Intent to participate: Journal of a Plague's Year

[michelleful]

Idea is to generate a diary chronicling the spread of a fictional virus with transmission characteristics similar to Ebola or influenza, from the point of view of the virus. Actual symptoms TBA but people can die from it. The virus jumps from person to person and gets to experience life through their eyes (and also death).

Obviously there are lots of complicated steps to this, but I was going to try going in this order, building up complexity as I go, so at each stage I get some text that will qualify as a NaNoGenMo novel even if I don't get through all the steps:

• Modelling the transmission of a virus in terms of people and locations.
• Generating names and stories for people (or taking them from Twitter or similar?) for what the virus gets to experience in locations where the people it's infected are at.
• Adding in virus mutations? Adversary in the form of immune systems and the CDC?
• Adding in plot: when virus transmission/people's symptoms/deaths hit certain stats, some text that I manually write gets incorporated.

Feedback and pointers to resources very welcome!

[ikarth]

Interesting. It reminds me of object narratives/novels of circulation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novel_of_circulation

And also Nick Montfort's World Clock ( https://nickm.com/post/2013/11/world-clock/ ) and Tariq Ali's Atheists Who Believe in God: https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/45

[michelleful]

Thanks @ikarth! I'd never heard of "it-narratives" but that does seem very apt. And thanks for the other pointers too - lots to think about!