Chatterbox: Crowd Sorcery

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Welcome to Crowd Sorcery!

This summer, Fred Durbin and Emily Fiegenschuh, author and illustrator of “The Star Shard” (Cricket April 2008–April 2009) will be working with ideas and characters you develop through Crowd Sorcery to create an original fantasy story for the November/December 2014 issue of Cricket.

Fred and Emily need your help inventing a hero or heroine, a sidekick, a villain, and an imaginative fantasy world. Beginning with the July/August issue, Cricket will publish in the magazine selections of what kids write on Crowd Sorcery. Sketches of some of your characters and ideas by Emily will be featured in the digital editions!

Digital editions of the magazine will be downloadable for free during the summer. They include everything in the magazine plus many extra features. Just go to the iTunes store or Google Play and search for Cricket magazine to download a free digital edition.

We hope that all of you who love to create stories on the Inkwell will enjoy collaborating in the process of creating a real Cricket story. We also hope that kids who read Cricket around the world will join the fun by linking from their digital editions to the Chatterbox.

If you’ve linked here from the digital edition, let us know! And welcome to the Chatterbox!

How does Crowd Sorcery work?

We’ve planned four threads where you can contribute ideas for a hero or heroine, sidekick, villain, and a Fantasy Dictionary. You can create as many characters and fantasy worlds as you like. Maybe your characters will live in a medieval village, or in ancient Egypt, or your fantasy ideas might lead you to imagine a futuristic world. It’s up to you! You can also change your ideas, and comment on the ideas of other Chatterboxers. (You can’t create new threads on this section of the Chatterbox. Please post your contributions as comments or replies.)

From time to time, Fred will create a Fred Thread. He may ask a question to help him, and everyone, better imagine the story’s fantasy world and characters. He may also post parts of the story as he writes, so that you can comment or make suggestions.

We would like you to begin with the threads for Hero or Heroine, Fantasy Dictionary, and Fred Thread 1. Later in May we will make live the threads for Sidekick and Villain.

How will we/Fred/you decide on the final characters?

We plan to have kids vote on the final choice of characters for the story. We’ll announce during the summer when voting will take place. Your discussions on the threads may also help you decide on your favorites.

When writing the story, Fred will probably draw upon a lot of your ideas, not just the final choices. It will be interesting to see how an author uses ideas in surprising ways to make a story his own.

So go to the threads and begin!

You don’t have to do them all at once. We hope you will return many times over the summer to add and discuss ideas.

Invite your Chatterbox or other friends to participate. We’ve never tried this before, but no one else has either because ... it’s a first-of-its-kind crowd-sourced fantasy story!

If you have any questions or comments, you can post them below.