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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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A Job Well Done (Short Story)

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The following short story was inspired by a prompt to combine a broken watch, peppermints, and a hug that went too far. Enjoy and please share any feedback! *** Kayleigh slowly unwrapped a peppermint, her own state of calm a sharp contrast to the screaming, excited children who careened around the yard in front of her, kicking about birthday balloons and chasing each other with ice-cream-sticky fingers. Placing the peppermint delicately in her mouth, Kayleigh let the taste tingle over her tongue.   Sweet, but sharp, much like unrequited love , she reflected.           “Mommy, mommy! The clown is scaring me!” A shrieking blonde-haired six-year-old, resplendent in party hat and sparkling pink tutu, threw herself into Kayleigh’s lap. The woman sighed good-naturedly and kissed her daughter’s head.            “But you insisted on having the clown, darling. Don’t be afraid; go ask him to teach you how...
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A Burst of Creativity... and a Jealous Priest (Short Story)

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Thank goodness for Writer's Club, an oasis of creativity for the dry deserts of a college student's soul. Today was the first time in months that I've had chance to do any creative writing, thanks to a writing game in which characters, settings, and conflicts are written up randomly and then chosen according to the roll of a dice. My prompt required me to write about a Catholic priest whose flaws of jealousy and pride were eating his life away. Twenty minutes later, and I had written this short story. Enjoy the fruits of my burst of creativity! * "O gracious Lord, grant rest to this good man's soul," the elderly priest intoned as he stood over the bed of his dying parishioner. Father James stood quietly in a corner of the room as he watched his superior go through the last rites with the wizened old man, and he couldn't help noticing how the sorrowful family at the bedside looked on Father James's mentor with the kind of reverence one mig...
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