This is ambitious.
Do you remember the serial story we did a few years ago? It was called Zero. It was a lot of fun, but after 7 installments (6, really, but 6 had two different versions); I started to realize that it just wasnt working, and it had to die.
Recently, Ive been trying to re-marry the idea of a serial story for Jux with the fact that, once again, my mind has turned to more serious writing instead of the light hearted fare that normally fills Jux. As almost everyone reading the site knows, Ive been trying to advance my real (*cough*) writing career lately, by shopping out my first book to agents and working on my second. This has sort of jammed my mind into literary mode, making it harder for me to work on things at Jux at the drop of a hat. It doesnt help that I spent most of the summer preparing in one way or another to move, either. But thats all behind us now, and were settled in quite well here.
Its a fact that whenever things get stressful for me, I start to think more about serious writing. Its the same well Zero sprang from. With school starting again in a week, I dont think things are going to quiet down here for awhile.
So, taking all of these things together, I had an idea I call CR4. My online handle is taken from a novella I wrote back in 2000, called, you guessed it, Crossed Reality. In time, I came to realize that the story didnt work very well, but I loved some of the ideas and characters, so I started to look for ways to use them again in stories that were better. CR4 is the fourth of those ideas, and the best, partially because Ive thrown together all the hemorrhaged little bits of stories that were cool but didnt really work and hurled them all into one big pot. At least, Im planning on doing that. Think of it as Good Vibrations or Abbey Road, only in prose form. But it wont be a serial story.
So what is it going to be? A bunch of features that will show the evolutionary process of writing. Most of the features will take the form of short stories that may or may not appear to be in any way connected. Some of them will be named, some of them may not be. All of them, starting with this feature, will start with CR4, just like my Juxtapositions editorials start with Juxtapositions. The name of the project itself may change at some point, but who knows.
There will be features that arent stories. Im going to post everything organically as I write. I loathe editing things too soon after I write them, so Im going to be posting very raw writing as the first post of each feature, probably. Later on, an edited version will appear, and it will be a separate feature. Or I could re-write the whole story, completely eliminating the original from the CR4 timeline. Now and then, big compendium features will be posted that will show the story up till then.
Let me say again: this isnt going to be a serial story. There may be regular updates, and there may not be. I could get sick of this idea within a week; it could be months or years. Im deliberately doing something far different from what I normally do with CR4. Instead of little, human stories, Im tackling the sort of thing I love but that Im afraid to write. Epic, sweeping stories. The scope of CR4 in my head is such that it wont be truly finished for a long time. This is the sort of thing that forms book series.
And so there you have it. Thats my great idea. Hopefully, you like it. If you dont, theres not much I can do about it. I hope most of you will look forward to the third CR4 feature to be posted.
Just in case you didnt figure it out, Ive already posted part one as a test to see if I could go through with it. I really should change the title of it, but I won’t, because we don’t revise things like that here on Jux. So I’ll just link to it at the bottom of this page instead. The links to all the features will be at the bottom of every CR4 feature created, just to keep things in order.
Good luck to all of us.
CR4 Feature List
I Just Wrote This Off The Top Of My Head
The Jux Entente 