A Brief History of The Decline of Empire Project

2004 - 2014: The Note Taking Years
Sometime between the election of Gearge Bush and the Re-election of George bush, the person who currently chooses to be known as Humphrey Dumphrey had the idea that there was sufficient material for quite an amusing satirical novel based on recent events, and started writing down notes under the heading "Satirical Fantasy". These notes involved random bits of dialog, ideas for characters, and the broader alegory which is now making its way into Wiki.

This process of note taking and idea generating lasted several years longer than originally anticipated for reasons that will not be discussed here. Needless to say, when your "back story note taking" phase lasts longer than one of the Google products being used to capture those notes, it has dragged on too long. Fortunately, Google converted all these files into Google Docs, and the "I'll get round to writing this book soon, but for now I'll just keep taking notes" phase continued unaffected, and unabridged.

This went on for 10 years. A lot of notes were written. A lot of ideas were noted. Not a lot of what actual writers would call actual writing took place.

2014: The Wiki Arises
1 January 2014: Humphrey Dumphrey has a good hard Happy New Year look at himself, and then has a good long talk with his family, and they came to the conclusion that if he doesn't start writing this damn book soon, some sort of psychological incident might occur, which would be bad for everyone.

Somewhere between 1 January and 30 January 2014: The aha! moment occurred that led to this Wiki. This immediately led to the next conclusion that this could work as a collaborative project. This immeidatly led to great nervous turmoil and anxiety.

30 January 2014: The Decline of Empire Wiki is created by Humphrey Dumphrey

30 January 2014 to 30 March 2014: First 38 pages created (all by Humphrey). First four Blogs written (all by Humphrey). No one invited to contribute. No one knows it exists. As collaborative projects go, it's not exactly thriving at this stage. But it's a start. At least it's not all locked up in Google Docs now.



To be continued...