> I suppose we could start our sections with
our "names".

The way we've done it in Word is to have each
of the authors use a different typeface for their
sections. However, with plain text, we'd
probably have to put some sort of signature on
it.

> I was thinking along the lines of "we finish
after x cycles" or something to that effect.

We need to determine our genre. We also
need to determine if we're going to be doing a
parody of something, or a serious story with
humorous references thrown in. These kinds
of things might help determine how long it
should be and what constitutes a "cycle."

> > Plaintext would be my guess, just to make
sure there aren't any compatibility problems
(well, except from CR or LF EOL markers), in a
.txt attatchment, possibly zipped if it gets too
large.

I do not think zipping it is a good idea, unless
we're all able to be on the same type of
system. StuffIt for Macintosh and WinZip for
PC are not very compatible in my experience. I
think it would make more sense to archive
our story by chapters, each of us on our own
computers, either as separate text files for
each chapter or one big file that is added to
continually; the point being that we'd only be
sending the current working chapter by e-mail
at any given time. We'd all have the previous
chapters saved on our own computers for
reference.

> > winter"Sounds like fun to me"mute
>
> Yeah.
>
> Nyperold

Yeah.

Oh, and one more thing I just thought about. I
think we ought to limit the number of authors
to four or five people. Too many cooks spoil
the broth, and the more authors you have in
the chain, the more potential you have for
"stoppages" if you know what I mean. The
parody I've been doing with my buddies has
been going since 1999, but we've had two
major periods where it's sort of gone into a
coma for a long time because one of the
authors dropped out. And we're only three
guys. I think five would be a good number, and
perhaps we could come up with some sort of
rule that if the story lays idle for too long, a set
period of time like say, a month, then the
procrastinating author "loses a turn" and the
story gets passed on to the next author in the
page. We'd all have to stay in communication
for this to work.

So far, we've had seven to nine people
express interest. Myself, Sosiqui, Nyperold,
Travholt, Darien, wintermute, and Melanie. I'm
not sure about teach and codeman.

Should we get two stories going? How to
determine the groupings?

Gri"am I overthinking this?"shny