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Next month we hope to host the world’s longest literary remix, letting individual GalleyCat Reviews readers rewrite short passages from a piece of public domain fiction. UPDATE: There is still time to sign up. The writing challenge officially begins on Monday, May 3rd.
We were inspired by the Star Wars: Uncut project showcased in the video embedded above. The project divided the Star Wars film into snippets and gave hundreds of filmmakers the chance to re-shoot one 15-second scene. The surreal results made this GalleyCat editor giddy–one filmmaker substituted dogs for actors and another fan replaced a starship with a hamburger.
We want to do the same thing with a piece of public domain fiction from 19th Century–letting you rewrite a passage from the out-of-date story in your own unique style. You can turn a flowery Victorian soliloquy into a stark Cormac McCarthy scene; refurbish wooden dialogue with Virginia Woolf stream-of-consciousness style; or rewrite a dull description with technicolor Thomas Pynchon prose.
Please join us on this grand experiment. If people are interested, we will give out prizes of some sort (most likely books) and feature some individual entries on GalleyCat. We will repackage the final product into a free eBook (complete with illustrations) that you can share with the world. Every contributing writer will receive a byline and a short biography in the remixed book.
Are you in? Email us today with the subject line “GalleyCat Remix” and we will add you to the list of contributors. If enough people sign up, we will band together to remix a 19th Century bestseller full of cheesy adventure, purple prose, wooden dialogue, crazy sermons, and plenty of Bad Writing.
Check out Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields for some provocative ideas about literature and remixing. You should also explore John Scalzi‘s reasons for rebooting a classic science fiction novel, Fuzzy Nation.