Old soldiers never die

In 1827, a terrible secret that has long stayed hidden is finally unearthed. The life-generating techniques discovered by Victor Frankenstein are seized by the radical Zeroiste faction, who raise an army of lazarans - resurrected men assembled from the bodies of the dead. As the tide of this unstoppable force sweeps across Europe, lives will be changed forever.

This is the gamebook I've wanted to do for over a decade - in fact, since the days that Martin and I first talked about the idea during our time freelancing at Eidos Interactive around the turn of the millennium. The Frankenstein Wars is a true blockbuster that weaves the lives of ordinary people against a backdrop of hellish war with the soul of humanity at stake. And now, with the help of writer Paul Gresty, artist Rafa Teruel, and the unholy design and code talents simmering in the vats at Cubus Games, The Frankenstein Wars is about to burst into the light of day on Kickstarter.

I call it a gamebook, but this is no ordinary choose-your-own text. Cubus and the team are promising a raw, bloody, uncompromising epic of gritty 19th century sci-fi and face-clawing body horror in which you get to explore interactive maps, direct rival brothers through branching non-linear storylines, pit yourself against ever-shifting goals, attempt time-sensitive missions (the longer you take, the better prepared your opponents will be), direct whole battalions in strategic battles - all of it made nail-bitingly immersive by full-colour artwork and a movie-quality soundtrack.

Even if you're a gamebook fan, you've never seen an interactive blockbuster like this. It's a story with the sweep and scale of a whole alternate-history universe. And with your help this is only the beginning.

"So you mean to create a man?"

After all the recent posts about the writing of my interactive Frankenstein book app, you may like to try it out. And now you don't even need an iPad or iPhone, as development wizards Inkle have put a Frankenstein web demo up on their site. Pop over and have a conversation with Victor about what he's got in that tank - just click where you see the words "Give it a try."

How I made my monster - Part 3

I presented Profile Books with a shortlist of classic novels that would be suitable for an interactive makeover. Far from favouring Frankenstein, if anything it was probably the one I was most reluctant to take on because of my company Spark Furnace’s own Frankenstein’s Legions project. That's a very different take on the source material (science fictional and picaresque rather than literary and tragic) by author John Whitbourn, but even so I was a touch concerned about possible confusion.

Luckily, Profile picked Frankenstein anyway, and it is unquestionably the ideal work for this treatment. There are even moments in Shelley’s original when Victor Frankenstein speaks directly out of the page: “I cannot tell you how my process works,” or, “If I die, swear that you will kill the fiend.” He’s talking to Captain Walton, of course, but Walton is our surrogate. There couldn’t be a better fit for what I wanted to do in building a relationship between reader and character. You get to influence Victor Frankenstein, not merely in building up trust between the two of you, but in encouraging his obsession or, alternatively, in helping him to reconnect with his friends and family. You are not merely his confidant; you have the ability, if you choose, to be his mentor.

At first I thought that Spark Furnace would have to hire the coders too, but by luck Michael met up with an app development company called Inkle. They had written a markup language which means that authors can write an entire gamebook as a text file, including all the variables and conditional links, and that can just be poured into the engine and immediately you have a working app. This was particularly useful to me, as I’ve done so many gamebooks that I mostly keep the flowchart in my head and just write everything straight down on the page. (Warning: if you’re thinking of writing an interactive book, don’t try this at home.)

While I was writing, Inkle laid it all out beautifully and added dozens of 18th and 19th century images to create the kind of luxurious coffee-table look that readers expect of book apps. The only picture that is actually illustrative is the one of a solitary figure in a bare wood, used as the “book cover”, which was designed by Profile’s art director. I specifically didn’t want any pictures that depicted scenes from the story because – well, are we children? A good novel is already 100% immersive, and even if it’s Phiz or Paget or Shepard, I’d just as soon see the scene the way my imagination renders it, thanks. That’s why Inkle’s decorative images and textures are so perfect; they subtly enhance the mood without pointing an intrusive finger at specific details.

Returning to the medium in which I started out, after a long detour through videogames, television, comic books and novels, was a little daunting. Would I emerge as the triumphant master of my (much more than) 10,000 hours, like Odysseus dispatching the upstart suitors, or would I merely reveal that I couldnae hack it anymore? With some relief I can announce that Penelope’s honour is safe: Frankenstein reached the Top 10 in App Store books on both sides of the Atlantic and has garnered some glowing reviews. Et voilà:

• Laura Miller on Salon.com
• Helen Bagnall on The Literary Platform
• John Higgs on Books Versus Apps
• Gabrielle Malcolm on Popmatters
• Dalya Alberge in The Independent
• Chris Welch on The Verge
• Emily Short’s Interactive Storytelling
• The Gothic Imagination
• Guys Can Read

You can buy Frankenstein, for iPad and iPhone in the App Store here.

How I made my monster - Part 2

Thus it was all change on my next project, an animated drama called Dilemmas in which the lead character narrated her life and occasionally turned to look out of the fourth wall to ask your advice. You could earn her trust (by showing that you understood her and knew which suggestions would work for her) and her friendship (by showing you were in tune with her). The overall plotline didn’t alter drastically, but the subtle variations were what mattered. Did Cathy get a lost gold pen back by standing up for herself or by lying? She’d walk away from that with very different feelings – about herself and about you – depending on the advice you gave.

But who are “you” in an interactive story like that? I deliberately didn’t want to define it. You’re Cathy’s imaginary friend? Her conscience? It doesn’t matter. You’re you, the viewer, the same you that Michael Caine addresses in Alfie, or John Cusack in High Fidelity. The effect is to draw you right alongside the character, with the added benefit that you don’t have to know any Crimean marching songs. You are most emphatically not a “player-character”.

I applied this model of interactivity in various other projects, including the Sims-type PC game I designed for Microsoft at Elixir Studios, and in a Law and Order Xbox game for the American Film Institute’s digital content lab in 2006:

Characters learn whether to trust the player. This occurs in the context of adventure-type gameplay, either when advising the character what to do or when interrogating a character. Advice that goes against a character’s nature or that turns out to have a bad effect will cost you trust. You might get to a point where Detective Stabler has found some evidence but he won’t show it to you. So if that happened you’d have to find a way to earn back Stabler’s trust.

Around 2009, Jamie Thomson and I started thinking about what we could do with our old gamebooks as apps. Pretty quickly, we realized that apps were a game-changer because we could pack all the nerdy stuff like hit points and inventory under the hood. A few minutes later, we realized that meant that the most interesting things we could do would be all-new gamebooks, where the variables wouldn't be hit points at all, but things like trust and compassion. We could write gamebooks that weren’t games any more but could now legitimately be called interactive literature.

(As an aside: why “interactive literature” not “interactive fiction”? Because I’m talking about books, while fiction includes TV, movies, comics, plays.)

Okay, so all that remained was to get a publisher interested. Read that last sentence as dripping with irony – I had about two years’ worth of publisher meetings with Spark Furnace’s long-suffering but indefatigable agent, Piers Blofeld. We pitched the idea of ghostwriting digital books for brand name authors, of interactive nonfiction, and original interactive novels to be released in serial form. Finally, in July 2011, I met with Michael Bhaskar at Profile Books and unveiled my plan for rewriting classic novels in interactive form:

There are two options for handling the interactivity. The traditional gamebook style is second person: “Tongues of flame dart round the bed: the curtains are on fire. In the midst of blaze and vapour, Mr. Rochester lies stretched motionless, in deep sleep. Do you try to wake him ●, call for help ●, or attempt to extinguish the flames ●?” Alternatively there’s a first person approach, which I favour, in which the narrator asks the reader for advice. This lends itself especially to epistolary novels: “‘Can it be that the count sleeps when others wake, that he may be awake while they sleep? If I could only get into his room! But there is no possible way. The door is always locked. Unless – Mina, dare I attempt to climb the castle wall, as I have seen him do, and enter by his window?’ Yes ● or no ● ?”

The concluding part of the making of the Frankenstein book app is on Wednesday.

How I made my monster - Part 1

Writers just can’t help making stuff up. Terry Nation claimed he got the word Dalek from the spine of an encyclopaedia, a story he stuck to for years, because the only other response to “where do you get your ideas?” is to punch the questioner in the face. Mary Shelley said that her monster bounded ready-made into a dream:

My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision —I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handywork, horror-stricken. He would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of life which he had communicated would fade; that this thing, which had received such imperfect animation, would subside into dead matter; and he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench for ever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life. He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.

I’m not saying it’s impossible, but she did write that fifteen years after the event, and when she adds her realization that “I have found it! What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow,” I think we can all detect some artful revision going on. People want a simple story. The truth is that invention is rarely so clear-cut.

My own Frankenstein creation, appropriately enough for a branching narrative, came about via an untidier route with many side paths. I wrote a lot of choose-your-own-adventure type books through the ‘80s and early ‘90s, and towards the end I was chafing at the restriction that the second-person narrative imposed on my storytelling skills. As a game designer, I am willing to switch off my authorial side – in fact, I insist on it – so I was happy in the Fabled Lands books to just create a sandbox world and let players loose in it. But in more story-driven gamebooks like Heart of Ice and Down Among the Dead Men, you will be able to see me trying to enrich the narrative beyond the “which door do you pick?” level by creating a bevy of fully developed secondary characters with whom the reader (the player-character, so to speak) develops a relationship.

If there was a eureka moment, it came when I was developing a few interactive drama ideas for Flextech and Endemol in 2001. No, there wasn’t a monolith, but the Damascene flash came as one of Flextech’s producers started talking about his idea for some kind of steampunk adventure thing. “We want to encourage the viewer to play a role,” he said, going on to list choices such as Crimean war veteran and Ottoman trader. But all I was thinking at the time was, “We’ve got to get our heads out of this box. I’ve been thinking like a role-player, and most people do not want to role-play.”

Part 2 of the making of the Frankenstein app on Monday.

When is it right to reboot a classic?

Like most writers, I could probably use more exercise. And I wouldn’t get even as much as I do if not for Luke Navarro and Kevin McGill, who host a books podcast called Guys Can Read. It’s easy to spend an hour listening to Luke and Kevin, and then you look up and realize you’ve run ten miles without going anywhere. With them, workouts are (almost) fun.

The idea behind Guys Can Read is to look at books from a guy/geek perspective. If you’re worried that means they only review genre stuff, not a bit of it. They might discuss an SF novel, but they’re just as likely to be talking about Steinbeck or Dickens. What they care about is great storytelling, and I haven’t yet heard any of their shows where there wasn’t at least one really profound insight that made me pause my MP3 player, slow down the treadmill, and have a good long ponder.

This morning, with glorious sunshine beating down on southern England, I couldn’t face a couple of hours in an air-conditioned gym, so instead took Luke and Kevin for a walk around the verdant lanes of Great Bookham. They were talking about Sherlock Holmes, and how the BBC television version in particular may have seemed like a terrible idea to purists, but has actually turned out to be a very good way of making the characters relatable for a modern audience. (And, sure, I apologize for using the word relatable, but this stuff does matter.) Asked which was best for a modern audience, the Conan Doyle originals or the Moffat/Gatiss revamp, Kevin didn’t miss a beat before replying, “Sherlock, hands down.”

It’s not just a question of putting the characters in a present-day setting. The recent movies also managed to make people care again about Holmes and Watson, and they did it (like the TV show) by letting character drive the storyline. As Luke and Kevin point out in their show, the breadth of knowledge with which Holmes astounded Victorian readers doesn’t look quite so impressive now we have Google, so it’s important to find new ways to make us gasp at his genius – and to see how being that kind of remarkable genius affects him as a person.

But, more than that, nowadays we want stories that take us on a journey of discovery through characters and relationships. J J Abrams did more to develop the core Star Trek characters in one movie than had been attempted in the seventy-nine episodes of the original series. Abrams's story wasn’t just an intriguing science fictional problem, or even a challenge of morality and courage. It got personal. And suddenly these characters mattered again.

Not every old story needs a new telling. Nobody need rewrite Pride & Prejudice or Great Expectations; they’re just fine as they are, and still selling strong. The rip-roaring adventure rides of yesteryear, though, do tend to date (look at John Carter) . More generally, the problem comes when an old, much-loved story was built around the motor of plot or high concept. Then, over time, the grand idea becomes familiar – too familiar. As Erica Wagner said recently in The Times of Sherlock Holmes and Frankenstein, those works “escape the bonds of literature and take on a life of their own”. When the surprise value of the core idea is already disseminated into public consciousness, and if the work has no real development of character to give the story structure compensatory support – that’s when you need a reboot.

And that’s where I came in with Frankenstein. What a powerful idea it is. An ingenious, obsessively driven man creates artificial life. It has become almost the defining archetype of runaway science – never mind that it’s not actually a novel about runaway science, at least not in the original 1818 version.

But that was then. Take a look at it with the core idea extracted. There’s very little expatiation of character, still less actual character development. Victor Frankenstein is highly strung and brilliant, but those are just ticks in boxes. Despite spending the whole novel inside his head, we barely know Victor well enough to recognize him at a party, as we would Lizzy Bennet or Long John Silver, unless he came over and started telling us about his plans for creating life.

The Mary Shelley novel hardly concerns itself at all with personality. We are introduced to Victor’s friends and family as types. He has “a great friend”, Henry Clerval, who is “of singular talent and fancy” and who invariably “exerts himself to amuse” while expressing “the sensations that fill his soul”. (Whatever those sensations may be, we are left to guess.) We are shown very few concrete scenes between Henry and Victor. There is no banter. The relationship never changes. Henry exists – as most of the characters do – merely to tell Victor not to mope quite so much.

This is why you’ll find a lot of people who have read Mansfield Park or The Pickwick Papers, near-contemporary works, but not so many who’ve done more than dip into Frankenstein. I hadn’t read it myself before I began working on the interactive version. And I didn’t want to stick it in a modern setting and get sidetracked by stuff about cloning, but I did feel that it needed a complete overhaul on the level of the characters. How they feel about things, and how the events of the story change them, is given much more emphasis in my version. For instance, when the monster finds a hat and a bag full of clothes, he ventures out at sunset and waves to a farmer on the far side of a field. And the farmer waves back - which, as you can imagine, is a pretty big deal if you’ve only ever been chased, persecuted and pelted with stones.

At 155,000 words, my Frankenstein is more than twice as long as Mary Shelley’s. Partly that’s because, in an interactive book, the reader weaves through different story threads and necessarily doesn’t get to read everything. But even a single read-through of the interactive Frankenstein should produce a longer novel than the 1818 version. In much of the new material you’ll get to know Victor, and observe (and influence) his relationships with his father, his fiancée, and the monster. You’ll understand his friendship with Henry, and you can see how that develops as Victor changes under the pressure of old unburied demons closing in.

It is the old story remade - as stories have been throughout history, in fact. It’s only in the era of publishing that we started to think of them as something to lock down. My intention in remaking Frankenstein like this is that you’ll be able to come to it with the fresh interest and wild surmise of those readers of 1818 who opened the pages to find something both modern and timeless. Now you tap your fingers on the glass instead, but otherwise little has changed.

Frankenstein was conceived, designed and written by Dave Morris and is published by Profile Books. Buy it here in the App Store, and listen to Luke and Kevin review it here.

Those academics and their literature

My upcoming Frankenstein interactive book now has its own Facebook page. In case you've missed the posts on this, or have been frozen in the Arctic for the last two centuries, Frankenstein is a digital book that allows you to befriend Victor Frankenstein and offer him advice. If you've given him reason to trust you, he might even take it. Actually, that's not the whole story - you also get to play the part of... but no, that'd be a spoiler too far.

Frankenstein isn't much like the gamebooks of old, but there's no denying that the structure is basically the same, and coincidentally the BBC this week had a very brief item about gamebooks (the 1980s UK variety, anyway) on their World at One programme. "Will there ever be a literary gamebook?" wondered the BBC reporter, deciding in the end that, no, "gamebooks aren't seen as academic enough".

If you too feel that literature is something that academics read, then you will surely want to know that Fifty Shades of Grey has just sold to Universal Pictures. Otherwise, pop over to Inkle Studios (who built the app) and read all about this "impossible" book, due out on April 26. And, of course, be sure to follow us on Facebook.

Frankenstein book trailer

It's gone live! The Frankenstein trailer, beautifully put together by awesome design/code maestros Inkle Studios, is now on YouTube. And in less than a month you can buy the book itself - for iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch. If you think you know "gamebooks", think again, 'cause this is a whole new species.

New version of the iPad app this week

And now we wait. Not for long, though. Our resident iOS coding genius, Simon Cook, has just uploaded the new version of the Mirabilis iPad app, and the only delay is while Steve Jobs satisfies himself that all the cool extra features do full justice to both Apple and the Year of Wonders. Give him a couple of days and you should be seeing the fruit of Simon's labours up there in the App Store.

But what exactly are those extra features? Well, in addition to having much easier access to the in-app storefront and your collected issues, there's direct connection to Twitter, Facebook and email so you can tell your friends about the comics you're reading without even leaving the app. Also there are next issue screens and buttons, the menu bar now comes with auto-dismiss if you're not using it, and you can look at the Mirabilis Facebook group from inside the application too.

In the next update we should have a news feed straight on the storefront screen, maybe even with material from this blog, making the app even more of a complete comics-reading experience. But Simon deserves a rest, so we're going to hold on that until the next 6 issues (that's all of Mirabilis Spring part one) are ready to start sending your way in a couple of months. In the meantime, if you haven't caught up with the 8 issues of Mirabilis Winter yet, here's the full round-up:

#1: The World Turned Upside Down
Jack Ember joined the army to find adventure. But when a green comet heralds the dawn of a new century, Jack is destined to get more adventure than he bargained for – in the form of warmongering cabbages from Pluto, a witch who can command the weather, antique pistols that shoot hornets instead of bullets, and a two-headed coin whose toss could decide the fate of the world.

#2: The Wrong Side of Bedlam
Magic shows its dark side as Jack finds himself caught between two very untrustworthy mentors. Gus is a centuries-old wizard or an escaped madman – or possibly both – while the Kind Gentleman is the kind of faerie godfather who’ll grant three wishes you can’t refuse. To save his grandmother, Jack is forced to undertake a quest that will change his life forever.

#3: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
Jack is on the outside looking in when Estelle stows away aboard the Orient Express and McNab comes spoiling for another duel. Steaming straight into a gruesome case involving severed heads and missing blood, Jack finds himself the prime murder suspect. And did we mention the four hundred foot baby?

#4: Fire and Sleet and Candlelight
Open graves, a brooding castle, and dead men walking in the woods… You know when you’ve broken down in Transylvania. McNab gets bitten by a carnivorous plant, Jack’s listening at keyholes, and Estelle gets her Goth on.

#5: The Darkest Hour
Jekyll plans to cut out Estelle's brain and use it to make her monsterpiece. Only Jack can save her, but he's a continent away – oh, and he’s dead. Grab your wolfsbane and stock up on silver bullets, because the full moon is up and things are looking hairy.

#6: Rhyme or Reason
Jack's behind bars, betrayed by his friend and framed for murder. Estelle's out at sea, locked in a box and surrounded by enemies. Meanwhile, the Auction of Marvels gets under way and the only hope of saving Gran is slipping away by the moment.

#7: A Ribbon Across the Sky
Time’s running out and Jack is forced to make some hard choices. With Simeon closing in, Jack and his foe have their final, fateful showdown beneath the sea.

#8: Saltwater and Ashes
Jack's in deep water. Mentallo's at the end of a rope. Dougy’s had enough of being one of the good guys. And Bodgkiss is back, and she’s bent on revenge. All this and airships too.

Two hundred pages of awesome fantasy action - can it really only be $12.93 for all that? Go on, treat yourself.

Comics 2.0

Six months ago, when we launched the Mirabilis iPad app, we had only the vaguest idea about online stores like Graphic.ly and Comics+. We figured that getting our work out on them was just like putting it in Barnes & Noble as well as Borders.

Well, these are interesting times. There's a lot to learn, and it's fun having to learn it. Like seeing how the online comic stores are as much like fan clubs as they are places to browse and buy digital comics. I enjoy Graphic.ly boss Micah Baldwin's regular mail-outs, wherein it seems to me that he has picked up the mantle of Stan Lee's old Bullpen Bulletins that made Marvel not just the home of fabulous stories, but a great place to hang out too.

If you haven't encountered Graphic.ly yet, this update by Micah on the revamp they're doing this week ought to whet your appetite:

When we started Graphicly, our intent was always to create a place for people that love creating, sharing and discovering great stories.

Remember the first time you ever heard a great story? What was awesome about it is that someone shared the story with you. Story is not a solo activity.

We are taking a big step towards making story truly social and collaborative with the launch of our new site. There are the features you would expect: Profiles, Twitter and Facebook integration, amazing reader, solid search and a great store.

But, here is what is cool. Take the comics with you. Just like a YouTube video, you can now embed the comic wherever you want. Put it on your blog. Include it in a story.

Story has become truly shareable, and great content has become discoverable.

App woes banished

Our tech genius, Simon Cook, just got back from vacation and barely had time to throw off his coat and brew up a cuppa before he was hard at work fixing the hitch we had with version 1.1 of the iPad app.

Apparently it was a pesky one-line bug that meant the update didn't know where to find issues of the comic. But that's all fixed and the new version (which we're labeling 1.1.1) will be up this week. When you get it, you just have to Restore your back issues and they'll reappear like magic, as ably demonstrated in the photo above by the dashing Mr Fin Hartas, who is just back from orc-slaughtering and mead-carousing with Leo at the Dumnonni live action roleplaying weekend.

In a week or two we'll be announcing the publication schedule for issues #10 through #13. That's got rakshasa, robots, Bifrost, Babylonian sphinxes, fairytales as dark as Russian bread, and not one but - count 'em - two undersea kingdoms. And wait till you see Jack in his Hulk pants. All coming soon, so don't go away.

Mirabilis e-comics are best bought from Graphic.ly

The first Mirabilis hardcover goes on sale in just over a week, the second volume is likely to follow within two months, and we're back to working full time on season two. So what could possibly go wrong? Here's what: an update to the iPad app which, despite being approved by Apple, turns out to contain a fatal bug that prevents you from downloading any of the issues. Epic fail is not an overstatement.

If you already had version 1.0 and just got the update, you can fix everything by deleting the new version from your iPad, then sync with iTunes on your computer to reinstall version 1.0 of the app. You'll need to restore the issues you already paid for, but you don't (of course) have to pay for them all over again. The old app will just re-download them, and in a minute or two you'll be good to go.

It was particularly annoying to hit this bump in the road as we had planned an update with lots of cool new features, including a Read Next Issue button and a social networking feature whereby you could tell friends about Mirabilis. None of those were in the 1.1 update, though, which really only had a new front page. So I guess it's a case of fixing what ain't broke and suffering the consequences. Doh.

Our hard-pressed coder, Simon Cook, is unfortunately on vacation this week so we won't get the new version of the app fixed for some time. But Leo has been in touch with Apple, who promise to try and revert back to version 1.0 as soon as possible. In the meantime, I'm in the odd position of having to tell everybody not to get the Mirabilis app - and if you do have it, don't update to version 1.1. What we'll aim to do is stick with version 1.0 for the time being, as it does the job perfectly well, and we'll only update when we can bring in a whole lot of new features in one go.

Even this cloud has a silver lining, as all eight issues of season one are now available on Graphic.ly, whose tech allows you to buy once and view the issues on multiple platforms including iOS, desktop and Android. And as a bonus, for a limited time only, issues #1 and #2 are both free. Get them from Graphic.ly here.

The author's promise to the reader

In the Best.Episode.Ever of The Simpsons, the Comic Book Guy is asked what right he has to complain about Itchy & Scratchy. “As a loyal viewer, I feel they owe me,” he says, to which Bart replies: “They’re giving you thousands of hours of entertainment for free. What could they possibly owe you? If anything, you owe them.”

In most countries outside the UK you don’t have to actually pay for the mere right to have a television in your home. But even if you’re watching The Simpsons for free on Fox, you still get shown a bunch of commercials that aren't exactly an enrichment of your viewing experience. And then you give in and go and buy stuff you don't need and the advertisers give the network some money to thank them for bringing all those bees to the flower. So you did end up paying for that show, whatever the writers at Gracie Films may think. There are no free lunches, and no free TV dinners either.

The contract that exists between writer and audience is more complicated than that between a craftsman and his customer. The reader or viewer or player gives you their money, but on top of that they give you their undivided attention (the ones who keep up a running commentary all the way through a movie, please leave now). They are asking you to make them believe - and not only for the time it takes to watch the movie or read the book, but an enduring belief. That’s why I can’t abide plot holes. A story should bear scrutiny if it has any right to my time.

Neil Gaiman says that the reader’s contract when buying a book is for that book only; it’s not a mandate upon the author to deliver more in the series. The problem I have with that, as an author, is that I know the power of suspense. It’s the best trick I have in my writer’s toolbox to keep you reading. You want to find out what happens next - at least, I hope you do. And after all, I don’t have to promise a ten-book arc with a sweeping plot that hinges on many secrets with which I am enticing your attention. I could just tie up everything in the one book. If I choose not to, it’s because I’m trying to plant a compulsion in you to buy my next book - and in that case I'd feel under an obligation to deliver.

The corollary is that if I do start to weave a story around some far-reaching mystery, I’d better have in mind the real answer to that mystery. At the point when it because clear that Lost’s writers hadn't yet thought about why the polar bear was on the island (much less why it was also in a Green Lantern comic) and they were just going to figure out something later - at that point, the contract is broken. Why continue to pay their wages when you can make up your own ending and it’ll be just as good?

The flipside of all this, and just as undesirable, is when stories are spun out indefinitely. “A beginning, a middle and an end,” is what Aristotle stipulated, not “a beginning and then endless variations on the theme until you finally jump the shark.” Success is the usual culprit, as endings have to be left open enough to leave room for a sequel or a new season. Prison Break is a perfect example of the problem: what would have been a memorably taut, single-season narrative suddenly splurged into the diminishing returns of patched-on plot developments. And, although I realize this is heresy, maybe we could say the same of The Sopranos. I know we got six seasons of the best soap opera on TV, and thank you, David Chase - but what about the pitch-dark Greek (okay, Italian) tragedy that the first season was building up to? The network’s need for more of the same possibly deep-sixed a climax that, had they gone ahead and ended the show there, would be remembered now as the chilling, thrilling apotheosis of TV drama.

Any sense of obligation a writer may feel to his or her readers, beyond delivering the script or book that they actually paid for, is of course self-inflicted. George R R Martin and Neil Gaiman rightly take their own view on this. However, the writer’s duty is to the characters is not up for debate. You brought them to life, so it’s incumbent on you to give them a life. That means a proper story, not leaving them in limbo halfway through or dragging them into an endless and directionless existence where nothing is ever resolved.

Obviously I’m thinking now of Mirabilis. I can certainly promise that the story will not be spun out ad infinitum. Leo and I have one year of narrative, which we currently expect to take about 800 pages across four seasons. Then it’ll be January 1st 1902, the green comet will be gone, and all our loose ends will be tied up, leaving not a rack behind.

The harder promise to make is that the story will reach its conclusion. I would gladly swear to that right here and now, but it’s not just up me. Since the DFC folded, Leo and I have been continuing to finance the work at our own expense. At least in comics it's not too difficult to do that: digital publishing brings in a nicely regular if not (yet) huge revenue stream, and every time we sign to a print edition in a new territory, as with the upcoming Print Media hardcovers in the UK, that pays for a few more issues. Mirabilis #9 through #12 are already fully funded, and by the time we complete #12 we'll be able to say the same for the four issues that will tie up season two. A handful at a time moves the mountain.

That's why I'm glad I'm not doing this for television. Joss Whedon would love to have had enough viewers to make Firefly and Dollhouse viable; same goes for David Milch and Deadwood. My heart skips a beat every time Fringe's ratings are mentioned. Since they announced the season four renewal, the heart in question is looking healthy at the moment, and thank you for asking, but if I had to find $1 million per episode of Mirabilis then I'd be in cardiac arrest in a month.

If Mirabilis continues to build an e-readership as it has been doing since Christmas, and if we keep on picking up print publishers in the US and Europe - in short, if enough people care about Jack and Estelle to want to find out what happens to them - then we promise on bended knee at any altar you like to take this story right through to the end. We’ve planned out an epic with some really big surprises that we think you’re going to enjoy. Hope you can join the ride all the way to the end.

The digital future of comics

It's kind of odd, as I'm not really that much of a tech-head. I've designed videogames, but I always had a team of coders to handle all the complicated techy stuff. And suddenly Leo and Martin and I are embracing all the new-fangled digital media - and the biggest surprise is that I find I'm really getting into it. Not just the tech side, but the whole big picture of how it's going to change comics.

Like collecting an armful of books every month. That's in my bones, been doing it since I was 9 years old, but more and more I found I was saving all the latest issues of Hellblazer or BPRD or whatever till there was a complete story to read. If you're doing that, you may as well just wait for the trade paperback, but of course that's not much fun for the publisher, who really needs the regular cashflow of monthly sales. However, the cost of paper has gone up and the number of places you can find comics on sale has gone down. Monthly comic books are never going to be on the shelves in Waterstones. Hmm, problem.

Now, I know a lot of old-school comics fans hate digital comics with a passion. They shouldn't, though, because digital comics are the answer to that problem. What's more, digital comics don't spell the death of print; they're going to rejuvenate it. Now I can dip in and try the first few pages or even the first couple of issues of a comic for free. If I like it, I can buy all the issues I want straight away, and I can read those on my iPad, phone or desktop. That's the kind of freedom Steve Jobs was talking about when he said:

"Your den, your living room, your car and your pocket: I hope that gives you a little bit of an idea of where we're going."

So that's cool, but here's the thing: I now buy more TPBs and print graphic novels than I ever did before. Digital isn't replacing the whole comics reading experience, it's just gradually taking up some of the slack lost to falling monthly sales. E-comics sales aren't (yet) at a level that Dark Horse are going to drop their monthly books altogether, but already we can see how e-comics can add to and enhance the raft of formats available for fans.

Our own toe-dipping with Mirabilis began with our dedicated iPad app - still the best digital comics reading experience for my money, and I can say that because I did actually have to pay to buy my own issues through the App Store! We've got an update coming for the app that will introduce social networking features, reorganize the in-app storefront and improve the UI. But a dedicated app for each title, even if that's the jewel in the crown, is not going to be the future of e-comics. We're seeing the rise of... are they publishers? are they stores?... sites like Comics+ and Graphic.ly, who take a modest share of revenue for adapting and hosting your comic on multiple platforms. This week we launched Mirabilis on Graphic.ly (iVerse's Comics+ will follow later this month) and that means readers can buy once and then read the comics on iOS, Android and PC/Mac, with Sony PSP not far off.

Why is it good for creators? Fifty to seventy percent royalties, and a means of cashflowing your work without having to sign away any ancillary rights. Why is it good for publishers? Digital sales can give a title a leg-up to the point where it's ready to come out as a collected print book. And all those digital outlets build the brand so there is a ready core market for the print book. Also, because comics are no longer tied to the narrowcasting inherent in selling via hobby comics stores, that means the end product actually can sit on a shelf in a store like Waterstones and not look out of place. Comics can be for everyone.

And that's why, most importantly of all, e-comics are good for readers - even for those readers who prefer to stick with print. Because digital editions will create more choice, lead to a more robust business, encourage creativity and innovation, and broaden the appeal of the medium. It's all good news for comics fans, so look forward to some exciting things coming your way in the very near future.

Coming next ish!

As part of the preparations for an update for the Mirabilis comics app in March, we've decided to add full-page teasers at the back of each issue. I'd love to run the full set as they're instant collectible classics, but the blurbs would give too much away to those of you who haven't read the Winter storyline. But here is the first, which will be slotted in at the back of #1 just after our hero muses that "nothing will ever be the same again". You got that right, Jack - especially once you meet the Kind Gentleman. Brrr.

Dance on moonbeams, slide on rainbows

While adapting the first 8 issues of the Mirabilis comic book for iPad, iBookstore and Kindle, I'm not neglecting the whimsical correspondence of the Royal Mythological Society that features on the comic's letters pages. These missives show the kind of things that are going on around the world as the ever-nearing Comet Meadowvane strikes a great green line through every rule of science, reason and logic. There's a whole book's worth already - and more coming in all the time - which makes them ripe for packaging up as an ebook.

New readers, of whom we have quite a few lately, may appreciate a bit of explanation at this point. (You old hands can jump straight down to the latest RMS letter.)

It is a little known fact of history – or myth – or both, that around the start of the twentieth century there existed a lost year.

In this year, a green comet appeared in the sky. As it grew larger, things that would previously have been considered utterly fantastical began to seep into everyday life. By the height of summer, imagination and reality were so seamlessly merged that few recalled a time when the world had been otherwise.

Mermaids swam in the Mediterranean. Martians commuted by train from Woking. Greek gods gave lecture tours of the United States. And with this new way of life came a whole set of problems of etiquette and decorum (see reference to mermaids).

Fortunately, the solution was at hand. In the depths of the British Museum, intrepid academics Bampton “Bammy” Bromfield and Cyril Clattercut had long been cataloguing accounts of the uncanny from around the world on behalf of the Royal Mythological Society. The arrival of the green comet was about to give them the busiest year of their lives. As you can see from letters like this:

Dear Doctor Clattercut and Professor Bromfield

If you could see my hand shake as I write this. Well, you can see from the ink blots how my nerves are shot. I am lately escaped from an ordeal of some months, and here is the way of it.

I think it was back in April - my diary says it was April the twentieth, but it seems now to have been in another life - I had occasion to drop in at the Savoy. O unhappy day! By bitter irony I was not even staying there; I had taken rooms at Claridge’s and only called at the Savoy to see if a lady friend of mine was in town.

The hotel had lately appointed a minotaur in a commissionaire’s uniform to stand outside the doors and hold an umbrella for people arriving by carriage. I have had to cross a few fields in my day, and I did not like the look of those little dark eyes and the snorting nostrils, I can tell you, nor the way the cap was pushed up by the fellow’s horns. But I hurried past him, pushed through the revolving doors - and there my ordeal began. An ordeal of four months when I wandered as though in a maze, ever turning as those accursed doors spun round and round and I thought I would drop from dizziness!

Occasionally I saw fleeting figures pass through. I called out but cannot tell if any heard me; certainly no-one stopped to help. At one point, after perhaps a month had passed, I stumbled out of the door and thought I had achieved deliverance. But it was not the lobby of the Savoy at all, but a vast hall of cracked masonry filled with sand drifts, which gave the impression of a great weight above as though far under the ground.

After that I returned to the revolving door - anything rather than bear the stillness and silence of that empty tomb. I survived on the rainwater that intermittently blew in as the weather changed outside, and once I caught a pigeon that had strayed through the hotel doors. Very tough and stringy meat when one has no fire. But for that poor bird, and the deposits of chewing gum left by some of the hotel’s foreign guests as they flitted through, I would surely have starved.

Was it desperation that led me to recall the stories of my youth? I was half mad by then, certainly; the whole world was on a corkscrew and my mind with it. I found myself thinking of the thread that Ariadne gave Theseus to lead him safely through the Labyrinth. It may have been in a delirium that I plucked the end of a thread from my trousers and attached it to the door frame so that even as it whirled around, I could keep my hands on that thread and follow it slowly back until I emerged onto the Strand, in the clear September light, and gulped the sharp and smoky autumnal air. It could have been a breath on the summit of Olympus, gentlemen, so sweet I found it.

The minotaur was still there. I gave him a look and he gave me a look back, and I was at the point of confessing how meanly I had thought of him before, and declaring him a good fellow, and I plucked at his sleeve and was ready to embrace him. But do you know what he did then? He called for the police and they took me away, and now I am up on a charge of public indecency. For, you see, in the escape my trousers had all unravelled.

Yours sincerely,

Theodore Lolley,

Seaford

Dr Clattercut replies: My heart goes out to you, poor chap. But other than publishing your letter as a caution to others, there is little we can do. My advice is to pay the fine and put the whole thing behind you.

Prof Bromfield: Quite. I got in touch with the manager of the Savoy and he tells me they originally had Cerberus on the door, but that was even worse.

Kindle users - here's your MOBI comic book!

After the app and epub versions, of course the Kindle had to be next on our list. So here is the first issue of Mirabilis in MOBI format. Creating this version meant chopping the pages of issue #1 into two hundred separate images (one panel per page in most cases) and then converting them to grayscale and crunching them down to a size the device can handle. Yet, as the picture above shows, the spark of genius in Leo's, Martin's and Nikos's work still shines through.

If you've got a device with a Kindle emulator and a color screen, you'll probably opt for the three full-color mini-episodes: "Stung!", "The Door in the Water" and "The Wrong Side of Bedlam". Just one thing... don't read those using the iPad's Kindle app, will you? You can get the exact same content in our bespoke Mirabilis free comic book app and there it's presented in zoomable, swipable comic pages the way it's meant to look.

A caveat: I don't own a Kindle, so I only know that this version works in Amazon's online emulator. And I'd still recommend viewing the comic in all its glory, either in its jaw-droppingly amazing App Store incarnation (where you can buy all 8 issues) or at the very least take a look at issue #1 as a full-color ebook. And if you do read at it on the Kindle and spot a problem, please let me know so I can fix it!

Top slot on BookBuzzr for Mirabilis app

After the Herculean effort of finishing Mirabilis: Winter and working with our code maestro, Simon Cook, to get it in the App Store, Leo and I started to think about ways to get the word out. One of the best forums for this is BookBuzzr, which is usually used for print books. BookBuzzr lets you set up a flipbook widget so that people can take a look at the first few pages of your book before they decide to buy.

As chapter one of the Winter book is free on iPad anyway, we also put that on BookBuzzr just before Christmas and promptly forgot all about it. (Two plates of turkey with all the trimmings and a bottle of Crozes-Hermitage 2003 can do that.) So I was astonished this week to take a look on BookBuzzr and find that Mirabilis is the #1 most-viewed title on BookBuzzr's comics and graphic novels section.

Now, I know what you're thinking. BookBuzzr is mostly looked at by proper literary types. You know, the folks who read Dan Brown and James Patterson. So how big a deal is it to be top-ranked in comics? Well, we're also #1 in Young Adult and #1 in Science Fiction & Fantasy. And we're in fourth place most-viewed on all BookBuzzr books last week.

How this will translate into app sales remains to be seen, but if you're a novelist or comic book creator and you're looking to publicize your work, I recommend giving BookBuzzr a try. Don't worry about giving part of your work away for free. If the story is compelling, people will come back for more. As Cory Doctorow says, today the artist's enemy is not piracy but obscurity.

US trade paperbacks on Amazon and Barnes & Noble

No need to fight, there are plenty of copies to go round. I'm talking about the long-awaited Mirabilis trade paperbacks, two fabulous volumes each with 112 pages of thrills, spills, wonder and chills.

Mirabilis: Winter volume 1: There's a green comet in the sky and things are getting strange. Every day, fantasy and reality are getting harder to tell apart. Witches in bottles, warmongering cabbages from the planet Pluto, and a pterandon roosting on the Eiffel Tower. Or is it a pterodactyl?

Jack Ember is caught between two very unreliable mentors. Talisin is a two-thousand year old wizard or an escaped madman - or possibly both. The Kind Gentleman is the sort of fairy godfather who'll grant you three wishes you can't refuse. Both of them have plans for Jack, who's spent his life dreaming of adventure and now is about to get rather more of it than he bargained for.

On sale on Amazon for only $19.99. Or get it from Barnes & Noble here.

And the action continues in Mirabilis: Winter volume 2: The green comet looms closer and the boundaries of reality are starting to crumble. Plant monsters, chess-playing robots, warrior saints and undersea kingdoms. And still the year has hardly begun.

Jack finds the odds against him piling up. He needs help. But who can he trust? Surrounded by fickle friends and obliging enemies, it's time to make some hard choices.

You can buy it on Amazon here. So that's a total of 224 pages of wild 'n weird green comet goodness. And for UK and Irish fans there's an even bigger treat coming up, as in just a few months you'll be able to buy the album-sized hardback editions.

Meanwhile, Leo and Nikos and I are cracking straight on with the next season, Mirabilis: Spring, the first volume of which we should have ready before the year is out. Year of wonders? Oh yes.

And in other news: we learned late last night that the Mirabilis iPad app has shot in at #7 on "What's Hot!" in App Store books.
So if you've got an iPad you can get all of Mirabilis: Winter and the Royal Mythological Society letters pages as a bonus feature. Enjoy!

It all starts here

Mirabilis has been in the App Store a little over 2 weeks now, and in that time we hit #12 in the UK books chart, #24 in France, and #74 in the US. Not a bad start to 2011. In a few weeks we'll have news of the iPhone version, and some other digital platforms too, along with more details of when readers in the UK and Eire can get their hands on those gorgeous Print Media hardback editions.

Stateside and Canada, you can get the trade paperback already: Mirabilis: Winter volume one from Amazon and from Barnes & Noble and volume two will be on sale before the end of January. There's never been a better time to make it a Year of Wonders.