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Literature

Plot Generator and Writing Prompt App for Android

March 4, 2019

Android, app, computer, programming, writing

Looking for a more creativity-based solution? Try Story Dice, a program I recently made.

Please note that none of my Android apps is any longer maintained – and they’re not even available on Google Play anymore – for reasons you can read about here. If you still have any of the Home for Fiction Android apps installed on your phone, you’re advised to uninstall them. The post below should be seen purely as a snapshot of history.

After finishing my ambitious Mansion Escape text adventure app, I thought to make something a little simpler. The Plot Generator and Writing Prompt app is a simple, lightweight app for Android that helps writers come up with new ideas. This writing prompt app, as the name implies, offers authors an idea to work and expand on. Effectively, it produces a short text containing what is a plot description of sorts. You can think of it as the back cover of a book.

The generated text consists of a basic structure (common in all generated combinations) and a set of randomized items, such as protagonist and antagonist names, gender, character attributes, occupation, field of narrative tension, and others.

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Authors Talk: a Discussion with Bryce Paradis and Evan Coupland

February 20, 2019

Author Interview, Literature

author, Bryce Paradis, Evan Coupland, fiction, interview, literature, writing

This article is a part of a series of blog entries, which I refer to as “Authors Talk”. You can think of it as an author interview and, indeed, that is the name of the blog category. However, I prefer to see it as a friendly chat between fellow authors. Today I’m having this virtual chat with Bryce Paradis and Evan Coupland, authors of Stories from the Nation of Wisland.

Or, to be more precise, I’m having a chat with them having a chat; an interview of them interviewing each other; a meta-interview. I don’t know what to call it, things are never simple with Bryce Paradis and Evan Coupland. Of course, this is what makes Stories from the Nation of Wisland such a remarkable text to begin with.

You can find a detailed list of useful links to their work at the end of this article.

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Mansion Escape – a Text Adventure App for Android

January 22, 2019

Literature, Programming

Android, app, computer, programming, text adventure

Note: If you’re interested in Mansion Escape, check its brand new iteration, available for PC, Mac, or Linux, on desktop or mobile.

Mansion Escape is a text adventure app I’ve developed for Android phones and tablets. Mansion Escape pays homage to the text adventure genre of the early computer era, as well as to the “dark mansion” genre of films, board games, and narrative in general.

After all, a text adventure app is first and foremost a narrative! That is, a text adventure app is a piece of interactive fiction, where the player/reader follows a story actually participating in it, deciding which path to take.

Mansion Escape: a Text Adventure App where Clue meets the Cold War

I’ve talked in the past about the devolution of video games, and how today’s games can sometimes be a bit too easy. Text adventures were a kind of adventure games in the early computer era, where the player had to actually read (the horror, the horror) the descriptions, as there were no graphics.

Of course I realized that this is not 1985, and an entirely text-based Android app would not be well received. So, instead of (old-school) typing commands, we use buttons. But make no mistake! This is still a text adventure game.

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