i don’t hate you

I will defer to Chris Avellone, who already answered your question and knows way more about that than I do, but speaking of CYOA, Vintage Books, the publisher of PRESS START TO PLAY, created this fun CYOA story that you can play online:

I’m a hard enough taskmaster on myself that I haven’t allowed any games to jeopardize my day job, but the last game I was completely obsessed with in that way was SKYRIM. I know that’s pretty old now, but as I say in my introduction to the anthology, I LOVE GAMES TOO MUCH. I actually can’t allow myself to even start…

Though I guess if you still win, it would be dumb for the coach to get fired. :)

Maybe they could have a “GM-o-meter” that shows you how happy the GM is with the coach (i.e., the player). And if you do stupid stuff like going for it on 4th and 15 all the time, you get fired and you can’t progress with your season, you have to start over.

Sounds like that will completely revolutionize the way people get hit by cars.

I talk a bit about my evolution as a gamer in the introduction to the anthology (which you can read here:

My favorite SF game series is definitely the Fallout series. You could also remove the “SF” qualifier from my answer, because Fallout is my favorite game series period. I admit, though, that I might not be the truest fan because I never did play Fallout: Tactics, so if there’s anything super awesome in that one, I…

That’s always going to be a real risk for writing about technologies like video games that are constantly changing and evolving. It’s almost impossible to really ward against it entirely. Probably the safest way to do it is to have something set during a very specific time period, instead of writing a story that feels…

It’s a different kind of game entirely, but this made me think of Spaceteam, a collaborative party game type game. It requires everyone in your group have a smartphone (Android/iOS) and you shout things at each other in order to save your ship from destruction and such. It’s got some humor sort of built into it, but…

Pretty much every story is pre-apocalypse in the sense that they take place before any apocalypse has happened, sure, but they're not ABOUT the pre-apocalypse; in other words, they're not exploring what the world would be like when it's on the brink of collapse, those moments leading up to the apocalypse, which is…

I thought of Canticle for Leibowitz, obviously, as a triptych of apocalyptic stories (it's one of my favorite books of all time), but it doesn't do what this is doing. It's about the cyclical rise and fall of civilization; it doesn't explore the three modes of the apocalypse like what we're talking about for this.

That's the whole story. The line right before "Enjoyed this story?" etc., that's the last line of the story.

Re: His historical fiction influences, GRRM recently touted THE IRON KING by Maurice Duron as an important influence on GOT. He just did an introduction for a new edition of it, in which he says "This was the original Game of Thrones."

Obviously it's hard to include in a list like this, but for people interested in power armor I would also mention my anthology ARMORED, which has 20+ stories of power armor in various forms. The full text (or audio) of five different stories from the anthology are available on the book's website.

They actually did publish a few mass markets. Mark Teppo's books were published as mass market originals, and after initial hardcover runs they later tried to backlist Liz Williams's Detective-Inspector Chen novels as mass market titles.