okay so one idea angling for sunlight in my head is a 401family anthology similar to the warm and bound but more collaborative. I first tried the nine story hotel project my last semester teaching and the results were pretty dope considering they were mostly college sophomores maybe a few seniors. god remember when a college senior seemed like the wise old trapper come down from the mountains.. anyway the nine story hotel project goes like this. remember back in the zeroes the internet was a total free for all with the file sharing and the napster mentality people were posting art photos music everywhere it seemed no watermarks no copyright strikes the wild west yeah anyway I came across this photo of a hotel in Japan that I surely still have on one of the flash drives but it was sort of a brutalist style building nine stories tall and a black and white sign with the name nine story hotel. too good right. I also had dozens probably hundreds of photos downloaded of shall we say unusual faces. models who were not classically beautiful but had stories spinning behind their eyes. I gave them names and brief back stories and passed them around to the class. the assignment was to either pick one of the stock characters as your primary or create your own primary and use the side characters as movable chess pieces within your narrative so to speak. the hotel itself was sort of a hideout for assassins criminals freaks vigilantes and such similar I suppose to the Artemis or the hotel on the edge of nowhere in umbrella academy. the 9 story was located at sort of a quantum crossroads on a nether plane and had some unspecified supernatural qualities portals and soft spots in reality such that the laws of physics and magic were flexible. I tried to keep that vague so the students could either make their own magic if they wanted a sci-fi feel or not go quantum if they veered more to the hard boiled. all of the principal characters were assigned to a specific floor, each floor had its own rules mood and lore. the 8th floor was closed. nobody lived up there and it was supposedly off limits. but what with all the main characters ebeing straight up criminals or at best antiheroes on the chaotic neutral spectrum some freaky shit tended to go down on the 8th floor. next we cooked up some hotel staff characters that were thrown into the mix. some of the students worked solo others collaborated with a partner. the only rule really was don't kill off somebody else's primary character without talking to them first. secondary characters got whacked and respawned as needed. the end results were wild and much cooler stranger and outlandish than I really expected considering we only worked on it for maybe a month toward the end of semester. so I tucked the idea away to either revisit myself on a solo run or with another group of writers one day in the hazy future. looking around now I see a fine pale yellow haze forming. more later.
fade.