Exquisite Corpse 2024
It's time to kick off the 2024 edition of Exquisite Corpse! An Exquisite Corpse is a frankenfic created by a group of authors working together... without getting the full story of what's going on! Anything can happen as the story passes from one writer to the next, changing dramatically with each scene.
Once it's your turn to write for a particular corpse you'll receive a message from the organizer with the last two sentences of the previous writer's scene. (Or, if you're the first writer for a story, you'll get a simple go-ahead instead; you start with a blank slate!) At that point you will have one week to write a scene of 250-1000 words to continue the story. Once you're done, send your scene back to the organizer and wait to see how it fits into the final story.
After the last writer in a corpse has sent in their segment, the organizer will arrange a Discord voice chat where volunteers will collaborate to read the entire corpse. For extra fun, the organizer won't reveal who wrote each segment right away--we'll see if we can guess who wrote what first! If you can't make it to the voice chat or don't have Discord at all, don't worry; the full corpse will be posted here on the forums for everyone to view and come back to as often as they'd like.
Check out last year's thread for an example of how this all works in practice!
We'll be running corpses with three different themes this year:
Isekai: Hit by a bus and transported to the Pokémon world? What a terrible fate! Will you use your in-depth knowledge of battling to become a gym leader, elite four, or renown professor in record time? Will you upstage the NPCs with your foreknowledge of the plot? The Pokémon world is your oyster in the isekai corpse!
Grimdark: In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only... friendship! Put your most melodramatic, over-the-top spin on turning the Pokémon world into a nightmarish dystopia. Mind the forum's content guidelines, but otherwise, go ham with the angst and violence. Depending on interest and capacity, we'll try something a little different with our grimdark corpse this year! In addition to having one general "grimdark" corpse, we may run one for either or both of our other corpse themes: grimdark isekai and grimdark Pokémon Snap! If you'd like to participate in one of those corpses, simply sign up for them! If we have enough interest and capacity to run those corpses, you'll be put into them as requested. If not, you'll be rolled into the general "grimdark"-themed corpse.
Pokémon Snap: Venture into the wild to collect as many Pokémon as you can... on film! What strange new species and behaviors will you observe? What could possibly go wrong on a photography expedition? All this and more in the Pokémon Snap corpse!
Sound like fun? To sign up, just post in this thread stating:
a) which corpse(s) you'd like to participate in; choose up to two
b) if there are any weeks where you won't be available to write
c) whether or not you're okay with being the first writer for any of the corpse(s) you're signing up for
Signups close Sunday, August 11th! After a bit of behind-the-scenes wizardry, you can expect initial writing assignments to go out a couple days after that.
Many thanks to icomeanon6 for volunteering to run a corpse this year! We could very much use some additional people to help run corpses this year, so if you have any interest in doing so, please mention as much in your sign-up, and I'll be happy to add you to the team!
Feel free to post any questions you might have in this thread. Happy writing!
