I was a fan of the original CYOA books way back when. I won't exactly say how long ago that was, but it was the last time we had a celebrity for president. Anyway, not only was I an avid reader/collector of the damn things, I wrote a bunch of them, too. By "write" I mean printing out my stories, by hand, in pencil, on paper. I also drew the illustrations and made covers. From about the fifth to eighth grades, I completed seven books, left two more half-finished, and had a diagram in progress for what would have been a tenth book.
In the year 1986, Bantam Books, which published the CYOA series, held a story-writing contest in which the winning author would get his/her story published as an actual book. Even though I was writing my own stories at the time, I remember being very much aware how inexperienced I was, so I never entered the contest. Now if they had held another one a few years later, that might have been different...
The problem with those pre-internet, hand-printed stories I had labored so hard to create was that it was difficult to share them. I think maybe my mother, a handful of teachers, and at least one of my friends are probably the only people who ever saw them. And yet I would spend months at a time working on one...
So eventually I outgrew the whole thing, went to college, never noticed when the original CYOA series went out of print, graduated from college, and then by a serendipitous chain of events became the proud owner of a series of hiking guidebooks for the Adirondack Park. That led to a variety of other writing projects--some of them paid gigs, much of it unpaid, but almost all of it focused on outdoor recreation and wilderness management in the Adirondacks.
So flash forward to February 2019. A guidebook that I finished writing the previous year is due to be released in May, but I'm kind of bored with guidebooks, a failed relationship needs to be replaced with an engrossing project, and I have been kicking around all these story ideas in my head that I have no idea what to do with.
Then I remembered that the CYOA series that I loved as a kid was partially resurrected a few years ago, and wouldn't it be freaking awesome if my next book was a CYOA? I know that approaching a publisher with an unsolicited manuscript is the absolute worst thing one could do. But just to prove to myself I could still work in this format, I wrote Marooned on Giri Minor anyway, and then started on an early version of Secret of the Grass Planet... when I learned, rather abruptly, that the publisher had no interest in even meeting with me.
There was the official reason this particular gatekeeper gave me, and there is what I suspect is the real, unspoken reason, neither of which I'll go into here. But I was worried that if I stopped writing now, I'd never pick the project up again; and I didn't want a repeat of thirty years ago, when basically I was writing CYOAs for my own nerdy amusement.
When I was conducting my internet searches on the subject of CYOA in general, this website kept getting ranked fairly highly by Google, not far below CYOA.com, actually. So rather than dwell in my frustration, I decided it would be healthier to just publish Giri Minor here, rather than let it become some forgotten file on my external hard drive.
And for what it's worth--and for those who care--I had no idea that sites like CoG even existed until after I started reviewing some of the threads on this forum. But it didn't take me long to figure out that I'm a generation or two too old for CoG. I mean really, if I want to read a story about cyborg warfare or some stupid thing, then it stands to reason I'm not interested in the option to have a gay romance along the way, right? Is that really a choice I need to consciously make? Nor do I see the point in questioning what my gender is... because the answer to that question is actually quite self-evident every time I pee.
