Now Online!

This is the beginning of the end: The project is now on air!

Visit ... to read and vote among five opening Chapters for the novel.

The current Voting Period will last approximately two weeks, and once the winning first Chapter has been announced everyone is welcome to continue the story and write for Chapter 2.

Join us now in the making of this innovative Web-based novel!


The ABCs of EndOfThisWorld

The goal of EndOfThisWorld is to create a surreal novel beginning with a seed event, which, through a series of domino events leads to a catastrophe that causes the world to end. Instead of trying to emulate the randomness and unpredictability inherent in such a story (like a single author would do), our approach builds these aspects in the writing process itself, by forming an online community that creates the novel interactively.

EndOfThisWorld consists of 25 Chapters that progress by means of an election system. We kick off the project by providing five alternative options for Chapter 1, the seed of our story, and let readers vote for the one they like the most. Our options for Chapter 1 span a variety of styles and concepts, ranging from ordinary events in the lives of ordinary peoples, to sci-fi and fantasy themes. Once Chapter 1 is selected, the community freely creates chapters 2 to 25, subject to the requirement that chapter 25 sees the end of the world.

Here, the concept “end of the world” is to be interpreted in a broad sense. For example it could mean the destruction of the human civilization, planet Earth, the Universe as a whole, or anything that writers can come up with. One thing required for sure, however, is that the world as we conventionally understand and experience it comes to an end.

Chapters advance on a two-period cycle (lasting approximately two weeks each). During the so-called Submission Period, members can submit candidate scripts for the current chapter. Then, during the Voting Period, the community votes to select the best one, which is incorporated into the official plot. In order to avoid having members vote among an unrealistically large number of candidates, we have established a pre-selection process, which we call Rating, that is used to nominate five finalists for each Chapter's election.

Rating runs in parallel with the submission period. When a writer submits a candidate Chapter, the Chapter becomes immediately available for viewing by members of the community. Whoever reads the Chapter, then has the option (and is strongly encouraged) to assign a score ranging from 1 to 5, according to how much they liked the Chapter. We will nominate the Chapters that receive the highest scores, but reserve the right to exercise discretion in cases where more than five submissions receive high ratings, or an exceptionally good candidate was submitted late in the Submission Period. As for the duration of the periods, this is nominally two weeks for both Submission and Voting, but we'll be tweaking it according to the number of candidates and/or votes we receive. Of course, we'll be notifying the community well in advance of a period's completion.

The writing style we use in EndOfThisWorld is completely experimental. It seems, however, very nicely suited to the surreal story we want to create here. After the novel is completed we hope to make something tangible out of our effort and, apart from the option of publishing it as a book, one can think of our story being made into a graphic novel, an animation, or even a movie script. We want you to be partners in any such endeavor. Accordingly, EndOThisWorld is built around a user agreement (to be announced in the beginning of Chapter's 2 Submission Period) that entitles with creative rights all authors whose chapters were selected in the voting process.

Happy reading, writing, and voting!