Please introduce yourself, who are you and what do you do?
I'm a 3D artist currently working in the creative industry in UK, who is a big bookworm and an even bigger fan of the Elite series.
What attracted you to create a story within the Elite universe?
I love reading, especially science fiction and fantasy books. Of course, I also love games and Elite, so for me, helping to create a book set within the Elite Dangerous sci-fi universe is like having all of my favourite things wrapped in one package!
You're trying quite a bold experiment with your project, tell us what you're trying to do?
Elite Chronicles is a fun and exciting experiment to encourage everyone to unleash their creativity and collaborate to publish a book set within the Elite Dangerous universe. If you are a writer, you can write about your own character and story lines, as short as a paragraph, or as long as a short book; if you are a reader, you can vote and choose your favourite paragraphs to be selected to be the official story line. So effectively, the readers are directing the story and writers will get lots of direct feedback throughout to guide their writing.
Has anything like this been tried before?
Sure, there have been a handful of similar experiments recently. For example, in 2007, Penguin Books and De Montfort University launched "A Million Penguins", a crowd-sourced novel. They got 10 hits every second in the first few days, created 1031 pages of content and attracted nearly 1500 contributors, including famous authors such as Margaret Atwood.
What inspired you to take this novel approach?
More than ten years ago, one of my favourite novelists wrote: "the Internet will let writers and readers to engage together in one of human's oldest and best inventions. Writing will evolve beyond our imagination.” I believe in his vision, and I think that this evolution is happening right now in front of our eyes. With the wide use of smartphones and tablets, writing, reading and publishing is becoming a more accessible and truly interactive experience. Now everyone can become a writer, readers can help improve the quality of content and direct the stories themselves, and it will be easier to get work published for everyone’s enjoyment.
This is actually just a small experiment to prove a bigger vision for the future of creative writing and publishing. I want to continue to push the boundaries in this field and raise money for Elite Dangerous at the same time!
You're funding the project through Kickstarter, tell us about that and how we can help?
It took a lot longer than I expected to get my project alive – Kickstarter goes to great lengths to make sure you are a real person with a legitimate project. :) Timing has been tricky, as it has been hard to reach out to everyone over Christmas. However, with the New Year approaching, this is the best time to help start something new and exciting!
If you would like to support the project, we are offering some good value for money packages on Kickstarter. However, you can also help by spreading the word, clicking ‘Like’ on our Facebook page, or tweeting about us using the @EliteChronicles tag. Every tweet counts and every penny is important for us!
How will the story get started?
I'm hoping David Braben will help out with this. :p But effectively, everyone will have all the freedom to start the book their own way. Only the version which gets the highest number of online reader votes will be selected for the official story.
Many people have come up with excellent ideas for the main character on the comments page for Elite Dangerous. But the beauty of crowd-writing is that it encourages variety and imagination, and we will take on board the readers’ comments to choose a captivating beginning for the book.
Is there anything else you'd like to share with us?
I have received a lot support from many talented people; they are the real heroes behind the project, who contributed to the artwork, the pitch video, and the ideas behind Elite Chronicles. I also have people volunteering to proof read and edit. I just want to say a big thank you to everyone for your support, and hope that we can continue to work together to make our exciting vision for Elite Chronicles a reality!
Thanks to Lin for sharing her thoughts with us, you can support her project via the link below:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1483152934/elite-chronicles?ref=live
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