Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Midwasteland: The Sequel Influenced By You?

For those that are or have read Midwasteland, I have two questions for you:

1. Did you like the book? Enough to care about the characters? The settings? What happens next? What happened before?

2. Can you write?

Here's what I'm thinking. I'd like to take submissions of short stories from all of you based on the Midwasteland universe. I'll compile them, editing only for grammar/syntax and to make the canon, get your final approval on the edits, and then put them together for a Midwasteland Collection eBook to be free to anyone and everyone. Perhaps (after Midwasteland becomes a best seller and gets turned into Spielburgh's latest box office smash) it will make sense to release it as a hard copy book for sale, at which point you all will be the authors and I'll just be the editor. That way, we can all share in some tasty income together while getting our collective names out there as writers and showing others what we can do.

Here's the the best part. I'm almost certainly going to write a sequel to Midwasteland, so long as anyone is interested in it enough to want one. I'd like to incorporate all of your stories into my writing. I'll have to take into account the new canon in the sequel. The backstories, the future happenings, the way you've evolved the universe. In fact, if anyone out there is a fast reader and wants to give this a go, I'll post it as a guest post on this site, so we can all see how it's done.

Thoughts?

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I'm somewhere in chapter 3, and I'm enjoying it. I haven't written any fiction since high school (5 years or so) but I really like post-apocalyptic settings and would probably enjoy an opportunity to add something to that world. We'll have to see when I finish the novel.

Tim Geigner said...

Well thanks for coming by and reading Midwasteland. I'll be interested in hearing your thoughts.

Incidentally, I used to write for fun all the time in grade and high school. I stopped until I was 25 or so and then started up again, writing, then reading about writing, then writing some more, then reading about writing some more, etc. etc. etc.

If it's something you truly feel the urge to do, there are some awesome books on things like plot lines, character creations, etc. Some of them are even written by well known authors that you may have read (my favorite, on character creation, was done by Orsen Scott Card). I'd be happy to recommend them.

Off hand, some of the areas I'd love for these short stories to explore are: the discovery of the first anomaly, apocalypse aftermath, Scythe's journey out of Chicago to Rownosci, other municipal areas throughout the world that are affected by the events in Midwasteland, the story of Saint's father.

Having said that, those certainly aren't the only subject matter that could be fun. What I'd really like this thing to blow up into is an ongoing saga style of series, not unlike what's occuring in the Star Wars universe. Obviously those aspirations are lofty, but wouldn't it be fun....