After a whole year off, we’re finally back — our (usually) yearly Halloween “Interactive” Fiction begins tomorrow! It’ll be spooky, queer, and a whole lot of fun!

How it works:

• On October 1, I’ll put up the first section of a story.
• By no later than 3 pm PST the next day, please leave a comment to the post with a suggestion to help the protagonist. Generally, this will be an action or something for them to consider.  (i.e. a post goes up on Oct 1 —> You have until 3 pm PST on Oct 2 to comment).  You can always just +1 other people’s ideas if you like what they’ve said!
• The next section of the story will get posted between approximately 4-8 pm PST on the next day.
• We repeat this every day through October! Please only leave suggestions on the most recent post — if we’ve already moved on, I won’t be able to fold the suggestion in.
• The story will climax on Halloween, and then I’ll put up a wrap-up post to chat about the story!

Aim suggestions at the protagonist — you can’t tell the villain to surrender, but you can tell the protagonist, “Beg the villain to surrender.” If suggestions contradict each other I’ll pick either the one most people have suggested or the one the character is most likely to do.

This game only works if people participate, so don’t be shy! That said, don’t feel that you have to comment or follow along every day: it’s OK to hop in and out as you like. If you don’t want to have to remember on your own to come back every day, you can put your email in to “Get Email Updates” in the page footer, and you’ll receive an email every time the blog is updated with a new post. (You can always unsubscribe if it ends up not working for you! I don’t update all that often outside of the Halloween event, so there won’t be any spam.)

For a visual idea of how this works, take a look through the Halloween IF archives.

This year’s story:

We’re doing a return to the Uncanny Valley, a setting we often use for our Halloween “Interactive” fiction! You do NOT have to have read any of the previous Uncanny Valley stories. It will be totally standalone (not a direct sequel to anything), and world information/etc will be given totally freely. Expect:

• Urban fantasy — fairies, vampires, were-dogs, demons, and witches!
• Lots of puns (for example, a witch’s bakery called “Loaf Portions”). 
• Our world, but that got introduced to magic in the 90s.
• Some spookiness.

The protagonist of our story will be my first truly nonhuman protag for one of these: a handsome singing shapeshifting brook horse named Star (short for “Son, That Ain’t Right”). Star appeared very briefly in a previous Uncanny Valley story as a tertiary character but, again, you do NOT have to have read that. There’s nothing from it that I’m gonna assume a reader knows. But if you did: get hype, weird horse-man is back.

If you DO want to take a look at the other Uncanny Valley stories, they’re these ones:

• • Uncanny Valley by Meredith Katz (2017)
  • A Little Night Magic by Meredith Katz (2019)
  • That Which Lingers by Aveline Reynard (2021)

KICKOFF COMMENTS

To get us kicked off, tell me a type of monster you’d really like to see appear. These should be suitable to an urban fantasy world (so not like, Cthulhu. That jerk always tries to take over any story he’s in) but other than that I just wanna hear about it! I will try to fold in any that you name (though any that would require a lot of research will likely be cameos as I won’t have the time to do the in-depth research required fyi).

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.

> Go to Day 1

This year’s project was inspired by a Tumblr post that consisted of, in its entirety:

I then looked back at Aveline’s project last year, That Which Lingers, and saw that my last comment on their Q&A was “University is a great place for a demon to get a start.” Somehow I shook these two ideas and came out of it like, hey, what if I made that a dark academia story with some extremely self-absorbed professors having academic rivalries and dangerous secrets! 

I hope you enjoyed this, whether you read it as it came out or read it later, whether your participated in suggestions or not! I had a lot of fun writing it, truly. (If you did enjoy it, now or later, and have some change lying around and feel like it, I have a ko-fi in the footer of this site! I’d also love it if you checked out more of my work!)

Anyway, the full story ended up being 61,263 words, and my PLANNING doc (in which I also included my daily outlines) ended up being 17500 words, so it was a wild month-and-a-bit for me. Can you imagine?? Frankly, I can’t, and I was there. If you want to read it all over again, you can find the whole thing linked off my Interactive Fiction page.

Thank you again for reading, thank you so much for participating ♥

Now… ask me questions! You can ask me about the story, about the characters, about the writing process, about how something looked in my planning doc and how it changed to now, whatever! AMA! (And if you don’t have questions, feel free to share some part of it you enjoyed and I’m happy to talk about that part at random!)