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Choose Your Own Adventure Retrospective: The Curse of Batterslea Hall by Richard Brightfield

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The Curse of Batterslea Hall  was always my favourite CYOA book – it was also, for reasons I'll get into, one of the more unusual ones. It sparked my later love of adventure games and inspired some of my sketchy early attempts at creative writing (including a thinly veiled recreation on 90s 'edutainment' program Storybook Weaver ). It also deepened my devastation when I returned home one fateful school night to discover my mum had donated my extensive CYOA collection – precious gems tremblingly unearthed from the dusty Mills and Boon-straining shelves of my local Scope – back to charity. Around twenty years later, and I took the obvious next step for a mildly lockdown-crazed 90s kid squinting down the barrel of their thirties: sourced a copy inflated by just four times the original cover price through eBay. But was it worth it, and does it still hold up? Dust off your bootcut jeans and fire up your Walkman – it's adventurin' time, 90s* style... The premise Battersl...
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Relearning How to Fly: What Revisiting My Awkward First Work of Fiction Taught Me About Letting Go

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'Without even thinking about it, I used to be able to fly. Now I'm trying to look inside myself and find out how I did it.'  - Kiki, Kiki's Delivery Service After my fellow blogger Lynette shared a climactic passage from one of her first stories, in the interest of fairness, I dug around in my own under-the-bed reserves of shame (the writer's equivalent of the dirty magazine collection, if you will). I present to you an extract from one of my earliest longer story attempts, The Lightbearers :
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On Fear, Writing, and Life

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Three stories up. Unforgiving concrete below. My heart was hammering in my throat as I swung my leg over the balustrade of the balcony, and I froze, suddenly and acutely aware that dying was a possibility if I messed this up. But I had to get out of the house. Everything I wanted was out of the house. I simply couldn’t stay in the house any longer. Climbing from my balcony to my next door neighbour’s balcony was the only way out, since there was a party in the street below and many guests had parked their motorbikes and were sitting at tables right outside my front door. I didn’t know how long the party was going to continue. Eyeing the celebrations below me, I wondered how traumatic it might be for the guests if a phalang (foreigner) suddenly crashed their party—literally.
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Greetings, Friend

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Starting a story could well be the most difficult part of the creative writing process of all. A blank page can be terrifying in its openness; words feverishly penned at 4am in a seeming revelation can result in the writer's equivalent to morning-after remorse. When I set about writing my first blog post, I had a strange impulse to begin as my primary school English teachers told me I should never, under any circumstances, open a story. 'Hi, my name is Sarah', 'Hey, kids, you wanna hear a story?', or perhaps even ' It was a dark and stormy night '  –  you know  –  to set the scene.
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