Knock Knock: an interactive sci fi serial (Part 1)
A few months back, I wrote a little vignette while experimenting with tools from Mary Robinette Kowal’s flash fiction workshop on Patreon. The end result wasn’t quite a stand-alone flash piece, and wasn’t quite a short story, but something in between—the opening scene of a longer story. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a story I was going to pursue with any real determination. In a lot of ways, I’m playing with a familiar trope, and I wrote it as a fun exercise rather than any ambition to sell it. But posting to my Patreon gave me the idea of doing a story developed in serial, writing scenes that bring things to a major decision point and giving readers the chance to vote on what happens next. Alas, voting proved hard to set up on many of my usual platforms than expected — turns out mailing out a poll to subscribers is a premium service for my newsletter provider, and cost more than
