If you’re a bookblogger, booktuber, or someone who loves and reviews books, I’m working with Escapist Book Tours for the release of my next novel, A Man Named Baskerville.
Read more about my latest book here, and if you’re interested, sign-up to join the tour! It runs April 18th to 24th. Slots are limited, so sign-up now.
I’d like to tell you about my upcoming novel, A Man Named Baskerville.
The germ for the book comes from a train trip across Japan where I had nothing to read save for a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories. From there I read The Hound of the Baskervilles and developed an idea I stored away inside my writing notebook:
What if I told Doyle’s original book from the point of view of the criminal rather than Dr. Watson?
I let this simple idea simmer for a few years before taking up the task. The result is my latest novel, due for publication this March.
To offer a taste, here’s my current back cover blurb:
He took on Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, and he lost.
Now he wants revenge.
In 1888, Sherlock Holmes slayed the spectral hound haunting the Devonshire moor, thereby laying to rest the curse of the Baskervilles once and for all. The perpetrator escaped into the night and was presumed drowned, consumed by the murky bog…
In truth, the criminal mastermind survived the night to nurse his wounds and plot his revenge against Sherlock Holmes.
A Man Named Baskerville recounts the life and times of Rodger Baskerville, heir to the esteemed family’s fortune. His journal records his adventures from the Amazon rainforests to the beaches of Costa Rica to Victorian England, where he attempts to rejoin his family and take his rightful place at Baskerville Hall. Along the way, he peels back the layers of family secrets and scandals untold in Watson’s account of the demonic hound haunting the Baskervilles.
Most of all, he describes a Sherlock Holmes unlike the detective you think you know.
A Man Named Baskerville retells the infamous Arthur Conan Doyle mystery in a way like you’ve never read before. It’s a sizzling new take on a classic hailed as a masterpiece of the English language, named one of the most influential books ever by the BBC and Le Monde, and beloved by Sherlock Holmes fans worldwide for over a century.
A Man Named Baskerville is a Victorian-era novel of crime and suspense about what may be the least-understood criminal in the Sherlock Holmes canon. As Holmes said of him, “We have never had a foeman more worthy of our steel … He is a creature of infinite patience and craft, with a smiling face and a murderous heart.”
He also has a story of his own to tell, and that’s what A Man Named Baskerville is about.
If you want to be notified when the book is ready, sign up for my newsletter. Not only will you get a message when it’s ready, you’ll have a chance to buy early copies at a reduced price.
I’m currently seeking advance readers. If you’d like to read an ARC (Advance Review Copy):
And that’s all there is to it.
Note that the advance copy you receive may still have typos, small errors, etc. It will be missing the cover and the usual front and back matter. I’m now using the BookFunnel service to distribute ARCs, which should make it easy to load the book into your e-reader (or read online).
The ARC is not ready at this moment. If you email me, you should expect to receive a copy in the middle of March, about 1 to 2 weeks before the book is published.
Thank you!
Some of you know my day job is computer programming, but you might not know the reason I first became drawn to the infernal machines: I wanted to write video games.
One youthful goal in particular was to write an interactive fiction—another term for a “text adventure,” a type of video game that was quite popular in the 1980s. Instead of relying on graphics, sounds, and animation, it’s a game where the player reads descriptions and enters commands. You’re interacting with the story more than reading the story.
It’s funny to look back to 1978 (or so) and recall my younger self as so eager to write the next Asteroids or Galaga. Forty-plus years later, after writing and debugging countless lines of code, I never once managed to cough together a program that could be construed a video game.
Until now. Recently I decided to check the box on this lifelong goal and see how far I can take it.
I’ve released my first interactive fiction, a game called Past Present. I describe it as akin to a Twilight Zone episode: The main character, an average man, is given a fantastic opportunity to change his past, and perhaps change his future as well. It’s a short game, one that can be played in a single sitting.
If you’re interested, head over to the game’s home page for more information, downloading instructions, and even a link for playing the game online.
The IF Competition 2021 award ceremonies were held yesterday, and the winner announced: And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One, which I reviewed earlier:
The execution is excellent. The prose and dialogue are spot-on, and the story develops organically. The shifting and blending between the “real world” and the computer world never left me confused. NPC interactions come off seamlessly.
House also took first place in the Miss Congeniality context (highest rating by other IF Comp entrants).
The superb Western The Song of the Mockingbird placed third (and second in the Miss Congeniality), and the impactful What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed took fourth.
(As an aside, Mockingbird was so enjoyable, it got me to pick up Louis L’Amour’s Hondo, a book I’ve been meaning to read for years now. Although I’ve watched plenty of Western films, I’ve never read one, and Mike Carletta’s Texas romp encouraged me to start.)
Any surprises? I thought Ghosts Within would have cracked the top 20, with its expansive map and many layers of exploration offering an old-school interactive fiction experience. And I hoped for the same with Closure, a game which unexpectedly captured my attention with its immediacy and a novel use of the IF parser. They nearly reached that ranking, placing 28th and 27th respectively.
The full IF Comp 2021 rankings can be perused here.
Congratulations to everyone who competed! All these entries represent a tremendous amount of work and dedication.
I’ve teamed up with my fellow writers in the Self-Published Science Fiction Competition (SPSFC) to put together a special deal. We’re offering for a limited time downloading our books or selections from them. Here’s your chance to download over twenty books from work under consideration in the competition.
Included is my cyber-noir thriller In My Memory Locked, as well as plenty of other selections from all over the sci-fi gamut.
See here for my IFComp 2021 scoring and reviewing rubrics.
The headline for Closure by Sarah Willson is “An ill-advised sad teen heist.” That truly is an appropriate summation for this quick and tidy parser game.
Closure opens with a Mad Libs series of questions (“What’s an activity you like doing around the house on a day off?” and so forth) before launching straight into the situation at hand. You receive a text message from your friend Kira:
i did something totally cool and normal that you will definitely not disapprove of
i'm in TJ's dorm room right now
TJ being Kira’s ex-boyfriend, naturally, who is away for the afternoon. Kira is Watergating his room to reclaim an old photo from when they were a couple. Kira texted you because she needs your help searching for said memento.
The innovation here is to use an interactive fiction parser as an SMS interface, where your commands are not actually instructions for the story’s “you,” but rather for Kira as she frantically ransacks TJ’s dorm room. All of my commands received character-appropriate responses from Kira rather than the flat, characterless responses typical for text adventures (although I didn’t try anything too wacky). Even when I got a touch stuck, the hint system remained in character:
>hint
you're asking me? that's why i texted you in the first place!
ok, let's see
if it were me, i'd probably…
Another nice interface touch: When Kira sends multiple messages to you in succession, you have to press a key to receive each one. It’s a clever way of emulating the natural pauses when texting.
There’s a Rorschach test within Closure: My first command to Kira was LEAVE, which she promptly refused. I betrayed my principles and began assisting her in her search. The game’s setup makes you complicit. I felt a bit guilty throughout my session.
Most everyone has been in this situation, or at least knows someone who was—well, maybe not texting while breaking-and-entering, but madly jealous and forlorn, along with the concomitant regrettable decision-making. There’s not a lot of time for character development or nuance in Closure; it’s Kira’s hyper-focused mindset and the frisson of her situation which sustains interest.
Is there room for improvement? I suppose so, but I admire the minimalism of the project: You’re dropped into the situation, you navigate Kira through it, and you witness a transformation. It’s not deep, nuanced stuff, but it doesn’t purport to be. Closure is more like a breezy short story, a slice-of-life, than a full-bodied, novella-like game. It can be finished over a short lunch.
I confess: Within twenty seconds of opening Closure, I thought, “This isn’t my kinda game.” The pleasant surprise was its constrained scope and smart design choices drawing me into Kira’s little adventure.
See here for my IFComp 2021 scoring and reviewing rubrics.
Amanda Walker’s What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed opens with a scene that could have been cut-and-pasted out of any number of text adventures from the days of yore: A bare room, a closed door, and a locked wooden chest. However, before this comes an introduction suggesting all is not as it seems:
…as you try to bring your hand to your eyes, you have no sense of your hand. No sense of your eyes. It is a strange sort of seeing. Looking down at where you– your body– should be, you see nothing. You try to open your mouth, to call out, but you have no sense of your mouth. No sound comes from you.
This disembodied sensation is not fleeting. This is your state of being throughout the game. Ghost Guessed takes one of the core assumptions of interactive fiction—the player’s ability to interact with the game world—and turns it on its head. You can LOOK and EXAMINE and glide from room to room, but otherwise, you appear unable to interact with the world around you.
Soon, some shattered glass and an opened piece of jewelry reveal you are capable of manipulating the world by your emotions. And your emotions are strongly felt: Doors don’t open, they slam open. Boxes fly across rooms to you, but rather than being caught, they soar through your incorporeal form and crash to the floor. This linkage between strong emotions and violent results is the game’s strongest element. I’m not encyclopedic when it comes to the taxonomy of the spirit world, but I believe this is known as a poltergeist, a “noisy ghost.”
While this concept of emotions-instead-of-actions may sound like a device, it’s handled rather well. Not only is the technique discovered organically, each emotion is tied to the character’s past. Learning how to manipulate the world reveals and defines your character and her history. The other story elements are gleaned through a steady accretion of detail within the house.
The title comes from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Spring and Fall” (“to a young child”):
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
Ghost Guessed is as doleful as its nineteenth-century namesake. It reminds me of other Gothic literature from that time period. As you float through the house, a picture develops of a quiet country estate occupied by a moneyed family, where the secrets are locked away upstairs whilst whispers downstairs are exchanged over tea and cakes. The bulk of the dramatic arc has already occurred when the game begins, but there’s plenty of empty space within this hushed, reserved home for the main character to realize the totality of what’s happened, and to grow from it.
Side note: The content warning indicates the game contains violence and child abuse. This turned me off at first, but I came to see it’s all handled tactfully and without sensationalism. Kudos.
None of the puzzles were difficult, but I would recommend anyone starting the game to examine everything. I don’t think of this as a “puzzle” game, however.
What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed is an elegiac game, a story of tones and grays within an interactive fiction, solemn without becoming moody—good for a rainy day.
