I’m not well-suited to writing puzzle novels. I do love the sort of narrative that casts a wide net and somehow integrates whatever it pulls in, but when I tried it I ended up with a weird lungfish/anemone hybrid creature that lived a mercifully brief life. Metaphorically speaking.

Bird, Said Bird began as a novel with multiple narrators. Each narrator was going to have an encounter with either a creature I called Bird or a different creature called Emma, which, when taken together, would show the somewhat tragic extremes Emma went to pursue and capture Bird, for reasons which I don’t feel like copping to, since there are flying saucers in them. (Okay, I’ll cop to them, but later.)

The first piece I wrote was Last Name, which was really the epilogue of the whole mess, since it takes place after Emma has ultimately failed to ensnare Bird. It stood well on its own, was satisfying to write, and earned me some valuable feedback. 

Trying to get a handle on the character of Emma — who was actually a character, instead of a Macguffin like Bird — I then wrote We Are Toys, which took the meta-story into the realm of the supernatural, where I had intended it to take place. 

Next, I wanted to show the pursuit of Bird, and started writing Sometimes When You Fall as another novella, like Last Name. A few thousand words in, I realized I had spent more than half my word count describing visuals. I can — eventually — take a hint, and so converted the story over to a screenplay format. If too much in a story relies on visuals, it’s freeing to reduce it to EXT. FOREST — PISSING DOWN RAIN and then getting on with the character interaction.

That’s about when I lost it. Suddenly, in a grand delusion, I envisioned Bird, Said Bird as a multimedia project, and quickly revised my outline to allow each of the five separate pieces to exist in a different medium. The plan called for: novella, screenplay, text adventure (or “interactive fiction,”) play for voices, and comic book.

Partway through Sometimes When You Fall, I started learning and experimenting with Inform 7, a conversational scripting language built from the ground up for writing text adventures. The story of Chuck Tanaka, unfortunate victim of military experimentation, dovetailed nicely with the restraints and opportunities offered by an interactive narrative. So, Crashtank was born. It’s not very satisfying as a game, but here it is in its original source text, which can be interpreted with Inform 7. 

With three-fifths of the project completed, I realized that nothing really held the disparate pieces together. There were common characters, and events from each story had minor or major impacts on each other story, but they lacked cohesion and purpose. Also, I didn’t like Emma anymore, and Bird stopped interesting me as either a metaphor or a monster. 

Long story short (too late!) I got bored of the project and moved on to something else boring. Just for fun and for poking fun, here is a brief timeline of the meta-story, showing where each section took place:

• Bird is bred in captivity offworld. He is designed with psychic experimentation in mind; he excretes feelings of satisfaction and low-level happiness while being drawn to expressions of opposing emotions.
• Bird says: “Fuck that shit,” and escapes to Earth with a team of researchers in hot pursuit
• The researchers experience some technical difficulties, during which their ship is terribly damaged, and only Emma escapes minimally harmed and capable of continuing the mission.
• Bird disappears into the world and Emma begins the hunt for him. Cagey as she is, rather than criss-crossing a huge area for her quarry, Emma starts to pick on people who seem ripe for depression, for sadness, to draw Bird out of hiding.
• [We Are Toys] Her first target is a little kid, who finds out that not only will he never met anyone like Emma again in his brief life, but that her alien physiology also causes some adverse reactions in humans.
• [Sometimes When You Fall] Emma picks a new target and exploits the emotions of a young man whose father disappeared hunting bigfoot in the forests of Washington state. Emma comes close to catching Bird, who makes his first appearance in the stories, but ultimately fails.
• [Crashtank] Chuck Tanaka, a young military man nearly K.I.A. is brought to a secret research institute, where Emma co-opts a deep dream simulation to turn Mr. Tanaka into a misery generator, forcing him to continually relive the same planned-failure scenario. 
• [The Dream in Halves] A bit of human intervention ruins Emma’s plans for Mr. Tanaka, though, when a paranoid scientist begins to see evidence of alien invasion around him — unfortunately, not from the direction of the actual mini-sized alien invasion that Emma and Bird represent. The scientist sabotages the Crashtank project and runs gibbering into the night or something. Meanwhile, Emma recognizes that the scientist’s delusions represent the imminent arrival of more of her people, a little backup from higher up.
• [A Thousand Cuts] A man gets swept up in another of Emma’s plots when she convinces him to help her build a machine that generates pure happiness, intended to coax Bird out with honey instead of vinegar. The machine works flawlessly, throwing Emma’s life into an unexpected downward spiral, and causing a schizoid fracture in her hapless accomplice.
• [Last Name] A listless Emma inserts herself into the high school drama of a young man who falls in love with her. Desperate now to achieve her goals, she engineers her own death to destroy the heart of her new friend; but her very last harebrained scheme falls just as flat as the others, as the young man’s outlook on life fails to disappear into the crushing depths of depression.
• Bird hangs out in the forest with the narrators of The Dream in Halves, Sometimes When You Fall, and A Thousand Cuts, just chillin’ and feelin’ good about themselves. No pro-drug message is to be inferred from this conclusion.

Of course, the meta-story isn’t really what each section is about. I just thought it would be fun to create agents of happiness and depression and pit them against each other in what would turn out to be one-sided battles for the emotions of normal folks. I keep biting my tongue; maybe I should pull it out of my cheek.