Forking Fic

So I got an idea, which I'm probably going to regret, but what the heck, here goes...

In as much as this has a "purpose", think of this as possibly waking up your creative juices and shaking you out of a rut. Mainly, it is just intended to be fun. The final result is not the point. It's about playing with the process. If it's important to you that the final result be perfect, you aren't going to enjoy this, because the final result will not be within your control.

Guidelines:

1. You cannot respond to your own comment. (This means a fork will die if there aren't at least two people contributing to it.)

2. You cannot contradict anything in the thread you are commenting on. (Improvisational "yes, and" protocol applies.) If you dislike something, you need to back up and find a point where you are still in sync with the narrative and start a different fork.

3. You do not have control over what people follow up your entry with. (This is not the place to introduce a beloved original character that you feel protective of. Anyone could kill them off or write them behaving in a way that violates your headcanon and that's perfectly within the rules.)

4. The story can fork off in as many different directions as people want (but people are also free to ignore the threads they aren't commenting on and you can't make anyone follow up on your thread). You can continue to contribute to more than one fork if you are so inclined.

5. There needs to be some length-cap to each comment. (How long can a Dreamwidth comment be before you get cut off? Is there already a reasonable limit or do we need to make a rule for this? EDIT: Dreamwidth will cut off a comment that gets too long but they are very generous. The FAQ says 16000 characters and Google says the average English word is 4.5 letters. So adding in spaces and punctuation let's round up to 8 for easy division and claim the limit is 2k words before Dreamwidth cuts you off. I can't imagine anyone going over that.)

6. Should there be a deadline end date for a post or can we count on things naturally trailing off?

7. Open membership for now, but if we get a reasonable number of people, I might lock it down to a thing you have to apply for and perhaps restrict the total number of participants. (I feel like there is a chaos tipping point but I haven't figured out what that number is yet.)

8. Rules can vary by post. Maybe some will be strictly G-rated and some explicit. Maybe some will be a crack-fic free-for-all and some be limited to a realistic modern world. Fanfic. Original fic. Crossovers encouraged vs crossovers forbidden. Perhaps some can be limited to X number of comments in a fork before it's declared over. Or keyword challenges. The story isn't over until we've logically worked in certain keywords. We can change the rules on every post or we can go, "Hey, that thing we did last time really worked well. Let's do that again."

Some of this I don't think we can know until we've played a few rounds and gotten a feel for it. I've made a tag for "longest forks" because I think it would be cool to copy-paste the longest fork of a given entry into a single post just to see how well it flows (or doesn't). There's also a tag currently for "brainstorming prompts" because I have so many contradictory ideas for point #8 and I'm curious what other things people might come up with that I haven't thought of yet.