The Story Tree

His guests have all left; the decorations have come down; Thag is finally settling down for a winters' evening in front of the fire with a glass of wine and a good book, when he realizes an awful truth: He has no good book. True, there's that local history book about the industrial paint mines of Bolton which Aunty Felton had given him... But then his eye falls on a slim volume on the coffee table. Ah; he'd noticed it earlier - one of his many guests had left it behind when they left. Leather-bound, with no title on it, and when Thag opens it he finds but a few sheets of electronic paper inside. It takes a bit of time before he works out how to turn it on, and by the time he does, Thag has noticed that the whole thing is constructed so that as he turns a page (forward or backward), another one slides across underneath, so he can effectively keep flicking through an infinte number of pages.

Thag assumes that it's your basic ebook, with the text stored on it somewhere, and the abilty to download new books and store them onboard. Actually, it's rather more than that.

When he turned the Book on, it logged on to the internet (never mind how, just accept the magic, okay), where thousands of amateur writers contribute a page at a time to several ongoing story projects. These... let's call them halfwriters - can choose any point in the story, and just start writing from there. Each story divides and subdivides, becoming story-trees. Okay? Now, back to Thag.

Thag has started up where his erstwhile guest left off, but within a few pages he's frowning mightily. "What a load of dross." he mutters. Eventually, frustrated, he flicks back a couple of pages. But now the book does something weird. The word "updating..." appears on its page, and when it clears, Thag recognizes the text on the left hand page - but not the text on the right. By flicking back a bit, he's sent the story down another branch, and soon he's feeling a lot happier. This one is much better written, but he can't help feeling there's still something mising. Maybe he should have flicked back a bit further.

While Thag reads, the book is keeping a careful record of which branches his story takes. This information is uploaded to the website, where the poor soul who wrote that particular branch gets another little positive mark next to his storyline. The longer Thag stays on it without flicking back to explore another plotline, the more plus-points our talented halfwriter gets. Badly-written branches wither, while popular storylines will attract more writers with alternative endings.

So Thag ended up with quite a good book; a struggling writer ended up with some recognition and some realtime feedback; and with a bit of luck, both can be persuaded to pay for the privilege.