A few of us Boot Campers met once to try batting around story ideas, and we're going to see about doing it again tonight. If anyone here would like to attend, you're welcome there. What we do is this: A writer puts out an idea they've been working out but want to flesh out more or explore. Everyone asks questions about it and suggests different ways it could go from what they understand of it.

Of course it's perfectly viable -- no, I think necessary -- to do this by yourself on your own stories. The idea batting session just lets us see what other people come up with that you would never have thought of: How they twist it, change it, expand it, misunderstand it, understand it better than you, etc. Kind of a mind expansion exercise for writing imaginings.

It's understood that whoever puts out the idea is the one who will use it, and that no one else will go off trying to write a story on the same basis -- but at the same time, bits and pieces of ideas are flying around all the time and are fair game. For instance, if somebody's exploring a story about an accountant going to Hell to help Satan with his taxes, it would be in poor taste to then write a story that's about an accountant going to Hell to help Satan with his taxes, but it would be fine to do something with some minor character somebody suggests, or with the broken air conditioning in Hell, etc.

Here are instructions, if you'd like to come. Similarly, if it's not inappropriate, a person could post an idea to be batted around here.

Voice chat works there, but not everyone has it, so we do the real stuff by typing. Please note that you have to pass through a public chat area to get there, which is kind of like renting office space that you can only get to by going through a seedy bar.

How to get there:
1. Go to www.yahoo.com
2. Click the Chat link
3. Click Enter Chat Room
4. If asked to install anything, say Yes
5. Under Chatters, find Luxbackup and double click
6. Send a message to me telling me to invite you and mentioning you're from Hatrack
7. I will. I think that should do it.

The Boot Camp room should also be available to you under Entertainment & Arts in the User Rooms section.

To send me an AIM message, my userid is LucReid.

Sorry for all the static in this thread.

Well, we had a bunch of problems with the chat sites tonight, so in a fit of annoyance, I wrote my own chat application and uploaded it to my Web site. (If you are impressed by this, please immediately refer me to someone who needs to hire a good programmer. I can use the work.)

Anyway, we usually try to get together Sunday evenings at 9:00 EST, so if you'd like to join in, please e-mail me for the address of the chat site (I don't feel comfortable posting it publicly, because I didn't bother to secure it) and I'll happily send it to you. It's kind of primitive, but it doesn't require you to download anything, register, etc. It doesn't involve Java applets or anything of that nature. It should run properly under Netscape 3 or later and Internet Explorer 3 or later, although I've only tested on the latest versions of Netscape and IE. It might well run on other browsers, but no guarantee.

Regards, and sorry for the confusion this evening.