Tuesday, March 13, 2012

The Story Olympics: our pirate balthasar

Alright guys, I kept you waiting because I needed to refine the details for our new game.

This one... you are going to love it. I call it : the deadliest competition of all times! 


That's because you are going to do a story pitch.


As you may know, The Pirate Balthasar will end in a few months.
I have a lot of ideas for the next stories, specials and... as some of you may recall... I will have several spin offs.
Then one of you sent me a story and at the core of it there was a very interesting idea. It tickled my imagination like crazy!

Then I thought: why not play a game as well?

I know a lot of you like to write stories and are interested in writing so... let's write a story together.


Usually when people write stories together they do it in different ways: I start, you end... or... we vote the most liked ideas... and they forget about the structure and/or they go on with wishful thinking or have collateral damages due to the fact that they are unfamiliar with the topic.

Well, with The Pirate Balthasar all this stuff is done for you as yours truly will be acting as an editor, researcher and script doctor. We are staying within The Pirate Balthasar's world so we can't go wrong: the characters are established, the setting is too.

All you have to picth are "what ifs?" "Little did he knows" and Story ideas.

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HOW TO ENTER THE GAME:


1) You can submit a what if: what if, The pirate Balthasar meets the friggin' Pope?
2) You can submit a log line: this is the story of how Castalia finds the recipe for the best cake in the World but does not know how to cook it.
3) Write a short synopsis: it would be a paragraph with your idea.
4) Ask a question: can we see Finland?


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As usual you can email it to me at dedadaniels(at)yahoo.com or post it here or on Facebook, or anywhere you like. Your choice.

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As I said I will act as an editor, I don't know if you ever had the chance to do so but, basically, it's very challenging and difficult, you need to keep an open mind on possible changes and have the guts to take criticism. There won't be any negative feedback and none of the comment will be "personal" nor unproductive. No idea will be completely discarded but editing might be required.

Having an editor helps the continuity of the story.

I will be the first one to skim your stories, saying if they are feasible and proposing challenges to improve them.

Once you submit your story we'll start the Olympic Games.
In short it will be up to the people to vote which idea should go forward and which one needs more work... by public demand.

The most voted will win the first round, the other ones would need to be retouched and improved probably, but can be resubmitted as many times as the author likes.

The winner will see the story actually drawn to become a chapter of a Project called: Our Pirate Balthasar. And the content of the story will determine which spin off should join.


The votes will determine which one will go first.

This is the rough idea, this game is ongoing!
There will constantly be polls.

And we'll have a chapter written by me and one written by US together released alternatively after the regular series ends.

This is because I have plenty of stories I want to tell, but to be honest I also want to tell you the stories you want to hear - given the chance - I was never lucky enough to be able to ask any of my favorite writers to tell me this or that story about this or that character (because they are dead, sigh).

I knew that story was in them but maybe they never felt the need to answer certain questions because nobody asked them.

I know this thing might not sound very clear right now, so ask away and I'll try my best to clarify everything.

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