The following is drawn from a document I put out to friends, a few of whom are starting to think about ideas.
The Project
The Crown of St Stephen is a collaborative writing project, working at multiple levels, in which an alternative history exists that began to diverge from our Original Timeline (OT) in the late 11th century. In the current day, there is an elective monarchy which governs most of eastern Europe, much of central Europe, and also the Levant and some of the Middle East. The writing will develop much of the backstory, but also develop “real time” contemporary issues and events for late 2016 and beyond. Its focus will be political (with both internal and external developments, with contemporary events described as news stories, website articles and even tweets.
Contributors will be able to shape events, both past and present, within certain guidelines and rules. Principally, we want to avoid two tendencies, the first of which is ‘my guy is the best’, in which an invented character, country or situation is advanced by a writer in implausible ways as some kind of wish fulfilment; the second of which is contradiction, in which an ill-researched addition is made to the story which overtly (and not just as a point of view) contradicts previous writings. The Moderator(s) will look to assist in this, but responsibility for ‘policing’ known facts about places, people and events will often rest with the individual who created them. Those individuals will be encouraged to keep their own databases (sharing them with the group), and to offer corrections to ‘errors’ of continuity and fact, which the erroneous writer should then correct.
Though a contemporary world which we broadly recognise exists (ie, there is a United States of America, there was a World War (or two…), especially in terms of technological and societal advances, the area covered by the fictional empire will be dramatically different politically, religiously and ethnically, and this will be the focus of the writing. While some authors may wish to develop separate strands (such as a history of American Presidential elections), these should be seen as side-shows, and not distract from or diminish the main thread.
Finally, over-arching this design, is the idea that this whole thing is a (unfeasibly popular) TV show, a kind of West Wing Game Of Thrones show which documents and dramatises the events revealed in the news articles and reports from the BBC. Each week, a ‘director’ will produce the synopsis of that week’s episode (and not a full script, you’ll be glad to hear) which shows which cast members appear, and that the A- B- and C-Plots are, etc.