Inky Path: An Interactive Fiction Lit Mag

Hello, fellow interactive fiction writers! I’ve started an interactive fiction literary magazine, Inky Path.

What is Inky Path?

Inky Path is the first literary magazine that showcases interactive fiction and provides readers with the tools to create their own game. It is about fostering a community of thought and discussion around IF works, seeing pieces for more than their entertainment value, and providing greater exposure of IF to the literary world.

What are you looking for?

We are looking for talented IF writers like yourselves to submit your interactive fiction to the site. There can’t be a literary magazine without submissions, so we welcome everyone to bring forth their best work!

It’s fine if your work is published elsewhere. You can also submit excerpts or the beginnings of pieces if you want. We welcome pieces of all lengths, types, and flavors. Bring us your best hypertext historical fiction, or parser-based paranormal romance. Or get even more experimental and send in some multimedia medley that defies all convention or classification. Have fun with it.

Check out the submission guidelines for more info on submitting. We are accepting year-round.

NOTE: We are also currently looking for more readers and graphic designers to help staff the magazine. Click here if you would like to know more about becoming part of the staff.

How can I help?

Since this is a relatively new publication, please, spread the word! Even if you are not personally interested in submitting, pass on the info to someone you know would love to. Since this really is the first of its kind, I’m hoping that it will succeed–I think it’s something that the IF community has needed for a long time.

If you want to help fund the project, we also accept donations.

Thanks everyone! Please submit your work and share with friends! For questions, comments, etc. you can reply here or email the mag at inkypath[AT]gmail.com.

Inky Path: http://inkypath.wordpress.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/inkypath

Looks nice! I have a few questions:
What’s a good example of the type of pieces you’re looking for in your magazine? I know in your submissions guidelines it said that IF submitted must not just be straight games, but what exactly are you looking for here?

Will the pieces be hosted on your own site? The info on the site seemed to be in conflict about this.

Formerly published works are okay, but what’s the upper limit on this? Would something I made, say, seven years ago be kosher, or would that be past the threshold for what you’re willing to accept?

(Can’t wait for the first issue, by the way.)

Most of the games are probably going to parser-based games like those made in Inform, Quest, TADS, etc. or hypertext fiction like games made in Choicescript, Twine, or AXMA. Examples of pieces that would be accepted are pretty much anything found on IFDB, choiceofgames.com, textadventures.co.uk, etc.

Of course if you’ve got something else that you think may qualify, feel free to ask about it or send it in. We’ll give all works careful consideration.

To me, “straight games” usually include the player moving around a character sprite, etc. While a game like Skyrim has text and choice, to some extent, Inky Path is not really its proper home.

The pieces will /not/ be hosted on Inky Path’s site. Instead we ask that applicants supply a link to their piece where it is hosted elsewhere online. This is mostly because a lot of people submitting will already have their work hosted online, and I don’t want to force every reader/editor to download interpreters for parser-based games.

No upper limit on the time since it was previously published. As long as it follows the other submission guidelines we’d love to have it!

Hope that helps. Let me know if you have any more questions.

So I might be missing something… and you should completely let me know if I am.

To my understanding:

  1. you’re not hosting these submissions, and
  2. these submissions are likely to be previously published work.

Why are you asking for authors to submit at all? It seems like you could just pick some good IF each month and present that list without authorial involvement. Or solicit IF recommendations from anyone, regardless of whether or not they’re the author.

Like a traditional literary magazine, I want the authors to be just as much a part of the process as the editors. Rather than, say, a top-ten list of the best IF games out there, Inky serves as a place where new as well as experienced authors can be showcased and hopefully find a wider audience for their work than the piece might have buried in IFDB somewhere.

UPDATE:

We are now accepting guest blog post entries for Inky Path’s blog. If you want to write about the state of writing, fiction, or interactive fiction today, or post any reviews for IF pieces, this is the place you can do it! We will also accept re-posts of entries you might have already posted to your own blog.

We are also still accepting submissions for Volume 1. Remember that your piece can be published elsewhere, and we accept most types of interactive fiction.

For guidelines on submitting your interactive fiction piece, or your blog entry, check out the submission guidelines here: http://inkypath.wordpress.com/submissions/

Hope to be hearing from you soon!

Inky Path: http://inkypath.wordpress.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/inkypath
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/InkyPath
inkypath[at]gmail.com

One last update for now:

Just wanted to let everyone know that Vol. 1.1 is officially released!

You can check it out here.

We are now accepting submissions for Vol 1.2 (scheduled for release May 31st) as well as blog posts on IF (for more on that, see Inky’s Submissions page.)

Thanks everyone!

I’m getting a connection failure from chooseyourownnovel.webs.com on the “read it here” link…

Hmm, that’s not good.

Did you try refreshing the page and trying the link again? The connection error thing should only be temporary, but if not then I can always change the hosting site. :slight_smile:

Still nothing, sorry. In fact I’m getting the same error from webs.com… but not www.webs.com. Weird. (Putting a www in front of your URL doesn’t help, though.)

Thanks for sticking with it. Could you let me know if this link works? philome.la/InkyPath/inky-path/play

Yep!

Great! I’ve updated the site link so that should no longer be a problem.

I’d noticed it was out. Certainly interesting, but if I may suggest something? It was unclear to me, until I recognised the names, that these were games previously released. I was under the impression that you would be having new, “exclusive” content.

I’m not advocating that you do have exclusive content, of course. I would just ask, so that you know, in the future, if you do end up having exclusive content at one time or another, please be sure and make that clear. It’d be very helpful to know which games are brand new and which game we’ve probably played before.

Other than that, well done and let’s have more of it!

Volume 1.2 has just been officially released! You can read it here.

We’ve got some fantastic pieces this time around ranging from funny to whimsical to surreal, and in the spirit of last volume’s quiz, we bring this quarter a small gamebook RPG in which you quest to find the “worldgates,” or various pieces, from the volume. We’ve also got a shiny new domain name, inkypathmag.com.

I hope you enjoy, and we hope to see submissions from you soon.

Quoted because not only did you not answer, you refrained from offering any such information this time around again.

So let me ask again: are any of the games in this new issue new? If so, which? I think it’s only fair that a reader know in advance whether or not a publication will have anything new to offer - an exclusive, maybe. The main “Adventure” does seem to be new - is it the only new piece of fiction? Are there others? Or has it been previously released?

I believe that both of the word document pieces (“An Affair to Remember,” “Six at Murdock’s”) are not previously published–though these are less traditional IF and more new media-type pieces. The main adventure is staff-written entirely for this volume as well.

While I like the idea of providing that info, I feel that at the moment it’s pretty common for people to release their IF work on multiple sites anyway, even if it is a new release. IF events like compos are more common for the release of new content.

You are of course free to do as you wish. I would personally like to know what to expect, especially since it’s been previously published, I’ve probably already downloaded it.

Thank you for the info about the three previously unpublished pieces. I am interested in your magazine and wish it all the best, but as a user/reader I quite enjoy knowing where to go for the new stuff, which you’ve made possible. Cheers!

Sure, I understand that. I figured that readers can see for themselves what they have or have not read (particularly because the content is pulled from all over the web–not necessarily in IFDB or lauded in the IF community, so might not be as well-known.) I can see why you’d want to know what content has already hit the web, though!

(this was originally edit to my previous post, but as you posted while I was writing I decided to make it a post of itself, as I think it merits attention)

I, er… I kinda agree that the two you mentioned are not really IF… In fact I am scratching my head as to their inclusion. If I may suggest, you might wish to have an editorial where you expound upon your philosophy for choosing pieces.

I hope I’m not coming across as difficult. It’s just that seeing those two short stories makes me go, “what? Why are these here?”. I mean, if it were something like Encryptment (ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=bmzsfmlktl20xvr0), I’d sort of understand. A fictional transcript, like Bollywood Hijinx or Time Bastard, too. Or maybe a CYOA like Trapped in Time or Blue Death. Or even possibly a House Of Leaves sort of text which is a puzzle all by itself - I could see an argument making that Interactive Fiction, of a sort.

But the two short stories in this mag? Er, not so much. Your philosophy for the mag eludes me, and it might be worth clearing that up.

I mean, they are certainly not conventional stories… but they still seem to belong to the area of “daring static fiction”, rather than “interactive fiction of a sort”.