Game book released!

My gamebook "Dwarven Vengeance" is now available to buy via LuLu.  This is a game book where you choose which path to follow and which fights to have. It's a classic "turn to page" style game book with 401 entries. It differs from some of the classic gamebooks in that it doesn't have any of the lame endings where you just die. Instead there is always a chance to win through, a small chance true, but then you pick your own fights! 

 This is currently only available via Lulu's Print On Demand printing service.

So onto the back cover blurb...

You've lost your home, your family and your future.

When you woke to find a dragon smashing through the gates of the underholm and goblins swarming in the corridors your first thoughts were of survival.

Then the anger came, and the thirst for revenge and the need to get your home back.

So starts the quest to find the Dragonbane, a mystical item that is your only hope to defeat the dragon.

Buy the book at LuLu.com

Nearly done

I'm finally reaching the end of the work associated with my game book. This has been an ongoing project for most of the year. I've only be working on it in fits and starts. Indeed it was mostly written during my lunchtimes at work, just a few paragraphs a day. Then I left it sitting for a while before starting on the editing.

I did two full editing passes, again during lunchtimes covering just a few entries per day, then let it sit again.

Then I sent it out to a few beta readers, only one of whom sent me feedback. I applied the fixes he suggested and let it rest again.

So here I am now doing the final proof-read-aloud. That's reading the whole book aloud. I'm so glad I opted to give this try. Even after all those passes once I read it aloud I found even more problems to fix!  This is process I'll definitely use in future.

With luck by the end of the weekend I'll have this book done and uploaded to LuLu as a POD book and I'll order a proof copy. If that comes through without issue I'll be foisting this on the whole world!

A pulp story

So with my game book's first draft complete, and sitting to fester for a few weeks, I started looking around for a small project to fill the gap.

Looking through by browser's bookmarks I spotted the Lester Dent pulp plan and decided to give it a go. I'm not writing a noir detective, but have opted instead for a post-apocalyptic story. Like Solomon Kane my hero uses a sword and carries a pistol, but instead of a fantasy background I'm plunging forwards into the sci fi genre.

I wrote the first quarter of the story, which was supposed to be 1500 words, but ended up with 2100. So I've just done a hatchet job on it, but only managed to get it down to 1587. I can't bear to cut any more!

I've started the next segment and will just have to write it using 87 less words...but I'm already running a bit long, considering how much I want to stuff in there.

Hmmm....too wordy, I'm too wordy. Less words, more action.

It's an interesting challenge, having to write less. It's exercising my brain in some new ways and despite the pain of cutting, cutting, cutting; it's a fun thing to do. If you haven't tried it, add it onto your to-do list.

Writing a game book

I've started writing a game book in the style of "choose your own adventure" or more accurately "fighting fantasy".  I have collaborated on one in the past  but this is the first time I've done one on my own.

I have a total of 400 paragraphs to write and have just passed the 250 mark.

Having recently changed jobs I've found my schedules at home have got quite mixed up. The time I used to use for writing is gone.  So I've had to adjust. I've now started using the lunch break at work as my writing time. It has worked out rather well.  I've been getting in the region of 5-8 paragraphs written each working day.

I'm actually quite happy with this arrangement. The office is quite quiet during the lunch hours allowing me to concentrate on the writing. At home I would be disturbed by "Mr Mankey" our cat, trying to take ownership of my lap during writing time!

I nibble my lunch and tap tap tap on the keyboard. It still feels like a break as I'm working on something I find fun!

It's started!

I have just completed the first two paragraphs of the game book, the first draft. Actually it's not paragraphs, I should say "entries". In the old Fighting Fantasy game books, most of the entries were paragraphs.  In my book most entries will be more than one paragraph, and indeed featuring a lot of dialogue, which will make the "paragraph" terminology redundant. So henceforth I will try and say Entries.

Word count on the document is at 3000, but at this early stage that is mostly a junk number. The majority of that is the headings for each entry and the "go to ..." that appears at the end of most entries. After this however the word count will allow me to see how much it's growing by. Yet, now I think about it, word count hardly matters in a game book. Progress is really measured in entries that have been completed.  So in those terms, 2 down and 119 to go.  Boy oh boy that sounds like a lot.

Progress, at last.

Tonight I completed my first editing pass over my AMRAT story (giant fighty robots).  I was horrified at how awful that first draft was.  Commas instead of full stops, missing capital letters, incomplete sentences "as" instead of "is" and any number of straight forward typos.

Still, that's twenty pages knocked into a legible state that I'm not embarrassed to pass onto my editor. It felt good to get that out of the way, it's cleared the decks for the next project.

On the small pile of outlined works is a Lovecraftian short story and pulp era detective game book. The Lovecraftian story is a "kind-of" sequel to my "Incursion" story which is currently locked into a six-month exclusivity agreement with Amazon, so I'll leave that to the side for the next few months.

That means the game book is the next project. I plan on following the same process as with the last game book, in that I will aim to write two or three entries every day. The current outline has 121 entries so that means I should have the first draft done in about 40 days.

The Resurrection

It's back! The Gamebook that I and my collaborator had released only to quickly withdraw from sale, is back on sale.  At present, only in ePUB from LuLu, but the other formats and locations will come online over the next week or so.

What was the problem, you ask? We decided to write a book set in the "Barsoom" universe, it seemed like a good idea what with the upcoming release of  the "John Carter" movie. We thought ourselves safe to write in that universe as the John Carter books are in the public domain. Alas and alarms! Be warned!

We opted to star in our book, and indeed name the book after, a secondary character in the first book (Princess of Mars) by the name of "Tars Tarkas".  Having written the book and even started to sell it, did we realise that the words "Tars Tarkas" had been trademarked!

What did this mean to us as authors. Well to start with, we are both hobbiest writers, so getting into anything "legal" was not in our remit, we wanted no part of any court case, so we immediately withdrew the book from sale.  Although the book (Princess of Mars) is in the public domain, once a phrase or name is trademarked it can be legally protected forever if the trademark owner wishes. So we would have had no standing in court anyway.

Back we went to the drawing board. We decided to stay "true" to the Barsoom universe, but avoid the trademarked names. Unfortunately for us changing our protagonists name meant that the relationships between the characters established in "Princess of Mars" no longer applied. So we couldn't get away with just a cut and paste name change in our text.

We changed our protagonist be a tertiary character from the original book then set about the editing the story line to match the position of the new character. Fortunately this only required a minimal number of edits, a few changes at the beginning and and at the end of the book, with simple name changes being sufficient throughout the rest of the text.

So here we are a month or so later just starting to put the book back on sale. Detail of outlets will be added to my Book page as they come online.

15th July 2012 :A footnote to the above : We have decided to not sell the book in ePUB format. Although we initially created a fully working ePUB we found that on some devices the navigation from entry to entry failed.  It worked fine on Sony readers but would fail on some of the others. For instance, when navigating backwards on the Nook, from page 200 to 105, the page would  be aligned with the bottom of the page rather than the top. At times this meant you could not see the text. We found this issue insurmountable and have decided that the ePUB format is not ready for bi-directional navigation.

Plotting a Gamebook

I'm now three quarters of the way through working on the big annotation project, about another one hundred and fifty pages to go.  I needed a break so I've spent a couple of hours working on the outline for my next gamebook.

This book is going to be different from the last sci-fi/fantasy thing, and is instead a detective story. Here's the plot being laid out one pencil scribble at a time...

It's only about half done in this picture and of course it's the first draft so there may well be much rubbing-out in the near future.

I'm finding that plotting this genre is significantly more difficult than the fantasy genre. In a fantasy book you can just add a new monster or use magic to provide an exit from any situation, but in a real-world book I don't have magic to fall back on. So instead I have to come up with a more realistic way out.  The plotting continues...

Back to work

With all the activity relating to my latest book release, I've been able to spend very little time on other writing projects.

I have two short stories on the go at the moment. One is with my editor, the other in a draw waiting for me to come back to it. That I'll give another week or so, then go back for my first editing pass. Once that's done that too will go on to the editor.

Tonight I'm starting on the outline of another gamebook. That is, a novel split into very small segments each ending with a choice for the reader to make that directs them to the next segment to read.  The Tars book was a collaborative venture, this one will not be. I'm trying a new genre with this little project, "hard-boiled".

I've not written anything in the hard-boiled genre before, so I'm looking forward to the change.  It's a detective story too, so planting clues for the reader to find is going to be a fun part of the challenge.

I've started by plotting the path-to-success.  The is the main and most direct route to the "good" ending. Once that is all laid out I'll start pencilling in the main alternate branches that wont have such good endings or that might even have "bad" endings where the good guys might die!

Gamebook released in ePUB format

My latest collaborative book project has started to become available via electronic outlets. "What is it?" you ask!

Well, here it is. Tars Tarkas of Mars. This book is based in the "John Carter of Mars" universe and is a prequel of sorts to the first John Carter book, "Princess of Mars".


In this gamebook adventure we follow Tars as he carries out a solo mission to recover a lost treasure.


It's not an ordinary novel, but rather a game in a book. You read the first entry and are given some choices about what you want the protagonist to do, and depending on the choices you make you will read different segments, thereby controlling how the story is told and the eventual outcome.


Your choices in this game can lead to the successful completion of the mission or even to the death of Tars!  Check out the Kindle link below and take a look at the sample, if you've never seen this sort of thing before you're in for a surprise.




The book is available as a DRM free ePUB from LuLu.com and on the Kindle.  Soon to appear in print as a print-on-demand book, and in the iBook and Nook stores.

WITHDRAWN FROM SALE UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE ( just found out that "Tars Tarkas" is trademarked, what a bummer!)
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Nearing the end

My currently most advanced writing project is a collaboration.  It's the first collaborative writing project I've ever worked on and has been a blast.  It's also the first "game book" or "gamebook" that I've ever written.

Now there is a chance that you kind reader do not know what a gamebook is!

Simply put, it is not a traditional novel but rather a game in the form of a novel. The story is split into  numbered entries, usually a paragraph or two long each. You start reading at the beginning and after a page or two are presented with a story based choice. As an example, you might be informed that if you want the protagonist to take the left hand fork you should turn to entry109 or if you want the protagonist to to take the right, turn to entry 205. Almost every entry ends with a similar choice, thereby giving the reader the chance to guide the narrative.

There have been a number of game books over the years and some very famous brands, the two best known being "Choose your own adventure" and "Fighting Fantasy". Our book follows in the footsteps of the latter in that it is a fantasy adventure style game that actually calls upon the reader to roll a die now and then in certain situations.

The collaborative nature of writing the book has been fun.  We started by devising an overall plot then split the actual task of writing so that we had 2 sections each to write.

I found this style of writing rather different from usual.  For a start, each entry had been plotted out before the actual writing began, it was like have an outline detailed right down to the individual page level. It made the physical writing extremely easy.  Each night as I sat down to compose an entry or two, I didn't have to consider plot, it was already detailed. All I had to do was effectively fill in the blanks.

I had in the region of two hundred entries to write, most of those I wrote at the rate of two or three per evening and then up to as many as ten on Saturdays and Sundays.  It gave me a very simple writing experience.  No planning or plotting each time I sat down to write, no need to reread the last chapter as the story was kept fresh in my mind as I was writing every day. Just writing a couple of entries meant I would only spend at most half an hour at the keyboard before getting on with something else.

I'm currently preparing a P.O.D. version of the finished book to go on sale at LuLu, with luck that might be finished this weekend.  After that my esteemed partner-in-this-crime will be preparing other digital formats which we'll put online as they are completed.