Choose your own...

Gothic melodrama!

I’ve been working on an idea for a Choose Your Own™-style gothic story. The plan is that I’ll post a page here every week or so, with a poll afterwards in which you, kind reader, can pick the NEXT thing that is going to happen.

I thought this might propel me through this story that’s been rattling around my head, and be a fun/hideous experiment.

Apart from the Choose Your Own books, another inspiration for this idea was Craig Gleason’s instagram from about a year ago, when he serialised a comic called Craig’s Fate in which he asked people to suggest next scenarios for his character to enact - that comic is no longer there, but his instagram is very worth a follow.

Well, of course it’s a Wuthering Heights/Shirley Jackson/Cold Comfort Farm/Jane Eyre/The Archers/Edward Gorey mishmash. The working title is Clettering Hall… but I feel like most of the following names could be improved. Apart from Xerxes - my friends Sal and Elfie had a cat called Xerxes when we were young, and he was a really great cat.

I reckon those are the core characters, but I’m imagining lots of people coming and going, living in and departing the house. And maybe a ghost, and some kind of monster. And a nun or two, OF COURSE.

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