In September 2012, a call went out for a group of writers to come together and collaborate on developing a serial space opera for both fun and profit. It didn’t take long to fill up the queue and before October there were five collaborators building a whole new universe in which a new story could unfold. M Cid D’Angelo, a literary author with a few genre works under his belt first presented the idea on Facebook and then Mike Manz carried it over to the fledgling Google Plus platform. Justin Zimmer, Tom Costello and Ann Siracusa joined in from there. A sixth was sought and found but didn’t last and over the next nine months the Fénix and her crew were born and their adventure — The Fénix Saga — was laid out into a serial that would span numerous episodes as an ongoing web series with a fully detailed wiki of each character and nuance within the universe.
Unfortunately, a project such as The Fénix Saga requires time and commitment and life likes to intervene and steal those things away. In June of 2013, the project was put on hold indefinitely, and the collaborators went their separate ways. Days would come where, thanks to the consistent connections afforded by social media, collaborators would touch base and reminisce on the project but each was still too busy and these conversations passed ineffectively into the persistent storage of Facebook’s or Google’s servers.
In August of 2016, D’Angelo reached out again to recommend that each collaborator take what they’d contributed to the project and put out their own works. This wasn’t an entirely new suggestion, half hearted mentions of this idea had been made before, but this time Justin Zimmer got a little inspired, and wrote a short scene starring Simonee Saran on a space station orbiting the Kronian moon of Enceladus. This sat idle in the cloud until June 2017 when Justin was exploring Kindle Direct Publishing and had just released an old short story onto the platform. Excited by the production process and the thrill of publishing, he began to look at what other snippets or stories he could brush off and give new life. The five-hundred word scene starring Simonee Saran began to bloom and suddenly there was a novella there to be written, something easy and familiar that could be produced quickly. It only took a month then for the first draft to be completed and Simonee Saran vs. The Ice Princess of Enceladus Station was born.
Since Justin intended to publish this story under the StarScribes banner and as a story set within the StarScribes Collaboration Universe, he decided to refurbish the StarScribes brand. He had designed the original StarScribes logo, but had lost the source artwork and so designed a better one, as you can see at the top of this page. Also, five years before, starscribes.com had been taken by a talent agency but now it was available and Justin snatched it up and built this website. Suddenly, the StarScribes had a presence on the web again and the dream of having more stories told within the universe suddenly became possible. But one person does not a collaboration make.
The founding five gave birth to this universe with the intention of inviting other authors to join in on the telling. The original plan was for a serial comprised of short episodes that cover a larger and possibly indefinite story arc, but plans change. A universe is a very big place with many names and many settings. There are stories within stories, and alternative viewpoints. There are endless perspectives and numerous timelines. There is a future and a past and places where they might meet that isn’t in the present. A universe is also multi-verse and people and settings change by subtle differences in the starting conditions of their history. Is the Fénix an airship? Is it a time ship? Is it a pirate ship? The StarScribes Collaboration Universe is an umbrella for just about any foray into these possibilities.
So, who are the StarScribes? That isn’t even the right question. How about, are you a StarScribe?