Online literary journal Titular is in the process of creating something unique:
Our Collaboratives project publishes work from multiple writers in a conceptually cohesive manner. Each project will be published, and updated, as pieces are accepted. Writers may or may not wish to employ the exquisite corpse tactic by referencing the 'start/end-points' of preceeding/subsequent stories. Each piece should be between 100 - 400 words. In the subject heading of the submission, just write 'collaboratives.'
Current Projects (and call for submissions):
I. IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME [Titles of pieces]: Swann's Way, Within a Budding Grove, The Guermantes Way, Sodom and Gomorrah, The Captive, The Fugitive, and Time Regained.
II. NINE STORIES [Titles of pieces]: A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, Just Before the War with the Eskimos, The Laughing Man, Down at the Dinghy, For Esme - with Love and Squalor, Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes, De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period, and Teddy.
III. SEINFELD [Titles of pieces]: Jerry, George, Elaine, Kramer, and Hello Newman.
IV. THE PASSION OF MEL GIBSON [Titles of pieces]: Mad Max, Lethal Weapon, Tequila Sunrise, Hamlet, Bird on a Wire, Braveheart, What Women Want, Chicken Run, Signs, The Passion of the Christ, and Apocalypto.
I have contributed a short piece to the Nine Stories project, alongside Jimmy Chen and Ben Spivey. They still need to fill out that section before officially launching, so you should submit something. Then we could appear together.
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Dutch artist Kimberly Clark:
Swansong (give her enough to shake your world)(2007)
5.00 Still Bored(2005)
Hooley(2006)
Crusade(2007)
Isissyndrome(2006)
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Last month Ben Marcus guest edited the fiction section of Guernica. He selected a few of his friends and few of his students.
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The Non Porn Zone is a project by an anonymous French archivist/artist who poses the question, "When is porn not porn—and vice versa?"
The methodology is simple: compile images from pornographic movies that are not themselves explicitly pornographic.
It is a provocative project: directing our attention away from the obvious and asking us to consider things we might otherwise overlook:
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1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things
happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak,
your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
