that route, maybe even publish it through a proper publisher. Either way, when that happens I will personally buy all 9 contributors and myself copies of the book. It would be really cool if we could send them (once we've received them) to each other so we can all sign them for each other too.

So, audition away. You don't have to be the most amazing writer in the world, what is most important in this is that you are willing to stick it out to the end and that you really want to work as part of a team to create something awesome. Who knows, we might even make money from this too down the line (which would be split evenly of course).

More importantly I want to see lots of auditions. Auditions can be collaborative or not and even be carried on being developed after the main story starts, regardless of whether you make the cut or not. It'll be awesome to see other peoples ideas grow out of these seeds, so no audition is a waste, even if it doesn't win you a place in the group.

So read the authors guidance and start auditioning people! I know I can count on you!

Ahh, good question.

To clarify, the auditions should (and in fact, have to be, since the story is currently solo) separate stories. After a certain period of time I have yet to decide upon or if I happen to get a whole load of auditions in then I'll make my choices or which authors to work with and we can start work on the actual collaborative story together. Hopefully group-locked stories will be enabled then, otherwise it might be worth either writing off-site or continuing each characters story as a separate solo until we can copy everything into a locked collaborative once those features become available.

Does that make things a bit clearer?

Well a comfortable posting rate is yet to be decided. Everyone that gets through will have a different pace they find suitable and differing levels of other commitments in their lives they need to attend to so once the auditions are over that will need to be decided though I imagine a post a day on the story, meaning that each individual author posts once every 10 days would be a rough guess.

The main thing I mean by commitment though is staying power, a commitment to seeing this through to completion and not just giving up or disappearing without a trace. If you plan on joining in on this story I'd like you to be sure you can stick it out until the very end. Of course, some characters will die earlier than others but I'm sure there will be other, secondary characters and what not people can write for, plus the general plotting and discussion the whole group will take part in too. Either way, if you want to be part of it, you have to want to see it through to completion.

That's pretty much all I ask.

Hey no worries, it's good that you're asking for help. When all the authors are picked, we'll be working together and helping each other out anyway so there is no harm doing so now.

Now, you could go with actually having his wife deliver the letter herself or phone him and tell him in person over the phone. You could have him wake ini in bed next to her, she tell him the terms of the story, and then him getting blackbagged and waking up with her gone except for some traces of hair, etc.

Perhaps something like that?

Well I haven't set a date yet, at least another week or so. Ideally I'd like to have multiple entries for every character which might take a long time, so there isn't a rush yet. I'll set a proper deadline once I either get one entrant for every character or a times seems to be dragging on after a week or so.

@Saraneth Go nuts with secondary characters if you like. For the purposes of this audition, building up the main character is important, but if you find you can do that better by using secondary characters, then sure go right ahead, no penalties there.