Choose Your Own Adventure Graphic Novel - Ultimate Villains
June 5th, 2008If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
[The image above is a hologram of your nemesis. But this hologram is about 1/50th the size of the real thing you are about to face…]
Creating a CYOA novel has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done. (Really, it hurts.)
But I’m out of the gloom state, and each day the book is gaining speed. I’m no longer in control. The novel is putting itself together now, and frankly, I’m in the way.
The main obstacle in this adventure is the ominous “Gorgon the adjective”. Your journey with/against him is best described as an action-mystery, and your job is to solve the questions you have while you fight a giant monster. And to be honest, there are way too many answers to be had if you’d like to explore. The key is that each answer feels satisfying as well as fun to read.
Funny thing is, it never started out this way. The story told you everything at the outset about this beast and simply asked you to take him down. It makes sense now, but at the time the whole set-up felt strangely empty. You had no reason to care. So pulling back the “why”, injecting a few questions, and letting the reader go play seemed the best bet.
If games are wish-fulfillments, and stories are meditations on actions, then CYOA books are somewhere in between. You need something meaty to play with along the journey, and for this first bit, what the heck you are fighting is perfect playground material.
But this Gorgon is just the first 150-pages of your journey…. You have so much more to explore!
Yes, yes, yes, no,
- Josh
