Collaborative Fiction

I am experimenting with Collaborative fiction. Some of you may have heard and participated in something similar already. For those that don't know about this, collaborative fiction is where more than one person participates in a story writing effort. There are many ways to do it. One of them is where one person writes a paragraph or a chapter, then sends the work to someone else who writes the next section in a way that it forms a continuation to the already existing plot, etc. He or she then sends the updated story to a third person and so a chain is created. The chain can end at any time provided of course that the story is somewhat complete. The other is using Wikis. There are many collaborative fiction wikis already on the web. One of them is Prosebush.

My effort is to explore collaborative fiction using weblogs. Readers will e-mail the author about possible continuation, who in turn will post the selected continuation on his/her blog mentioning the name of the person whose continuation was selected.


So here goes my section of the story. And please note that the following is a work of fiction and hence any resemblance of names of people in the story to actual people, either living or dead is purely coincidental.


TITLE: The Cricketer


Midway through his run-up to bowl his first delivery on his One Day International debut, fast bowler Amit Bhola saw no point in what he was doing and he just continued to run without stopping to bowl. He simply ran across the pitch and soon he had gone past the puzzled batsman and his bewildered team-mates and just as quickly he had reached the pavilion and was running out of the stadium...

Amit's run-up was unusually long even for a fast bowler and from the point he started to run till the point he let the ball out of his hand, he always had plenty of time to think about life and the many tricky questions it threw at him. Or atleast so he thought. Quite often he found his own way to answer them and even if those were not the correct, he was satisfied that he had spent time in self-introspection. For after all, hadn't Socrates said something like "the unexamined life is not worth living". Amit had these words caligraphed on the best designer paper in large capitalized letters and had it put up in his room so that it was always the first thing he saw when he woke up in the morning.

Playing cricket wasn't an accident in Amit's life. He excelled at it. Having won numerous school tournaments, then having been selected for the highly competitive Mumbai team for the under-19 Ranji tournaments and then till the point he got his call for the Indian cricket team for the Champion's Trophy, Amit rise was natural and surprised no one. He was being compared to Sachin Tendulakar and there was always the expectation that he would do with the ball what Mr. Tendulkar did with the bat. But these were expectations and it kind of popped up and then vanished into smoke in the minds of the spectators as they saw Amit run away from the Stadium that fateful day. What happened to him? Is it that he couldn't handle the pressure? Even questions like "Has he lost it?" kept occuring to the million people who were watching it all happen.


Readers are invited to e-mail in what they feel could be a continuation to this story. If I do receive a response, I will post some of them on this site. But only one of them will be the official continuation. This is to make life easy for all of us. If I don't receive any response, I will post a continuation myself next week. So until then, see ya!

update: It was Socrates and not Aristotle who said something about introspection. Sorry about that.

(N)Ever Ready Rechargeable Batteries.

Last night I purchased Ever Ready's rechargeable battery set that came with a charger and four AA cells (cost: Rs. 300). The instructions on the pack say that the first time, the batteries must be charged for a minimum of 16 hours. After that the cells must be charged for a minimum of 12 hours everytime! I wonder how long the batteries last ?! I am going to be using them with an MP3 player. Duracell Alkaline batteries used to give me about 20 hours of listening time consistently. A regular non-rechargeable pair of Ever Ready battery gave me about 4 hours the last time I used them. But then,I forgot to switch on the hold button on MP3 player after I had switched it off. So it is possible that I may have drained the battery accidentally.

But I seriously doubt if I will get 12 hours of listening time with these rechargeable one. The reason I purchased them is that I save more using these. But I wonder if the people at Ever Ready have thought about reducing the recharging times.;-)

Also check out this comparison of performance and rates of batteries from different companies.