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!