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Showing posts from March, 2013

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Choose Your Own Adventure Retrospective: The Curse of Batterslea Hall by Richard Brightfield

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The Curse of Batterslea Hall  was always my favourite CYOA book – it was also, for reasons I'll get into, one of the more unusual ones. It sparked my later love of adventure games and inspired some of my sketchy early attempts at creative writing (including a thinly veiled recreation on 90s 'edutainment' program Storybook Weaver ). It also deepened my devastation when I returned home one fateful school night to discover my mum had donated my extensive CYOA collection – precious gems tremblingly unearthed from the dusty Mills and Boon-straining shelves of my local Scope – back to charity. Around twenty years later, and I took the obvious next step for a mildly lockdown-crazed 90s kid squinting down the barrel of their thirties: sourced a copy inflated by just four times the original cover price through eBay. But was it worth it, and does it still hold up? Dust off your bootcut jeans and fire up your Walkman – it's adventurin' time, 90s* style... The premise Battersl

Greetings, Friend

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Starting a story could well be the most difficult part of the creative writing process of all. A blank page can be terrifying in its openness; words feverishly penned at 4am in a seeming revelation can result in the writer's equivalent to morning-after remorse. When I set about writing my first blog post, I had a strange impulse to begin as my primary school English teachers told me I should never, under any circumstances, open a story. 'Hi, my name is Sarah', 'Hey, kids, you wanna hear a story?', or perhaps even ' It was a dark and stormy night '  –  you know  –  to set the scene.