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For the last while I've been convening a semi-weekly Frantic Fanfic group on the Scintillaton discord. Frantic Fanfic is a website which works like this: everyone writes down five characters, then those names are shuffled up together in a virtual hat, and everyone is given a different five to choose a pair from; then everyone has three minutes to write the start of a story starring that pair; then each start is passed to another player, who has four minutes to read the first part and then follow it up with a middle; then ditto for the end. (Except that in the mode we play, the last writer can't read the story's beginning, only its middle. This makes the discovery of what the beginning was more fun at the end, and adds chaos, for example, sometimes a story will begin after the defeat of Sauron but end before it).

Innovations have developed over time: including characters like 'their trouble-prone toddler' and 'their doppelganger', or having scenarios from a night's first round of fic pop up in the second (Doctor Strange was seduced by two different monarchs of Europe at one point).

We find characters returning frequently when they come with a form that's easy to write off the top of our heads, like Socrates (he enters dialogue with people) and, as seen below, Sherlock (he solves and deduces). Also, characters who come with rhyme schemes and directly copy-pasteable formats. (As Satan was recently heard to declaim: I do not like God's Grace and ham! I do not like them, Sam I am!)

This week's stories were really fun, and represent a good range of the things we tend to write, and, as it happens, were all written by Dreamwidth-havers, so I'm posting them here!

( A Tale Whose Narrator Shrank Too Far To Finish It )

( Too Close for Comfort )

( The Once and Future Detective )