Gamebook Friday: Dracula - Curse of the Vampire

I'm loving Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat's take on Dracula and am looking forward to the final part of BBC 1 this evening, and it's got me thinking about adaptations of classic stories.

The BBC has broadcast adaptations of four such stories recently, three true classics - H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, and Bram Stoker's Dracula - and one modern classic, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials.

The whole family was gripped by His Dark Materials, which even had the kids looking up from their phones, and I loved Lorne Balfe's score. The score was the best bit about The War of the Worlds, and I religiously fell asleep every Sunday night whilst watching it. The jury's still out on A Christmas Carol - how much can you take away from a classic story before it is no longer recognisably the same story - but at least it held my attention.

I have spent the last five years producing my own gamebook adaptations of a number of classic stories, some of which are more like re-imaginings than straight adaptations - NEVERLAND - Here Be Monsters! being a case in point - while others are much closer to the original source material, like Beowulf Beastslayer. But no matter what I have done with the stories, I have always tried to ensure that I hit all the beats people would expect.

Both Alice's Nightmare in Wonderland and The Wicked Wizard of Oz are populated with a host of characters from the original source texts, while 'TWAS - The Krampus Night Before Christmas is filled with every Christmas cliché you could think of.

It just so happens that the sixth ACE Gamebook will be Dracula - Curse of the Vampire, and may be my closest adaptation yet. By the way, the Kickstarter campaign launches on Sunday 1st March 2020, with special rewards on offer for those people who back within the first 24 hours.

It was with no small amount of relief that on watching the BBC's Dracula I realised that it goes in a very different direction from my version, which allows you to play as the eponymous Count himself, and has diverged from the original novel massively. However, this has not been to its detriment; if anything it has reinvigorated the story and made it horrifying again*. All the important characters are still in place, but Gatiss and Moffat continue to surprise and intrigue the viewer throughout.

"You have something in your eye."

Where the BBC's adaptation of The War of the Worlds went wrong, I believe, is that some of the changes that were made were utterly illogical - for example, the levitating heat-ray thing - but worse than that, it was boring. And it's quite a challenge to make H. G. Wells' classic about an alien invasion of Earth that dull. While I'm still undecided about taking so much of Dickens out of A Christmas Carol, at least it wasn't boring**.

And I think it's safe to say that Dracula - Curse of the Vampire won't be boring either. To be kept up to date with developments, subscribe to my Newsletter here, and join the ACE Gamebooks Facebook group here.

* The opening scene where Sister Agatha says to Jonathan Harker, "You have something in your eye" springs to mind.

** And I'm a big Guy Pearce fan.

Tie-in Tuesday: Steven Moffat talks about Doctor Who's 50th anniversary

Steven Moffat on writing

Screenwriter, novelist and journalist Jason Arnopp has posted a couple of interviews he undertook with Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffat. For any aspiring writer, or anyone interested in the creative process at all, they make for very interesting reading.

To read about Moffat's views on the power of secrets, click here and scroll down the page. On Moffat's current writings practices and writing for New Who, click here.

On keeping surprises a surprise

I was listening to Steven Moffat talk on Doctor Who Confidential about the importance of keeping the surprises in Doctor Who a secret, something he's striven very hard to do (unlike the producers of soap operas who trail major plot developments weeks in advance through the media). It's obviously no mean thing to achieve when you're producing something on the scale of one of the Beeb's top-rated dramas, but it can prove a challenge for us jobbing writers too.

These days I often get to write the blurbs for my novels myself, or at least the first version thereof. Writing blurbs is a challenge in and of itself but at least I retain control over what's revealed and what isn't. You want to dangle enough carrots to get readers to want to part with their cash to read the book in the first place but you don't want to reveal the final twist that comes right at the end.

However, in the past, I didn't write my own blurbs and this resulted in one of the biggest cock-ups, in terms of revealing the ending, I've ever had. Magestorm was my third novel for the Black Library, written to tie into the Storm of Chaos campaign as well as Dan Abnett's Riders of the Dead. That proved a challenge in itself, but I also had to base it on the War Cry CCG, including various characters from that game in my novel.

I have to confess, it's not my best work, but the blurb on the back of the book certainly didn't help when readers actually read the book because it gave away a major plot reveal that only came in the penultimate chapter (or thereabouts). And now it's happened again.

Sir Dagobert's Last Battle will be available to read as part of Hammer & Bolter Issue 9. It's full of twists and turns and (hopefully) unexpected reveals - except that one of them has already been given away in the single sentence that's promoting it on the Black Library website. So, if you're planning on reading my latest Warhammer short story, by all means follow this link and click the pre-order button, but please don't read the write up of the story as you do so.