His Father Must Be So Proud

I know there are more young authors (i.e., younger than me) every year, but Max Brallier is the first I met when he was really young—going into middle school or so. I used to work with his dad.

The New York Daily News just interviewed Max about his opus Can You Survive the Zombie Apocalypse? It traces possible responses to a zombie assault on New York City, using branching paths. Max described the creative process this way:

"As I was writing, I kept thinking, man, I want to do this in the story, too. I wanted to do a dirt bike scene. I wanted to do an underwater scene. I also wanted to have zombies on fire and zombies at Yankees Stadium, but how do I get all of this into one narrative?" he says.

"I used to love these Choose Your Own Adventure books as a kid, so I thought, why not get in as an adult, and put every stupid zombie thing that ever happened into one book?"

Max survived being on a TV series in his early teens, so I figure he can easily survive the rough life of an author. He might even survive the zombie apocalypse.

Fleep Fleep

A long while back, Publishers Weekly ran a rather extraordinary interview with Jason Shiga, library employee and cartoonist. His most recent milestone then seemed to be an Ignatz nomination for Bookhunter, a "library crime procedural."

Shiga told the magazine:

I get pegged as the math cartoonist, but to be honest, I don’t think there’s anything in Fleep that someone who’s passed all their math courses in high school couldn’t figure out. Certainly nothing past freshman calculus anyway. Maybe a little group theory and combinatorial analysis. But mostly my comics are just extremely rigorous and analytical. Also, there’s a little graph theory in my last two comics.

You know, Mr. Shiga--I think that makes you a math cartoonist.

Shiga's Fleep is an episodic comic about a fellow trapped inside a phone booth, applying logic to each decision point--without, however, getting any closer to the outside.

Shiga also has comics whose narratives are variable, based on reader choices. He told PW:

I’ve always loved Choose Your Own Adventure books since I was a child. I think part of the allure of the genre is that as a child, you don’t get to make any choices in your life. As an adult, however, one aspect I really love is the idea of collaborating on a story with the writer. I like to use my imagination when I’m reading and I’ve noticed that seems to be the direction a lot of narrative is heading. . . .

I only sell [those comics] at conventions. They’re basically too heavy, and I get killed in the shipping. Hello World is the world’s first programmable comic. The story centers around a mother who gets to pack items into her children’s lunchboxes. The children pull out the items that can cause other items to go in or remaining items to get switched around in various ways. So essentially, the comic works as a very basic three-line stack program.

Okay, remember what I was saying about "math cartoonist"?

Knock Knock is another choose your own adventure comic except instead of two or three choices, the reader gets to choose from over a dozen choices at each node. The only thing is, after the reader makes three choices, a crazed gunman bursts through the door and shoots you. There are over 250 ways to die and only one way to survive. The reader must in his three moves pick up enough clues about his identity, the identity of the killer and why he wants to kill him to formulate some sort of survival strategy.

Figuring out the reasoning of a "crazed killer." Perhaps there are some things beyond logical analysis.

Choose Your Own, part 1

You read a Publishers Weekly report about the re-launch of the Choose Your Own Adventure series that filled B. Dalton shelves with small white paperbacks starting in 1979.

You recall sampling those paperbacks as a literary-minded teenager, noting their similarity to your friends' Dungeons & Dragons and other role-playing games. You recall discussing them as a rare use of a second-person narrative voice at last year's SCBWI New England conference. That voice let the books' protagonists be genderless, though the line art often put specific features on that young person. You note with a little surprise that "More girls [than boys] read the books by only one or two percentage points"; you'd have thought it was the other way around.

You note that Chooseco, the awkwardly spelled publisher putting these books back on the market, was started by R. A. Montgomery, author of the earliest books in the series, and his wife, Shannon Gilligan, working out of their home in Vermont. In addition to updating and reprinting some original titles, they're also expanding up and down in age range:

• Choose Your Own Adventure: Dragonlarks series for ages 5 to 8 will feature full-color art.
• Choose Your Own Adventure: The Golden Path for young adults will be an "illustrated, interactive seven-book fantasy epic starring eight continuing characters."

You're pleased to see that to market these interactive books Chooseco is taking advantage of newer interactive technology: a website with games (under "Secret Online Endings") and iPod downloads. But you wish the website didn't start out by telling kids these books are "different than" others rather than "different from."

You notice there's a free download of The Abominable Snowman, the series' very first book, in audio form. It will be available until 26 January. What do you do?

If you choose to download, go here.

If you choose to read something else, go here.

Choose Your Own, part 2

The Abominable Snowman audio file you download for your Mac turns out to be 57 megabytes--and that's before it's unzipped. Once you open it, your system doesn't recognize its files at all. The documentation implies it won't work with your version of iTunes or your older iPod.

You go back to the site to sample the author's reading in a .wav file instead.

You decide that a professional voice actor might have had an easier time producing the proper level of suspense for these books. You remain curious as to how the market will respond to them today.