Thoughts on Puzzles

One of the things I like to do with my stories, is introduce various features that might only be picked up by attentive readers. Usually this is mundane, in the form of foreshadowing.

For example, in "Toofy", the namesake's victory is only made possible by an event that occurs in chapter four. What happens there, is what makes the twenty third chapter possible.

However, as well as something immersive to the story like that, I also like to break the mould a little. In "Cocktails, Heels & Desperate" I poke fun at myself and my thing for catgirl stories. A self-reference being the highest form of arrogance for a writer, whilst also being self-deprecating.

But the most fun I have, is giving puzzles to my more attentive readers.

Sadly, most of these go unsolved, even when people assume that they have fully solved the puzzle.

"Coming Home" was the first time I embedded morse code into my writing. I thought it was a nice little touch, and fairly obvious. However, even for most people that noticed it, they missed that I wasn't just repeating the same morse code. There's three different messages - most readers only picked up one or two.

However, due to typography and the web, I didn't quite like the way that the morse code came out. The kerning made it more difficult to separate certain symbols.

So, the next time I used morse code, in "Cocktails, Heels, and Desperate", I changed up the symbols. At first, the editor thought it was randomised garbage from my upload and stripped it, and I had to request for it to remain unaltered.

Strangely enough, though, to date nobody has come forward and said that they've managed to decode the very simple messages for that tale. I also made it more obvious that the encoded messages are different.

Finally, my most recent puzzle to date is found in the second half of "System Restore". This one is slightly harder than previous ones.

The puzzle is actually a two parter.

First, the key is encoded in a simple rotation cipher, and presented along with a notification that makes it seem like a glitch, which happens now and then throughout the story. Hidden by the narrative, if you will.

The second part of the puzzle is an encoded message. To decode it, you need to do a simple alphabetic substitution. Basically, write down A-Z, and then beneath it first write the key, and then write the remaining letters of the alphabet, A-Z, without any repetitions. Then you can substitute from one row to another.

I expect that one will go unsolved for a lot longer, but there's four messages to decode, and the last one is extremely obvious and should hopefully prompt more interested readers to go back and find the rest of the puzzle.

However, being a multi-step puzzle, it might be too much for a place like Lit. It is certainly ambitious.

The main reason I like adding features like puzzles to my stories is that beyond "strokability" I want my tales to be re-readable. Some of them follow some pretty standard arcs, once you remove the cruft, so they need something to make you feel more involved.

It's also a way of me as an anonymous authour to directly engage with my audience. To prompt them to reach out in victory, and let me know that they saw me teasing their brain, and triumphed over the challenge.

It helps to create a connection between random strangers.

Some authours on Lit measure their success by the rate of "Hot" marks they get on their stories. Some by the number of reads a tale gets. Others by the star system. And yet more have some wider reaching statistics.

For me, engagement is the metric.

I do consider almost all of my stories to be a success - because I write mainly for myself. I create tales that I haven't seen, or haven't seen in a way that I consider to be polished well enough.

So my stories are a success, because I enjoy them. If they don't succeed, they don't get published. (I've only got a dozen or so failures sitting on my hard drive, waiting for me to rewrite them...)

However, to be more than a success, a story needs to reach the rest of the audience. I get the biggest thrill in knowing that I bring entertainment to other people.

Sometimes, my fantasy stories get a massive braindump from fans trying to predict where it might go, and I absolutely adore it. That they've picked up on all the details I've put forward.

It's a little bit harder to get that kind of response in a down-to-earth romance. There are some, like the infamous box from "Coming Home", and the speculation that it invites. However, for the most part, I don't get to offer up an entire world, just entangled lives.

Thus, the puzzle.

Hopefully, this reminds my readers that there are puzzles out there in my writings, and not all of them have been solved - even the simple ones.

And that I would adore hearing from someone who found and decoded the messages.