I’ve doubled down on which way to work with ‘Hearthorne’ opting for a different OS to dramatize my work. As much as I liked the look of the CoG …
Expanding Narrative Options
Tag: Outlaw
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Visual Novel WIP “Hearthorne” #VisualNovel #WIP Gothic short game I am making over the holiday break. It’s getting bigger by the day, of course. Excuse typos and the like as I plot and plan. It comes complete with all the sound FX one might wish for and a haunting music box melody to tie it all together.
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Thankful that I’ve busted 400 pages in #NaNoWriMo with the end in sight. Just about to have my second unit Neo-Nazi #BunchaFuckingGoofs get taken down by #MedievalReinactors as my main unit shoots the #Kumate death match with #Eurotrash #SnuffFilm assholes.
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Hypertext and #IF were the first games back in the 80’s when computers were just a gleam in the eyes of many. My first gaming experience was in a parser story trying to figure out which way to go typing in terse little commands – go left, open door, pick up whatever – and I found it frustrating trying to figure out syntax and orient myself in this new space.
Cut to 40 years later and I find a scene that has richly evolved using software like #Twine to develop a whole creative narrative stream outside of RPG quests and inventory stacking.
As a writer, as an artist – hell, as a poet, I’m always expanding and exploring and looking for that next high. I’ve always been an addict looking for that personal hit. Cinema did it forever, live-action and animation and my entire professional output and career have been in service to this form. And now writing, third-person novels, first person poems and other flash stories, short-story journeys and even a memoir mashed up with a drug dealing murder mystery/ crime spree that reinvents my history as a farcical fatal fantasy fiction.
Yet – it’s still wanting my work, that is. Or at least still not the ‘droid I was looking for. Cut to #IF – interactive fiction – a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ platform that doesn’t have to be about actually RPG questing. There are poets, storytellers and writing visionaries creating next level mutable fiction that twists and warps and changes as the reader navigates the interactive links – and it’s glorious. I’m attaching links to a couple recent IF favorites that I played/read/engaged with this weekend and a link to a rabbit hole of content that is a constant source of inspiration and imagination.
IF has come so far in 40 years and I have so much to learn and contribute and play and read and enjoy. And I choose this new path happily. No longer confined to just one meaning or view, I can explore and provide deeper dives into my characters, location, meaning, intent, opinion and even change my own mind halfway through or allow the reader to have the agency to do whatever they want with the story. This can be glorious or frustrating or engaging or stupid or funny or sad or (make a choice) which leads me further on. It’s up to me. Or you?
Turn the page for links to the wonderful Springthing 2020 IF contenders and two separate linked games – ‘Gunbaby’ and ‘Sabbat’ that a) blew my mind b) changed my creative life c) encouraged me to learn even more about this creative wellspring.
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It was the kinda town that made you lock your car doors and take a little more care next to the locals. Every vehicle had an angry dent or masking tape and Bondo barely holding it together as you hip-check together along rutted and forgotten streets. Overhead, traffic lights flashed hard red only instead of the usual three – as if to warn you, here there be tygers. I drove into Gary, my neck aching from tracking the battered tin can cars and the slouched forms glaring out from shuttered storefronts. It wasn’t so much a town as it was a funeral procession in slow motion with a corpse more likely to steal your wallet than lay down easy. It was my kinda place.
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He wasn’t happy.
His bean cans were 4 cents more
Abandoning them
I should have paid for his food
Instead of letting him leave.
In the grocery store today, I watched an old man frustrated at the prices of his food. Three cans of beans and a box of Saltine crackers. The bill was only $2.49 and he fought with the cashier about the pricing. She checked, he was wrong and I missed the chance to help.
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Old Man running hard
Shirt off, feet slapping the dirt
Breath locamotive
Panting in lockstep rigor
He races to stave off death
Every morning at 7:30 am, a senior jogger runs topless down my street eyes focused on a finish line only he can see.
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At a funeral
Dollar bills in corpse’s hand
For Grandpa’s stripper
“He gets table dances still,”
Said his grandson to me there.
I was at a visitation last week for one of my wife’s colleagues from the flea market. She’d lost her husband to cancer and he was decked out at a local funeral home. Open casket visitations are never my favorite but they were proud of how good he looked. Dressed in a t-shirt (‘I love my grandkids’) and red baseball cap, his coffin draped with the US flag, he held a handful of dollar bills to pay for his lap dances in Heaven.
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Food falls in my mask
Hanging around my neck now
Inconvenience
Amazed at the number of people not wearing proper masks or ignoring basic health protocols due to inconvenience. Citing petty and lazy concerns over personal safety.
Outlaw Poetry 