Hah, well, you may be wondering what’s going on. I had a great idea, like a GREAT idea for a special chapter for you. It’s a choose your own adventure chapter (actually think you’re not allowed to call them that anymore but anyway). Now clearly, it is not finished. I’m not even sure how I’ll be able to put it in Substack, but I thought I’d tell you a little about how this works.

Some of you might recall the little game I built some time ago. It was back in those glory days when twitter was a place people regularly went to, rather than avoiding like the plague and before… You know what, let’s not make this one of those posts that tumbles down the staircase of whinging and lands broken and battered in a puddle of faux-good old days. Taking off the rose-tinted spectacles can help to avoid tripping on that tricky top step - not that things aren’t shit, just you can hear about that pretty much anywhere else.

So, that game I built was surprisingly easy to create. I just had to learn a little about the language to use something called inkle, write the words, then hit export as .js. Then you just have to do a little tweaking with some pretty simple html and boom, silly little game activated. The game is here if you’re bothered - but it’s not what this post is about.

Bitter

When writing a game with different narrative pathways it can be easy to forget that you have to write ALL of the pathways. Yes, yes, I know you’re sitting there thinking ‘OBVIOUSLY’, but it might not seem so obvious at first. You think, oh, let’s give them some options - but wait, every option leads to another set of options, so before you know it you’re grappling with a hundred different story threads and every time you cut one more are revealed - it is the hydra in story form! So trying to create a choice-based story for an episode of Necromance in the Air was REALLY stupid. It’s currently sitting around 5000 words, you, as the reader, will likely experience about a quarter of them.

The other tricky thing about slotting this into a serial, is that it needs to do something, and also do nothing. Your choices have to matter, but equally, your choices cannot ruin the rest of the story forever more.

Imagine noticing a plot-hole and (as I have done many times) rather than fixing it, creating multiple other plot holes first. This my friends is worse. It’s not falling down the rabbit hole, but being intimately involved in the architecture of the rabbit warren, explaining the planning to a disgruntled builder and delivering four or five times the required building materials but insisting they have to be used anyway - oh, and also that the warren can only have one very specific exit even if there are a thousand rooms inside. Let’s not even get onto the rabbits and what they’ve been doing all that time you’ve been wondering about the right type of grouting to use on rabbit themed tiles.

However, there is a benefit to this calamity I have wandered into- it’s fun exploring what different characters will do when put in the exact same situation. I hope to show you…eventually.

Anyway, if you’d like to have a go at doing this I recommend you download either Twine or Inky (I prefer inky - it seems more suited to writers), I’m sure other tools are available, and give it a go. If I work out a way to place them within a newsletter I’ll try to let you know (I don’t think it can be done).

In the meantime, I’m going to go waste another day or two working out how to share this now over-hyped choice based chapter - Then I’ll probably give up and choose my own adventure for you to read. OR, I’ll fold under the imagined weight of expectation from absolutely nobody reading this and go live in a hole for a while and tell everyone that, ‘Substack was full of pretentious wankshufflers and cockgoblins, I just couldn’t take it any more. I’m going to find somewhere for REAL creatives.’

For now, ponder this - Are spider webs ‘sweet’… Wouldn’t it just make sense for a spider web to mimic nectar like qualities to encourage insects to approach it? Why has no spider evolved to smother its own web in nectar? Would a giant man-eating spider then smother its web in something that attracted people? What would it be? What do people crave? Attention? How would you smother a web in something that mimicked the need for so many to get the attention they so desperately crave? Social media? Should a man eating spider smother its web with potential likes? Is the man eating spider the internet itself? The world wide web smothered in the shiny things that people want? ARE YOU THE SPIDER’S PREY? ARE YOU TRAPPED IN THE WEB OF A WORLD EATING SPIDER THAT IS JUST WAITING FOR YOU TO STOP STRUGGLING AND GIVE UP?

So anyhoo, don’t forget to do the clicky likey stuff.