The whole thing reminded me of this great article on Calvinballing, the art of those series that get along by creating more and more mysteries with the promise to answer them:

The most successful Calvinball series are those that manage to keep themselves on the air for year after year without alienating or frustrating the audience and without having to resort to such heavy-handed ground-clearance techniques as crashing a plane into a village, travelling back in time, revealing that it was all a dream or repeatedly hitting the reset button. The aim of the game is not to provide answers but to hold an audience’s attention by asking ever more evocative and unexpected questions until the continuity eventually becomes so cluttered and unmanageable that the entire enterprise collapses in on itself like a dying star.

To be honest, it stressed me out trying to connect all of those threads. My own contribution was incredibly short and limited in scope because I couldn't really do it. I think my own weaknesses as a writer is in the macro, the world building and backstory and to a certain extent, character.

I would be interested in exploring a different method of collaboration. I'll echo others here in that it might be fruitful to discuss groundwork type foundation stuff before diving in -- although certain magic can arise too from narrative exploration type freewriting stuff to inform the groundwork type foundation stuff.

How do the pros do it? Can we have a 'director'? A leader??

bAAAaa