Chinese Gangster Story

Know More: Feature Stories 2.0, Feature Stories

Two weeks ago, alerted by supersite BoingBoing and The Institute for the Future, I wrote here about an amazing bit of Chinese mass written fiction. It's an episodic gangster story written by competing authors:

"In the following, there is the translation of the beginning of an immensely popular forum post. This is a story about a man's involvement in the world of gangsters in China. The author was probably making things up as he progressed. Periodically, some of the commentators stepped in and made up their own variations. So the popularity of this forum post is based upon different reasons, of which the interaction may play a significant role."

It's fan fiction without a canon for readers to reference, a Choose Your Own Adventure written by readers and writers who bicker over what happens next, and one crazy step for blogging and fiction and humankind. Before being boingboinged, that story had 1.7 million page views and 21,000 different episodes.

As a publishing experiment, I'm exploring the whole Chinese Gangster Story medium in my own work--writing about two messed up bloggers in New York. If you are an adult and you are interested in contributing an episode to a piece of mass-written fiction, then go check it out...

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