Introducing Trail Blaze Fiction
Experiments in participatory storytelling by fantasy writer Adam Thomas
Greetings and welcome to Trail Blaze Fiction, a new experiment in participatory storytelling. Each week beginning Friday, July 5, 2024, I will post a chapter of a brand new fantasy story. At the end of the post, you will vote in a poll about where the story will go in the next chapter.
The inspiration for Trail Blaze is, of course, the Choose Your Own Adventure books that I read in the late 80s and early 90s. Over ten years ago, I started a website called “Crossroads Fiction,” which was essentially a Choose Your Own Adventure story using a webpage format. I quickly learned how hard it is to write a story like that, as the permutations began growing exponentially almost immediately. I abandoned the site, but the idea has bounced around my head ever since.
With Trail Blaze, instead of many permutations that spin off into ever expanding storylines, the readership of our stories will collectively choose one path at the end of each post – like the Sacred Timeline in the Loki series. We’ll prune the branches each week as we figure out the tale together.
Who am I?
My name is Adam Thomas. I’m a book-writing, board-game-playing, soccer-reffing, laundry-folding soy-free chocolate enthusiast. I live in southeastern Connecticut with my spouse Leah, our voracious reader twins, and a fluctuating number of guinea pigs.
In 2015, I started playing Dungeons and Dragons (thanks to Critical Role), and stories started building up inside me. I have been writing fantasy novels since 2016. You can find nine of them on my author website, adamthomas.net.
With traditionally and independently published books, as well as several completed manuscripts lurking on my hard drive, I am always looking for new ways to pour the glut of words in my mind onto the page. My mission: to find truth through fantasy.
Who are you?
I don’t know for sure, but I’d be willing to guess that you love to read and to interact with other folks who also love to read. You enjoy sci-fi/fantasy stories and/or you play D&D. Or you’re my mom. Hi Mom!
What can you expect?
Chapters will post each Friday. Over the weekend, you will participate in the poll which will guide my writing for the next week. Your comments and questions in response to posts will also influence where the stories go.
Written and audio versions of the stories will always be available to free subscribers. Once I turn on the paid feature, paid subscribers will have the opportunity to help me decide on the content of future stories, from big things like premises, plots, and settings to little things like names of places and characters.
What’s the First Story?
We’re beginning in my fantasy world on a continent called Lanesanya in a country called Titanstep on a small island housing the Spark Foundry where an arcane engineer, the halfling Amilira, has just presided over a spectacular failure: the malfunction of the entire batch of experimental automatons. Or was it? A single Spark, designated B27-Arrow-10 has somehow survived.
A Test Poll
For this inaugural post, please help me understand the poll feature of Substack by participating in this short poll.
