m. c. de marco

Via Daring Fireball: Fighting Fantasy, the gamebook-style line of Choose Your Own Adventure books, has been flowcharted by fans into some massive directed graphs. The linked site covers some more minor series as well, along with a couple of classic Choose Your Own Adventure books—-including, of course, the ever-chartable The Cave of Time (requires a real browser).

Via Daring Fireball: the most technical and beautiful analysis of Choose Your Own Adventure books yet was created by Christian Swinehart. Be sure to try the menu at the top, which leads to more images, animations and an online book.

Via twitter: the new HTLit blog seems to be a handy clearinghouse for information about “literary hypertext.” It is itself on twitter; hypertext has always been a high-tech genre so nobody in the community is complaining about how pointless or incomprehensible twitter is.

A couple of weeks back Chris at Gimcrack’d linked an interview with ChooseCo founder Shannon Gilligan, and also kicked off a series on his own process for writing hyperfiction:

I’m going to try documenting my own process, as I work. It’s a little scary because a) it feels awfully narcissistic — but then this is the Internet b) what if I fail? What if I give up? How embarrassing would that be?

Via Stan Carey on twitter: Visualizing a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book at Boing Boing features a pretty map of Journey Under the Sea.

This is far from the first such map online. You can find The Cave of Time, The Third Planet from Altair, Sugarcane Island, and probably more out there if you look.

SFScope reports on a deal to reprint The Legends of Lone Wolf series of tie-in novels for the Lone Wolf gamebooks:

The gamebooks (awarded the Gamemaster International “All Time Great” award in 1991 and Game Book of the Year awards in 1985, 1986 and 1987) have been published in over 30 countries and been translated into 18 languages, and have racked up sales to date of over 10 million copies.

I’ve been reading Aftershock & Others: 19 Oddities by F. Paul Wilson. I’m enjoying the short stories, especially “Offshore”, but the unique part of the anthology is the description of his career scattered between the stories, and especially his largely unsuccessful attempts to sell interactive fiction back in the 1990’s.