what is it?

The editor's own description, written in 2000: “8 is a spontaneous work of on-line interactive fiction.”

What began as one text, collaboratively written by some chums in a TMN-sponsored conference called artist, ran as item 8 of that conference — an item in Caucus conferencing software on The Meta Network — from September 2, 1997 to August 31, 1998. The editor called the item, and the method, coelaboration: collaborative elaboration, each response elaborating the ones before it. Nineteen writers posted 241 numbered responses; 212 survive, and they are printed entire in the river.

why is it?

The editor, again in his own words: “i wanted to see if i could create anything like my name is scibe, which i was a part of years ago.” Scibe was the 1994 collaborative hyperfiction written on ARTS WIRE and The WELL. Item 8 was the experiment run a second time, three years later, on a different network with different software — and, from January 1998, with a classroom's worth of new writers.

faq

Is it still going? No. The item closed on August 31, 1998; the cessation of the exercise was, in the editor's words, completely arbitrary. This site is a snapshot of the finished work, not a revival — nothing here is open for posting.

Is the text complete? 212 of the 241 numbered responses survive. The 29 that survive in neither copy are printed as gaps in the river, never renumbered over. See the colophon for how the text was established.

Was anything edited? One line of third-party link spam that had been injected into the later copy was removed. Nothing else — misspellings, joke bylines, and one corrupt header date all print as they stand.

Who owns it? Each response belongs to its writer. This edition claims nothing.

kudos

The editor's thank-yous, as printed at the time: to Scott Burns, to Caucus Systems, and to The Meta Network, whose artist conference housed the item. And to Ginny Little, whose Creative Writers on the Net brought the January 1998 writers — the flood that made the river.