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TLDR: I got nowhere with my first efforts, tried a different thing that also didn’t work, pity party then got back to making a fun book. Where did we leave off again in the story of Bastion, the app I made? Oh right: being a sucker for the profits
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I promised a tale at some point in the newsletter you’ve likely read and reread and then printed out and framed to put on your wall. It was to be an undulating, heartbreaking and ribald tale of brilliance penned on pub-soaked notebooks and sleepless nights. I may have even
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So apparently this book, the fantabulous tome The Gates of Vienna, qualifies as literature. I know that because I was asked to talk about it and other things I’ve written and designed at a literature festival. If you don’t believe me, check it out here: https://northlondonlitfest.com
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I’m writing, I really am. These points of view for The Gates of Vienna take a while. There are spreadsheets! Dates, times, maps, all of that. When you’re writing a thing like this, and one that needs precise latitude and longitude, there’s loads to sort out. How
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Ordinarily, when I tell people about The Gates of Vienna, I explain it regarding what the story does. Now I’ve been asked to speak at a literature festival, which, besides boggling my mind, has flipped how I need to talk about it, which is what it means for writing.
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I can’t decide how to spell this thing; I really can’t. US or British English? Double or single quotes? What the hell do you do with a book that doesn’t take place in either place written by a more or less American type guy living in Britain?
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You might have come here through the inter-webs purely by accident. Maybe you have a penchant for alternate history or know some crazy designer guy named Jim, or maybe just maybe you’re interested in this burgeoning but shouldn’t be still nascent thing sometimes called “interactive storytelling”. In any
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When you’re writing a book about a historical situation, even a fictional one, you can’t help think about how things worked way back when. This is the point really, to try and imagine how it could have been and build a world around that. When writing historical comedy-fiction,
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I’m living in my third country now and every time I move country I believe in each one less and less. It could be because I see how much people believe in this abstract notion of a state as a holy or spiritual thing worth suffering over. Dying for
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A new point of view. A new character, or actually, a whole bunch of new characters. And yes, of course, all the incompetence and hijinks one could expect from a comedy about a 17th century siege. His name is Valvasor, Johan Weikhard Freiherr von Valvasor, or Janez Vajkard Valvasor in
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would like to think that I’ve stumbled into a new title as “conflict designer” but this would be slighly presumptious and basically wrong since I don’t design conflicts, but have done things to actually address them. So sure enough, after Rwanda, bits of ex-Yugoslavia and the Ukraine, I’
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As I read The Songs of Fire and Ice I spent way too much time looking at where stuff is Maps were one of the main reasons I even started The Gates of Vienna. I had ploughed through Songs of Fire and Ice and was sometimes spending more time on
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So sure enough the ‘sequel’ to “To Kill a Mockingbird” comes out and everyone and their mother is excited. I’m not and mainly because I hated “To Kill a Mockingbird” as a kid. I was made to read it which I always resented. This was Literature. Old and from
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Most of The Gates of Vienna I’ve written by just writing. There might have been a vague outline at times, but more than anything there is just a loads of little, separate bits of dialogue, descriptions and random paragraphs that I’ve been mashing, massaging and chucking about to
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The other day when trying to do my elevator pitch at a pub to an ex-colleague’s colleague explaining just how amazing The Gates of Vienna was and how I was redesigning experiencing fiction and all that, upon questioning I realised that its been two years. Two long, arduous, painful,
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I never meant to build a publishing system. I really didn’t. I knew this was going a tad beyond feature creep, but application and solution creep. But it just sort of happened. When I first started making The Gates of Vienna in earnest, that is making it into a