You Are Jonah Yu
Shaenon: So Jeff and I both promised to write bonus prose stories for backers of the Skin Horse 4 Kickstarter. One of us wrote a normal story like a human living a 24-hour day who also needs to sleep would write. One of us wrote an epic branching-paths novel that could have been a Kickstarter project in its own right. Everybody who pledged at the level where they receive Jeff’s You Are Jonah Yu is super lucky, is all I can say.
Channing: Hope all y’all’s like it! It’s a bit more absurd than the average Skin Horse story, in homage to the raw batcrap insanity that permeates even a garden-varity CYOA-type book.
Is that Tigerlilly Jones? If so, I must read this…
Sadly, no; it’s Hyacinth Jones, her remarkably-less-funky twin sister.
(And on a side note, now I’m wondering about Victorian Tigerlily Jones.)
Something tells me that Tigerlily’s Victorian counterpart was strongly influenced by Romantic poetry. Or penny dreadfuls…
Come to think of it, now I want to see a Victorian Tigerlily Jones. And something tells me she would be named “Hyacinthe”. ^_^
Where’s her brother C.O. Jones (cojones)?
A worthy sequel to the Jonah Yu arc.
Na na na na na na na na Batcrap!
Na na na na na na na na Batcrap!
Na na na na na na na na Batcrap!
Na na na na na na na na Batcrap!
Na na na na na na na na
Na na na na na na na na
Batcrap!
(go up an octave)
Na na na na na na na na na na na
Batcrap!!!
Man, I hate being constantly broke :<
And I hate not actually being broke but living in a country where the exchange rate makes it very expensive to get stuff from the US. Shipping alone usually costs around $150…
Is that a mole man?
I really really want to read that.
Hey wait, is that ever going to be a real physical book? Is it available for non-backers? It looks great.
Unsure. It turned into like a 50k word novella somehow, so it might be worth a couple bucks to some people, but I am not certain if I can offer it in good conscience without impacting the exclusivity factor that may have been some people’s deciding factor to pledge as high as they did on the Kickstarter in the first place. Y’know what I mean?
OK, related question: I pledged for, and got, the .pdf. (It was awesome, by the way.) Can I print a copy with that cover? I wouldn’t mind having a physical copy of the book, and it would be a shame if the cover never got used.
And if it makes a difference, I personally wouldn’t mind at all if you sold the book to non-backers, but I would understand if other backers did. Maybe you should try a poll or something if you’re seriously considering it.
In all my draft copies of the CYOA story, that image was the first page. Did you somehow get a .pdf that omitted the cover image?
I guess so — the first page of my copy just says “You Are Jonah Yu A Jonah Yu Story By Jeffrey C. Wells” on a plain white background. It’s no big deal, though. Mainly I just wanted to know if it was OK to print a copy at all.
Amy, Creative Commons allows you to print a physical copy for your own personal non-commercial use. Head on over to my contact form and drop me a line and I can set you up with a copy that includes the cover properly. Thanks for checking!
You could do a timed-exclusivity thing. Like, wait six months after the backers get it.
While I was a KS backer, I didn’t pony up the extra cash for the level where you got this book. That said, I would be highly interested in getting a copy of it. The limited exclusivity thing might be a good way to do that.
A backer poll or mass emailing might be another way to gauge the feelings of your backers too.
I’d definitely be interested, especially if it’s canon. If it is, then is the “Jonah lives long and dies happy only to wake up back in the theater” theory debunked? Does he really have checkpoints?
(TUNE: “All I Know”, Art Garfunkel)
You are Yu,
Goodness me!
Who knows who
You might just see?
Each choice will be
For you to try …
One will live,
Thirty-eight will die!
A new door opens, when another shuts …
Each path will end … in death & blood & guts!
Your world was made by one who’s completely nuts!
But then Tigerlily
Has her fun!
Jonah, will he
Find the one?
What can be done
To help him through?
Up to you;
You are Jonah Yu!
There’s an open source program called Twine that lets you make your own Choose Your Own Adventures stories. Fill in the text, put in links for your options, and it builds HTML for you. It also has a dice generator, so you can have random events. It’s pretty cool, but it doesn’t handle Unicode well when I was working with it, so things like Word’s Smartquotes can be problematic.
Check it out all over the web, lots of people play with it. One such site is at http://www.gimcrackd.com/etc/src/ and there’s a Tweecode group on Yahoo.
You can also put in commands for “key info” moments, and put statements into “locked choice” moments, much in the same way as the original Choose arc. If you liked Choose, and are willing to go with a somewhat more serious tone (basically serious with funny thrown in instead of funny with serious thrown in), then you should really check out the Zero Escape series of games. (Time loops and death games and room escapes and quirky characters and murder mysteries-! *gasp* *gasp*… oh my!)
Aw man, now I’m really sorry I didn’t have spare cash during the Kickstarter drive…
Me too! Is there any way that the Choose Your Own Adventure Story, or the regular Prose story, could be something we could purchase as a PDF or a .Doc file in the store? That would be really cool.
For the record, during future Kickstarters, I’d enjoy having a level that was “Current book pdf + all pdf bonus material” and another level that was “current book pdf+all previous book pdfs + all pdf bonus material.”
I’m finding that my iPad makes it much nicer to do pdf comics than traditional graphic novels, so levels like those will tempt me a bit more than ones with physical products.
He dies in all of them, doesn’t he?
I hope all of the endings end with “The End. Turn to Page 5.” I also hope there’s a bonus, single-page ending not counted among the eight that is better than any of the other endings but has no page actually leading to it, to frustrate those who read CYOAs backwards from the best ending.
Fun fact: I am very very bad at finding out about Kickstarters while they’re running, so I often miss out on really cool stuff that I’d really like. (Also until shortly before this Sunday strip ran I didn’t actually have money, so there’s that contributing factor.)
All of which is to say: count me in as a buyer if this ever becomes a thing available for sale.
This was frogging brilliant!