Author Interview: Holly Schofield

Holly Schofield travels through time at the rate of one second per second. Her short stories have appeared in Analog, Lightspeed, Escape Pod, and many other publications throughout the world. She hopes to save the world through science fiction and homegrown heritage tomatoes. Find her at . Holly is the author of The Vector III’s Potluck Signup Sheet, one of our February games.

This interview was conducted over e-mail in January of 2019.

sub-Q Magazine: Our theme for 2018 was love. What does love mean to you, and do you think that affected how you approached your game?

Holly Schofield: All’s fair in love and tennis? As an older writer *clears throat* I sometimes think I’ve seen all the permutations. But the range of possible interplay between people, romantic or otherwise, continues to blow me away. Technology may change how we relate to each other, or it may not. I mean, Facebook is really an reiteration of the old-school telephone “party line”, isn’t it (except with some degree of consent)? And I remain convinced that flirting via potluck signups will be a thing forever. 🙂

sub-Q Magazine: All the games for our jam were very short. What challenges did you experience trying to create something in such a constrained space?

Holly Schofield: I’ve written a lot of flash fiction and always try to experiment with form. My concept of a potluck signup sheet wasn’t one that I’d seen before and I wrote it for a flash fiction contest on a writer’s forum a couple of years ago. The structure seemed too artificial and required too much shoehorning of plot into it and so I parked it for a while. When I learned about Sub-Q’s interactives, I realized the story was more suited to a multiple set of narratives and I sat the darn thing down and gave it a relationship lecture.

sub-Q Magazine: What’s one thing you wish you’d known when you first started making interactive art?

Holly Schofield: Well, Twine would have been handy 🙂 Kudos to the Sub-Q staff for going out of their way to involve non-gamers and non-coders into their very special milieu. I go back to the days of keypunch cards and Fortran but I haven’t coded in several decades, so studying the game after its conversion into Twine has been totally fascinating and I hope to become fluent someday.

sub-Q Magazine: If you play a lot of games, what was your favourite new game in 2018? Anything coming out in 2019 you’re excited about?

Holly Schofield: I’m not a gamer but I have to say that I find the growth of the whole field exciting. The rift between people who game and people who read books doesn’t have to be huge — interactive text-based gaming can be the superhero that leaps across the void to connect both kinds of people.

sub-Q Magazine: What’s next? If you have any upcoming games, artwork, or other projects you want to talk about, let us know!

Holly Schofield: I have a story coming out soon in the fifth volume of the middle-grade Young Explorer’s Adventure Guide anthology about aliens, spaceships, and…er…babysitting. And I also have a more serious piece in the upcoming Tesseracts, Canada’s iconic annual sci-fi anthology, examining a fantastical reason behind a certain well-known disaster. You can find a full list of my stories (and links to free ones!) at hollyschofield.wordpress.com.