About All My Friends Are Stories
If you love to (or aspire to) tell stories in creative, collaborative ways, this is a place for your to find resources and like-minded people to help you on that journey!
All My Friends Are Stories is composed of:
- this website and all the troves of information nested within it,
- the associated videos hosted on YouTube,
- Twitch live streams about storytelling,
- a Patreon to support the whole thing.
My goal is to keep everything linked through this website so no matter what the algorithm says, or which billionaire decides to blow up a social media platform for fun, the information will stay connected and accessible.
Collaborative fiction
There is the author, and there is the reader. There are the people who make the movies, and the people who watch the movies. There are those who tell stories, and those who listen to stories, and never the twain should me. Unless...
What if we blurred those lines? Instead of outlining a novel and carefully constructing it before presenting it to an editor, we just sit around a table with a group of friends and make it up, or we write it in such a way that the audience shares authorial control.
For many of us, this might be a new kind of storytelling. I started out as a novelist, where I weilded my authorial intent like a sabre -- I held all the responsibility to make the story *good*, and would receive all the glory if I succeeded (and all the shame if I failed). And while I still love writing, there is an incredible joy in loosening that control and creating shared stories. The creativity is amplified, the pressure is lessened, and we get to experience being the performer and audience all at once, marvelling at how a story unravels even as we tug at the threads.
The goal of AMFAS is to make this kind of collective, social storytelling as accessible as possible for anyone who wants to try it out, whether it's through TTRPG, Actual Play, text-based adventure games, improv, or other kinds of collaborative fiction.
About Anne
Right now, it's just one person behind this: me. I'm Anne, known as Gnome Anne or AnneTheGnome across the internet. I've been a TTRPG creator for about 4 years, and a writer for as long as I could write. I have a strong interest in stories, narrative design, and I'm infinitely fascinated by the ways people can tell stories together.
As my day job, I'm a librarian, because I love connecting people with information (and with each other). So that's what this project is all about!
About Neocities
I built this website on Neocities, a modern geocities revival, and it's completely handcoded with HTML, CSS and javascript. I literally have it backed up on my computer in notepad. While it would be much easier to use a blogging platform or rely solely on social media, I value the indieweb revival, and that this website won't be lost or supressed by an algorithm.