Uncle Mac's Gamebook Shack

  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'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...

 "All systems GO. It's awesome down here." The book that kicked off the initial gamebook craze, Journey Under the Sea puts readers in the role of a deep sea explorer who comes equipped with a special sub called the Seeker,  and an experimental diving suit designed to withstand the crushing depths, should you actually leave your sub for some insane reason. Your mission? Locate the lost city of Atlantis. Secondary mission: don't get eaten by creatures. The series was originally titled The Adventures of You , in 1976. Bantam Books changed the series title and published half a dozen volumes to kick the series off a few years later, including this volume. The rest, as they say, is history. The Choose Your Own Adventure series was aimed at young readers, and the narrative reflects this. Lots of short, basic sentences and light on immersion for an adult reader. For a young reader, though, the idea of piloting a mini-sub to the dark, uncharted realms of the deep is exciting...

 Welcome to the Gamebook Shack, where I will be posting reviews of gamebooks, talking about board games, possibly video games, and other weird stuff. I'll post updates about author events as well for anyone who wants to come say hello. What is a gamebook, anyway? Gamebooks are interactive fiction. You probably know them as "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, which is actually the name of the brand that kicked off this fascinating sub-genre of fiction way back in 1976. Gamebooks allow you, the reader, to decide what the hero does and, to an extent, how the story ends. There have been many interactive fiction experiments since the early 1940s (look up authors Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, and Raymond Queneau for examples), but CYOA launched the genre into the mainstream. Countless publishers jumped on the bandwagon and launched their own gamebook brands. Some were simple and straightforward with chapters consisting of only one or two pages, while others read more like s...