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.

Reality kick

Every so often these days, somebody suggests using Kickstarter to fund one of my comics or gamebooks. I expect it was similar in the 1930s – “You just need to put it on the wireless.” Did Caxton tell Malory that the printing press would make him rich?

I’m no expert on crowdfunding. In fact, so much not an expert that I’m not even sure about the “crowd” part. Most projects seem to get off the ground because less than a thousand people stump up an average fifty dollars apiece. Those T-shirts had better be stunning.

But let’s say you put your comic or gamebook on Kickstarter and you raise $100,000. Whoop! Quit your day job, right? Well, no… Because you now have to print, parcel and post about six thousand copies of the book. Plus some T-shirts and a free lunch for the rich kids. A conventionally-published book doesn’t get onto the bestseller lists by selling six thousand copies.

Admittedly, by using Kickstarter as a publishing platform you cut out the bookseller. So that’s 50% of the cover price that you don’t have to give away. But you do have all the manufacture and fulfilment issues to take care of.

What’s the profit margin on a Kickstarter campaign? I haven’t looked (see Not An Expert disclaimer above) but I’d expect them to vary wildly. By profit, I mean the money you’re left with when the last cheque clears and the last book goes sliding down the chute at the post office. With that you have to cover all your fixed costs – writing, art, typesetting, leaving aside the risk of running the Kickstarter in the first place.

This is why I’m sceptical when somebody tells me how easy it would be to fund an entire book through crowdfunding. I can do all the writing for nothing (I didn’t pay myself a penny for all the work I did on Mirabilis books 1, 2 and 3, including layouts and lettering) but there’s still artwork costs. Editing, if you care about quality. Lettering. Typesetting. Printer set-up.

I’m pretty versatile. I can do about three-quarters of that stuff myself. But I still have to pay artists and colorists. And at the end of the rainbow I’m even hoping there might be a few coins left to pay for the thousands of man-hours I put in along the way.

Kickstarter is a way of raising a subscription to print books. It also serves as a great way to enthuse a core of fans who will hopefully spread the word about your project. But it is not a viable way to raise development funds – unless you are super-famous to begin with, in which case you probably don’t need the development funds that badly anyway.

But Kickstarter as a publishing platform? That’s something else. Now you have to make enough on sales to cover costs from scratch. I’m often asked about gamebooks because I wrote a lot of them in the ‘80s and ‘90s. A gamebook takes about four man-months to write. (My interactive adaptation of Frankenstein took nearly eight months, but that was much bigger than a regular gamebook.) Interior art, call that a man-month. Cover, editing, typesetting, another man-month. So a minimum of six man-months for just a black-and-white gamebook. For a full color graphic novel like Mirabilis it’s getting on for twice that.

Writers and artists do need to eat. (Nobody in the movie or publishing industries believes this.) No executive wants to pay them as much as you’d get for flicking paperclips around an office and setting up PowerPoint presentations, but even so that Kickstarter-based publisher will need to find some $23,000 to fund the gamebook, $46,000 for a graphic novel. If you build in a 20% profit on sales, that means the campaign will need to hit a quarter million to get the OGN paid for.

That’s not how it works, of course. I didn’t go out and get investors to do Mirabilis. We had some money in the early days from David Fickling and Random House, but when The DFC (blessed be its memory) had to fold, we didn’t shut up shop. I continued writing for nothing. I went out and found supporting jobs that would pay for Leo and Nikos. This is how most creators have to work. Kickstarter may be a shiny new thing, but it’s not going to change that.

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.

Only connect!

Having written a couple of dozen choose-your-own type books in my career, but only one of those in the last year (and that one, Frankenstein, very different from all the ones that came before) I’ve been musing on the dos and don’ts of interactive storytelling. My tolerance for rules, theories, and patterns doesn’t go very far – not when it comes to creativity, anyway; science is another matter. But here are three rules that are kind of pinned up above my computer screen, metaphorically speaking:

1. First do no harm.

It’s easy to make people interact. You could lock each chapter so that the reader has to solve a sudoku before they can read on. But you haven’t made them want to interact, and they’re not interacting with the story, just with the medium that allows them to read it.

Consider what fiction is trying to achieve: to tempt us into clothing ourselves in another life, a different reality. That’s if it works. If you want to make your story interactive, your first hurdle is not to break that.

2. Just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should.
Even if an option to interact doesn’t harm the work, if it isn’t going to enhance what you’re doing, why put it in? Decide who this is for. Have a clear vision of what the work is. That way you’ll roll out a clean design, uncluttered by bells and whistles that add nothing to the experience.

3. Think about who the reader is in all this.
All right, so you can interact with this story – but as whom? This is the big interactivity question. (Well, one of them.) I don’t mean that you have to make the reader one of the principal characters. You certainly can do it that way, but it’s just one solution that suits one type of story. More generally, consider the role that you are giving the reader, whether overtly or tacitly, because that role will inform all their interaction.

One kind of interactivity we’ve been seeing in (digital) books is the playroom model. Your sweep your hand to blow characters’ hats off. You shake the iPad to get the characters to open up about themselves, or just to fall about. The reader’s role here is god – or author – and it works okay for kids, who are perfectly able to look down on and toy with characters in a story at the same time as putting themselves in their shoes. Adults don’t have the same mental flexibility, so for them this kind of interactivity is likely to have a distancing effect. It’s hard to empathize with characters when I’m treating them like bugs in a jar.

More alienating still are those book apps where you click on text to rearrange words. You might represent a character’s amnesia by having letters drop virus-like off the screen, or unconsciousness by having a rising black blot that obscures the text. Now it’s just a puzzle, a trick, an executive toy. The reader’s role is reduced to that of a person looking at words arranged on a page. And if you think that’s what a novel is, you’re in the wrong class.

Forget those tricks. Remember rule #1: a good story already goes way beyond that kind of hotch-potch interactivity. If you want to create interesting ways to interact, look at how a regular, non-interactive story engages the reader and play to that.

If I were writing an interactive spy thriller, I could give you the role of the hero’s controller. You’re advising him on his mission. Maybe he’s reluctant, so you have to coax him. And now, see, there’s conflict – which is good, because if you’re in conflict with the hero then you’re definitely engaged.

I could develop that in another way in an Arabian Nights fantasy, where your role is as the genie that the hero calls upon to get him out of scrapes. His wish is your command – but there’s obeying and then there’s service, two different things. So you’ll develop a relationship, either Chewie and Han or Captain Jack and Will Turner, up to you.

Those examples are quite overt and gamey, placing the reader distinctly in the story, even though in a supporting role. In Frankenstein, the reader’s role is only implied. You’re Victor’s confidant, the alter ego from whom he has only those secrets he also keeps from himself. That allows you to step back into the shadows, which is where the reader of a novel normally watches from. But it’s never that simple, is it? Am I only observing Bond when I read Casino Royale, say? Not at all. Another part of me is Bond, raking in the chips, sipping the martini, chatting up the girl.

That’s books, but the same applies to videogames. You have a role (in fact more than one) implied in the way you interact with a game character like Lara Croft or Max Payne. That sets up expectations – a contract between creator and reader/viewer/player. Break that contract, violate the rules of the role(s) you’ve put the user in, and you’ve got the fatal flaw of something like Heavy Rain, a flaw explained very insightfully here by Emily Short.

Rules are only useful as reminders of what you know already. To create good interactive entertainment, first understand non-interactive entertainment. You want to write an interactive novel? Look at literature, see what it is that makes that so powerful. Want to make a kids’ book app? Study the best picture- and popup-books. A narrative game? Soak up what’s effective in cinematic storytelling. That way, when you add interactivity, you won’t be fixing what ain’t broke.

Interacting with stories

Outside the games industry, interactivity is often met with fascination and fear, and it’s never long before somebody asks, “Will the reader be able to choose the ending?”

Would you want to? A good story is meant to surprise and delight. If you could bring yourself to pause the action just before Holmes grapples Moriarty, and decide who will go off the ledge, you can’t have been that enthralled. And how would that kind of interactivity enhance your enjoyment anyway? If complete control of the plot is what you’re looking for, the solution is simple: become a writer.

Instead of choosing the ending, then, maybe good interactivity should allow you to influence the ending. There’s something to be said for that. Literary academics are fond of psychoanalysing characters, and it’s a small step from there to giving them advice. “Hamlet, get off your arse, mate.” Of course, characters in a story – just like your friends – don’t have to take your advice. Or how about this: they could misapply your advice and then blame you. Now it’s getting interesting.

The kids’ gamebooks of thirty-odd years ago all followed the obvious model of an omniscient narrator presenting you, in the role of protagonist, with limited information: “Here are three caskets, of lead, silver and gold.” Characterization of the main character is difficult because hearing your avatar talk about things that you as reader know nothing about can really mess with suspension of disbelief. The interactivity inevitably reduces to problem-solving. And I like problem-solving, but it’s not really what’s interesting about fiction.

A more fruitful kind of interactivity is to have a first person narrator with whom the reader can have a dialogue. You’re his Hopkirk, his Harvey, his Tyler Durden. That’s the approach I’ve taken with Frankenstein. In five of the book’s six parts, you are the voice of Victor Frankenstein’s conscience – or ambition, or reason, as you prefer. The effect is very different from a game. It’s like reading the novel. But where, in the original, Victor’s self-pitying introspection can become wearying, here you have the opportunity to challenge him. In striking up a dialogue – a relationship, in fact – you become more invested in his fate. You’re not solving the problems of the plot so much as exploring the crannies of character.

For that reason, perhaps, Michael Bhaskar, my editor at Profile Books, said he found that reconfiguring the text to make it explorable like this makes for a more engaging read than the original. Modern readers, some of whom even struggle with the genius of Dickens, can certainly be forgiven for not wanting to wade through the teenaged Mrs Shelley's stodgy prose. I certainly feel making Frankenstein interactive is a worthwhile experiment, and it opens up other rewarding forms of interactive fiction that are a far cry from, “You see a bloodthirsty ogre at the end of the passage.”

I don’t think this is the future of books, though. The novel as a form does not require fixing. Never, when reading War and Peace, did I wish I could break out of the story to call up a map of a battlefield or research 19th century Russian etiquette. Sometimes I might grudgingly refer to the notes at the back, resenting the interruption of the narrative flow even as I did. If it’s a good novel, I don’t want it to have pictures or sound effects or 3D. It doesn’t need them. A great story holds you spellbound in the world of your imagination. Or rather, and better, in the fusion of your imagination with the author’s.

Which is, when you think about it, a truly rewarding form of interactivity. And it’s been there all along.

Frankenstein is coded for iPad and iPhone by Inkle and published by Profile Books.

Boys' own

My first publisher was the legendary Angela Sheehan at Grafton Books. In those days, I wrote choose-your-own type fantasy gamebooks, and every publisher wanted a series so I kept pretty busy. I worked with Philippa Dickinson at Corgi, Elizabeth Roy at Knight Books, Gill Evans at Mammoth, Mary Tapissier and Marion Lloyd at Pan Macmillan, and many more.

You can see the pattern. British kids’ and young adult publishing is run by women. There are no men. None. Well, there is the (also legendary) David Fickling, but there really is only one David Fickling!

It’s no mystery how this came about. Institutions that are run by men tend to appoint men, institutions run by women appoint women. So inevitably there’s a positive feedback loop that will take you one way or the other. And it wouldn’t matter, except that it used to be said that “boys don’t read” – which is almost perfectly analogous to the videogames industry truism of a few years back that “girls don’t play games”. That’s because female editors may not be the best people to judge what boys like, just as predominantly male game developers didn’t have much idea how to make games that girls would play.

(I once said to an editor that she could find out what kind of stories boys like by looking at the videogames they play. Her reply: “Oh, we did that once. Back when games were at their height.” To her, videogames were a passing fad.)

It is getting better. Kate Wilson at Nosy Crow (now, she really is legendary) took the radical step of actually asking boys what they like to read about. I was going to say it’s not rocket science, but actually rocket science turns out to be one of the very things they’re into – along with dinosaurs, robots, warfare, sport. Really, though, they just want stuff to happen. Less jaw-jaw. Boys did read Harry Potter – more boys, in fact, than girls – and when that juggernaut first gathered momentum, one publisher declared, “It seems like adventure is back in fashion with kids.” The fact is, of course, it never went out of fashion. It just wasn’t being published.

Having said all that, I don’t see fiction or games coming down along gender lines. Okay, there’s chick lit and movies like Mamma Mia – but, averse as I am to them, I have no more liking for over-testosteroned stuff like The Losers. What the average boy wants in a book is just the same as the average girl wants: a cracking story that makes you wonder and care what’s going to happen next. So it’s good for fiction that there’s been a move away from twee, leisurely, soft-concept stuff in favour of exhilarating, character-driven, high-stakes, high-concept storylines. We can pretty much thank J K Rowling and her editors for that.

And all of the above is a preamble to say that one of the best places to find that kind of fiction reviewed is the Book Zone. (“For boys” is added parenthetically, though these are books just as much for gutsy girls like Maria Jones in The Box of Delights.) As I often look at the Book Zone to find my next read, it was very nice to find Mirabilis Volume One reviewed there – and simply stunning to see that Mr Hartwell described it as one of his favourite books of the year. Leo and Nikos and I were reet made up by that, I can tell you.

Now, we had hoped that Mirabilis Volume Two would be out in time for Christmas, but the schedule has been thrown out by shipping times from the printers (in Bosnia – well, it’s a long way from there to the North Pole) and the fact that Leo has got sidetracked by some for-hire work, meaning that Volume Three has got pushed back to the autumn. But turning that around, the good news is there will be two new Mirabilis volumes next year (Volume Two early in the year, Volume Three in October). And you still have time to get Volume One before Christmas - at 25% off on the Book Depository with free delivery anywhere in the world. They must be using reindeer.

To make up for not getting the new book out for this Christmas, we’re going to be running a 5-page preview over the next week, starting tomorrow. This is the episode that, if The DFC had continued, was originally going to be called “Lock and Load”. Grab your torches and pitchforks! To the castle!

Do you want to climb the beanstalk?

A decade ago, a phone was still just a device you used to call somebody up. Then people in games and television started to take an interest. After all, here's a little gizmo stuffed with electronics that people carry everywhere. The developers started to think of what kind of games you could play on that - a route to the holy grail of casual gaming, then only dreamed of. Television folk noted the way that audiences were engaging with shows like Big Brother, their interest piqued probably not so much by the opportunity to create new and interesting formats as by the chance to milk more money from the viewers.

Leo and I were working in that unmapped border country between games and TV. We got to go to lots of meetings and conferences where people would get excited by ARGs and ways of delivering content as a finger buffet across multiple media. Where there are no maps, dragomans grow sleek and fat. Nowadays you'll hear the word "convergence" less and the words "curate" and "transmedia" more; otherwise those conferences haven't much changed in the intervening ten years.

As Leo and I were not equipped with the lavish budget that broadcasters give to the people who jaw-jaw, we had to focus on rather more modest goals than setting up a citywide game funnelling attention towards a reality TV show. One of the technologies we looked at was WAP. Crude by the standards of a modern smartphone, the phones back then allowed text and very simple graphics. "Aha!" we thought. "Gamebooks."

We realized that the sub-sub-Tolkien brand of fantasy popularized in the gamebooks of the 1980s were not going to grab a broad, casual, all-ages market. Instead we focussed on various types of family entertainment. One of our projects was Tell Me A Story, a series of mother-&-me interactive stories on a phone. Say you miss the bus, it's raining, and you have to wait twenty minutes for the next one. Twenty minutes - that's a yawning infinite gulf of boredom to a preschool child. These WAP gamebooks gave you an interactive fairytale that you could read to your kids, helping them with the choices - none of which was ever a wrong choice, of course. The pleasure of interacting was to see where the story would spin off to.

You can see how one of our Tell Me A Story gamebooks would have worked over on the Fabled Lands blog. As fairytales are such archetypal story forms, and most of us learn our storytelling grammar from them, kicking in a bit of interactivity seems to make a lot of sense. Now that we're into the era of apps, I'm thinking that Leo and I ought really to get back to this project. Um, just as soon as we finish the remaining 540 pages of Mirabilis, that is.

On the horizon

There are no more online episodes of Mirabilis planned, but we do still have a 200-page adventure all ready and waiting for you. What you've seen so far is barely the first quarter of just the first book. And, like Blondel searching high and low for the Lionheart, we're going to keep exploring ways to get that out into the world. One day.

In the meantime, keeping dropping by for updates on our other projects. It may still say "Mirabilis" at the top of the page but it's going to be about a whole lot more. We've got Sweet, a romantic comedy story in graphic novel form. The first 23-page instalment of that is already written and storyboarded, but of course it may take quite a while to do the artwork. If and when we have something to show, you'll see it here.

And there's Frankenstein's Legions, for which Martin and I have long been searching for the perfect storm to give it life. We just need to agree on the right medium. Videogame? Comic? Gamebook? There is already a prose novel, by the award-winning fantasy author John Whitbourn. While we make up our minds where to take it next, just glom onto that stunning image below and then zip over to PODgallery where you can buy it as a gleaming Giclée print.

And if you enjoyed the gamebook we gave away a short while ago, keep an eye out for a whole range of interactive adventures that Jamie Thomson, Mark Smith, Oliver Johnson and I have got planned for publication on e-readers. Fabled Lands is where you'll get all the breaking news on that.

The Fabled Lands Studio also has some plans to turn Fangleworths into a manga and, although that's very early stage and wouldn't directly involve me and Leo, it's still our baby and we'll be on hand to guide it along if it goes ahead. We might even do a series of Fangleworths books, Astrosaurs-style, to back it up - and those we would most definitely write personally. It's all a bit up in the air contractually, but we'll tell you more as and when.

And quite apart from all the above, Leo and I have been cooking up a completely new book series that we're almost ready to unveil. All that I'm going to say is that it's for boys and it makes extreme sports look like tiddlywinks. This series will have its own website and we'll tell you all about it very soon.

So, though 2010 may not be the Year of Wonders, it will nonetheless be a year of goodies!

Free interactive fiction

UPDATE: Oct 14 2012 - I've taken down the free Heart of Ice file because the book is due to be re-released in spring 2013 by Osprey Books, along with half a dozen other gamebooks by me and Jamie Thomson - with more to come after that, we hope. Read all about it on the Fabled Lands blog. Still haven't picked up your copy of the Heart of Ice e-gamebook? What are you waiting for? It's free!

Oh, I get it. You're worried that you might not enjoy it. You're saying to yourself, "I know it's a whopping 453-section adventure game with multiple routes through the story, loads of mutated monsters to fight, characters to interact with and intriguing mysteries to solve. And I know it's a completely diceless game system and has an auto-fill character sheet so no need to fuss around with pencils and stuff. But can I be sure it's a more worthwhile use of my time than watching Jedward-v-Lady Gaga mashups on YouTube?"

Ooh, you're hard to please, you are. Well, this snippet from an interview with gamebook aficionado Efrem Orizzonte may help you to make up your mind:

EO: Heart of Ice is arguably the most mature gamebook ever written. The plot is superb, character design and development is among the finest ever seen, the atmosphere is perfect and the multiple endings mean that if you survive to the end, you can always “win” – if you can call any of the ambiguous, bittersweet finales a victory! Heart of Ice is a story full of deeper meanings, and it is so good that it may even have inspired a movie, called Post Impact. What inspired you to write such an original and mature story in gamebook format? Is there some particular message you wanted to convey to your readers?DM: I’m not so much into trying to give my readers messages, I just have certain topics that interest me and I like to get readers thinking about them. Questions, not answers. Heart of Ice got started as a role-playing session. I can pinpoint it exactly to Christmas 1976. I was back home after my first term at college and I needed a scenario for a large number of players. Believe it or not, I started with the idea of doing a serious version of It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World, kind of the way Failsafe Point is a serious version of Dr Strangelove. The idea of Du-En came from marvelling at the buildings of Christ Church, absolutely deserted late on a frosty night after the end of term, with the buildings lit up pale against this immense field of stars and the unyielding smell of cold sandstone, I love that. After the first game session, I was walking home with one of the players and he said how he was imagining Du-En as a movie, and what he liked was that the focus of the session had been in the tension among the characters camped out in this ruined, snow-filled city. It was big end-of-the-world action but it was centred on a small group of characters. And a mere 18 years later I took all that and put it into the book.
Made up your mind yet? 'Cause I've done all I can. The Earth is dying, ultimate power is up for grabs, and what the human race needs now is a hero. If you think you fit the bill, grab your barysal gun and get to world-saving right here.

Bald sand elf

No, Mirabilis hasn't gone all elves and dungeons, that's a page from the Fabled Lands comic written by Jamie Thomson and drawn by Russ Nicholson. To tell the truth, it's the only finished page they did, although you can read the whole comic in rough pencils as a work in progress - issue #1 and issue #2. It's based on Jamie's BBC Radio adventure serial "The Heart of Harkun" that gets repeated every couple of years. He's currently at Lionhead Studios writing the script for Fable 3, so you know to expect a high standard.

If high fantasy action is your thing, you might want to check out the Fabled Lands blog, which has updates about stuff like the upcoming iPhone game, the FL boardgame and so on. Make sure to stock up on potions of +3 healing before you head over there. Dragons abound.

Meanwhile Mirabilis steams on into the east, with the next episode seeing Jack renew an acquaintance and finding out more about the green comet. Catch up on earlier episodes so you're ready for "Outside Looking In" tomorrow.

The best gamebook ever? Discover for yourself – it’s free!

UPDATE: Oct 14 2012 - I've taken down the free Heart of Ice file because the book is due to be re-released in spring 2013 by Osprey Books, along with half a dozen other gamebooks by me and Jamie Thomson - with more to come after that, we hope. Read all about it on the Fabled Lands blog.

In the twenty-third century the world is dying. Only a few million humans are left clinging to existence as the weather worsens and ice tightens its inexorable grip on the planet.

The cause of this slow death is Gaia, the AI satellite system designed to regulate Earth's climate. But Gaia has gone mad, and instead of a paradise she has made of the world a frozen hell.

Mankind's last glimmer of hope is the Heart, a crystalline meteorite thought to have been forged in the Big Bang. It has the ability to shape a universe, the one who touches it becoming mankind's savior and wielding the power of a god - or a devil.

The power to make yourself lord of a new creation is a tempting prize. The greatest heroes of the age covet the Heart for themselves, and the race is on.

The quest for ultimate power will take you across a dying world, contending with monsters, mutants and desperate men, to the haunted city of Du-En in the midst of the Saharan ice wastes.

You will need all your resourcefulness to choose the right allies, outwit your rivals, and be first to reach the Heart.

Now don't say I don't spoil you, because we've got a free gift and it's a big ‘un. Right HERE you can download an interactive PDF of my sci-fi adventure gamebook Heart of Ice, complete with exquisite illustrations by fantasy gaming legend Russ Nicholson and evocative maps by Leo. You won't need dice, you won't need a pencil. Just unzip the file and get playing.

And if you like it, please tell a friend. Or mail it to them. Shout about it on forums. Tweet about it. Plug it in your own blog (it’s http://tinyurl.com/y8qo9ou if you do, and I thank you from the bottom of my not-at-all icy heart). That’s it, that’s the only payment – we just ask that you help spread the word to everyone who might enjoy it.

Now, I appreciate that in these days of freebies everywhere, you do have to look a gift horse in the mouth. It may not cost you money, but there's still your time to think of. So I will say that Heart of Ice has been frequently described in reviews as "the best gamebook ever" and, although I obviously can't comment on that, it is the best gamebook I ever wrote and, frankly, that does probably make it the best gamebook ever. (Hey – it's honesty you're after here, right?)

If further incentive is needed, take a look at some reviewers’ comments:

• “The game system is not only simple and elegant, but it also makes an absolute joy out of character creation.”
• “Superb use of exposition, tone, and detail.”
• “The characterization surpasses that of many a novel.”
• “Technology whose deeper secrets are lost to the centuries meshes wonderfully with a kind of freakish neo-Renaissance civilization of explorers, opportunists, merchants and nobles.”
• “At all times this world feels as if it exists outside of your immediate experiences, outside of the page.”
• “The metaphysical element reflected in the skill set melds seamlessly into the setting.”
• “It shows every sign of having been written by someone who loves the gamebook medium, and with great narrative skill and vision to back that energy up.”
• “The best character design, the best one-shot world design and the best writing.”
• “Heart of Ice is an experience to remember.”

Thanks to Paul Mason, print publisher of Heart of Ice, for okaying the free ebook version. And to Per Jorner for insights and critique.

Shiver me timbers!

For the sake of completeness, here's another of the comic strip concepts that we pitched to David Fickling in the early planning stages of the DFC.

In a parallel universe you are reading the blog, not of Mirabilis: Year of Wonders, but of Down Among the Dead Men, a rip-roaring pirate fantasy adventure. Here's the guff from the pitch document. I hate writing this kind of hyped-up summary btw - just seems so fake if you're not actually a foot-in-the-door Glengarry Glen Ross type of guy - which I'm certainly not:

 

Orphaned in a pirate attack, Angel Bones has grown to young adulthood aboard the Belle Dame, captained by the dreaded Captain Skarvench, most evil man ever to raise the Jolly Roger.

Greed and plunder, black powder and blood - this is the only world Angel has ever known.

Now Angel makes a bid for freedom accompanied by a motley crew of three: tough, abrasive Joe Oakley; lugubrious, lantern-jawed Ed Grimes, and timid but resourceful little Billy Blutz.

Pursued by Skarvench, our plucky band of heroes are sucked into an adventure that will see them cross swords with sea-going vampires, pit their wits against the wiliest wizards, and take flight aboard a galleon powered by moonlight.

Whether they like it or not, they must thwart Skarvench’s most evil and blackguardly scheme ever - to kidnap the beautiful young Queen Glorianne and hold her to ransom for a million gold doubloons.

A daunting task for any youngster. But wait - didn’t we say? Angel Bones has a secret no-one knows...

Angel is a mermaid.

Too Cap'n Sparrow for you? In fact the story was based on a gamebook that Leo and I worked on back in 1993, when Pirates of the Caribbean was still just a fairground ride. Not that that makes any difference, of course. By the time we came to pitch it as a comic strip, this particular mix of spookiness and swashbuckling was no longer looking as fresh as it had done. 

I'm happy we went with Mirabilis because I think it's a stronger story, but Dead Men would've been fun too.

Hubris

I don't normally give interviews. Not in a Greta Garbo kind of way (slaps hand to forehead, gasps, sinks into armchair) but simply because I think work should speak for itself and authorial intention is irrelevant. Entertaining in its own right, okay; but still irrelevant.

Take Bruce Robinson on Withnail & I:

"I think if there was even the remotist hint of [homosexuality] in [Withnail's relation with Marwood] there would have been the remotist hint of it in my relationship with Viv [MacKerrell] and there wasn't."

Now Bruce Robinson is a true genius. He writes beautifully and his movies are like nobody else's. But I like the interpretation of that last scene in Withnail that implies an unrequited love, and I don't care what Robinson says. Maybe he can't see it. After all he is only the author.

Anyway, I did in the end give an interview to Efrem Orizzonte because his questions were really good and I figured people would enjoy reading them even if the answers I gave weren't much cop. So you can read that interview here - it's mostly about gamebooks and fantasy role-playing games like Dragon Warriors but there's also some stuff about Mirabilis.