Howl of the Werewolf - the Fighting Fantasy fans favourite gamebook!

The long-awaited Fighting Fantazine #5 is here and includes a fantastic cover by Natalie Gingerboom, an interview with one of my favourite (and most under-used FF artists) John Sibbick, the massive amateur adventure Bones of the Banished, news of the revised Advanced Fighting Fantasy range, and the readers' poll to find out the most popular Fighting Fantasy gamebook.

It's that last part that I'd particularly like to draw your attention to here.

Seventy different gamebooks feature in the readers' poll and mine are ranked as follows:

45= - Curse of the Mummy

31= - Knights of Doom

31= - Night of the Necromancer

30 - Spellbreaker

23= - Bloodbones

23= - Stormslayer

1 - Howl of the Werewolf

Yes, you read that right - Howl of the Werewolf topped the survey with an overall score of 84.6% (Plot 85.8%, Gameplay 82.5%, Atmosphere 88.3%, Illustrations 81.7%). I have to say that I am utterly thrilled (needless to say) but should also mention that without Martin McKenna's fantastic illustrations, I doubt Howl would have placed so high, so thank you to him.

It must have been a mammoth task collating all of the votes and working out the rankings so I would also like to extend my thanks to Alexander Ballingall and his team over on the Fighting Fantazine for all their hard work.

You can download Fighting Fantazine #5 from here, and, best of all, it's free!

Fighting Dantasy?

Came across this rather unusual review today of Spellbreaker - my first ever published book - and didn't know quite what to make of it.

See what you think of it here.

This is weird

I have just had a very strange experience. I came across the video below purely by chance. It's basically a guy talking about his experience of playing Spellbreaker. Be warned, it lasts a good 8 minutes, but I watched it to the end.



On one hand it gave me a buzz realising that there's someone on the other side of the world who was equally frustrated and delighted by Spellbreaker (a book I wrote nearly 17 years ago!) and on the other hand, his comments gave the writer inside me something of a wake-up call. That said, it's a wake-up call I've had from other sources over the years and hoping has helped me to improve as a writer (particularly of adventure gamebooks).

You'll be able to judge for yourself come September, when Stormslayer, my sixth Fighting Fantasy adventure, will be published by Wizard Books. Just bear in mind that when I wrote Spellbreaker I was trying my darnedest to catch out the cheats, and as a consequence probably punished the honourable players too much as well. However, with Stormslayer I was aiming for a fun reading/gaming experience that would stand a number of re-plays. I look forward to reading your reviews on Amazon later this year.

A triumph of hope over logistics

Anyone who's ever seriously wanted to make a living - any kind of living - as a writer will have heard of the slush pile. It's that collection of unsolicited manuscripts either sent directly to the publisher by authors, or sent through an agent not known to the publisher. It collects dusk at the corner of an office until, teetering under its own weight, some poor unpaid assistant or junior editor is given the task of trawling through it, trying to separate the wheat from the chaff - and there's a lot of chaff.

Many publishers publicise on their websites that they do not accept unsolicited manuscripts. However, there is always the secret hope that a trawl through the slush pile will result in the discovery of the Next Big Thing. (A case in point would be J K Rowling at the first Harry Potter book.)

There’s an interesting article on the Guardian website about publishers’ slush piles. My experience of the slush pile is this: the only time I think I probably came close to it was when I sent my initial proposal for a Fighting Fantasy gamebook to Marc Gascoigne, the FF consultant editor at the time. The difference with this arrangement was that Marc's job was to go through every unsolicited submission and give feedback as appropriate. Thanks to his nurturing efforts, eventually my second proposal - Spellbreaker - made it all the way through to publication. Since then, everything else I have written has come off the back of that first book, either directly through contacts I had made or as a result of being able to say to other publishers, 'Look, I've already been published' which has been enough to at least get them to look at anything I've sent them.

Of course many people try to get an agent before trying to submit anything to a publisher. I don't have an agent yet (but any agent reading this should feel free to get in touch) but I have plenty of writer friends who do.

My suggestion to anyone wanting to become published is to know the market you're writing for and, if you are going to pitch to an agent or publisher, follow their guidelines for doing just that to the letter. With them receiving so many manuscripts week in week out, you don't want to give them any excuse to throw yours out before they've even read it. And, of course, you want to appear professional. Writing for a living is a profession after all.

I have never submitted a complete manuscript without it having been commissioned first, which has inevitably save a lot of heartache, not to mention time, along the way.

(Thanks to Alex Milway over at The Mousehunter Blog for alerting me to the piece from The Guardian.)

Behind the Scenes: Spellbreaker - The Acolytes of Pain

When I was commissioned to write my first Fighting Fantasy adventure in the summer of 1992 I had been living on a diet of Brother Cadfael medieval murder mysteries for some years and this inevitably influenced Spellbreaker.

The overall adventure involves the hero in helping the monks of Rassin Abbey recover the Black Grimoire, a book of dark magic which holds the key to unleashing a hellish demon on the highly religious land of Ruddlestone.

My take on Ruddlestone came from a passing reference in Titan: The Fighting Fantasy World, which referred to a devout populace ruled over by a priest king. Hence, a lot of the things that feature in Spellbreaker involve quasi-medieval religious mumbo-jumbo of one type or another - the bits that don't feature witches, that is.

The adventure is populated with pilgrims, holy men, martyrs, fanatics, saints and hallowed sites. One of these is the town of Hallow's Well. As our hero tries to leave the town by the West Gate he runs into the Acolytes of Pain.

A bald man at the front of the group has a metal band around his head, which seems to be spiked on the inside, and another similar artefact around his neck. Another man stares skyward while beating himself with a cat-o'-nine-tails. One woman, almost in a trance with the chanting, grips hot coals in her hands. These are the Acolytes of Pain, religious fanatics who believe that to get closer to their gods they must endure great physical suffering.

If our hero is captured by the acolytes, as a punishment for profaning the sacred way to enlightenment, he is then put to either the Test of the Wheel or the Test of Scorpions.

Apart from a general fascination for all things medieval and their religious beliefs in particular I remember, quite clearly, that this encounter was also inspired by a scene from Terry Gilliam's first solo feature film Jabberwocky.

Very loosely based on the nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll, the Internet Movie Database describes the movie as follows:

After the death of his father the young cooper 'Dennis Cooper' goes to town where he has to pass several adventures. The town and the whole kingdom is threatened by a terrible monster called 'Jabberwocky'. Will Dennis make his fortune? Is anyone brave enough to defeat the monster? A medieval tale with Pythonesque humour.

During his adventures Dennis (played by Michael Palin) runs into a bunch of religious fanatics who at first intend to set him on fire. However, the more they discuss his horrific death-to-come, the more excited one of the masochistic fanatics (played by Kenneth Colley) becomes, until he sets himself alight and launches himself from the city walls using a giant catapult. It was he that I had in mind when I wrote the description of the acolyte withe the metal band around his head.