I have been keeping a secret. Not the kind I put in my novels, not buried under floorboards or sealed inside old correspondence. A quieter kind. The kind that lives in the gap between who you are and who you are still becoming.
Here it is: I am no longer only a writer of books.
I know. I needed a moment with that sentence too.
Let me tell you how this happened, because it did not happen the way I expected. It never does.
I have always thought about stories in terms of what they do to the person receiving them. Not what they mean, exactly. Meaning is something we negotiate together, you and I, across the distance of the page. I mean what they do. The particular shift that happens when a sentence lands exactly right. The way certain scenes stay with you for days after the book is closed, living somewhere just below thought, rearranging things.
I have spent years trying to produce that effect in prose. And I still will. That work is not finished, not by a long way. But something kept insisting on itself.
What if the reader could choose?
Not in the shallow sense of choosing between endings. I mean something closer to what it feels like to be the protagonist of your own emotional life, to decide, in real time, who to trust, what to pursue, which truth to live with. Stories have always done this implicitly. We project ourselves into characters, we feel their decisions as our own, we grieve or exhale when things go the way they do. But interactive fiction makes that contract explicit. It puts the weight of the story partly in the hands of the person experiencing it.
I found that I could not stop thinking about it.
So I began building something.
It is a game. I use that word carefully, because what I am making feels less like a game and more like a novel you inhabit. It will live on Steam. It is built in a form called a romance life sim hybrid, which is a technical category that does not come close to describing what it actually is: an emotionally intense, choice-driven story with the same DNA as everything I write. Longing, atmosphere, buried secrets, the slow pressure of intimacy, and the particular weight of decisions that cannot be unmade.
The writing standard is the same. The emotional standard is the same. The brand promise is the same: stories of desire, secrets, and emotional consequence.
It is simply that now, the story responds to you.
I want to give you a name, because it deserves one, and because I have been sitting with it long enough that keeping it to myself feels unreasonable.
The first game is called The House at Vale Hollow.
A protagonist returns to a decaying family estate after the death of a distant relative. The estate is beautiful, quiet, and organized around omissions: sealed rooms, conflicting stories, the kind of silence that has been carefully maintained. The people bound to the house carry different versions of the same past, and not all of those versions can coexist.
There are relationships. There is a mystery that is revealed through people rather than through clues. There are routes, different emotional architectures of the truth, depending on who you choose to become.
It is atmospheric. It is intimate. It is the kind of story where desire and danger share a room and both of them know it.
I am making it with the same care I give to every paragraph I have ever written. It will arrive on Steam. I do not have a date to give you yet. I will not give you one before I am certain it deserves to be said. But it is real, and it is coming, and I am proud of it in a way that surprised me.
What does this mean for the books? Nothing changes. What the Mirror Knows is out. More novels are in development. The book line and the interactive line are not competing with each other. They are the same imagination operating in two different directions, trying to produce the same essential feeling in the person on the other side.
What I am is still the same thing I have always been: someone who takes emotional intensity seriously, who believes that atmosphere and character and consequence are not decorative but structural, who thinks that the best stories cost the reader something and give something back in return.
I am just, now, doing that in more than one form.
I think that is allowed.
Manuela