{"id":27814,"date":"2015-09-24T08:25:25","date_gmt":"2015-09-24T12:25:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/?p=27814"},"modified":"2015-09-24T08:26:36","modified_gmt":"2015-09-24T12:26:36","slug":"stories-about-stories-experimenting-with-form-content-audience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/2015\/09\/24\/stories-about-stories-experimenting-with-form-content-audience\/","title":{"rendered":"Stories About Stories: Experimenting with Form, Content, Audience"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I know Lucas from my time in the Transmedia Trenches — he’s a smart dude with big ideas and plans to get them done. So, when he wants to sit and talk about story and the form of story, hey, I’m listening. And, I hope, you’ll listen, too.<\/em><\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

(or, How To Spend Five Years On One Crazy Project Because You Care, Damnit)<\/p>\n

A few years ago, I wrote a story called Azrael\u2019s Stop<\/strong><\/span><\/a>. It\u2019s a fantasy story about a teenager named Ceph who\u2019s had to deal with a lot of death in his life\u2014his whole family, a childhood friend, his best friend from school\u2026 And it\u2019s kind of fucked him up. He thinks that everyone he loves is going to die, and so he won\u2019t let himself get close to anyone.<\/p>\n

Then a mysterious man brings him to a bar called Azrael\u2019s Stop\u2014said to be the watering hole of the Angel of Death Himself\u2014and sets him up as the bartender. People start coming to the bar, people who are either ready to pass on from this world and just need someone to share their story with, or people who, like Ceph, have experienced death and need help dealing with it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Why did the mysterious man bring him here? How is Ceph supposed to continue to live his life? How can he let himself have friends, or fall in love? Why is there a crow living in the bar, why does she keep shitting on the floor, and why does she only caw when someone dies in Azrael\u2019s Stop?<\/span><\/p>\n

The story takes place a day at a time over the course of a year, and is about depression and alcoholism and friendship and love and music and of course death\u2014but more than that, it\u2019s about how we live, and how the stories we share help us live better.<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

Azrael\u2019s Stop<\/span><\/i> was first conceived at the start of 2011 \u2014 a date which still reads to me like yesterday but was, in fact, a while ago.<\/span><\/p>\n

I was just out of school and starting to figure out what I wanted my career to look like\u2014starting out as mostly a freelance writer working towards his own original projects, novels, and more. I was not yet even considering that <\/span>my company Silverstring Media would end up primarily making videogames<\/a><\/strong><\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n

I had dreams of working on big projects, games and transmedia franchises of my own creation, but I decided I needed to start something new first, something small, something that could help find me an audience. I liked the idea of serial fiction, which I could roll out over time and slowly build an audience as the project itself grew\u2014but I also didn\u2019t want something that would take up all of my time.<\/span><\/p>\n

I wanted something small. And easy. That wouldn\u2019t take much time at all.<\/span><\/p>\n

And this is the point where present-me would slap past-me. Because what I ended up with is much more than my original concept imagined\u2014and took a lot more time.<\/span><\/p>\n

So rather than try to write full stories every week or even every month, which I figured I wouldn\u2019t be able to have time for or keep up with, I landed on the idea of \u201cTwitter fiction.\u201d I would post one single tweet every day, and over time it would all come together to form the full story.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, I didn\u2019t want to simply have each tweet be a sentence, with all the tweets needing to be strung together to form the story; Twitter is too ephemeral for that to work, and the story would be too disjointed for potential readers. Rather, each tweet would in itself be a micro-story, a complete thought or scene contained in 140 characters, each one taking place a day later, chronologically, from the previous one.<\/span><\/p>\n

Thus, each day would be a snapshot into the lives of the characters and the setting they inhabit\u2014it would be about a small core of characters and a single setting, so that over time the audience would get to know those characters and that tavern, without needing a lot of extraneous explanation, and without needing the audience to necessarily see every single tweet.<\/span><\/p>\n

The story would be very thematic, about establishing a particular tone and themes, characters that grow only slowly over time. I developed the concept of the bar where death visits, the mythology that would grow around it, and the characters that would inhabit it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then, I started writing content, one tweet at a time. It was a challenge to keep everything in 140 characters, sometimes, but it was good practice to keep writing succinct (and finding ways to squeeze more in, like leaving out occasional spaces…). Once I had a small buffer of content, I launched by project\u2014exclusively on Twitter, at <\/span>@azraelsstop<\/a><\/strong><\/span>\u2014with my first tweet:<\/span><\/p>\n

They said people came to the Stop to die.<\/span><\/i>
\n<\/span><\/i> They said Death himself was a patron.<\/span><\/i>
\n<\/span><\/i> But Ceph didn\u2019t trade in rumour. He just served drinks.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

By the end of the first month of content\u2014content I was certainly proud of, but by no means had achieved much of an audience yet\u2014I was ready to introduce the second part of my story concept: I wanted each month of tweets to be augmented by some other kind of content. Wanting this to be an experiment in \u201ctransmedia\u201d\u2014which I was particularly into at the time\u2014I didn\u2019t want to limit what kind of content that could be. I envisioned short stories, music, games, photo essays, comics, audio plays, and whatever else I could think of.<\/span><\/p>\n

That first month, I posted a fairy tale\u2014<\/span>Biggles and the Departed<\/span><\/i>\u2014which as purely text-based fiction was something I could produce myself. I hoped to attract others to work with me on future installments, as I didn\u2019t have audio or art skills or anything.<\/span><\/p>\n

Music I knew I could do, since my best friend and now multi-project-co-creator Devin Vibert is a composer, so the end of the second month featured the song <\/span>Elegy of the Twilight Prince<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/span>, as performed by one of the characters of the story. Over the course of the project, I did manage a fairly wide variety of content: an interactive fiction game, a kind of photo essay, an audio play (with what little talent I could find at the time)…<\/span><\/p>\n

But it was only a couple months before two problems caught up with me: <\/span>Azrael\u2019s Stop<\/span><\/i> was, despite my original intent, still requiring too much of my time; and I wasn\u2019t seeing the kind of results from it that I had hoped for. And so I decided to put the project on hiatus and reevaluate my strategy.<\/span><\/p>\n

I ended up doing this twice over the course of the project. That first hiatus, I realized that being only on Twitter was restricting my potential audience; while I liked the easily-shareable potential and content size limit, and knew that even people without a Twitter account could follow along, for my friends without Twitter it still seemed overwhelming or unintuitive to follow. So I brought <\/span>Azrael\u2019s Stop<\/span><\/i> to Facebook as well\u2014and took the time to make sure I had more content to post before relaunching.<\/span><\/p>\n

By the time I took the second hiatus, I transformed the project into what it is now. I needed a central hub for the project online, rather than just the multiple disconnected social media accounts, so I created <\/span>azraelsstop.com<\/span><\/a>. I scrapped the idea of having so many different media between months\u2014those pieces of content were becoming more vital to the story, but having them all be different was both alienating to the audience and impossible to keep up with as a creator (especially without a larger team). I added a prologue to help bring readers into the world, and finished writing all the content so I wouldn\u2019t run out again before the end, then compiled it all into an ebook\u2014hoping I could interest readers in purchasing the full book immediately rather than waiting for it to roll out one day at a time. And Devin composed music not just for the three songs the character sings over the course of the story, but for every major chapter, comprising the one transmedia extension that ended up in the final product, and the one I thought was most important and useful.<\/span><\/p>\n

All in all, <\/span>Azrael\u2019s Stop<\/span><\/i> didn\u2019t come to its final conclusion until December 2013\u2014a full year later than intended. It found its biggest audience on Wattpad, where being featured led to it receiving about 3,200 reads all the way through (with 325,000 of just the prologue), but otherwise had remained modest in audience. <\/span>Azrael\u2019s Stop<\/span><\/i> was an experiment in storytelling, and while much of it never worked out the way I originally envisioned, or got as big as I had hoped, I am very proud of the book and album that resulted from it.<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

In the tavern, stories are shared as a form of rebirth. The stories of both the main characters and the often-nameless patrons that visit allow the characters to learn and grow, to move on from the pain of death or move on from the pain of life.<\/span><\/p>\n

While creating the project, I always envisioned a way for my audience to join the patrons of the Stop, to provide their own stories. Early on, I had some friends and family share their own Tweet-sized stories with me.<\/span><\/p>\n

When a dream of her long-dead father was gifted, it was bittersweet: wonderful to hear his voice, but then she missed him all over again.<\/span><\/i>
\n<\/span><\/i> ~ Freda Johnson (hi mom!)<\/span><\/p>\n

But ultimately I wanted something bigger, and so I developed the idea that became <\/span>Tales of the Stop<\/span><\/i>, an anthology of short stories that took place in Azrael\u2019s Stop alongside my main story. I reached out to my audience on social media, to friends, and even to sites that list public writing opportunities.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was an interesting proposition, because I wasn\u2019t simply asking for stories around a particular theme, but stories that existed in my world, with the characters I had created. I was inviting people into my original space, to take my creation further, but in doing so was asking a lot.<\/span><\/p>\n

But I was thrilled with the response. I received a good number of submissions, some from friends (such as <\/span>previous-Terrible-Minds-guest-poster Andrea Phillips<\/a><\/strong><\/span>) and some from strangers who had simply liked <\/span>Azrael’s Stop<\/span><\/i>. Not every submission was fantastic, but I ended up with ten new stories (including a one-act play and a piece of Interactive Fiction) that I loved. <\/span><\/p>\n

It was a lot of work to corral those stories together, to edit them, to work out the legal details and compile everything into an ebook. It took a lot longer than I had anticipated, especially with life and other projects getting in the way. But I am extremely proud of each story that ended up making it into this anthology, from friend and stranger alike: from the examination of motherhood in <\/span>Changed and Changing<\/span><\/i> to the examination of suicide in <\/span>Pieces<\/span><\/i>; from accepting the past in <\/span>Facing Secrets<\/span><\/i> to accepting the future in <\/span>The Hammer and the Nail<\/span><\/i>; from exploring the stranger places in the world I made in <\/span>Long Journey\u2019s End<\/span><\/i> to exploring other worlds entirely in <\/span>Death and His Deer<\/span><\/i>; from the powerful friendship exhibited in <\/span>The Ones We Leave Behind<\/span><\/i> to the liminal journey in <\/span>The Ghost of a Memory<\/span><\/i> to the exploration of our place in our stories in <\/span>This, At Least, Is My Story<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

And of course a new short story of my own, where I could finally look at what happens long after Ceph leaves the Stop.<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

And so this month Silverstring Media released a brand new Second Edition of <\/span>Azrael’s Stop<\/span><\/i>, and today we release <\/span>Tales of the Stop, <\/span><\/i>a journey back to Azrael\u2019s Stop, back to the time that Ceph spent there as barkeep, back to the stories we tell to each other about life and how to live.<\/span><\/p>\n

It’s been a long journey and a tumultuous one, but I’m glad to have made it\u2014and glad to be able to tell my own story of creating this project, that I can learn and grow and perhaps you can learn something too. Despite the troubles I had, from the faulty initial designs to the effort to reach out to new authors to the legal arrangements required and everything that goes into indie publishing, I never gave up on this little project. And however it may fare, I am extremely proud of it.<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

Lucas J.W. Johnson is a writer, game designer, producer, and entrepreneur. He founded the new media company Silverstring Media in 2011, where he\u2019s written for award-winning games like Extrasolar <\/i>and Crypt of the Necrodancer<\/i>, and produced original projects like Glitchhikers<\/i>, which was a finalist for Best Indie Game of 2014 at the Canadian Videogame Awards. He\u2019s had several short stories published in anthologies and magazines, including \u201cSubtle Poison\u201d in Speaking Out!<\/i>, and Remaker, Remaker<\/i> and A Clockwork Heart<\/i>, both for Fireside Magazine. He first created Azrael\u2019s Stop<\/i> in 2011, and much of his work can be found at silverstringmedia.com<\/a><\/strong><\/span>. He lives with his boyfriend in Vancouver, BC.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Azrael’s Stop<\/span><\/i> and <\/span>Tales of the Stop<\/span><\/i>, along with the <\/span>Azrael’s Stop Official Soundtrack<\/span><\/i>, are all available now for digital download.<\/span><\/p>\n

Azrael’s Stop: Amazon<\/a><\/span> | B&N<\/a><\/span> | iBooks<\/a><\/span> | Kobo<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Tales of the Stop: Amazon<\/a><\/span> | B&N<\/a><\/span> | iBooks<\/a><\/span> | Kobo<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Azrael’s Stop Official Soundtrack: iTunes<\/a><\/span> | CDBaby<\/a><\/span> | Amazon<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Or get <\/b>all three in all available formats and for a bundled discount price at the Silverstring Media store<\/b><\/a><\/span> or <\/span>itch.io<\/a><\/strong><\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I know Lucas from my time in the Transmedia Trenches — he’s a smart dude with big ideas and plans to get them done. So, when he wants to sit and talk about story and the form of story, hey, I’m listening. And, I hope, you’ll listen, too. * * * (or, How To Spend […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-27814","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"category-theramble","8":"no-featured-image"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pv7MR-7eC","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27814"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27814\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27820,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27814\/revisions\/27820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}