The Old Bitch

[Jeff Markowitz]

I am always looking for ways to connect with my readers. And so, from time to time, I devote one of my blogs (www.xanga.com/doahsdeer) to writing collaborative stories with my readers. I'll post the first few hundred words and invite my readers to write the story along with me. We write without a plan, without even an idea who our co-writers will be. Quite simply, I invite my readers to post the next section of the story as a comment at my blog. And so the story grows. In the last two years, I've hosted five collaborative stories, each time with a slightly different group of my readers joining in as co-writers. Typically the stories run about 10,000 words and take about a month to write. It's my job to try to find a story arc, and, after we're done, to edit the story down to something a little shorter, a little tighter.

And now, the first of those stories, The Old Bitch, written along with four of my readers, stretching from Pennsylvania to Perth, Australia, has been published. You can find The Old Bitch in the summer issue of Mysterical-E.