Hey, do you remember the time Sterling Gibson reported that Clive Spooner attended a World Cup game in a year the World Cup wasn't even held?

No? Well, he did. I know because I was there.

In case you have no idea what I'm talking about, Clive Spooner is a very rich and powerful character in the world of The Beam (on normal stores here or cheaper on my store), and Sterling Gibson is a Malcolm-Gladwell-style writer in the same world. To be clear, Gibson is FICTIONAL and doesn't actually exist ... and yet there's a book in my catalog called Plugged: How Hyperconnectivity and The Beam Changed the Way We Think (my store / everywhere else) with Gibson's name on it ... but in truth, Plugged was actually written by me and Sean. (Shh - don't tell anyone).

We wrote Plugged (and put Gibson's name on it) between Seasons One and Two of The Beam because we needed to understand the incredibly complex sci-fi world we were creating. The most-fun way to "explain our own story world to ourselves" was to 1) create a fictional author living in the year 2097 along with all of our other characters, and then 2) have HIM write a book about the world he "lived in."

Yeah. I know. Told you this world was complex.

Plugged is written like nonfiction even though everything in it is fictional. "Sterling Gibson," being his world's Malcolm Gladwell, wrote it the way Gladwell wrote Outliers and The Tipping Point. And as part of writing Plugged, Gibson wrote about the influence of Clive Spooner.

After we published Plugged, an astute British reader pointed out an error in its pages. See, Spooner is British, and he was reported as saying he'd attended a World Cup game in a certain year. Our reader told us, "Hey, you lousy sods -- the World Cup wasn't held that year, and no English football fan would get something like that wrong!"

(NOTE: He didn't actually call us sods. That's my written-down Brit impression. How did I do? Feel free to reply and call me a wanker if I got it wrong.)

But he was right! Clive Spooner wouldn't get the year of the World Cup wrong. Obviously, we had to change it the way we'd fix a typo ... but there was just one small problem: We couldn't change it, because the events of Plugged had already happened.

WHAT?

That's me, quoting you: WHAT? What the fuck are you talking about, Johnny? This is too weird and complicated, even for you.

But it's actually quite simple. YES, Sterling Gibson is a fictional character. YES, Sean and were the ones who actually wrote Plugged. YES, Clive Spooner is fictional -- and YES, his trip to the World Cup was also fictional ... whenever the hell it "happened."

And yet we couldn't fix the mistake in Plugged by simply changing the year Spooner supposedly attended. Doing so would be dishonest -- even for two fictional characters discussing a fictional event.

Once it's written, it exists.

If you're still confused, it's because you're missing one key truth that I haven't told you yet: I believe that once I've written and published a story, its events actually exist ... as indelibly as if the story had happened in the real world.

The second Plugged was published, it became an artifact from the future. Changing facts inside that artifact would therefore mean ret-conning something real. If we changed anything, we'd be gaslighting anyone who'd already read the book: a literary Mandela Effect. People would ask me, "Hey -- didn't Spooner say he went to the World Cup in X year?" And I'd be like, "No, man. Spooner clearly went to the World Cup in Y year, not X year. Don't believe me? Well, look for yourself. It's in the book, right there in black and white. You're crazy!"

I can't gaslight my readers like that. I just can't.

I don't like to change my books, because I believe in them. Because I believe the story existed before I wrote it, and all I did was to transcribe what was already there. The stories come through me and are flavored by my personality and style, but I don't really feel like I'm inventing them.

(You'd understand if you were inside my head while I'm writing. I don't know what will happen until it happens. Characters constantly surprise me, as do twists in the story. If I'm creating these things, shouldn't I have more control over them?)

In the case of Gibson and Spooner, Sean and I had a real conundrum. Clearly something was wrong (there was no World Cup that year, so obviously Spooner wasn't at it that year), but we couldn't "change existing history" (also called "editing what happened in Plugged") to fix it. There was a problem, yes, but its source had to be something else.

Or, in this case, someone else.

Stupid Sterling Gibson.

Clearly, Sean and I hadn't made a mistake. By process of elimination, there was only one person who could have had made the mistake: Sterling Gibson, our fictional author living in the year 2097.

Crazy Gibson. He'd failed to double-check his sources. Turned out, he'd misquoted Clive Spooner. Clive Spooner did attend the World Cup one year, but Gibson (not Spooner and DEFINITELY not us) had gotten that year wrong.

That's how we solved the problem: We discovered quite by accident that Sterling Gibson wasn't the hardboiled news source we'd thought he was. Turned out he was unreliable, as evidenced by the whole Spooner gaffe.

So when Sean and I wrote Season Two of The Beam later that year, we knew Gibson was going to be suspect. It even became a plot point: Nobody could trust Sterling Gibson's books anymore because everyone knew he'd screwed up in Plugged, when he'd made his argument about Clive Spooner's whereabouts.

Problem solved. All it took was to scapegoat one sloppy journalist.

To be honest ...

Yeah, okay. I guess if I'm honest, this whole thing feels a little bit silly. We could have just fixed the mistake in Plugged ourselves instead of blaming it on Gibson, who doesn't actually exist. We could have done that, but the way we actually handled it was cooler, led to an unexpected plot twist, and felt more honest.

To me, stories are real things. I treat them as if they actually exist, because that's the way they present themselves to me while I'm writing them. With the exception of typos, I tend to feel like publishing a book more or less casts it in stone, and that changing events within a book post-publication is cheating. Get the story right the first time; that's how I feel about it. There are authors who realize they've written themselves into a corner, so they go back to the previous book and change things to give themselves more freedom. But that's bullshit. What happened in that book HAPPENED, and if the writer wants to explore story threads that the first book's events closed off, they'd better get inventive and find new ways around the facts that've already been established.

Personally, I enjoy writing myself into corners. I do it on purpose, then publish the corner-laden book to cement my self-imposed noose in the same way Cortés burned his ships upon reaching the New World. To take another example in The Beam world, there's a cliffhanger between books of The Future of Sex series (my store / other stores) that Sean and I wrote with ZERO IDEA how the hell we'd resolve it. We basically made an impossible contradiction, then published the book and dared ourselves to figure our way out of it.

The result was awesome ... and the resulting awesomeness was only possible because we refused to change the published book and instead had to find a better answer the hard way.

Which brings us to the topic of this new thing I can't write after all.

Sigh. I really hate breaking promises. I'm a man of my word and try always to do what I say I'll do. And yet just this morning, I finally threw in the towel on a project I've promised to people who are waiting eagerly for it.

Remember Mine Zero, that vote-as-you-go story that many of you voted live to help me write?

As part of my last Kickstarter, I promised a very cool "stretch goal reward" to my backers: an extra item the creator delivers if the campaign reaches a next-level funding goal. In this case, the reward was a branching-narrative version of Mine Zero: a version that contained ALL of the possible story paths rather than just the ones that won the live votes. I even had a name for such a story, since "Choose Your Own Adventure" is copyrighted and hence unusable. The name, suggested by a reader, was "What's Their Fate?", which shortened to a very on-brand "WTF."

I should have been able to write that story, right? The old Choose Your Own Adventure books did it all the time. All I needed to do was to write all of the things that didn't happen the first time.

Hmm. Maybe you already see the problem.

I've been trying to figure out how to write the WTF version of Mine Zero for weeks now, making zero headway. Just this morning, I figured out why. It's because in order to write it, I'd have to undo the truth of the existing story. So for example: At the first decision point, most readers voted for the expedition to go down the mineshaft even though it was on fire rather than rappelling in through a skylight into another chamber. All I had to do was to write a version wherein they DIDN'T go through the flaming shaft and DID go through the skylight ... right?

There's just one problem: That's not what happened! The story already exists, and in that story they went through the damn mineshaft, not the skylight!

Back me up on this, will you? Many of you were there. You saw it happen, same as me!

There's technically more to it, but "I'd need to lie about what 'actually happened'" is at the core of everything. The Choose Your Own Adventure books had plots based entirely on actions, not character development. In those books, the choice of "if you turn left you encounter a monster, but if you turn right you find the exit" was straightforward and therefore easy to rearrange no matter what order in which a reader encounters them.

But I don't write that way. At all.

In my books, character dynamics are affected with every choice. The Clara Remik you see on Page 1 is very different from the Clara on Page 50 because she's goes through some shit on pages 2-49. I can't just rearrange her journey through the mines and expect it to make sense, because she's growing the entire time. That psychological "character stuff" is baked firmly into the narrative, impossible to remove without making the story so bland as to be meaningless.

The ONLY way I could MAYBE have written a branching-narrative book would be to throw everything away each time I started a new fork and write the entire rest of the book from scratch ... and to do it 12 times, to account for the twelve different endings.

(Note that I couldn't even re-use endings in the way the COYA books used to, because very different things have happened on the way to each of them.)

But more importantly, I'd be lying if I did that. I'd be ret-conning the story each time, then gaslighting the reader. That's how it felt to me, anyway.

Writing the promised WTF book was an impossible task. I sincerely tried -- over and over again -- to find a way to make it work, but doing so became an entirely left-brained endeavor and I'm a right-brained person. You don't want a book from me that was written through mechanistic, left-brained logic. Trust me. If I can't get into flow (impossible for any "multiple possibilities" story, I've realized), the story will suck. HARD.

Wait! I need closure on that anecdote!

Those of you who backed the Kickstarter and are therefore expecting the WTF version of Mine Zero as your promised stretch goal reward will get closure via a forthcoming Kickstarter update. However, that's the minority of you reading this right now, and I can feel the rest of you wanting to know the end of this story. You want to know how I'm going to keep my promise after this kerfuffle ... right?

Well, it's simple. For one, I'll deliver an eBook of the current Mine Zero (the single narrative version many of you have already read) so that backers who haven't read it yet can at least read the original without having to read it on my website. That part is triage. More importantly, I'm going to write a brand-new novella for them. It'll be a single narrative, like the rest of my books, but it'll be a cool-as-hell read that'll be exclusive to them for a while. For a while, nobody but backers will have it.

Hopefully that makes people happy enough to not throw virtual tomatoes at me.

But man do I hate breaking promises. If you're one of the backers who've been eager to read the branching story, I'm sorry! My way of viewing storycraft just won't allow me to write a story without a single clear narrative. My stories have "a truth" about them. There's one set of events that happens in a Truant book ... not multiple sets of events.

I mean, what am I supposed to do? Pretend that none of it happened for real? Pretend this is fiction?

Now who's being silly?

-Johnny