It’s that ‘choose your own adventure’ time of year again! My yearly Halloween Interactive Fiction begins tomorrow. It’s gonna be spooky, gonna be queer, and gonna be driven by you!

Here’s how it works:

• Tomorrow (Oct 1) I’ll put up the first section of a story. 
• You leave a comment to the post with a suggestion to help the protagonist. 
• Get this comment in by no later than 4 pm PST of the next day (i.e., if a post goes up on Oct 1 —> You have until 4 pm PST on Oct 2 to comment). 
• Please only comment on the most recent section of story — if you comment on a section I’ve already posted the follow-up to, I won’t be able to fold the suggestion in.
• You can comment more than once to add details you forgot, or +1 other people’s ideas. I’ll be counting unique suggestions by user ip address to round them up into one suggestion.
• After 4 pm PST on the next day, I will begin to write the next section of the story. It will get posted between approximately 5-9 pm PST that day (depending on how intense the section is to write & also if I have other things going on that day).
• This will repeat every day through Oct, culminating in a Halloween Climax!
• Feel free to check out the previous Halloween games I’ve run for examples.

Suggestions are to be aimed at the protagonist, not at the narrative generally — you can’t tell the villain to surrender, for example, but you can tell the protagonist “Beg the villain to surrender.” If two suggestions are contradictory (ie: Break the vase/take the vase with you), I’ll pick either the one that gets the most people suggesting it or, if a tie, what seems most likely for the character so far. As well as the obvious ‘do this, do that’ suggestions, you’re welcome to suggest things that explore the character’s personality or past.

This structure only works if people participate, so please don’t be shy — jump in! Remember, even if someone’s already said what you want to say, by repeating it you make it more likely for that thing to happen. 

To be alerted as soon as the post’s gone up, make sure to add your email to the “Subscribe to blog” form in the sidebar to the right.

A note on this year’s game:
This one’s going to be a little different tonally/stylistically from previous years, both to celebrate the 5-year anniversary of doing this (Five years!!) and because 2020 is hard and I need something that will lend better to being flexible and short-form. It’ll be less heavy on traditional narrative investigation and more immersive, focused, and surreal. Think, oh, Fallen London meets the Last Door.

Let’s get started – your first comments!:
Our main character is going to be an actor. Comment to this post with a thing you want to see happen in the play he’s starring in 🙂 I’ll start: “A murder”.

If you think it could happen in a play, you’re welcome to suggest it! Some other examples (and you are free to use any of these if you can’t think of one yourself) might be: An affair, a betrayal, a secret identity. These may not appear in Day One, but will appear throughout the work as a whole.

(The small text: I reserve all rights to this work. If I eventually get this published in any form that requires me to take this version down, I will send copies of this online version, with comments left intact, to everyone who contributed suggestions, if I am reasonably able to get in contact with them.)

[Day One | Day Two | Day Three | Day Four | Day Five | Day Six | Day Seven | Day Eight | Day Nine | Day Ten | Day Eleven | Day Twelve | Day Thirteen | Day Fourteen | Day Fifteen | Day Sixteen | Day Seventeen | Day Eighteen | Day Nineteen | Day Twenty | Day Twenty-One | Day Twenty-Two | Day Twenty-Three | Day Twenty-Four | Day Twenty-Five | Day Twenty-Six | Day Twenty-Seven | Day Twenty-Eight | Day Twenty-Nine | Day Thirty | Conclusion | Author Notes/Story Q&A]