blogs_blog_1053

Hi, Kohila. Haven't seen you around too often.

 

Anyway, I'll be blunt. The CIRCLE was, in my mind, never really a group that collaborated in writing. I primarily joined because I was working with Ausar on writing epics at the time. The CIRCLE rapidly became only a mindless rubber stamp process of voting on whatever random fact a member wanted to insert into their story, and about all the CIRCLE seemed to provide in practice was some sort of shared canon (which also jumped through strange hoops to accommodate the bloated mess of the official storyline).

 

Ausar himself dominated the group, and he grew less and less pleasant to deal with, reneging on many agreements to review or otherwise interact with content of members of the CIRCLE, not least of which being the epic he helped me write. He then claimed to have made no such agreements and eventually vanished from BZP and the dismal CIRCLE Wiki entirely, with the CIRCLE going away with him. (Apparently he's playing RPGs on some other site without caring to tend to what he started, which says a lot.) And not much of value was lost.

 

Given that all it did was supposedly force writers to mindlessly vote aye to random articles on a regular basis and make people needlessly accommodate minutia of other folks' stories, the CIRCLE failed utterly in the goal of achieving collaboration, in my mind. Any reattempt at it would have to be very far removed from the mess Ausar created and, to be honest, I think there are organizations in the Library which already fulfill goals of collaborative writing just fine.

 

~B~

It's nice to see you around too, Ballom.
 
I don't think that the aim of The C.I.R.C.L.E. was ever to write joint stories together in the sense of a single, unified epic in which different authors write different chapters. The idea was to create our own joint universe where a member could reference another member's work to provide a deeper consistency and knit ourselves together as writers.
 
I think that the polling process was flawed in the sense that more story-changing proposals were on the same level as a very minor, obscure proposal. As in, the canonization of an entirely new Matoran/Toa/Turaga element was on par with the naming of a random Kanohi.
 
I guess that the only way that a proposal had any sense of weight was due to the fact that higher-ranked members had a more meaningful ballot. It helped in some ways and, while everyone in the group was a good author, not everyone could put proposals under the scrutiny of their knowledge of the BIONICLE universe and therefore, not that many valid arguments were made against proposals until after they were canonized. As they say, hindsight is 20/20.
 
Throughout the entire lifespan of The C.I.R.C.L.E., I honestly can't think of a single instance where Toa_Ausar went back on his word. He was very consistent and legalistic in the way that he headed things, and I think that the structure really boded well for the group as a whole.
 
I know that I myself never had the time to read through every member's stories and review them. I think that the expectation to do just that was heaped onto his shoulders. If memory serves, however, I do remember chats on Y!M with him where he would discuss fanfic with me as he was reading it.
 
The C.I.R.C.L.E. Wikia, while not terribly aesthetically pleasing to the eye anymore, was pretty well fleshed-out. We had so much content added, and I'm very proud of the work that went into it. Again, Toa_Ausar had the responsibility of fleshing out the majority of the Wikia on his own. Toa_Ausar, Koji, and I were the ones who put in the most work on the Wikia. Toa_Ausar would flesh out practically all lore content, and I would design the Templates and NavBars and a lot of the technical stuff. I don't remember what all Koji did.
 
Toa_Ausar didn't vanish in the sense that he just stopped showing up. BIONICLE ended almost 5 years ago, and following the cancellation's footsteps was BZPower's Great Dataclysm.  We were without any references, and the ability to do any work on the Wikia was severely hindered as a repercussion. I know that we churned out as much Wikia work as we could, but eventually the flame of interest just kinda... faded out? It did for me, anyway.
 
I still talk to him pretty frequently; we exchange Star Wars talk pretty often, and I throw some miscellaneous LEGO/BIONICLE links at him from time to time. I don't really think he has the interest in BIONICLE that he once had, but I know that Toa_Ausar really enjoys what he's doing now, which is good enough for me.

I don't think that the aim of The C.I.R.C.L.E. was ever to write joint stories together in the sense of a single, unified epic in which different authors write different chapters. The idea was to create our own joint universe where a member could reference another member's work to provide a deeper consistency and knit ourselves together as writers.

You misunderstand what I meant. I didn't mean collaborative in the sense of Round-Robin writing, or anything of that sort. What I meant was that there appeared to be little interaction in the way of members helping each other improve as writers and critiquing stories, etc. A shared consistency is much less important than the individual members growing as writers, and the latter seemed to be greatly marginalized in favor of the former.

 

~B~