The Hitchhiker Economy is a fabulous machine for creative exchange, where stories, scenes, and characters flow between many authors while each writer keeps control of their own canon and books.
Instead of a single, fixed novel, this Story Economy treats a world as a multi-authored living guide, where anyone can add entries, side quests, interviews, and scenes as long as they respect the shared rules of licensing and attribution.
In this model, the Guide” is the living document, while “the novel” is your personal line through that shared universe, carved out of commons material plus your own private work.
# Why Hitchhikers Is a Perfect Fit Hitchhikers is, at heart, about creating guides. A Guide entry is a playful, opinionated entry about real stuff (the universe), about things that matter (life), and about the wonderfully ridiculous (humour, stories, characters, everything). That makes Hitchhikers the perfect host for a Story Economy.
Each new piece of creative work can appear in Guide Form. - A character interview becomes a new Guide entry or a fan-wiki-style page about that character. - A branching storyline becomes a cluster of entries, each capturing one perspective or timeline. - A setting description becomes a “travel guide” entry for that place.
The act of interviewing your own characters, or my characters, or shared characters, reads like adding a Guide entry about them. “Ford Prefect interviews your exiled Martian AI diplomat” is both a story scene and a Hitchhiker-style Guide Entry. This provides a carefully bounded creative play space for fiction writers. - Bounded, because it lives inside the Guide frame and its licensing rules. - Creative, because anything that fits the Guide tone and ethos is welcome. - Playful, because the default voice is humorous, opinionated, and slightly unreliable. Within this frame, writers can safely develop and test characters and storylines with an invited and motivated audience, who already understand how to read Guide entries as semi-canonical, semi-chaotic.
Alternatively authors can enter into new collaborative aliences by forming Witers Rooms to develop new characters and stories.
# Guides, Characters, and Fan Space The Guide structure maps beautifully onto fan practices. In a Story Economy based on Hitchhikers, each character, ship, planet, or storyline can accumulate multiple entries over time. - An official author entry that describes the “canonical” version as the author currently understands it. - A set of “rumour” or “in-universe” entries written by other characters, fans, or co-authors, giving alternative angles. - Interview logs and crossovers where characters from different works question and challenge each other. From a fiction writer’s perspective, this is a live testing ground. You can see how readers respond to your character’s voice, how they handle conflict, what parts of the world they latch onto, and where things feel thin or confusing. Because these interviews and entries are explicitly framed as Guide content, you can treat them as semi-orthogonal to your main canon. You can keep your novel’s continuity clean while still letting your characters run wild in the Guide.
# Bounded Creative Play Space The Hitchhiker frame gives us a social contract. Inside the Guide, we treat everything as provisional, playful, and remixable within agreed licenses. Outside the Guide, your individual novels and series remain fully under your control. The Story Economy uses that boundary to create a safe playground. - Writers know that Guide content is for experimentation, dialogue, and shared fun. - Readers know that Guide content is where they can participate, comment, and play. - Publishers know that the Guide is a discovery engine, not a direct competitor to the books. This encourages fiction writers to bring early material, side scenes, and experimental formats into the Guide without fear of “spoiling” their book or losing control of their rights.
# Annual Galactic Meeting Once a year, the Hitchhikers Project hosts a great group show. This is the Annual Galactic Meeting, or AGM, where we select the best material from the Anarchive and weave it together into an amazing networked event or spectacle. The AGM is part festival, part exhibition, part live performance. - Curators and editors pick standout character interviews, scenes, and Guide entries from the past year. - These pieces are linked together into an interwoven experience, sometimes as a live show, sometimes as a networked reading or performance, sometimes both. - Authors and readers meet in real time, discussing the worlds and characters that emerged through the year. The AGM becomes the yearly heartbeat of the Story Economy. It is also a lens. It shows newcomers what is possible in the Hitchhikers creative space, and it gives long-term contributors a moment of recognition and celebration.
# Showing Your Work to the Galaxy The Annual Galactic Meeting is more than a celebration. It is a launchpad for new work. Having your scenes or characters featured in the AGM is a way to put your work in front of a global audience. - Readers encounter your characters in a curated context, then follow attribution links back to your books or longer works. - Collaborators and co-authors discover you and may invite you into new projects. - Funders and publishers can see your work in a living, performed context, not just as a cold pitch.
The Hitchhikers Foundation, as a non-commercial social purpose publishing company, can use the AGM to award grants, residencies, or development support to promising projects that emerged through the Guide that year. External publishers can also scout the AGM for strong voices, worlds, and ideas. In this way, the Story Economy turns playful Guide entries into tangible opportunities for new books, adaptations, and experiments.
# Attention, Rights, and Funding Within this Hitchhikers-shaped Story Economy, attention, rights, and funding are carefully aligned. - Attention is generated by Guide entries, character interviews, and live events. - Rights are held by individual authors for their core works, while specific Guide pieces are clearly licensed for shared non-commercial use. - Funding flows through grants, patronage, and external publishing deals triggered by visibility in the Guide and at the AGM. You can keep full and exclusive rights to your novels while still donating selected scenes, characters, and experimental fragments into the Hitchhikers Commons. In return, you gain critique, collaboration, exposure, and a yearly chance to be showcased to a global, story-loving audience.
# Next Pages From here, related pages might include Hitchhikers Guide Economy, AGM Curation Process, Guide Entry Templates, Character Interview Exercises and Funding Pathways for Story Economy. Each of these pages can drill into practical details, such as how to submit work to the AGM, how licenses are tracked, and how to design good Guide entries that both entertain and invite collaboration.
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