Martyn Cruise, Author

 Uploaded a video about writing The Enchanted Ones The basic concept of this story came together a long time ago but it wasn't until other elements fell into place that I felt I was ready to write it. I've always been interested in werewolves and shapeshifters but the two things which formed the central idea were, what if an animal turned into a human every night? and what if that animal was a unicorn. The pieces slowly started to fall into place like a white witch being cursed to age quickly unless she was in close proximity to a unicorn and the enchantment of the unicorn so that it became human in the evenings, allowing them to spend time together. I needed a protagonist so created a back story with a wicked sister who starts the whole plot rolling and returns to cause mischief. I normally get ideas about horror and sci-fi so it was nice to be able to explore something completely different from that, which I hope to able to do again. Until next time.

 Uploaded a video about writing Attack of the Zombie Vampires The original inspiration for attack of the zombie vampires or zompires came years ago when I had an idea for a series of short films. They were a parody of a Van Helsing type character who would disguise himself as a typical victim and after defeating the monster loudly proclaim 'the menace has been defeated'. I can remember wanting to call one of them 'the phantom menace' and having a chuckle about the thought of someone clicking on the video and instead of enjoying a George Lucas epic they would see this strange little movie instead. Yes, I have a pretty weird sense of humour. I never made the films but the idea of the character stuck and after having various discussions about what a vampire / zombie hybrid might be like, I had the seed of what became 'Attack of the zombie vampires'. It was always going to be slightly comedic because it just sounds like some trashy straight to video flick from the 1...

 Uploaded a video about writing 'How to write an adventure gamebook'. Buoyed with confidence after finishing Monstrous Manor, I decided to try to create a useful guide to writing an adventure gamebook. I was and still am clearly no expert in the field but I felt I could gather together lots of useful information into one place to give a useful overview of the process from initial gestation to published book. I had also developed a short lived but rabid interest in AI and wanted to explore its possibilities. To that end, I used Dreamstudio and other AI image generators to create characters and backgrounds for the cover and internal decoration. I experimented with ChatGPT to try to create a gamebook which I quickly discovered was way beyond its capabilities. Nonetheless I expanded some of the passages it produced to create a small gamebook adventure which I included both to illustrate potential AI capabilities and as a bit of fun for the reader. Overall I think I managed to give ...

 Uploaded a video about writing Monstrous Mythology Monstrous mythology was my second adventure gamebook. I had read a number of fighting fantasy books in the months in-between Publishing monstrous manor and planning this one and I learnt a lot about structure and flow. I also decided I wanted to try to implement a simple scoring system. Letting the player do some of the work makes it easier to plan the book but also increases it's interactivity so it's win win. And here I have to make a confession. I never played a full gamebook properly using dice or scoring systems and I have frequently used the multiple fingers in pages method of reading just in case I met an untimely end. I was and still am a reader as opposed to a gamer. The mechanics got in the way of the story for me. I do appreciate that lots of people play gamebooks because they enjoy the mechanics of it which is great and that's why I decided to include a scoring system in this book but I probably made it a bit t...