2021 Halloween Interactive Fiction Kickoff!

For the last five years (!!) Meredith has run an interactive Halloween-themed choose-your-own-adventure storytelling event throughout the month of October. This year, she’s taking a well-deserved break! But: Aveline is taking the spooky queer reins and will do their best to Not Fuck It Up.

So! Starting October 1st, 2021, I’ll be posting a daily short section of a Halloween story and ask you, dear readers, to leave comments suggesting the next steps. What should our intrepid protagonist do? What bad decisions should they make? Who should they flirt with? It’s up to—well, it’s up to me, but you get to have significant input in shaping the story.

You don’t have to comment or follow along every day: it’s OK to hop back in and out (though please do comment as much as you’re able because that definitely helps with the interactive part of interactive fiction!) I’ll incorporate as many of the suggestions or ideas as it makes sense to: majority influences, but doesn’t necessarily rule.

You can get notified when there are new sections a couple ways:

• “Subscribe to Updates” via the form in the right side of our homepage (here)
• Follow me on Twitter (here)

You can also take a look through the archives to read Meredith’s excellent stories from previous years and to get a visual idea of how this works!

This Year’s Story

This story is set in the Uncanny Valley universe (as with 2017 and 2019), though familiarity with any previous stories or settings is NOT required. 

Some decades prior, rifts opened up across the world that enabled magic, mayhem, and monsters to seep into the mundane world: fey, vampires, werewolves, witches, dread horrors, you name it. Most of the strangeness is contained to the areas clustered around these rifts—literal uncanny valleys where communities have sprung up and run by their own rules. 

Our lovely protagonist is nonbinary, pansexual, polyamorous, and the literary equivalent of a grumpy NPC who’s unwillingly found themself thrust into an adventure with a bunch of people that are just so unnecessarily fucking extra.

What can you expect? Well, my working taglines include:

• Vampire Fuck Mansion (and all I got was this lousy t-shirt)
• We Can’t Stop Here, This Is Bat Country Club
• Opening Up a Boy With The Cold Ones
• And some questionable songcalls 

So, you know, it’s gonna be a perfectly safe time!

The Fine Print

I reserve all rights to this work. If I eventually get this published in any form that requires me to take this version down, I will send copies of this online version, with comments left intact, to everyone who contributed suggestions, if I am reasonably able to get in contact with them.

New sections will go up between 5-9PM PST. Cutoff time for suggestions is 4PM PST.

EXCITED AND EQUALLY NERVOUS! Let’s go! To get us kicked off, comment here with your favourite cryptid, monster, or spooky creature. For science.

START READING

♥ Aveline