Uncle Mac's Gamebook Shack

  "Your twip to Cwete will now be vewy wough." I have mixed feelings about the first volume of Cretan Chronicles, Bloodfeud of Altheus . It manages to strike a perfect balance of great and terrible, and anyone who has read it will probably already know what I'm on about. This post will record my general impressions of the book and its contents, rather than a professionally organized review, since I try to avoid spoiling things too much for people who are interested in the books I blog about. Also because I tend to write these posts late in the evening before I go to bed. The most obvious plus about this series is that it eschews the tired old medieval European fantasy setting in favor of ancient Greece and Greek mythology. I can't stress enough just how refreshing this is, and as a mythology nerd I was thrilled when this trilogy finally arrived in the mail so I could sink my teeth into it.  In fact the story retcons a lot of myths so that you, the be-all catch-all cha

  I paid a visit to  Lloyd of Gamebooks to share a guest post about my approach to writing in the genre. Lloyd's community is chock full of gamebook fans and authors, so be sure to follow them as well and read their Lindenbaum Gamebook Contest entries. In the post I summarize a few different approaches to making a gamebook, such as mapping the forks in the story with sticky notes, and my own analog method called the Chapter Drafting Method . If you want to write a gamebook, but aren't sure how, the posts at Lloyd of Gamebooks should help you out.

Meet & Greet Uncle Mac and Get an Autographed Copy of Holiday in Castle Quarantine! Come see me at these Fry's Food & Drug locations: Sept 5 @ Fry's Food & Drug, 3-7PM 2727 W. Bell Rd, Phoenix AZ 85053 Sept 12 & 13 @ Fry's Food & Drug, 3-7PM 18420 N. 19th Ave, Phoenix AZ 85023 Sept 19 & 20 @ Fry's Food & Drug, 3-7PM 4315 W. Bell Rd, Glendale AZ 85308 Sept 26 & 27 @ Fry's Food & Drug, 3-7PM 6611 W. Bell Rd, Glendale AZ 85308 Oct 3 @ Fry's Food & Drug, 3-7PM 25401 N LakePleasant Pkwy, Peoria AZ 85383 Oct 17 & 18 @ Fry's Food & Drug, 3-7PM 1815 W. Glendale Ave, Phoenix AZ 85021 Oct 24 & 25 @ Fry's Food & Drug, 3-7PM 18420 N. 19th Ave, Phoenix AZ 85023 I will also be at Drawn To Comics's Halloween author event at the Velma Teague Library in Old Glendale!  Oct 28 @ Velma Teague Library, 5-8PM 7010 N 58th Ave, Glendale AZ 85301

"You mean you go to your doctor for a flu shot, tetanus shot--even the booster shots little kids get--and you get souped up with COBRA mind potion number one?" There are a lot of GI Joe gamebooks by Find Your Fate, but this one came highly recommended, so I decided to snatch it up. It didn't disappoint, either.  Obviously it's written for kids around ten years old, but I was surprised by how readable it was for an adult. Operation Poison Dart puts you in control of a new Joe called Headset, an expert in mind control and hypnotism whose gadget is a special strobe light that instantly hypnotizes people. There are several points throughout the book where you get to use this ability to trick people into doing your bidding, and Headset does prove himself useful during the rare scene when he's been deprived of his precious gizmo. Your mission is surprisingly topical: stop Dr Mindbender and COBRA from using a bogus vaccine to control people. I can hear the Google fact ch

 A few samples of the artwork in Holiday in Castle Quarantine .

You'd go great with syrup, if they can ever peel you off the wall. So I was planning to review an especially cool GI Joe gamebook next, but then I happened upon another Twistaplot book, and after riffing the last one I couldn't resist grabbing it. I know, I'm ignoring my own advice by not just reading it in the bookstore, but remind me which of us is the one blogging about these in detail. Yeah, that's what I thought. Unlike Crash Landing!,  the lucky 13th entry in the Twistaplot series managed to entertain, in that it made me laugh. Had I gone in expecting something that was actually scary, I would have yeeted this book across the room after the first couple pages. Right from the cover you can tell this is not an outing that takes itself seriously. The background is genuinely creepy, with an especially frightening face superimposed over the castle, but then when you see the blatant Universal movie monster lineup in the foreground, you know this is going to be a lighthe