choosing the adventure

Aside from poker, writing and storytelling have always been my major obsessions. In between finishing BOOM and writing Season Two of The Micros (writing episodes, but no production plans yet), I've managed to make a significant shift in my professional habits--from online poker pro to writer. This basically amounts to writing a lot, creating training exercises for myself, developing my ideas, and consuming/thinking about/discussing a hell of a lot of movies, television, plays, literature, and video games. It's fun.

Recently I wanted to power up my knowledge and enhance the quality of my ideas, so I've been taking some Coursera courses, which have all been really sweet experiences. I just finished one on Fantasy and Sci-fi, and I'm currently engrossed in The Odyssey for a Greek/Roman mythology course. Coupled with the massive volume of incredibly good anime I've been watching (Cowboy Bebop, now Code Geass), I'm itching to write something new.

So as luck would have it, last night I stumbled on inklewriter. Its a free piece of software that allows writers to develop really nice looking, Choose Your Own Adventure style stories for iOS/Kindle. I have a pretty cool idea for a military SF/action-adventure/mystery story that seems like it would be fun to try in this format, so I am diving in. This kind of stuff is the frontier of modern storytelling--emergent narrative--and I am psyched to see what I can do with this tool. I might post stuff about this little experiment along the way, but my goal is to finish by Thanksgiving and share it here. Maybe that 's an ambitious goal, but if it's not challenging and exciting it's not worth doing, and this seems like it's both. 

I have no expectations other than a complete interactive short story--its not going to be a masterpiece, but we'll see where it leads.