Events
Roguelike Celebration runs online October 16-17, and is often a great place to pick up some talks on procedural generation of various kinds.
October 18, at 2-4 PM Eastern time, Zack Whalen is running an online workshop on creating your own generative novel, in preparation for NaNoGenMo month.
October 22 is usually the deadline for submitting spooky interactive fiction to the yearly Saugus.net Halloween contest. This contest accepts both interactive and non-interactive short fiction, and has been running continuously since 1998. It doesn’t always get IF entries, but can be a fun place to send something if you’ve got a scary story in mind.
October 24, the Oxford/London IF Meetup will be playing IF Comp games together online.
Even if you don’t want to join us there, IF Comp games are currently available to play and judge. Anyone can participate in judging — so if you want to be part of that, check out the website for instructions. The judging period runs through November 15.
November 6 is the next meetup of the San Francisco Bay Area IF Group.
Stuart Lloyd is revitalising the tradition of the Windhammer Prize for gamebooks, with the new Lindenbaum gamebook competition. The submission window opens December 1.
Awards and Prizes
The XYZZY Awards have announced the winners for 2020: congratulations to Kyle Marquis for winning Best Game with Vampire: The Masquerade – Night Road.
Games are selected for the XYZZY Awards each year from the interactive fiction listed on IFDB – so if you’ve written some IF this year and would like it to be eligible for the 2021 awards, making sure it has an IFDB listing is the first step.
Articles and Books
Max Gladstone has an article about endurance hunting as a metaphor for writing.
Hannah Nicklin writes about how to implement a 4-day week at your studio.
Forthcoming from Dan Cox, Dynamic Story Scripting with the ink Scripting Language is a book on writing interactive stories with ink, starting with some simple structures, but working up to tutorials on connecting ink with Unity and using it to control dialogue or other elements of a larger game.
Many indie games use ink in exactly this way, but learning to plug ink into the Unity engine can take a little effort, so the guidance may be helpful for anyone struggling here.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 
XYZZY oddly credited the winning game without its full title. V:TM is a setting with many games. I believe the winner is V:TM — Night Road.
Aha, thanks for the correction! I’ve updated accordingly.
Thank you for the link to the Lindenbaum competition! I only discovered the Windhammer competition on its last year, and though I don’t usually pay attention to Gamebooks I thought it was very interesting. I’m looking forward to this new one.