A few years ago a wrote a flash fic piece called “Communion” for the NPR 3-minute fiction contest. The story had to take place in the form of a voicemail message or messages, which I thought was fun. It didn’t win, and I tried a couple other venues, before forgetting about it.
Then not too long ago I discovered Sub-Q, a market for Interactive Fiction. And I thought “Oh, this could be neat! Since I wrote the story entirely as voice-mails, and I have a lot of experience doing audio fiction/podcast stuff, I bet I could make the entire thing audio!”
My first attempt didn’t pass, because it was a linear story, and Interactive Fiction has to be interactive. (doh!) So I expanded on it, doubling in word-count to give it multiple endings and a couple branches. Then I resubmitted.
It still didn’t pass muster. So now I’ve got this bizarre little story that is basically unpublishable in any other market, since half of it is audio and there’s clicking and stuff that needs to be done. What does one do with such a thing?
Well shit, why not self-publish?
If you’d like to read/hear a short Interactive Fiction piece by me (15 minutes-ish), here you go:
Communion, by Eneasz Brodski (Twine version. This is the official version, and looks best)
Communion in HTML, by Eneasz Brodski (HTML version. Not as pretty, but it works as a back-up for people that can’t get the Twine version to work for whatever reason. The choice options are links at the bottom.)
6 Responses to ““Communion””
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If we find things that are probably typos, would you like to know about them or are you pretty much done with it?
I probably won’t fix audio stuff, cuz that’s a huge pain. But written typos are pretty easy to fix, and I would be happy to do so.
The first written sentence is “Once, your were called Jenna.”
I didn’t notice any other typos, but haven’t gone through all the branches.
Fixed, thanks!
Fuck man, great story. I went through twice, first Ignoring all the calls. I actually got chills when I went back and listened to the voicemails and realized what happened. Very neat. Thank you!
:D I’m glad you liked it!