Reading a gamebook can be a disappointing experience for several reasons. Poor creativity, lack of realism (or, at least, internal consistency) and plain old bad writing are up there, and those are common problems with every book out there. Gamebooks also have a unique opportunity to disappoint through the challenge they present to the reader, and the subsequent satisfaction in completing it. Probably my favourite of the Fighting Fantasy books is still Creature of Havoc, and one of the most positively received modern gamebooks is Victoria Hancox’s Nightshift, for that very reason – overcoming the high level of challenge is part of the fun, and they’re both books that are enjoyable to return to as well. So in…
Author: Sam Isaacson
My new book will be launching very soon – if you’d like me to contact you when it’s live, please do get in touch. I thought it might be interesting to give some context around why Escape From Portsrood Forest got written now. The Entram trilogy is waiting for its third book, and when New Gaia launched just before Christmas, the intention I’d laid out for myself was for the finale to be out by Easter. The plan and much of the content was already written – this was perfectly possible – but I found myself suddenly in the midst of a stressful house move. My ability to write seemed to go out of the window. I wasn’t…
I’m pretty much done with the writing part of a new book, and it’s been quite a different writing process from my others. With both The Altimer and New Gaia there is broadly one true path through the book, and so the intuitive way to write was to do it in a relatively linear way. The new book, Escape From Portsrood Forest, is much more non-linear. It has just over 50 distinct locations, all of which can be visited in any order from any direction and multiple times. So there’s been a challenge to write them such that they make sense to the reader regardless of whether they’ve just started out their adventure or are about to conclude…
Just take a moment to appreciate the image below. It might not seem that exciting at first glance, but it really is. It’s the wall I’m sitting in front of in my new house, and that means good news for the final in the Entram trilogy because my brain is finally working properly again. Expect good news in due course (notwithstanding current events, which will have unpredictable consequences, I’m sure). Thanks to everyone for bearing with me while I’ve been away from the adventure!
I’ve made a decent start on the final instalment in the Entram trilogy, following The Altimer and New Gaia, and I’m sorry to say that I’m struggling to make progress as quickly as I’d like. The past couple of weeks I’ve been forcing myself to write at least one section a day, but it doesn’t feel like I’m producing the quality I want, so this week I gave myself permission to think a little bit about what I might do after it’s published. I’ve not quite landed on anything specific yet, but I am thinking that I’d like to experiment with a different style of illustration. For Entram, I wanted something with blocks of shadow to give a…
I’m in the process of writing the third and final installment in the Entram trilogy. This one will be 500 sections long and will take you across earth and into a large-scale battle in space following your time on Mars. I’m discovering that the increased number of sections is making the complexity disproportionally greater – there are more codewords and more possible routes. As a result, I’m finding it’s taking me longer to write the content in a way that will make sense regardless of the journey you’ve taken to get to that point. In addition, I’m now moving house so am stuck dealing with estate agents, solicitors and lenders – all of whom I think I’d normally…