Viking Fiction Universe

The CHYOA format, making the most of it, and how it applies to House Semya. Everybody’s different, so I’m not suggesting that there’s any one ‘best’ way to do it, but there are a couple things that I’ve noticed over time that affect how I’m handling my ongoing stories. My favorite is to write something with lots of options and interactivity and post it all at once so that when engaging with it the first time, the readers get to hopefully enjoy having the options and getting to actually click things. I would find it frustrating to have to wait days or weeks for options to appear and waiting for a big multi-branch story to be posted piecemeal would be pretty annoying. We saw this in the latter days of FSC. Writing up all that material with all those choices is a lot of work, but it’s also fun, so that’s not the problem. The problem is getting people to actually see that story. This isn’t just true of CHYOA; it’s true of most similar sites, but stories get bumped to the top when they’...

There’s a lot to unpack here. My last blog post talked about why we went with family values as the theme for House Semya, now let’s talk about the rest. I had three mostly separate challenges with this story: how go about telling a fantasy story and how to do a family story and have them at least mostly succeed at being kind of sexy. On fantasy, I thought about my own experiences reading fantasy novels and things I’ve read about other people reading them. I looked at some of the eroticism in things like Game of Thrones, and observed how even old-timey fantasy was massively horny. I concluded that from my perspective, the most attractive fantasy smut wasn’t smut at all. It was “legit” storytelling that happened to include a larger amount of horniness. I decided to risk going a little bit more plot and exposition heavy and to try to get some characterization in there instead of just throwing us into massive orgies. I felt like that would make a stronger story and make the family compon...