Playing the 'Game of Blogs'

The last few weeks were one the most memorable I've had this quarter, thanks to an innovative initiative by Blogadda.com. They organized the 'Game of Blogs', a fiction writing contest where 30 teams battled it out. I was a part of team Tete-a-Ten, and we had a whale of a time with each other! Before I tell you about our journey, let me introduce you to the 10 members of this fabulous team:-

• Ayan aka Gyanban - He led the team in Round 1 and helped frame the story for the next 2 rounds.
• Sharon - She penned her parts soulfully and ensured our story was free of inconsistencies.
• Ritesh Agarwal - He steered our team through Round 2 and 3 and painstakingly edited spelling mistakes in our pieces.
• Tinu Menachery - She wrote wonderful episodes despite being stuck in remote foreign locations with no internet access!
• Gauri Kamath - The only blogger I had the privilege of meeting face-to-face at a bloggers' rendezvous! :-) She is a gem of a storyteller!
• Raghu Chaitanya Koorella - His point of view was interesting and he had some cool ideas in Round 1. Unfortunately, he left us before Round 2 could begin. :-(
• Vaisakhi - She joined us in Round 2, but caught up fast on the story and crafted some nice posts for the team.
• Anupriya Mishra - She was terrific at her stuff but had to leave us in Round  2 as she left for USA.
• Vinod Bidwaik - He remained incommunicado all through the show. So essentially, we never had a 10th member :-P
• Oindrila De - Yours truly! :-) 

Now, I'll tell you how it all unfolded. On fine day in September, Blogadda emailed us details of our team members and revealed the first task. The nine of us almost spammed the mail-chain with our introductions and ideas for the story. When we tired of email, we hopped on to Whatsapp. A call was made for the team-lead. When no one volunteered, we started nominating one another to take on the reigns. Fortunately before midnight, Ayan put his hand up and put an end to the notification-bombardment.

Our start was a little chaotic, but we organized ourselves through the course of the competition and went about our mission methodically. We logged on to Skype and discussed our genre, fleshed out the characters and sketched a structure for our story to smoothly flow through each round. Having a frame and distributing story-parts really helped all the writers plan their time and write their pieces independently. Everybody knew the sequence and each author modified her/his post to blend with the previous post before submitting the entry on Blogadda.

We were in the middle of Round 2 when found out that our team topped the charts for Round 1! We were overjoyed and doubled our efforts to stay ahead in the next round as well. That sure paid off because we were the number one team for Round 2 also! We gave each other virtual high fives and concentrated on Round 3 - the finale!

We had intense discussions on how to end the story and tie all our threads back together. I think we did a fantastic job and we all agreed that the ending was superb! I hope the judges enjoy reading our first collaborative novella just as much as we did writing it.

Before I conclude, I'll share the blurb of our story, "Missing" with you:-

'Missing' is the story of a set of seemingly unrelated characters who lose important people in their lives and search entire cities to discover they were missing something even more important. Will they find what they were looking for? Or will it all end in a tragedy? Read all the 25 gripping chapters to find out!

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four and twenty-five.