Tell A Story With Me
One of my favorite things in the world is making up stories with my friends, and I’d love to get to tell one with you. I have no idea where this will lead, who we’ll meet, or where we’ll travel together, but I think it’s going to be very fun, and I’d love your help making it happen. So this is how it’ll work:
I will start telling a story, and I’ll publish each new segment in a blog post. At the end of each segment, I will ask a few questions with options for where the story might go, but I will also leave an option open for an entirely new path.
At the end of each segment, there will be a voting poll and an open comments section. Comment on anything you like, but if you want to help steer the story, tell me what you’d like to see happen next. It can be one of the choices I’ve laid out, or if you want something entirely different to happen or you want to see a certain bit of character development, tell me what you’d like to see.
I’ll check out votes and read all of the comments, and I’ll use what I’ve read there to write the next segment of the story. If this really takes off and people are into it, I might even have guest writers come in to write segments from time to time.
Let’s have a good time! This is an experiment, so there are no bad ideas—and considering I’m going to be trying to post often, this certainly won’t be perfect writing. I do hope it’ll be a great way to connect with each other over an exciting story.
Part 5 — Crestmeer
Crestmeer was close. The trees had thinned out, and I could even see lanterns flickering in the distance. My stomach started growling at the sight because I knew we’d be passing my favorite bakery just as they were starting to open, and that ended up pulling me into this minor rage because I was pretty sure we wouldn’t be allowed to stop there. There being The Crooked Crumble. Home of the best peach puff in Turningtree.
That apple from earlier was not tiding me over.
Part 4 — The Copper Cloth
As we walked, the forest came alive again. Turns out, it really had emptied out. Once the Gert traps had gone up, everything near them had vacated—partially to avoid capture but mostly just to alert any rebels in the area.
By the way, when I say everything, I mean every kind of thing. Animals, people, sentient plants—all of them took a hike towards the nearest rebel camp. Lucky for us, I guess. By the time we’d gotten caught, the rebels had already been on their way to deal with any Gert soldiers they found.
Part 3 — Captured
My neck hurt. That was the most immediate concern. We’d been stuck in our nets—separate nets, swinging about a foot away from each other—for about an hour, and I was worried I’d wrenched it. I know that probably shouldn’t have been the main thing on my mind, but it had been one heck of a day, and I just wanted to sleep, and I couldn’t because I was stuck in a net with a messed up neck, and I was swinging next to a small but incredibly strong woman who’d just pulled me into some kind of fantasy world.
Part 2 — To Turningtree
Fwoosh. We dropped onto a patch of grass and moss as the glow from my necklace radiated around us. As expected, Ian had tried to pull away from me mid-transport, which could have been really bad or at least extremely inconvenient, but I have excellent grip strength so it was all good. As we arrived, I let him go because I could tell he really wanted some space.
And So It Begins
It was a giant pile of crap. Well, not really crap. “Crap”—like the things you’ve had for a really long time that you wanted to get rid of but you also wanted to spend time sorting out first, and then it gets to be an even longer time and they start to fall apart a little and then a lot. And then you move them to a giant pile in your front yard so you can finally get rid of them, but they’re just sitting there looking sad. That kind of crap.
Janet looked at it, then over at Ian. “So, what do you think?” She sounded tired, her voice slightly hoarse, but her eyes sparkled all the same. “Can you help me get rid of it?”