Hi, I'm CJ Bernstein
I’m a storyteller with over twenty years of professional experience as a screenwriter, novelist, community creator, and game designer.
I’ve worked in a lot of creative fields over the years, but I’m probably most “known” for The Monarch Papers, an online interactive literary experience I created in 2016.
The Monarch Papers + The Briar Archive
The narrative of The Monarch Papers took place in real-time via dozens of websites and a central community forum where readers could work together to solve puzzles, unravel mysteries, and interact with dozens of characters, all played by real people (mostly me, this was long before AI).
The experience was only meant to serve as an immersive game-like prequel to my debut novel, The Book of Briars, but the experience had an impact I could never have anticipated.
Over 10,000 readers created a devoted community around the narrative, and a year-long experience became a six-year odyssey called The Briar Archive.
The Briar Archive spanned six years of immersive, interactive storytelling, not only via websites, forums, and even a dedicated app, but also physical encounters with characters, clues hidden in real-world places, and even experiences personally tailored to readers’ geographic locations using geofencing (with permission).
Once each branch of the story came to an end, the experiences and the readers who experienced them became part of the final adapted book series.
Though the experience ended in 2022, the adapted books remain a popular and bestselling chronicle of the magical world built in partnership with a community of passionate and insanely creative readers.