Ages ago, I tried my hand at the ‘interactive story’ function of the site. It was a little confusing at first and I needed to be bailed out by management a couple of times in order for the mechanics to work properly. It was certainly an interesting experience doing it, but I quickly became aware that I had messed up big time.
Instead of creating characters and having them react to situations, I had created situations and had my characters react to them. This might seem the same thing, but what it meant in reality, was that there was no character cohesion between the various plot lines. So characters could be angry about something, and yet be happy about the same thing in another arc.
It was a mess.
Large chunks really need to be pulled and rewritten so characters held the same characteristics across the various arcs. But, fundamentally, I’m lazy, so…
The other issue, was that there is no site function/capability for me to see which branches were popular and which were not. Unlike in a normal linear story, where you write it and readers score (sometimes) it as to how they thought the story went.
The new site polling feature might partly address some issues. It won’t give me any indication as to how good a (separate) story arc is, nor how ‘popular’ it is via numerical access count, but it does give me an indication as to where readers want/would prefer the story to go. Obviously, there is no guarantee I’m going to take it in that direction, but you have to be pretty stupid/narcissistic to ignore reader wishes.
So I have decided to give it another go, based on the lessons learned with the first one. If I don’t make too much of a mess of the second attempt, I might go back and redo the first attempt and include the polling ability with the re-submission.
The start of the second attempt is in the submission queue.