A foreword

Ten was born of a random thought that just popped into my head with little to no prompting. Instantly, I knew I wanted it to be something special. I wanted to see a piece of collaborative fiction go the distance and actually reach publication, if only via self-publishing.

With that in mind I decided to hold auditions for the main characters so I could put together a killer team of authors that would be able to see this through to the end. We all got to see some great entries and I had some incredibly tough choices to make but eventually I settled on ten authors. I had originally intended on writing on character myself but it turned out that there were so many strong entries I just couldn't bring myself to turn anyone away so I could take on a character.

Anyway, we're finally here, a team assembled and a story being planned and written. It's going to be an exciting adventure, both for us authors working on this and hopefully for you readers as well. I'm looking forwards to this, so I'll end this with a single question.

Do you want to play a game?

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Synopsis:

Ten people are contacted from around the world with an incredible offer. Do they want to play a game?

The rules are simple. Given no information other than their names they have to find and kill each other.

The winner is the last man standing and gets whatever they want as a reward. A house, a car, a new life rich and powerful. The love of their life. The child they lost returned to them, even from death. They've seen the proof that in the game they can win whatever their hearts desire but at the end of the day, can they kill for it?

Characters

Michelle Sanchez
Basics: An American divorced mother of two whose first child was kidnapped 3 years ago.
Motivation: She is offered the chance to be reunited with her missing daughter.

Godfrey De Vries
Basics: An escaped prisoner from a minimum security prison who was a Dutch banker involved in money laundering. Sold out his criminal connections for a reduced sentence.
Motivation: Can make his problems go away, go back to life as normal, rich without worries of the law on his tail.

Elias Heikkinen
Basics: A sixteen year old male student from Finland studying computer forensics with a side-business selling stolen credit card information to the highest bidder.
Motivation: Stumbles onto something he shouldn't have, now wanted in association with terrorism. Offered the chance to make it all go away.

Tony Blake
Basics: A British police officer who lost his wife during a terrorist attack in London.
Motivation: They can give him his wife back.

Kamali Ncube
Basics: A twenty-one year old Zimbabwe woman working as a successful architect.
Motivation: They can cure her and end her struggle with terminal cancer.

Ebisawa Hitomi (first name Hitomi, family name Ebisawa)
Basics: A heroin-addicted, female Japanese pop-idol whose one-hit wonder has rapidly faded from the public consciousness.
Motivation: They can make her famous again and get rid of her addiction (or feed it, as she desires)

Alexi Bogdanov
Basics: A Russian man who is a performance artist and amateur magician looking to make it big.
Motivation: They can make him rich and famous.

Yu Mei (first name Mei, family name Yu)
Basics: A female detective hunting a long-running serial killer for the violent crimes division of the Shantou City police Department, China
Motivation: They can give her the killer.

Thiago Torres
Basics: An enforcer for a small-time drug baron in Brazil, who he hates with a passion. Only does the work to support his 9 year old son.
Motivation: They can give him a new life with money, power and make sure his kid gets the best life possible.

Vahide Younan
Basics: A girl from a village in Turkey, living off of scraps and working as a prostitute under a harsh and violent pimp.
Motivation: They can make it so her pimp will never hurt anyone ever again and give her a new life.

Information For Collaborators

Everything should be written in third person, past tense. Omniscience should be avoided, keep things limited to the perceptions and thoughts of your character. If they can't see/hear it or the thought is in somebody else's head - don't write it.

Each post should try and achieve a minimum of 500 words but not exceed much more than 1500, to keep things nice and readable and not slow down the story too much. Collaborators should take turns in the order of characters written above. Please wait your turn.

If you are going on holiday or can't post for a while, please choose one of the other collaborators to take over in your absence so we don't have to keep everyone waiting (this is less of an issue if the posting rate is fairly slow anyway). Also, as a rule, if you do choose someone to take on your character and they agree, you should take over their character if they are absent in the future, to keep things fair. Agreeing to cover each other is a kind of 'buddy' system. Once you have both covered each other, feel free to choose other collaborators to character exchange with.

I want us to be writing this with an aim to finish so with that in mind, when the groups are done, we should try and have regular discussions in the discussion groups to keep the story on track, make plans and generally helping each other out with editing.

Joining the story

Don't. This is for the team selected below to add to and no others. However, it'd be awesome if you start you're own version of Ten with other entrants that didn't make it into the final group. Ten is a story framework as well a story itself so take that and run with it. That's half the fun of this project - seeing how differently people work with the same base material.

The Authors (with entries)

Michelle Sanchez
http://prt.ag/71sD by Larina

Godfrey De Vries
http://prt.ag/71gv by Gabriel

Elias Heikkinen
http://prt.ag/71cw by Asheyna (retired)
Now being written by myself

Tony Blake
http://prt.ag/71ge by Burnthestars

Kamali Ncube
http://prt.ag/71p1 by Archi_Teuthis

Ebisawa Hitomi
http://prt.ag/71eX by JackRubashevskiy

Alexi Bogdanov
http://prt.ag/71cq by seldom

Yu Mei
http://prt.ag/71mv by mike_itong

Thiago Torres
http://prt.ag/71ik by Bill_Hartzia

Vahide Younan
http://prt.ag/71ss by Atropos (retired)
Now taken over (and very well too) by weirdmagic

Group

There is a group for planning and discussion here: http://www.protagonize.com/group/planning-brainstorming/topic/1355
There is also the google wave, but this is being deprecated in favour of using google docs (when necessary/useful) and the protagonize group.

updated 9 hrs ago by darkliquid