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Brannon Hollingsworth chats it up about collaborative projects, The Wandering Men, card-based game playing, his Web site for writers, PlotStorming.com and more with Book Addict Editor Angela Wilson.

You love role playing, God and hanging out with the guys. How did these ultimately culminate in The Wandering Men?

We were loved Christ and were friends, explorers, and writers long before the thought of the Wandering Men ever stirred inside someone’s skull. It was actually on a hike that one of our number suggested we form a group of writer-explorers. We thought it a very cool idea at the time, but it was little more than just that - an idea. It was not until an opportunity to write for a fiction anthology came up - and we all got accepted to write for it - that the idea resurfaced. After that, it just seemed completely natural. We do lots together already, so why not write as a group, too?

How did you meet the others involved in The Wandering Men site?

That’s a whole series of long stories (as with almost everything with the Wandering Men, us being story-tellers and all), but I will spare you the pontification ;)... Davis and I are best friends from high-school, Hall and I are college roommates, and Nathan and I met over the internet (no, not *THAT* kind of relationship), sharing a common bond of play-by-post roleplaying. While Davis, Hall and I have known each other for sometime, the first time we actually all met Nathan was on a trail. :) We’ve all been fast friends ever since.

There are four of you involved in The Wandering Men. How do you collaborate on projects? What do you like about this type of collaborative writing?

Actually, there were five of us when we crafted the mosaic novel,  Skein of Shadows - Corey Blankenship was also a member of that effort. Since then, Corey’s made his intelligence check and gone off to college to do something reasonable and responsible with his life, which we all support him in 100%. Writing Skein was a major task that required many hundreds of hours of collaboration, but we think it paid off in spades. We met face to face once during the writing of the book (at its onset), at a Writer’s Retreat where we brought all of our initial ideas and formed them into the larger, overarching tale that is Skein of Shadows.

To collaborate, we send lots of emails and use several online tools, such as Google Docs, wikis, forums, and even some cool real-time, collaborative writing and editing software called Etherpad (which we highly recommend - http://www.etherpad.com). In order to organize and put Skein of Shadows together, we actually created a website called Plotstorming (http://www.plotstorming.com/) that is now open to the public. We offer all sorts of stuff for folks wanting to collaborate - all for free: daily writing prompts; contests; constructive criticism; help with proposals; even private areas where others can work on their own small or large collaborative projects. Personally, I LOVE collaborative writing - the very process of combining ideas and making something far better than the sum of its parts gets me very, very excited! I really enjoy bouncing ideas off of other people or creating new things based on things they say or ideas they have!

Tell us about the Wandering Men book, Skein of Shadows.

Without just copying the back cover text and pasting it here, I’ll give this a go. ;) Skein is a fantasy novel set in world that will be both familiar and alien to fantasy readers. You’ll find elves, dwarves, magic and many of the tropes of fantasy literature, but you will also find many new twists and turns on those well-worn fantasy elements. The format of the book is a rather unique reading experience - a mosaic novel is a series of completely stand-alone novellas that each build upon or tie together to tell an overarching tale that is bigger and more expansive than any single novella. It’s a very unique and rewarding reading experience, according to many of our readers.

This book was an incredible start from Dark Quest games. How did you get involved with the company? How did this project break ground in gaming promotions?

Actually, Neal Levin (owner of Dark Quest Games) was a fan of mine - he had read some of the work I’d done in the D20/RPG industry a few years back and contacted me asking if I would like to write a story for his anthology. I was very excited to be writing some fiction (something I would very much like to do full time) and jumped at the possibility.

Neal then asked if I knew of any other writers who might be interested in jumping on board the anthology, and the rest is, as they say, history. Well, not exactly history, as we soon asked for permission to weave our separate short stories together. The stories grew into a novel of their own; the stories were solid and the publisher was feeling generous, so he gave us a separate novel deal. We’re now working on the sequel to Skein for Dark Quest, and some of us are due to appear in some additional anthologies that Dark Quest has coming out. In the RPG industry, there’s never been a SMALL publisher to try to make the jump into fiction this way. Several larger RPG companies have done it to varying degrees of success, but I think that Dark Quest really broke ground in the gaming world by taking the risk. To my knowledge, it is paying off for them, as there are more books coming.  :)

When can we expect the sequel?

Winter 2010 is the date on the books at the moment. We’re pushing hard to make it, too!  :D

Are you ready to take on projects for other gaming companies?

Absolutely! We’ve talked to some major names, but most of them want only adventures, adventure arcs, or monster books (which are all very “safe” sellers in the RPG industry). We’re able to provide those sorts of products, but frankly, we’d rather stick to fiction, graphic novels, comics, or other products that push the boundaries of what is happening in the RPG industry. We like to do new and exciting things, especially those that have a “new media” spin or future application. Also, we’re developing our own game, Untold (http://www.untoldthegame.com) and it’s consuming almost every spare second of our lives, so it’s not like we’re not lacking for things to do at the moment. So while we’re not actively looking for outside projects right now, we’re open to entertaining certain types of projects, if the right one happens along.

What has been one of the greatest achievements you have made personally since joining Wandering Men? What have you learned about yourself on these real-life adventures and does it work into your fiction writing?

Hurm - that’s a tough one. It would have to be a tie. Having Skein become accepted into a public school’s required reading list for High School Juniors and Seniors was a true honor. Knowing that your writing is being examined as Literature somewhere is pretty humbling. Also, another amazing achievement has been the creation of Untold. To take an idea as “off the wall” and “impossible” as a Card-Based RPG from concept to game in about a year has been an dizzying, unreal, (at times very tiring) and very self-fulfilling journey. Overall, I’ve learned that creating things is very similar to one of the Wandering Men’s favorite activities – backpacking. While the journey along the trail may often be tough, filled with brambles, rocks, muddy holes, poison ivy, scrapes and scratches, the views at the top are worth it all. :)

How do you find time to participate and write with a full-time job, a wife and five children?

Don’t forget church; my wife (who is VERY understanding and patient with me) and I are youth Sunday School teachers too! It’s NOT easy - I don’t get to sleep as much as I’d like and the last complete T.V. show I watched was about five years ago! Basically, you sacrifice the things of lesser importance for those things that are more precious to you. T.V. has never been a big priority for me, but creating things has, however; some choices are easy but others can be hard. Thankfully, I’m also very blessed to be an efficient multitasker, which helps with getting lots of different things done at once. One of the things I’ve learned is that you can ALWAYS get something done. I try to fill every moment of the day with a little project - those little projects add up to larger successes and eventually, completions.

Give us the scoop on Project Epic. What’s happened since it appeared in beta at Imagicon?

Its gone public, for one! Imagicon was our world debut for our new CBRPG (Card Based Role Playing Game) called Untold (http://www.untoldthegame.com)! It met with amazing feedback and success at Imagicon and since then, we’ve been demoing the game all over the southeastern U.S., and everywhere we go folks are loving it! We’re even getting some international attention now and are gearing up for our Initial Product Release in a few short months!

Can anyone join Wandering Men? What about on your real-life adventures?

LOL - we’ve had this question posed to us OFTEN. For now, Wandering Men “membership” (we’re actually a company now - Wandering Men Studios, LLC) is not open to the public. However, anyone crazy enough to go with us into the hills, mountains, swamps, ruins, muck and mud is more than welcome to tag along!

Name the coolest place you’ve been so far on a Wandering Men adventure.

Hand’s down - Ft. St. Phillip, which is a 200+ year old Spanish fort that is sinking into the swamps of Louisiana, south of New Orleans. We had to sign wavers before exploring the place because it is so dangerous and we had to kayak across the Mississippi River (dodging ocean-going freighters and dealing with ocean tides and the Mississippi’s current) just to get there. It was awesome!

Any plans for a solo work?

I am currently working on a solo novel based on my character from Skein of Shadows, a work tentatively titled Tenet’s Tale (how’s *THAT* for some alliteration!). Also, I’ve recently finished another novel with a different co-author, Austin Boyd (http://www.austinboyd.com); this is a contemporary Speculative Christian novel entitled H20 (http://www.h20thenovel.com) that is being reviewed for publication by several major Christian fiction publishers. I’m working on a few other solo or “non-Wandering Men collaborations, too.

Where can we find you on the Web?

Tons of places! The Wandering Men have a website: http://www.wanderingmen.com, a Twitter account: http://www.twitter.com/thewanderingmen, a Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thewanderingmen, a Youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/thewanderingmen, and so on and so forth…

Also, you can check out Untold at http://www.untoldthegame.com and H20 at http://www.h20thenovel.com. Of course, we’d love to invite any authors or author-hopefuls to visit us at http://www.plotstorming.com, too!  :)