Your mission: go undercover at an evil organization and retrieve a deadly new bio-weapon. But word has leaked there’s a mole, and you’re running out of time to pull off your mission and escape with your life.

You are the top operative at the DTU (Domestic Terrorist Unit), a covert agency that specializes in investigating terrorist groups on US soil. Now put in place as Silas Bishop’s administrative assistant, you are in a prime position to spy on his business and search for the deadly weapon his scientists have engineered. Undercover Agent is a 135,000 word interactive novel by Naomi Laeuchli, releasing Thursday, January 25th. I sat down with Naomi for a short interview. 

What’s your background as a writer?

Since I was six years old, I’ve been writing. I was homeschooled, and something we had to do every day for school was write for half an hour. We could write anything we wanted we just had to write. I even spent a year writing fanfiction for a virtual pet site’s newsletter (it never did get accept). Writing was my favorite part of school, and at some point I realized I was doing it for fun as well.

When I was nineteen I got my first freelance writing job and have been doing it ever since. I’ve written about dentistry, garage doors, and diamond cuts, written reviews and created personality quizzes. During my time off, I wrote a four book romantic suspense series called Holly(Woods) and posted it online in web fiction format (though I’m now releasing it through Amazon).

Currently I’m lead game reviewer for the quarterly magazine Casual Game Insider.

What were some of the challenges of writing in ChoiceScript for you?

Not being able to write it in Microsoft Word! It made proofreading a lot more difficult.

Do you read much interactive fiction? Any favorites from the COG catalogue or otherwise?

I read it both on and off COG. My favorite non-COG one is Long Live the Queen. My favorite COG books are probably A Midsummer Night’s Choice (I adore the setting) and Choice of Alexandria (again, I think the setting is quite unique and I really enjoy that about it). Though I will always have a soft spot for Choice of Zombies, which is the first one I read and how I first discovered Choice of Games. I was nineteen at the time, and I remember thinking it would be amazing to write one of these, but they’d never have me!

What are you working on next?

I’m currently writing a werewolf novel, about a group of teens in a small town who killed a werewolf when they were kids, suffered some pretty bad consequences from it, and are now beginning to suspect there’s a new wolf in town.

Short answer, Bernard Pivot-style Questionnaire:

Favorite color.

Red.

Favorite word.

Felicity.

Profession other than your own you’d like to attempt.

Flight attendant or Queen.

Profession you would never want to attempt.

Bullfighter.

James Bond or George Smiley?

James Bond.