Charlie Stross (who's up for the Hugo, Neb and BSFA awards this year!) and I are collaborating on our third story together, working title "Unwirer." And we're doing it online.
We've set up a Movable Type blog for the collaboration. You can read along as we write, rewrite and discuss the story as we work our way through it. I think this might be a net-first — an act of auctorial exhibitionism that no one has ever attempted before.
I think it's gonna be cool. Writing with Charlie's always as fun as a rollercoaster ride, as we try to one-up each other with ever-more-outrageous corners to turn (check out Jury Service for a look at how this works out).
For me, this is a good way to keep track of the actual creative process. Today, when I re-read the stories I've written in collaboration, I'm hard-pressed to remember which bits I wrote and which bit my partner wrote.
Charlie and I had talked about doing this before, but we needed to get an editor to sign off on it first: we didn't want to write the story and then find out that we couldn't sell it. So when Isaac Szpindel asked me if I'd write a story for ReVisions, the alternate science history anthology he's co-editing with Julie Czerneda, I told him that I'd do it, if I could write it online, with Charlie.
And away we go! The story, "Unwirer," is an alternate history in which the copyright industry's 1995 bid at the National Information Infrastructure hearings to redesign the Internet was successful. Now, America labors under a kind of MiniTel hell, where every online transaction costs a few cents and you can only field a website with the phone company's permission. Meanwhile, the French IT giant Be, Inc., has launched a global revolution with the first WiFi AP, and American guerrilla networkers are running through the hills on the US side of the Canadian and Mexican borders, establishing meshed access-points, working to provide end-to-end meshed IP from sea to shining sea. Hilarity ensues.
We're going to be updating the site daily, more or less, and we hope to have the story done in about a month.
The cops caught Roscoe as he was tightening the butterfly bolts on the dish antenna he'd pitoned into the rock-face opposite the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. They were State Troopers, not Fed radio cops, and they pulled their cruiser onto the soft shoulder of the freeway, braking a few feet short of the soles of his boots. It took Roscoe a moment to tighten the bolts down properly before he could let go of the dish and roll over to face the cops, but he knew from the crunch of their boots on the road-salt and the creak of their cold holsters that they were the law.
"Be right with you, officers," he hollered into the gale-force winds that whipped along the rockface. The antenna was made from a surplus pizza-dish satellite rig, a polished tomato soup can and a length of co-ax that descended to a pigtail with the right fitting for a wireless card. All perfectly legal, mostly.
