When Dice Were Made of Flint #11

In 1985, I was an archaeology postgrad, compiling 150-odd years of excavation reports on Neolithic and Bronze Age burials and building a database on the university mainframe. I was becoming dispirited: I knew nothing about computers, and my supervisor and I were completely incompatible personality-wise. But that’s a story for another time, and probably another magazine.

As I said in an earlier column, gamebooks were everywhere at the time. Following the success of Fighting Fantasy, imitators had sprung up like weeds. Imagine magazine had just published an article on the gamebook phenomenon that I had co-written with their book critic Colin Greenland, and I was doing an occasional gamebook spot on BBC Radio Newcastle’s children’s book programme. Then, out of the blue, I got a phone call.

Now, “getting a phone call” wasn’t easy. Mobile phones barely existed, and were either large consoles that Captains of Industry had bolted into their Bentleys or portable units that came in a satchel and cost only a little more than their weight in gold. What I actually got was a scrawled note that someone from a company called Scribos had rung, and wanted to talk to me about a freelance writing project.

There was no internet to look up this Scribos, and I had no idea who they were. My college had half a dozen payphones for the use of 300-odd students. I collected a fistful of 10p pieces, wandered the corridors until I found a free phone, and called them.

It turned out that they were an educational publisher, and wanted someone to write two 6-volume fantasy series in the Choose Your Own Adventure format. The books were aimed at teens with reading ages of 6-7, so language had to be kept simple. The concept relied on the read-comprehend-decide activity loop of the gamebook format, along with the popularity of the gamebook phenomenon. I was sent a reading age chart and told that each book should come in at 50 entries.

Though I’d been sending articles to White Dwarf and Imagine for a few years, I had never seriously thought of making a living as a writer. But two things sealed the deal. First, the books were to be published by Oxford University Press. And second, I was offered £600.

Now, £600 was a tidy sum to a mid-80s college student, but this was a one-time project and I never did the maths on how many such projects I’d need each year in order to make a living. Between this and my modest but semi-regular checks from White Dwarf and Imagine, I thought I was on my way. Over the next few months, my archaeological research fizzled and eventually died.

I finished the Quest Books project and was paid (which isn’t always the case, as any freelancer can tell you), but the £600 didn’t last long. TSR shut down Imagine, my most lucrative market. Editor Paul Cockburn started the short-lived GameMaster Publications and I became a regular contributor, but I just wasn’t bringing in enough money.

When I remember my confused, conflicted, and wildly over-optimistic mid-twenties self in that lean winter of 1985-6, I can’t suppress a smile. I had no idea what I was doing, and in a reasonable universe I would never have got away with it. But that one decision, swung by the name of Oxford University Press and the promise of £600, set the course of my life.