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Showing posts from September, 2015

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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

"The Jealous Rival" and Other Inspiring Characters

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I have just reread one of my first works of fiction , grandly entitled: "The Jealous Rival: In Death Not Divided". Featuring beautiful maidens, awful love poetry, and grisly deaths, it is a masterpiece of my 10-year-old imagination. Here's a gem of a scene: "Bertram and Geraldine were immensely happy and started to make plans for a grand wedding. But then, alas, shadows began to darken over their paths. Cordelia was secretly in love with Bertram de Vere herself, and when Geraldine told her about the engagement, she was simply furious...One evening, Cordelia, thinking they were alone, pushed Geraldine off a bridge with a wild mocking, 'Ha ha ha! You will never marry Bertram now!' But Bertram saw it all and at once he plunged into the dangerous current, exclaiming, 'I will save thee, my peerless Geraldine! Have no fear!' But alas, he had forgotten that he couldn't swim, and they were both drowned, clasped in each other's arms." Well,