Matt is the author of our August story, “The Bone Poet & God.”

This interview was conducted via email in July 2020.

Matt Dovey

sub-Q Magazine: One of the things I loved about this story were the lush, vivid, and detailed descriptions of the natural world. What role does nature play in your work?

Matt Dovey: In trying to answer this question I glanced back down all my other published stories and realised that the power of nature plays a part in arguably about half of them. I honestly hadn’t noticed before; as with so much about writing, your subconscious is spilling out without your knowledge. Writing: it’s like therapy, except slower and full of rejection!

It’s interesting to realise that every time I’ve done magic in a story, too, it’s been a natural force, part of the world and not drawing from some other plane or some such. In Bone Poet & God it’s a part of the bears, a part of their world; Homebrew Recipes is a very obvious nature-magic story, but even Squalor & Sympathy‘s magic is something innate and inherent to everyone.

sub-Q Magazine: Ursula approaches her poetry and her bone magic, to an extent, not just as a combination but as a collaboration of and with words. So you got me thinking about that in relation to the writer’s work. I think that all short stories are, in a way, a collaboration between author and reader, and interactive stories even more so. But you have also collaborated with our very own Editor-in-Chief on another short story in the past. What role does collaboration play in your writing life?

Matt: Well not a one of my stories has ever gone anywhere without getting feedback on it from other people first, so it’s pretty fundamental I guess. First drafts–in fact, all my ideas, in writing and in life–tend to be a big rush of creativity and possibility and I could do THIS and I could do THAT and it’s only when I sit down to talk them through with other people that I re-evaluate and notice all the flaws and holes and bits in need of patching up. Most of my process for anything longer than flash is a jigsaw puzzle of problems and patches, and I have to juggle all the pieces in the air as I try and work out how they all relate and which ones I need and which ones I can put down before I finally spot the pattern and it all clicks together. Most of my published stories are on their 3rd or 4th major version, with big structural changes between them.

And, as you say, all fiction is a collaboration between author and reader. Stories exist in a nebulous space between both parties: shaped by the author, but also shaped by each reader’s experiences and perceptions and assumptions. A lot of writing is working out where you can lean on that baggage that readers bring, and in deliberately leaving enough space for them to fill in the gaps and personalise the story to them, giving it a greater connection. An example I had to learn early on: if I’m describing a room I’ll have an image in my head based on a room I’ve known in real life, but I don’t need to describe it completely because it doesn’t really matter (and is reeeally boring prose, too). What matters is the emotional connection I have to it, and to recreate that connection for an unknown reader I have to give them enough details to latch onto but enough space to make it their own. You have to consciously give up some control to the reader, in order to get them to buy in.

Actual collaborations are like play. Certainly with Stewart–Coruscating Queen was mostly a game of “try to stitch the other person up with where you leave the story, and see how they get out of it” (and I will never not mention that Stewart totally cheated one night and decided he would “revise what we’ve written so far” instead of trying to solve the problem I had left him, and so the sword-pulled-along-via-shorn-ponytail is my own solution to my own problem). Even ones I’ve written with other people that are less jokey are still playful, though, even when the story itself is horror; it’s all about the joy of trying to delight the other person, and being delighted by the way their brain works in turn.

sub-Q Magazine: What do you think your breastbone rune might be?

Matt: Probably “sorry”. I am a bit too British in that regard and apologise in all circumstances, up to and including “someone has paid me a compliment”. “I really enjoyed your story!” “Sorry about that.” (Apologies don’t need to make sense to be made.)

sub-Q Magazine: Do you have any favourite recent games or interactive fiction pieces?

Matt: Like everybody else in the world I bought the itch.io bundle for BLM, and a new life by Angela He in that collection is short and beautiful, both the art and the writing. Two more well-known (and not necessarily recent) games that both made me ugly-cry are Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, which wouldn’t work as anything except a game–that moment, oh my god, it broke me–and Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, which is simply the pinnacle of the art as far as I’m concerned, a studio operating at the absolute peak of its powers in all regards. It’s only ten hours long but the character design, sound design, world design, combat design… everything works together as whole, each aspect supporting every other aspect. I rambled about it drunkenly as soon as I finished it, in fact, if you want unfiltered and awe-struck thoughts on it. I cannot recommend it enough, though I must caveat it with all the content warnings.

sub-Q Magazine: What’s next for you?

Matt: Frustratingly little, ha. The last 18 months of real life have been pretty emotionally draining for all sorts of personal reasons, and writing–fundamentally an emotionally draining task–has been all but impossible at the end of another long day. I was finally getting some space back in my life for it and then the world ended in March. But it’ll come back again! It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

I have got a third story out at Diabolical Plots next year–a very silly piss take of DOOM, attempting to answer the infamous question of “what if you could talk to the monsters?”–and I just had a short flash piece out at Tina Connolly’s Toasted Cake podcast that might be a pleasant way to pass twelve minutes.

The post Author Interview: Matt Dovey appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.

To Stewart Baker, who brought together more authors, readers, and supporters than I could have dreamed, thank you. Your ideas and energy brought sub-Q to the next level of polish, creativity, and engagement. I am in awe of what you built sub-Q to be.

To Natalia Theodoridou, whose work it is as much of a pleasure to read as it is to publish, thank you. I am so grateful for your willingness to help grow sub-Q into its next phase. I hope that phase is yet to be. In the meantime, count me another loyal reader.

To our other editors and first readers, thank you for your work these past five years. It moves me that you volunteered so much time and skill to keep sub-Q in steady supply of quality content.

To our creators, thank you for giving sub-Q the chance to publish your work. Every issue has been a delight.

To our subscribers, thank you for your kind and generous support. It’s because of you we made it this far.

It has been an honor to be on this team.

If you’re reading this, you too played a part in sub-Q‘s success. Thank you. None of what you see here would have been possible without you.

More information will follow as we conclude publication. For now, all I have to offer is thanks.

Take care, and write on.

The post A Thousand Thanks for Five Years of sub-Q appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.

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.

The post Author Interview: Stephen Granade 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 over e-mail over January and February of 2020.

sub-Q magazine: I love the different people and stories in The Coffin Maker, and how they come together—regardless of your class or wealth, everyone meets their end in a coffin. How did the idea come to you?

I’ve been writing a lot about death lately, and I don’t know why. It certainly hasn’t been purposeful. In some ways, my recent works’ focus on death scares me because it forces me to confront the way in which the frightening realities of the world are infiltrating my craft.

I am so terribly afraid, and I think in some ways that my writing is a way to tell myself and my readers that everything will be ok. Several people have mentioned to me how hard it is to get a ‘good’ ending in The Coffin Maker, but I think in some ways all the endings are good. Either the elites are convinced to help the city, or the revolution comes and wipes away the coffins altogether.

sub-Q magazine: The descriptions of each coffin are sharp and vivid, as are the consequences against the backdrop of revolution. Were you inspired by any specific historical events? How did you decide on the choices and outcomes in the narrative?

Ann LeBlanc: The tight word-count requirement (1000 words across all play-throughs) helped to shape the way I handled the outcomes. Originally, I was over-ambitious and wanted to have the choice of coffin affect each of the characters’ endings. Halfway through writing the story, it became clear that wasn’t going to work within the word-count.

But I also realized that choice of coffin would only really matter 50 years later, when the Long Winter ended and the occupants would emerge. So in a way, which coffin to give to each character is a false choice. What really matters is whether you give a coffin or not. Who do you allow to escape the troubles of the present day?

Giving coffins to the rich and the powerful robs them of any incentive to aid society in the here and now. They’ll hoard their resources so that when they awaken at the dawning of spring they will retain their privileged position, having escaped the consequences of their exploitation of the commons. And yet, maybe society would be better off if they were out of the way for 50 years?

The question is different when applied to a dying widow. Is the world better off with her working alongside her fellows, or does the coffin maker have a duty to mercy? And for someone already marginalized, what sort of mercy is waking up alone in 50 years?

The widow’s daughter seems to be a favorite with readers. I think she’s both a bit of a Greek chorus, and the real protagonist of the story. I’ve already promised one of my Viable Paradise friends that I will write a sequel centering her character.

For all of the characters, the ending is often less about their personal outcome and more about how their life and death affect their loved ones and society at large. None of them are solitary figures—all exist within the web of the urban community.

sub-Q magazine: As someone who writes both non-interactive and interactive fiction, how does your work process differ between the two? For a story idea, how do you decide whether to take it down the interactive route?

Ann LeBlanc: I think one commonality between short stories and interactive fiction is the importance of choice. For short stories, it can be quite challenging to portray a full character arc in just a few thousand words. One way to do this is to focus on a singular dilemma and the protagonist’s choice—which often happens at the end of the story.

For me, what sets interactive fiction apart is its ability to make the reader complicit. By offloading the choice(s) to them, they are now partly responsible for whatever wonderful or terrible things happen in the narrative. This complicity can help the reader feel more connected to both the characters and the plot. It’s lovely when a reader gets to the end of a piece and gasps, “What have I done?” You don’t get that with non-interactive fiction as much.

I’m also deeply in love with multiple endings. Writing a good ending for a short story is incredibly hard. With interactive fiction, I can explore multiple endings not just to escape the burden of choosing one, but as a way to explore the central themes of the story.

sub-Q magazine: You edit and write for The Spectacles, a speculative fiction review site. What is the best part of deeply engaging with a work? What’s a piece of fiction you enjoyed recently?

Ann LeBlanc: One of my favorite pastimes is ranting with my reader friends about books we love. My series “What I Loved About…” is a way for me to do that on the internet, and to specifically focus on a specific part of the story I thought was well done—whether that’s a craft technique, work, characters, etc. It’s very much inspired by Jo Walton’s excellent “What Makes this Book So Great” series, which is now available in book form.

Recently, I absolutely loved Alexandra Rowland’s “A Conspiracy of Truths” and “A Choir of Lies“. Both are some of the best books I’ve read about the power of stories and the responsibility of the storyteller. The first book is one of the best uses of a story within a story, and it does an incredible job of showing the ambiguous consequences of each story told. The characters are all absolutely amazing, and the settings of both books do very cool things with queer world-building. Also the cover art is gorgeous—well worth searching for in the bookstore.

The post Author Interview: Ann LeBlanc 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.

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This interview was conducted over e-mail in January of 2020.

Photo © Lisa Tang Liu

sub-Q Magazine: I love the way “How to Build a Dragon at the End of Time” engages with our environmental theme by turning the idea of escapism on its head: here, the dragon, which one might see as escapist, becomes the means of our literal escape from a dying universe and the creation of a new one. But making the dragon is not a simple process. It requires building, assembling. Our materials demand reflection, balance, and thinking about the whole of what we are trying to create. It’s hands-on and, at the same time (as if there were any contradiction), poetic.
How do you escape?

Ken Liu: Thank you so much! It’s always such a joy to have one’s work understood deeply.

When I wrote this piece, I was trying to work through the idea of “environment” for myself. It seems that the way we think about the environment often falls into the trap of binary thinking: something is either part of “nature” or part of “artifice,” the environment or humanity, Other or Self.
Often, I use fiction as a way to have an argument with myself, to weigh ideas and see how they resonate against the heart.

So I set out to wrestle with the trap of binary thinking: the problem of how to “escape” the end of the universe presupposes that there is something doing the escaping and something to escape from—it’s how we frame so many disaster narratives. But as it turns out, “what’s in the dragon is also not in the dragon.” Building the dragon—an act of selection—necessarily also constructs the dragon’s environment—the negative selection. It’s a binary that collapses in on itself. We are also part of nature, the environment, the other-in-self-in-other; we cannot escape from ourselves; we have always been both problem and solution.

The result of my struggles to work through the infinitesimal patterns in the bamboo-of-existence was this piece of IF, which requires the player-reader to embrace balance by discernment, to eschew binary thinking by practicing it.

sub-Q Magazine: One of my favorite sentences in this piece was “Going forward requires pushing back.” Do you think that applies to other processes, in addition to dragon-building?

Ken Liu: I do. I think growth always requires examining where we come from and how we got here. To go somewhere new, to improve, to make progress—however one defines these concepts—require first that we accept the weight and gravity of our history.

sub-Q Magazine: Another standout for me was this: “It’s the fall that generates the force to uplift.” How does a writer fall?

Ken Liu: I think writing is about constantly failing.

Perfection is unattainable, and the stories that have moved me the most as a reader are not perfect stories: they are flawed creations that did something exceptionally well, with a sharp edge that cut through the veil of the quotidian to reveal something Beautiful and True underneath. But to hone such an edge necessitates the removal of material, the grinding away of aspects of experience that may be equally beautiful and true, but are distracting to the particular beauty and truth of this story. Every sharpened edge, when examined closely, is damaged, scarred, flawed.

Each beautiful story is thus also a monument to its own imperfection, and to dare to fall from the false promise of all-appealing grace is the most crucial act of every writer.

sub-Q Magazine: You have engaged with interactivity in literature before; for example, in “The Clockwork Soldier,” which is a non-interactive story that incorporates an interactive text adventure. What draws you to interactive fiction?

Ken Liu: A formative text for me is Milton’s Paradise Lost. As Stanley Fish pointed out a long time ago in Surprised by Sin, Milton’s epic can be understood as a kind of interactive text in which the reader is the most important character. The reader is constantly seduced by the text into advocating for the devil’s party, and the poem gradually builds power through these revelatory encounters that literally show the fallen nature of the reader.

After that, the interactivity of all narratives became a touchstone for my own aesthetic.
I think interactive fiction is still a largely underexplored medium. By fronting the agency of the player-reader, it has the potential to evoke powerful emotions that may be hard to achieve in less interactive narrative forms.

sub-Q Magazine: If you could make anything into a game, what would you choose?

Ken Liu: I’m very, very interested in VR and games, especially the potential for VR to allow us to experience the world viscerally from perspectives otherwise unavailable. Our proprioception can be extended and molded through VR in ways that have barely been explored. What would it be like to soar like an eagle? To dive like a whale? To slither through the grass like a snake? To race across the open plains on all fours like a cheetah? As full-body VR immersion becomes reality, I think there will be so many more interesting ways to play with our extended cognition and embodied minds.

sub-Q Magazine: Any recent games/interactive works that caught your attention?

Ken Liu: I loved GRIS, which I only got to play recently. I was especially amazed by how powerfully it evoked emotions by withholding and using color.

sub-Q Magazine: What’s next for you?

Ken Liu: My second collection of short fiction, THE HIDDEN GIRL AND OTHER STORIES, is being published by Saga Press on February 25, 2020. I’m also in the last phases of editing the conclusion of the Dandelion Dynasty, my silkpunk epic fantasy series. This is shaping up to be a busy as well as productive year for writing, after years of struggling on one project. I’m so grateful to all the readers who have supported me on this journey.

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