In the end, we decided to put the magazine on “indefinite hiatus,” which is the term genre magazines typically use for “closing down for the near future but we don’t like to say we’re closing down forever.”

There are a number of reasons for the hiatus, but mostly it comes down to the sheer amount of time it takes to manage a project like sub-Q, along with some changing life situations and new priorities (not in a bad way, fortunately!) that are going to make that time even harder to carve out than it already is.

As some of you may know, we had been in the process of transitioning the magazine from a for-profit entity to a non-profit this year, and were planning to run a subscription drive over the summer to put the magazine in the black. (Currently it runs a couple hundred dollars in the red with each issue, all of which comes directly out of the publisher’s pocket).

While I think we could have done well enough with the drive to keep the magazine going for a while longer, running a subscription drive and managing all the additional things we’d need to do after that operate smoothly as a non-profit organization would have taken a lot more time, so wouldn’t have really helped in terms of time management.

Will sub-Q come back in the future?

Maybe. (I certainly hope so!)

But only time will tell whether it does and, if so, what form it will take.

As for now, after our August 2020 issue sub-Q will be on indefinite hiatus.

That means we won’t be accepting submissions or publishing new content. However, all our existing content will remain up.

(If you’re an author and would like your work taken down from our site, please email me at stewart@sub-q.com and I can do that!)

Indefinite hiatus is sad, but!

August of 2020 also marks the 5th anniversary of sub-Q’s first content going online.

So, dang. Five years!

I’ve been here since close to the beginning, and it’s been a great ride that has absolutely changed the way I look at interactive fiction, writing, and life in general.

It’s thanks to our great community of authors, developers and artists, our fantastic staff, and our lovely readers that any of it could have happened at all.

So thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

I would especially like to thank all the generous souls who have supported us on Patreon or through a subscription on our website at any point. Your help really made a difference. Thank you a fourth time!

Stewart
editor-in-chief, sub-Q Magazine

The post sub-Q is going on hiatus after August 2020 appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.

This interview was conducted over email in February of 2020

sub-Q Magazine: What’s your favourite thing about interactive fiction?

Isabel Kim: My favorite thing about interactive fiction is that it allows for stories that are weirder than a traditional linear narrative, both structurally and in subject matter. Taking the idea of “linearity” out of a story gives the writer more opportunity to explore different types of narratives and outcomes—the conclusion to the narrative doesn’t need to be fixed, and as a reader I love exploring the ways “things could have happened.” I also love that intfic isn’t just about writing the story, but about creating an experience for the player/reader.

I also really appreciate how intfic straddles the line between literature, games, and “weird internet experiences.” I fell into intfic because I took a class on digital literature while taking a different class on digital media and artwork, where we were introduced to Twine, and I appreciate that reading and writing intfic gives me the opportunity to use my digital media creating skillset.

sub-Q Magazine: As Kingmaker’s front page boldly proclaims, it’s a story about ambition. Is this a topic you’ve explored before, one that you find yourself returning to in your work, or a one-off?

Isabel Kim: A topic that I end up returning to is “desire,” and I think in that sense, ambition as a facet of desire very much interests me. Kingmaker is the bluntest application of the idea that I’ve written, because the character the reader embodies is focused on their goals to the detriment of every other aspect of their life—arguably, Kingmaker is about a backstory for a villain.

In a lot of my earlier, unpublished-and-never-going-to-be-published work, I was really interested in exploring the dynamic between characters who are blindly wanting and characters who apathetically want nothing at all. The push and pull between desire and what a person is willing to do to get what they want is something really interesting to me, and that has bled over into a lot of my work. The dichotomy between happiness and ambition is also something I think a lot about, not just in my writing but in my personal life. “What makes someone want?” and “Is what they want good for them?” are two questions I like investigating in my narratives.

sub-Q Magazine: In Kingmaker, you play the game painfully aware that your choices will make a difference, but with no clear idea (at first) which ones will make the right difference. And, of course, sacrifices must also be made… What led you to the idea of giving the player a clearly numbered set of opportunities before the effects of their choices were revealed?

Isabel Kim: I wrote Kingmaker during my first year of law school, when I was still thinking a lot about whether I had made the right choice to apply, and how the trajectory of my life was going to be different because of that choice. I had also just finished college—with a double major in English and Fine Art—and as the semester progressed, I was struggling with what felt like giving up on some of my artistic dreams in order to pursue other goals. I felt that I was on a time limit for many of my desires.

I was thinking a lot about the sacrifices that one makes in pursuit of blind ambition, and the other paths that become closed as time advances. Most of all, sitting in my apartment studying casebooks and praying that finals would be kind, I thought about how when one sets on a path, one never knows the outcome. In a semi-sarcastic sense, Kingmaker is about my personal quarter life crisis, magnified a hundred-fold.

Kingmaker functions on a few different principles. The first, that you need to keep advancing—there is never an option to give up. The second, that to win (and to read a full narrative), you need to pick a talent and drill down on it, at which point the other two talents become liabilities that you should sacrifice. The third is that the choices you get are randomized—except for the fact that your sacrificed talents are removed from the board, and that means the chance of getting SACRIFICE is higher. And the last, that winning and losing are emotionally similar outcomes, despite the fact that there is a win/lose condition. Adding a clearly numbered set of opportunities forces the reader to engage with these principles on a time limit, and use their resources based on their knowledge that their time is limited.

sub-Q Magazine: How would you fare on coronation day?

sub-Q Magazine: Tell us about something that’s new! Anything exciting you’re working on? Plans for the coming year?

Isabel Kim: If you like weird digital conceptual art, I’ve got a piece coming out soon in the ICA Philadelphia’s online publication, titled ALL SHOW — it’s a riff on my Infinite Artwork Simulator(http://isabel.kim/infiniteartwork/), this time responding specifically to the Fall 2019 ICA show. I’m working on writing a novel with a friend about gravediggers, flesh-based magic, and evil anthropologists trying to resurrect a dragon. Another friend and I are resurrecting our screenprinting and social activism pop-up studio, Studio AltF4 (http://studioaltf4.com/). Also, I’m starting my third year of law school. I’ve got a lot of irons in the fire. I’m multidimensional like that.

The post Author Interview: Isabel Kim appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.

This interview was conducted over email in February of 2020.

sub-Q Magazine: You’ve written interactive fiction for us before. What challenges did you face as you approached this as the first piece of a multi-part game, rather than a self-contained whole?

Sharang Biswas: One area in which I’m less practiced in as a writer is outlining. Since I mainly do shorts, I tend to have a hazy image of the whole narrative, and let my writing lead me to where the story lies. For this piece, I’ve had to become a little more disciplined in my process, and have had to plan out more in advance!

sub-Q Magazine: I love the religion in this game, and the culture that lives at the edges of it. What drove you to religion in particular, and the specific elements of the Spectrum, as you brainstormed and wrote the game?

Sharang Biswas: The idea of a priest struggling to follow the letter of the (religious) law came to me when I was doing research for Honey & Hot Wax: An Anthology of Erotic Art Games, the collection of erotic games I’m co-editing. The game I ended up designing didn’t end up using that research, but the idea kept gnawing at me, until I finally birthed it as The Book of Chroma.
More generally, I’ve always been interested in religion as a human social factor, and fascinated by religious rules, rituals, and rites. Since games can be observed through the lens or rules and rituals, the two fit together pretty naturally? I suspect this won’t be the last time I focus on religion in a game or fiction piece!
I’ve also been doing a bit of reading around colour…and when I was trying to figure out the elements of this piece’s religion, I think my current reading just crept up on me!

sub-Q Magazine: As a follow-on to that last question, what’s your favourite unusual fact about a real or fictional religion (other than this one)?

Sharang Biswas: During my grandfather’s funeral, I remember sitting at a ritual with the pandit, who was making symbolic offerings of rice cakes to my grandfather’s spirit. I remember the pandit meticulously dropping the rice cakes by twisting his hand just so, and patiently explaining to me how dropping the cakes this way was an offering to the soul, but the other way was an offering to the Gods. I was intrigued by how particular the Gods were about their offerings…
I love the fact that in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, the gods desperately hunger for human belief, and how they need people as much as (or perhaps more than) humans needs them. Small Gods is still one of my favourite books.

sub-Q Magazine: If you were a guru, what colour would your robes be? Do you think your prospects for advancement would be as, uh, complicated as the narrator’s?

Sharang Biswas: Hah, no spoilers, but I probably wouldn’t rise very far in the Mandir, due to some similarities in the narrator and my own life!
Would I like to be of the Scarlet, lording it over everyone else, transmitting light and knowledge to the rest of the world through inscrutable means? Maybe…

sub-Q Magazine: I’m looking forward to seeing the rest of this game in June. What other cool things do you have planned for the year?
Sharang Biswas: I’m really proud of Honey & Hot Wax, coming out this year from Pelgrane Press! My co-editor Lucian Kahn and I worked really hard on it, and we think we have a nice slate of though-provoking games made by a diverse cadre of game designers.
I also wrote my first piece of erotic interactive fiction, coming out some time in March for 10th Muse! That was pretty challenging, but I’m proud of the outcome! It’s gonna be a delightfully weird one, just saying.
I’m also writing a bunch of short game stuff for a couple of Kickstarter projects, and *GASP*, maybe launching my own KS sometime this fall?

The post Author interview: Sharang Biswas appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.

This interview was conducted over email in February of 2020.

Sub-Q Magazine: You wrote this game as part of our 2019 game jam, which had a theme of environment. Can you talk a bit about your process, and how you approached the theme–and the really tight wordcount?

George Lockett: I experimented with a few different ideas for the theme before settling on the one that appealed most: someone tending a garden and, essentially, talking to the plants. Somehow, this led me to ‘an ASCII plant made of words’ from which some advice would emerge depending on the choices the player had made.

Having landed on this core conceit, I worked backwards into the ‘why’. Why is this person in the garden, and why are they tending this plant? The feel I had in my head was one of intimacy and tenderness – something that felt small and human. From there, I landed on the image of someone grappling with a relationship that has recently ended.

Most of the actual writing and coding was fairly routine. However, there is one key design question that I faced which bears mentioning: finding the right words for the plant.

I wanted the piece to have several endings, reflecting how the player chose to engage with the memories of their relationship. Each storylet the player completed would nurture the plant and cause it to grow another letter. Thus, the plant’s message would appear gradually over the course of the playthrough. I wanted the player to be considering this emergent phrase, trying to guess what the plant was saying, in its slow, botanical way, before the message was complete.

The practical constraint of this was that the different ending messages needed to have the same starting letters – suggesting a range of possible sentiments that wouldn’t become clear until there were enough letters for the phrase to ’emerge’. The theoretical-but-impossible ideal for this would be a set of words that were identical up to the last letter, the appearance of which would dramatically change the meaning. But that doesn’t really work in English. So, I looked for something that would best approximate that.

I experimented. FORG -ive/-et seemed like it might work, but that raised other problems. The plant’s message is meant to be reflective of the player’s decisions. I also didn’t want the plant’s already-grown letters to ‘mutate’ into new letters mid-way through. This meant that FORG would lock the piece’s ending message after only five decision points, with many more to follow before the player reached the end of the game. This meant that the final message could well clash with the player’s own perception of their choices.

I opted to use the same initial word (FORGIVE), and provide significant variation with the word that followed.

sub-Q Magazine: Is there any gardening going on in your life right now, either at your home or in an allotment?

George Lockett: I’m actually not much of a gardener! I am fortunate enough to have my desk situated next to a set of big glass doors onto a garden, but my powers fall more into the domain of squirrel-wrangling.

Our local squirrels are regular visitors, and welcome distractions from writing.

This is Lennie:

 

She has never given me relationship advice. At least, no good relationship advice.

sub-Q Magazine: You were a contributing writer for Where the Water Tastes Like Wine. Notice any interesting differences in the experience of writing a large game as part of a team, versus writing a short game like this one by yourself?

George Lockett: There was less of a difference between the two than you might expect! Though I think that’s a quirk of the development of Where the Water Tastes Like Wine.

I wrote many of the ‘vignettes’ – the small, (generally) self-contained stories that the player encounters on their journey. There were several constraints provided by the wider project, but Johnnemann Nordhagen – who led the development of the game – gave us a huge amount of creative freedom.

Each of the vignettes had to have a specific ‘mood’ that was discernible to the player (‘funny’, ‘thrilling’, ‘scary’, etc.), and needed to conform to one or more of the game’s topic tags, but within those, we had an extremely broad remit. The vignette writers were given a set of art to draw from, which we’d discuss and divide up based on what we each liked most. Sometimes, a piece of art had a specific reference point behind it – generally a city or a specific urban legend or myth – but most were left to us to run with.

This was fantastic. We were given a sensible scope with a lot of artistic freedom to delve into the different weird things that interested us.

sub-Q Magazine: Do you have anything coming up soon that you’d like our readers to know about?

George Lockett: I’ve not got anything upcoming that I can talk about just yet, but if you like Growing Pains, you can find more of my work – mostly short fiction – on my website.

I’ve got a few more IF pieces in the pipeline that I hope to release in the next few months, so keep an eye on that page or my Twitter account for more about those.

The post Interview with George Lockett appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.

This interview was conducted via email in January of 2020.

sub-Q magazine: In addition to your game writing experience, Underwater Memories really makes it clear that you have experience as a musician as well. Can you talk a bit about how you think music affects players’ perceptions of games, or perhaps give us some of your favourite games with music?

Monica Valentinelli: One of the reasons why I like games with an interactive component is because they become an immersive experience. Music helps identify thrilling moments and motivates us to battle enemies, but it can also be a balm or highlight areas of tension by warning players time’s running out. When added to the story, the music becomes a tangible part of the experience and becomes clearly associated with that game. There’s a universe of 8-bit gaming soundtracks out there and I bet any arcade/Nintendo fan could identify which game was what based on the sound alone. When removed (outside of grinding), the mechanics are up front and center and the experience can be diminished if the sound doesn’t fit the game.

There are so, so, so many great soundtracks out there for mobile and video games like the sense of epic stakes in Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014) or exploration and wonder in Journey (2012), but not as many that implement music as part of the core mechanic. In addition to music centric games like Rock Band (2007-2017), Eternal Sonata (2007) is a wonderful example of a game that blends classical music with the rules well. Often, you’ll find an outfit that employs buffs when worn like the Songstress dressphere in Final Fantasy X-2 (2003), but it’s not as common to find an entire game that embraces music as the primary mechanic.

Yes, before you ask, I would absolutely love to create a game that uses music and color as the core mechanic — and NOT classical, either. Tech and resources have always been my barrier to making this happen. I dream big, but I do what I can.

sub-Q magazine: Speaking of music, do you have any advice for game creators who may not feel the most competent when it comes to sound design and editing, but want to add sound to their games?

Monica Valentinelli: There’s a lot of technical jargon and expensive gear that can get in your way when you first start out. Sometimes, to figure out a direction the basics are your best bet. Instead of dumping money into gear, go for the freeware at first. Start by working with what you know. Replay the games you love and analyze their tracks. What is it about their sound that you love? That’ll help you figure out what you want — which is the hardest part. Then, start with the big stuff: Emotion. What feeling do you want to evoke? Why is a specific soundscape important to that scene? How do the soundscapes play off of each other? Work against each other? I’d add in sound effects after you find the soundscape that defines your game. You can layer effects with a little experimentation by using Audacity, which is freeware, or Logic Pro X.

If you’re still at a total loss for how to do this, reach out to artists you like on Soundcloud or one of the sites that hosts and offers public domain soundscapes like Soundbible.com or Audioblocks.com. Depending upon what you want, any musician who creates sound for film/TV could absolutely compose something for your game to fit your budget. Musicians are sound alchemists who can do a lot of really cool things by composing a melody that loops or tracks that layer at key moments to replicate movement. Don’t be afraid to reach out!

sub-Q magazine: What’s your favourite underwater memory (if applicable)?

Monica Valentinelli: I am in awe of the ocean: Its power, its creatures, its movement. All of it. But, it’s hard to recognize its beauty when you’re in it unless you surf, snorkel, or dive (which I’ve never done). For me, the next best thing are to visit the aquariums and zoos built with levels so you can see a cross-section of that environment or “walk” amongst the sharks and giant sea turtles. The turtles remind me of Urashima Taro from the Japanese fairy tale I loved as a kid. (And still do.) I’ve always wanted to visit that undersea palace. Maybe someday.

sub-Q magazine: One of the things that makes this game stand out to me is how it approaches themes of loss, grieving, and acceptance in a unique setting. It’s been great seeing it go through the stages of the game design process to completed product, so thank you for that! What’s coming up next for you that you’re excited to be working on?

Monica Valentinelli: Ah, NDAs and all that… Well, I’m working on two story-centric mobile games right now that I’m pretty excited about. I’m also taking the opportunity to pitch (again and again). This time, for a non-fiction book and a few comics. I love storytelling and the craft so much my work isn’t just centered around games; there’s so many stories everywhere I look I want to tell them all! Just trying to make some magic happen, like so many of us artists out there, to keep doing what I’m doing and have a life.

Outside of that, I’ve been outlining a Ravenloft 5^th Edition campaign, finishing up two Scarred Lands 5^th Edition piece, and am preparing to launch the Hunter: The Vigil Second Edition Kickstarter. Hunter 2E is a modern tabletop horror game I developed from Onyx Path Publishing where you’re committed to hunt the supernatural with your friends and family to keep your communities safe. How and why you hunt are where the interesting stories intersect in hunter society, because over time the darkness takes its toll — even for those who are extra vigilant and well-equipped.

The post Author interview: Monica Valentinelli appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.

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

sub-Q Magazine: You write short stories as well as fiction of the interactive variety. Do you find yourself approaching both genres in a different way?

Jei D. Marcade: Yes and no! Operationally, it’s been quite similar: I take a pretty fragmented approach to my stories in both forms, so working in Twine felt like a fairly organic transition after using Scrivener for years. And while my process usually depends on the project, I’m inclined to build character-driven scenes first and worry about narrative continuity later, which lends itself to a certain adaptability of structure.

When writing a game, I’m more conscious of the proximity and clarity of consequences, whereas in traditional fiction, I frequently rely on the reader’s ability to retain or review certain lines to appreciate the emotional weight of much later ones (a strategy deployed with debatable degrees of success, I’m sure). Because I personally am far less patient when I play narrative games, I also try to build atmosphere with an even more economic use of words than in traditional short fiction, which is already pretty spare!

sub-Q Magazine: That Night at Henry’s Place hits on a lot of horror (and other) movie tropes. Do you have a favorite trope? A least favorite?

Jei D. Marcade: I don’t know that I have a particular favorite, though I’m pretty fond of Affably Evil and Retired Monster. And while I’m usually rather desensitized to on-screen violence/gore, I absolutely cannot abide any body horror that involves parasites, hands, or teeth.

Probably the strongest influence to Henry’s Place is the simple happenstance of having grown up in Illinois, where so many modern horror stories are set.

sub-Q Magazine: I noticed that you’ve written a few Twitter-bots (@tinydiviner and @allhailyourself, for the curious!) Which do you think would win in a debate?

Jei D. Marcade: As my eldest botchild, @tinydiviner will always hold a special place in my heart, but I suspect that @allhailyourself would be the kind of debater to simply shout down their opponent and call it a clear victory. (They do mean well.)

sub-Q Magazine: What new projects are you working on? Or, if you’ve got another recent or upcoming release to share, tell us about it!

Jei D. Marcade: I recently released a little Hallowe’eny game called “Trick/Treat” in which Henry makes a cameo appearance, and I’m writing an IF novel for Choice of Games that deals with witchcraft, academia, and organized crime that I’m very excited about.

Re: trad fic, I’ve been working on a secondary-world fantasy novella loosely inspired by Korean history and East Asian folklore, and have a couple short stories, “Where Black Stars Rise” and “#MotherMayhem,” coming out in anthologies slated for mid- to late-2020 releases that are chock full of eldritch abominations and body horror involving hands.

The post Interview with Jei D. Marcade appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.

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

Sub-Q Magazine: What interests you the most about writing interactive fiction?

Astrid Dalmady: I really enjoy the multimedia aspect of it. In addition to crafting a story, I also get to craft the presentation. I get to think much more about how the player will experience the work: what choices to offer, how to offer them, how to signal differences between them, how to lay out a page, how much text to put on each page, etc, etc.

It adds a whole new set of challenges and gives me a lot of fun things to chew on. And there’s nothing better for my writer’s block than working on a project’s CSS for a while. The two feed into each other for me.

Sub-Q Magazine: Night Guard / Morning Star took 7th place in the 2019 IFComp, and some of your other games (like Blue Cactus Motel and the delightful Arcane Intern (Unpaid)) have done well there in past years of the competition. What about the contest keeps you coming back, and do you have any advice for first-time entrants?

Astrid Dalmady: I enjoy entering the comp whenever I can because of the feeling of connectedness. It’s a month and a half where you know people are playing your games, and talking about them, and (hopefully) enjoying them. There are forums and twitter and twitch streams and podcasts and a whole lot of noise and fuss. Writing can be a lonely business, so being able to toss out the project and be able to see the buzz and connect with others in your same position is pretty great.

As for advice for first-time entrants, there’s the obvious: get others to test early and often. The player will always introduce unknowns and the faster you can catch them the better.

Less obvious: don’t underestimate the intro. The beginning of your game has to do a lot of heavy lifting in interactive fiction because it needs to introduce story AND mechanics. You want to try and get people on board as soon as possible, so think about what choices you present early on and give the player a taste of all the cool things to come.

Sub-Q Magazine: The family dynamics in Night Guard / Morning Star are–as the content warning notes–very messed up. What challenges did you face in writing about this kind of family?

Astrid Dalmady: Mostly I struggled with how much to make obvious. I knew I wanted to focus on the ambiguity of memories and to have an unreliable narrator. But it’s a feature of the format that you tend to inhabit someone else, so to ask the player to doubt themselves can be a pretty big ask.

The mother in Night Guard / Morning Star is never a good mother. That wasn’t the question I wanted to pose. I wanted to ask the player if they thought the main character was a good daughter, and hopefully, things weren’t that clear cut.

Sub-Q Magazine: What’s next on the horizon for you?

Astrid Dalmady: Nothing is set in stone yet. I have about 3 projects in the brainstorming stage at the moment, but I like to do A LOT of planning before I sit down to write, and so far nothing has coalesced enough to start in earnest. I do hope to have something in time for Spring Thing though.

The post Interview with Astrid Dalmady appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.

Jei D. Marcade’s “That Night at Henry’s Place” takes on horror movie tropes as you search for a missing friend at a party that’s getting out of hand. In Astrid Dalmady’s “Night Guard / Morning Star,” you must hunt down a vanished painting–and the truth about your relationship with your mother. Last–but certainly not least!–Elizabeth Smyth’s “Zoinks!” asks one of life’s fundamental questions: Can you get away with it, in spite of those meddling kids? (And their mangy mutt, too.)

We’ll round out the issue with essays from Anya Johanna DeNiro and Sharang Biswas, and “I Found You First,” our festive, seasonally appropriate cover art by Laura De Stefani.

This is our last issue for 2019–phew! 2020 is going to be a little different. For one thing, we’re going to be switching to a non-profit organization. To support that goal, and to make sure that sub-Q is sustainable for the long term, we’ll be running a subscription drive some time in the summer.

One important impact of that on 2020 is that for now, we don’t have an open subscription period planned. That’s because the three issues planned for the year (February, April, and June/July) either already have content or will be special cases. February will include the winners of our 2019 subQjam (which you can join now on itch.io!) alongside a game by Ken Liu and one other guest author. The June/July issue will be our subscription drive issue.

A little bit more about that: Rather than a Kickstarter-style fundraiser where success is measured in dollar amounts, we’re hoping to gain enough subscribers to keep the magazine going without having to run a fundraiser every year.

The success of the drive will affect how the rest of 2020 looks in terms of what and how much we publish and how much we can afford to pay for it. We’ll have more news in early 2020, but the short version is that we can’t keep running the magazine without help from our readers.

All told, we’ll need just over 260 annual subscribers (or a similar number of monthly ones) to stay in the game at our current level. Currently our numbers are about a factor of ten lower than that, so if you want to help us meet our goals you can get a head start by signing up for our Patreon or subscribing on the website today. Doing so will also mean you get to see our special issue as soon as it’s available–instead of only if we reach our funding goal.

(Note, though, that we still haven’t become a transition at this point, so donations and subscriptions are not tax deductible quite yet!).

Of course, if we hit our goal before June/July, well… that means we’ll just stay open for business as usual, probably with an open submission period early in the year.

The post December 2019 table of contents appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.

No, wait, that’s not what it means in this context (although if it’s on your agenda we wish you the best!).

Let’s try again: subQjam 2019 is on the horizon!

That’s right, folks. Following the success of last year’s subQjam (theme: love), we’ve decided to make the game jam an annual tradition. Between November 15th and December 15th, you’ll be able to submit your 1000-words-or-less piece of interactive fiction for a chance to land in our February issue alongside our amazing guest authors. (Yes, 1000 words or less. It’s a challenge, but also a lot of fun. Or at least we think so.)

Although we aren’t going to announce the theme this year until the jam opens on the 15th, we’re thrilled to share that one of our guest authors for 2019 is author and translator Ken Liu!

Photo © Lisa Tang Liu

Prior to becoming a full-time writer, Liu worked as a software engineer, corporate lawyer, and litigation consultant. Liu frequently speaks at conferences and universities on a variety of topics, including futurism, cryptocurrency, history of technology, bookmaking, the mathematics of origami, and other subjects of his expertise.

If by some chance you haven’t encountered his work before, you’re in for a treat. (Also, do yourself a favour and go read his award-winning “Paper Menagerie,” or some of his other fiction!)

If you’re already a fan, get those interactive fiction engines revving! Two of the entrants in subQjam 2019 will share a table of contents with Ken and our other guest author in our February 2020 issue.

We’re every bit as excited about our other guest author, by the way, but we haven’t gotten the final all-clear to share their name yet. But as soon as we have that, we’ll share it!

In the mean time, you can head on over to our subQjam 2019 sign-up page on itch.io for a full list of rules and to join the fun. And if you’re curious to see what did well last time, check out our February 2019 issue, which contains the winning entries for last year’s jam.

If you’ve already signed up, we can’t wait to see what you put together!

The post subQjam 2019 opens soon! appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.

This story is set in the same universe as “With Those We Love Alive,” and while you don’t need to have played that one to enjoy this, doing so might increase your enjoyment. If you want to give it a whirl, fetch a pen or other writing implement and head on over to Porpentine’s website (Go ahead! We’ll wait!).

October also brings an excellent complement of essays by Sharang Biswas and Anya Johanna DeNiro, and our lovely cover art from Laura De Stefani.

In other news, our 2019 game jam is coming up fast! We’ll post an announcement in November with information about our two guest authors (spoiler: they are both fantastic and I wish I had a chance to share a table of contents with them!) and the year’s theme will be announced when the jam opens to entries on November 15th.

You can sign up now and learn more about the jam on our itch.io jam page.

The post October 2019 Table of Contents appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.