Will You Survive?

This post was originally supposed to happen last week. Life gets in the way sometimes.

And continuing under the label of “was supposed to”, the theme for June was supposed to have been “Will You Survive?” The idea was to write a Choose Your Own Adventure story in the classic style. As early as the first week of April, I had a basic concept and structure worked out. The concept hasn’t changed much but the structure has evolved considerably from a simple version that I swiped from the Internet to me just using that for inspiration and building a structure that contained 100 short scenes.

Short meaning very short. Various sources on the internet seem to suggest that scenes in your standard CYOA story ran between 100 and 300 words. I wish I still had a few around to do some test counts, but that feels reasonable to me.

The first edition structure had 100 scenes. My next attempt pushed things to 120, but somehow a third of those were endings. The current edition, which is still in progress, will probably round out to somewhere above 160, and I’m hoping that less than a quarter of those will be endings, give or take. A fifth would probably be better, but I tend to like the branching possibilities too much, so higher is more likely.

Let’s call it an average 200-word scene times 160 equals 32,000 words or in that ballpark. Considering we’re halfway through the month, it feels unlikely I’m going to get the whole thing in before the end of June even if I can manage to focus on it exclusively (and I have my own graduation, plus that of one of my children, and a couple of other family events between now and then).

My intent is for it to be a hyperlinked addition to my website at some point, as much work as that sounds like, but I’m not going to worry about that until it’s actually written. There exists the possibility of this becoming a failed writing experiment, something that sounds really fun in theory but proves to be too much like work during the execution. From experience, if I’m not having fun writing it, it’s going to be hard to finish. And if I don’t have fun writing it, will anyone have fun reading it? And a fun (or interesting) read is the point of any story I write.

As of right now, the planned structure has 169 scenes, 49 of which are endings, and there are 78 distinct choices built into the potential narrative. Some adjustments seem in order, but I’m not sure how many. I may like how this is shaping up.

But sooner or later I need to start writing it.

Be well, everyone.