Bus Station Unbound

Back in 2015, Jenn Ashworth and I published Bus Station Unbound, an interactive choose-your-own-adventure style novel set in and around Preston Bus Station.

The plot seems pretty simple: you're trying to get home for Christmas but a huge snowstorm has trapped you in the bus station, so you wander about, doing stuff and talking to people.

Basically a novella, right? Probably take a few weeks to write and edit, right? Wrong! Writing this thing nearly made the two of us lose our minds. All that stuff the protagonist does and those people they talk to open up different routes through the building, creating a vast number of variations within the story. If, for example, there is a scene in which the protagonist climbs a staircase, have they spoken to the rough sleeper? Have they purchased a box of Black Magic? Have they passed the payphones? And if so, did the payphones start ringing? Did the protagonist answer any of them? If so, which ones? That brief ascent up the staircase contains multitudes, a firmament of different possibilities and outcomes. And it turned out the job Jenn and I had signed up to was being the chumps who had to work out all of those variations and outcomes and to write them all.

And, as if that wasn't bad enough, Bus Station Unbound promptly disappeared. The initial release did reasonably well but the original platform shut down a couple of years after publication, the laptop the file I'd stored the file on was replaced, and that was that. I assumed had been lost for good.

But then a couple of weeks ago, more than a decade later, I spent an afternoon fiddling about with AI, asking it how I might resurrect the novel, and following a series of instructions I barely understood, I managed to recover and restore Bus Station Unbound.

So AI may well spell the death of the novel but, weirdly, it’s brought back one of them back from the dead.

You can read Bus Station Unbound here.

(Please ignore all the donation links as they will no longer work.)