Contact and FAQ

You can email me at emshortif@gmail.com. Please use a meaningful subject line: I delete spam aggressively. I do try to answer email in a timely fashion, so if you get no response after a week or more, feel free to ping to make sure the message got through

I’m also on LinkedIn, though LinkedIn messaging is kind of inconsistent about actually letting me know about incoming messages there, so email is usually better if you want to be sure of reaching me.

A little more guidance about specific areas in which I get a lot of email:

Consulting Availability

I am currently employed in a position that prevents me from taking on outside projects for the foreseeable future.

Publicity Requests

I have not been updating my blog with particular regularity, and I left most forms of social media several years ago. This has been good for my mental health, but means that I am less able to offer exposure than I used to be.

Talks and Workshops

My past and upcoming talks and workshops are listed on my Talks page, and video or slides are available for many of them.

Mentoring

Students. I sometimes get requests from students who want me to mentor them through a project in interactive fiction — often because their teacher or professor has told them to get a mentor from their industry of choice. This is time-consuming task for me, and it’s not always clear that it yields useful results for the students; in some cases I’ve spent hours on feedback that was unacknowledged, and in other cases it has felt like I was doing work that was really the job of the teacher of the course. My current policy is that I take on only a couple of these tasks a year, and only if (a) the student is advanced and self-directed or (b) I have heard from the teacher/professor about the expectations of mentorship and the nature of the program.

In general. If you think I might be able to help you, feel free to email the address above.

Interviews

Press, podcasts, etc. My personal email address is best, if you have questions I might be able to answer.

Students. If you are a student who has been told by your professor to interview a professional in the games writing field, I have limited resources to help with this kind of homework project. I also think it is a little unfair of your professor to make your grade contingent on someone else doing some last-minute, unpaid work for you. I sympathize, but I probably cannot help.

Advice

Technical assistance. If you have a coding question about Inform 7 or other technical aspects of interactive fiction, I encourage you to post that question to a public forum such as the intfiction forum rather than emailing it directly to me. I am not able to provide coding help via email.

Hint requests. If you have a question about an old game of mine, the intfiction forum may be able to guide you, or — depending on what it is — IFDB may have a walkthrough for you.

Access to my old games no longer online. To the best of my knowledge, there is no working way to any of the Versu games, including Blood & Laurels. I cannot help you find working versions or get them set up.

Feedback on a game, tool, or project that you are working on. Unfortunately, I get asked for a lot more of this kind of help than I’m able to provide. Here is an article I wrote about tool development advice, and mailbag posts answer questions submitted by other readers that I thought might be of general interest. If you have a general advice question that hasn’t already been addressed on the site, I am sometimes able to answer those as additional mailbag posts; no guarantees. (If you’re willing to have your question answered as a mailbag post, feel free to say so in the body of the email.)

As a rule, I’m not able to look specifically at your new tool/concept/game and give feedback.

Suggestions for games to play or tools to use; requests for bibliographies or research. This kind of request can be time-consuming to answer and often is replicating information that already exists at your fingertips via Google or existing communities. To find games of a particular type, you’re usually best off going to IFDB or soliciting suggestions on the intfiction forum. IFDB has tags that let you look for particular qualities of games, as well as the capacity to set up a poll and ask for community suggestions.

If you’re looking for information on IF history, I have made a post of bibliography resources. If you’re thinking of running a jam, competition, or anthology and want to know about past work on those, this post contains input from dozens of competition and jam-runners on what worked and what didn’t.

Tools in the IF space are frequently updated, but you can find many of my posts about them in the Creation Tools category. Likewise, if you want book recommendations (or anti-recommendations), the Books category may be useful.

Occasionally if there’s a very specific question that I feel is not well covered elsewhere I will do a mailbag post on it. But please do your own initial research before emailing me.

Advice about career or sales matters. I have written a couple of posts about getting hired in general, how this works out for me, resources in learning interactive narrative, and how I set rates for projects, which may be useful to people starting in this area.

This Script Lock podcast talks about how I got into interactive fiction and a bit about my transition into writing for games, as well as a large number of other topics.