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.








I’m loving this already, thank you Tor! I used to LOVE those choose your own adventure books, especially that I always tried to read them backwards from my preferred ending and could never get the pages to work out right, which felt like protective secret magic to keep the true path hidden.
Ooo I want to know more about Isolde - there’s definitely a Dark Side lurking… 🖤