Hi I’m a novelist and IF writer who somehow got it into her head that the due date for the if comp was the END of October. So, a bit of a mad rush at present.
Would anyone like to take pity on a poor caffeine-fuelled writer and help me beta test? I’ll have a complete and working third draft ready for testing in about 48 hours, and goodness knows I’ll need all the help I can get.
Here’s the beginning of the story, which will hopefully give a sense of whether it’ll be a fun read or not…
“Flight: an alchemical adventure”
You may call me evil, if you wish. Like the engineers of Babel; like Hypatia and Galileo; like the Montgolfier brothers.
I am brilliant, and I have no use for humility or the mewling complaints of priests. What is life for, if not to fly?
That’s not a metaphor.
Today is a shining October day; sunny, with a hint of a bite in the wind. I know this, because they’re letting me out today—the fools. Goodbye, stone walls. Goodbye, filth and rats and chains. One way or another, I won’t be going back into prison. I hope that if the Montgolfier contraption is doomed to explode, it will not do so while it is still on the ground. But even if today goes badly for both scientific progress in general and myself in particular, immolation is a far better fate than the stocks, or pressing, or a firing squad.
[[Perhaps I shouldn’t spend my life so lightly]]
[[Time to fly!]]
You should be able to fix that as a regular member (once you’ve read about 10 minutes on this forum you’ll get promoted automatically if you’re not there yet)- use the pencil icon to the right of the subject line.
Guess what? I got the due date wrong a second time. I just popped onto the ifcomp site to investigate uploading options and… there aren’t any. Because the entires are due on 28 September, not 30 September. Which has already flown by.
I’m so sorry for all the hasty beta-ing (and so grateful, too!)
The good news is that I wrote “Flight” in ChoiceScript (on account of not feeling mentally competent to do stats in Twine at the moment… yes, I know my brain has Serious Issues, yikes) so it will be extremely simple to have it published as a Hosted Game.
After I bask in the luxury of being able to take my sweet time to do more editing, of course!
And now that I’ve utterly failed to enter the comp, I can reveal my amazingly subtle and cunning disguise… for I am not the dewy-eyed newbie Louise Curtis, but the steely-eyed pirate queen FELICITY BANKS!
Mwa hahahahahahaha!
(I was a bit uncomfortable submitting in ChoiceScript as I know CS fans get a bit rabidly enthusiastic sometimes, so I was trying real hard to be stealthy. It’s… not my forte, to be honest.)
You know, when I first read this post I thought: she should not emphasise END, she should emphasise OCTOBER. Cause this makes it sound as if you have until the start of October, which is false. O well, don’t react Victor, nobody likes a smartass.