Damon L. Wakes's Blog, page 45
July 22, 2017
Twine for Beginners: Pen and Paper Stories
If you’re writing interactive fiction, you’d be hard pressed to find a better tool than Twine. It’s incredibly simple and incredibly powerful, with a reassuringly shallow learning curve. With a little know-how you can use it to create very sophisticated role-playing games, but even with no know-how at all you can jump right in and […]
Penny McPaperface
This is an interactive story intended to illustrate the principles outlined in this tutorial post about pen-and-paper interactive fiction. A hyperlinked version of it can be found here for comparison. 1 Once upon a time, Penny McPaperface was writing a story in Twine. Twine let her put together a really top-notch bit of interactive fiction […]
July 21, 2017
Long in the Tooth
Flash Fiction Month 2017, Day 21 “Visiting hours are over, I’m afraid. They have been for about seven hours.” “Ah. But I called ahead!” “I see.” The nurse checked her notes. “Then you must be Count…” “Please, Count Dracula is my father! Call me Vlad.” He reached out, took her hand, and kissed it in […]
July 20, 2017
White Rabbit
Flash Fiction Month 2017, Day 20 Challenge #9: Write a story featuring every sense but sight. It must have a palindromic word count and not use any adverbs ending in “-ly.” “Bugger. There go the lights.” “Spare lantern?” There were a few seconds of vigorous clicking while Harper tried the switch. “Dead.” “Oh well. Absolute […]
July 19, 2017
Little Red and the Three Bunkers
Flash Fiction Month 2017, Day 19 Once upon a time there was a terrible dragon, which crawled along the ground on endless feet. The dragon was an ancient beast—forged long before Little Red was born—and only Grandmama was old enough to remember it. But Little Red had heard stories, and so when she saw the […]
July 18, 2017
And I Would Write 500 More
Flash Fiction Month 2017, Day 18 Challenge #8: Write a story at least 500 words in length including no unnecessary details whatsoever. “Banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana banana […]
July 17, 2017
The Shawshank Deception
Flash Fiction Month 2017, Day 17 “Uh-oh! Uh-oh!! Uh-oh!!!” “What? What is it?” Mullins came running. The sound of the food tray clattering on the floor had been a bad sign. The “Uh-oh!”s might as well have been written in neon tubing with bells on. “It’s Count Erfitter,” said Harris. “Or…I mean…it’s not.” Mullins took […]
July 16, 2017
I’ll Be Back
Flash Fiction Month 2017, Day 16 “Okay, so here’s how we’ll do it: there’s this robot apocalypse and the robots go back in time to kill the leader of the human resistance before he’s born.” “Wouldn’t work,” said Zara. “If they go back in time and kill him, he never starts leading the resistance in […]
Ten Little Astronauts Reaches Massive Milestones
There was some good news on Thursday as Ten Little Astronauts reached 33%: a full third of the funding necessary to get it onto bookshelves everywhere! That was pretty amazing in itself, but within a couple of hours of announcing it the book also reached a grand total of 150 unique supporters! If you follow […]
July 15, 2017
An Ernest Mistake
Flash Fiction Month 2017, Day 15 Challenge #7*: Write a story from the perspective of an existing detective character in collaboration with another author. It must include a red herring and a film noir style inner monologue, but must not take place in a typical film noir setting. This story was produced in collaboration with […]
