Jared AxelrodWriter of Adventure

Warren Ellis has a new idea:

ROTOR
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one site, five writers, five weekdays (five RSS feeds). every day each writer posts something new – either a piece of a serial, or a short fiction, or an article. Under 500 words, ideally (probably 100-200 words is the ideal), but whatever. Each writer is therefore, yes, generating content for free – but each writer’s sequence goes POD-book when it’s generated enough words, the spine and back of the book also bearing the ROTOR mark. And then start again. Or bail out and free up a slot for another writer, whatever.

Astute readers will notice that Ellis is, essentially, describing what we did three and half years ago over at  365 Tomorrows. I will take this moment to mention that my POD book of 50 stories that I wrote from that site is still available for purchase:

Ellis’s vision differs from what we cobbled together in that he proposes a far more structured system, and weekends off. I like both these ideas, and totally would have insisted on them if they had occurred to me four years ago when we were talking about such a project seriously. But we didn’t know that traffic would slack off on the weekend, nor did we think that we think that some added structure might make everything hold together better. We just didn’t know, because we hadn’t done it. No one had.

Now that Ellis has brought it up, it’s hard not to picture what a similar project would be if I started it now. With the knowledge gained, what would I do differently.  Heck, forget knowledge, the technology is different now. If created a M-F flash fiction site with four other writers on the 365 Tomorrows model, what would I do?

First off, we’d finish all the content before we started.  This is the major problem  we ran into our first year, and why so many similar projects crash and burn. And that’s understandable. Even taking off weekends, that’s 260 stories–52 stories apeice–and that’s is a huge amount of content to ask of anyone without the promise of payment. Sure, I wrote 78 stories for 365 that first year, and JR wrote 84, but still. Lot to ask.  All the more reason to wait until we have ALL 260 peices of content before you launch. And we’ll pre-load those suckers, so the site updates itself. Because when the site starts up, we don’t want to focus on it.

Instead, we want to focus on the 5 POD books we’ll be making with this content.  Contacting illustrators, adding extra material, designing a visual look for all 5 books. Make them real works of art in their own right. In other words, make them worth buying. That’s not going to be difficult, but it is going to take time, so we might as well start on that as soon as possible. Plus, we’ll also be busy  creating content for the next year. So, you know, the more the site can do without us watching it, the better.

Someone’s going to have to be in charge of  podcasting every single story as well. As my brief step into the world of daily podcasting has shown, people love regularly scheduled entertainment. So we’d capitalize on that, and podcast each story as it goes up. Again, something that would be good to have done ahead of time, but as long as the written work is there it’s less of an issue.

One thing that isn’t included in Ellis’s concept, but that we had huge success with is fan-created content. There was a great deal of fan-work, both written and visual that showed up on the 365 Tomorrows forums. So we’d encourage that, and post the best pieces of that on site on the weekends. This would be a great way to find new writers for future itterations of the site–that’s pretty much what 365 Tomorrows has done as I and other founding members left.

Going back to content, I’d also have a handfull of “theme weeks” spread throughout that first year. “Cyberpunk” or “Medieval Fantasy” or “Timetravel,” were all five of the writers would write around a theme, and those stories would be put together. This was an idea that was brought up in the planning stages of  365 Tomorrows that was ultimately decided against, but in retrospect, I think it was a good idea.  Something to bind the diverse opinions and styles together every now and then, to remind people that they weren’t just visiting a site of individuals, but a team. A group with a common goal.

I’d also add some film offerings. I wouldn’t ask for 52 shorts–though, how cool would that be?–but as another piece of erratic content to put on the weekends, that sort of content would be perfect. I’m not sure who could create multiple shorts for such a site–again, no payment promised–but since I’m fantasizing here, why not?

What it comes back to, basically, is that in order to this sort of project to work everyone has to be on the top of their game. Nevermind being a professional on Day 1, this sort of thing requires you be a professional through to Day 365, as well as 365 days before Day 1, or however long it takes to get it all done before you start. The more things I do, the more clear it becomes that the difference between success and failure is how much you plan ahead.

It’s not enough to run with ideas. You’ve got to make sure your shoes are on before you take off.