Sorry (not sorry!)… no choices for you!

Choose your own path… orrrr maybe not…

So I told you all this next book series, The Legacy of Lucky Logan, first began when I wanted to explore more the idea behind an outlaw falling in love with a law-abiding woman, inspired by Mary Linton and Arthur Morgan’s relationship in Red Dead Redemption 2.

Well, after I mulled around that idea a bit, I thought it would be super fun to write a Choose-Your-Own-Path-style novel, where the reader could choose whether they wanted to stay an outlaw or attempt to go straight to settle down and start a “real life”.

Kinda like the game, but as I said before, dig into both of those paths a lot deeper. Explore those emotional consequences more. And the thing is, in the game, you aren’t given a choice in whether or not you end up with Mary. That result is already determined.

You do at least have the option to rethink your outlaw ways, and start trying to do some good instead… but again, the end result is pretty much set. There are a few mildly different endings, and whether you are “high honor” (ie, “good”) or “low honor” (ie, still a murderin’, theivin’ bastard) does have impact on some other aspects of gameplay. (Enough that I’m trying to force myself to stay an evil bastard on my second play-through… whew, folks, it’s hard, but I’m trying my best just so I can play through those differences! Lol.)

BUT even still… Arthur Morgan’s fate is sealed, regardless. Which is about one of the most heart-wrenching things I’ve ever experienced in a game, to be honest. (Thus that ugly crying I mentioned… also why I now have to do the same heart-twisting in my books… #sorrynotsorry)

SO I THOUGHT… well, we have more freedom to explore things in novels. We don’t have to pay hundreds of people for thousands of hours worth of work to explore different choices and different paths. We only have to suffer ourselves as authors, after all… pour our own blood, sweat, and tears and hundreds of hours of our own time into novels. Why not play around with this idea through a Choose Your Own Path book! Readers can choose: stay a murderin’, thievin’ bastard, or turn their lives around for the greater good. Reunite with a lost love, and decide whether to pursue that relationship in a more permanent manner, or let it slip away into the past for good….

So I started developing those different paths, deciding where the branches would be (all the while having nightmarish visions of what happened in Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch to the poor kid trying to make a CYOA game, mind you – and also why I’m calling it a Choose Your Own PATH novel, because as you can see, using the exact phrase “Choose Your Own Adventure” can be legally problematic…) and also what the backstory would be for the reader character…

… well, that backstory brainstorming led to the reader character having an estranged sibling (originally a brother, but then I thought a sister would be more interesting)… which then led down a whole new rabbit hole…

Because that led to the question… why was this sibling estranged? (One of the plot paths would be if you decided to track down your sibling or not, and there would be a sibling-related outcome for either going after them or not.)

What had happened between the two of them to make them not speak anymore, or not want anything to do with each other anymore?

Was one an outlaw, and one a law(wo)man? Oooh, that sounded fun. How far would family blood take them, in this case? How would the one on the side of the law react if it was their own family they’d have to bring in, or arrest, or kill… or watch hang? What would the one who was an outlaw think of their sibling being a lawdog? What were the circumstances that drove them each to such separate sides of the line?

So I followed that rabbit hole for awhile, and things started falling into place rather quickly. Except then I realized, this backstory was so much fun, maybe I wanted to write a short story about it.

Maybe that could be one of the freebies I offered to my mailing list!

I congratulated myself on my brilliance, and promptly started to write Bargain at Bravebank.

(“Wait,” you might be saying, “isn’t that the novel you have coming out this/next month??” Yes, yes that’s right, You. Patience, grasshopper, we’ll get to that…)

Of course, readers couldn’t have choices in this backstory… otherwise it would be too hard to integrate their choices into the main series. So I decided to keep the prequel story NON-Choose-Your-Own-Path.

And then I ended up falling in love too hard with all the characters… so the notion of letting readers decide what was going to happen, even in the main series, went out the window… 😛 (#sorrynotsorry again… but hey! I AM still going to write one of those interactive stories someday, I SWEAR, because it sounds WAY too fun!)

But how in the heck did a prequel short story turn into a full novel, and not only a full novel, but Book 1 of a much longer series? Well, my friends, that’s a tale for another day…

Stay tuned… and if you’d like to follow my Red Dead Redemption 2 obsession and also some fun book-related stuff, you can always find me at the above-mentioned places: Instagram or Facebook, or join my mailing list here to hear all the news first, and get a free book for your trouble, too!