New Designs

Hello there, I was recently had an idea for a new kind of Slender blog, and I wanted to see how well it would be recived. Basicly New Designs would be a "Choose your own adventure" blog, quite literally, every now and then I would introduce a crossroads in the story, and the readers would have to answer a poll saying what decision they would want the main character to make, I would then write it as though he was choosing the majority opinion. This was initially going to be a regular Slenderblog, but I decided that the character(s) could easily be adapted to fit this new idea, so if it turns out there's no intrest in this I can still go back to my origonal plan. Anyways, I'll be willing to try a lot of experimintation with the usual Slender blog formula with this one, and what I end up doing may look very diffrent from your typical Slenderblog. Even if you think this is a stupid idea please click on the link and read my introductory post and vote on the polls, I want to make this an enjoyable experiment, and hopefully a sucess, but I'm not going to do anything if there isn't any intrest in it. Thanks for your time and please check out my first post.

This is an interesting idea. I for one dont usualy follow many blogs very closely, letting them sit there in my RSS feed for a while before I get it done i one long reading. Also, not everyone will get to jump in early (I never seem to) and to them they will be reading it a any other blog, and thus not experiencing the choose your own adventure.

But If you go though with it, I am very interested and will add it to my lists of blogs to watch. I'm all for inovations and new ideas to the "slender series"

My hope is that by advertising this far enough in advance, and taking all those polls on wether or not I should do it and in what style, I'll know before I start if there is enough intrest to make it successful. This way there will hopefully also be enough people right off the bat to actually make the choose your own adventure theme sucessful (as it ovbiously wouldn't work if nobody was there to participate.)

I think this a great idea, provided you have a plan and tree mapped out and the story is good.

In terms of narrator perspective, I'm torn between 2nd and 1st.
2nd person gives me that MSPA feeling.
1st person allows for an unreliable narrator as well as pretty amusing commentary should the audience pick a "silly" path (if you have one included).

Side question: After the story is finished, are you going to post other branches of the tree and let late readers pick their own path? (ie: Go to post 4 to go to the well; Go to post 2918 to stay and wait for the cops)

Well i like the idea and it would be a cool idea i shall be watching your blog daily to check out what is going on good luck and have fun with it.

Hey, more support, that's great! So far 6 people have said they would be willing to see this, so unless lots of people show up who just hate the idea that's probably enough for me to start with actual posting sometime in January (and many thanks to the one person who said update whenever I get around to it, I'll probably go with the masses on this one, but somehow it feels slightly less stressful now).

O.k., now to answer some questions: I won't have a full story tree mapped out, pre-se, what I will try to do is write up all my updates in advance, up till the point where there is a decision, and then I will write both outcomes. Then I will update regularly until that point, post the poll on the decision update, and post the "winning scenario" as soon as the poll goes down. That way I would be able to prove to myself (and possible provide evidence for the readers after the blogs conclusion) that there would have been actual different story options.

After the conclusion I may upload all of the different options and continue updating at a slower rate, and put links in all the decision posts with the links leading to each outcome. I think it would be fun to let readers who missed the chance to effect the story a chance to explore the different paths it could have taken, and to give old readers a reason to come back, but writing all of those different stories without getting confused would be difficult, I'll decide by the time the story finishes, though, and I won't remove any of the drafts of the alternate decisions.

As for the perspective question: As a reader of this blog, I wouldn't want to see 2nd person perspective, but as the author, it would be the easiest alternative 1st of all my options. I think that I could pull of an unreliable narrator in 2nd person, and while there won't be a "silly path" for this particular project (as for the future, who knows, if this is a success I may just do more of these in different styles), you should know from MSPA that 2nd person can still provide a pretty funny commentary. This may be something completely new (regardless I haven't seen it before), and so it's a rare chance to play with the formula for a story. As I said, as a reader, 2nd person wouldn't be my first choice, but as a writer I'm excited to possibly try something that is different from the status quo, so if you want to see 2nd person please vote that way on the poll.

And while I kind of said this in the last paragraph, there probably won't be a silly storyline because I want the focus of this story to be on the fear and paranoia associated with Slenderman. Somewhere along the line Slenderman stopped being Freddie and starting being The Mummy, which is to say that he stopped becoming a horror monster and started being an action adventure monster. There's not really anything wrong with that, it's kind of the natural evolution of a meme, you give people something designed to create fear, tell them "do whatever you want with this, and you can work with each other," and they will find a way to fight it. I think that's part of the reason people love fear, it gives you something to fight, and over time that's exactly what people have done. While you're still hard pressed to find a good blog without some solid fear moments, I don't think fear is the main part of the verse any longer, it's been replaced with hope, drama, and war. So this blog will be my attempt at getting back to the fear part of the mythos, not in an attempt to bring it back, just as a chance to "re-live" some of that paranoia I had when I was looking at JAF or DiD or early MH. Of course I will probably slip in some of my patented sarcasm form time to time (yes it's patented, if you've used sarcasm (TM) without my consent you owe me a royalty), but the focus of this blog will probably not be on humor.

Thanks again to everyone who's voted for your support and participation, and if there are any more questions please feel free to leave them here, on the blog, or in that accounts e-mail. I hope I can make something you guys enjoy.

Call me interested as well. It sounds like a good idea if you can pull it off well. It's definitely something new.

I'd say just make sure you got a LOT of plans set up for all the different routes and choices. But then...that's a given.

As for updating, don't pressure yourself into trying to update at set schedules. If you can manage to set a schedule then that's great, but don't try and pressure yourself into it. I've had that problem with other projects...pressure yourself into doing it, you lose the drive to do it and then it starts to annoy you.

If you get behind on an update you could easily just have the character one-off say about being busy or something afterall.

Well good luck with this. Sounds like it will be interesting

Hey guys, just wanted to give a quick update. I've made a new post detailing what I'm planing on doing, and I'm going to start writing pretty soon. For ovbious reasons I want to write as far in advanced as I can before I start updateing, but the blog will begining offically in a week or two. I just want to say thanks for all the support and I hope you guys like it.

Hey, if anyone's intrested I'm holding a contest of sorts to let someone create some art for New Designs.

Also posting has started in case you didn't notice, and the first decision poll is up.

Just throwing this out here: I like the idea, and I'm totally going to be following this.

I think that it would work well. Hell, I'd read it.

I usually don't like bumping my stuff all that much after introducing it, but there's a new poll out and only one person has voted. Come on, for this to work people need to participate.

Also, I'm sorry about the scheduling delays, I really did mean for it to be updated faster than this, I'm considering changing it to a weekly update fromat just for consistaincy, so it won't get lost among all my other projects.