The Secrets of the Secrets of Caledon
- Uncategorized
- April 15, 2026
Yesterday saw the launch of my latest book, Life is Strange: Welcome to Caledon University, the updated, edited, amended, redacted, and vandalised prospectus for the university that is the setting of Life is Strange: Double Exposure and Life is Strange: Reunion.
Much like the Life is Strange games themselves, the book is about scratching beneath the surface, of communities, of people, and finding things are more complex, and weirder than you thought. In that spirit, let me invite you behind the curtain to reveal some of the secrets of the Secrets of Caledon.
1. I Now Want to See the Brain Bucket Movies
Obviously in coming to write a Life is Strange tie-in there was a lot I was excited to do. There’s a great cast of characters, and a setting with an absolute ton of hidden history and background worldbuilding to muck about with. Plus, Moses. We all love Moses.
But one of the places where I had the most fun was simply going through all the fictional book covers and movie posters scattered around Caledon University campus and coming up with plotlines for them. What is the story of I’m in Love with a Slug? And why does Lucas Colmenero have a copy of it in his desk draw?
And I think the peak of this was getting to map out the history of the Brain Bucket franchise, the story of an evil bucket that can puppeteer the corpse of anyone whose decapitated head is placed in it. The beloved original, the superior and subversive sequel, the inevitable derided “in space” sequel after the original director left, before it eventually threatened to expand into a shared universe mega franchise.
Even after all that, I still feel like there’s so much storytelling potential in a murder bucket.
2. The Book Had to Fit Both Timelines
Okay it didn’t have to.
A fun thing to do when you are creating a game that is going to be the offshoot of an entire media franchise, is to give it two equally canon endings that have consequences for thousands of people and your two main protagonists.
Most of Life is Strange’s tie-ins can get around this by just picking a timeline (I’m reliably informed the “Bae” timeline is the one you should pick), or by being so far away from the events of the original game that the causal ripples haven’t quite washed up against their shores.
But doing that with Welcome to Caledon University didn’t feel quite right. Ultimately, this was supposed to be an artefact from the game universe, right up close to Chloe and Max’s story. Whatever decisions you made, I wanted you to feel like this book came out of your game, not some mythical “canon” version. This led to some tricky work to make sure that every comment, headline and artefact could be read as equally valid in the Chloe and Arcadia Bay timelines.
Of course, the other reason for this is that in my playthrough I killed Chloe dead (there were kids in that town!) and I don’t need to deal with that kind of backlash.
3. I Made Hannah Telle Canon
There is a passage in the book that implies the existence of the actress, Hannah Telle, and her cats, within the Life is Strange universe. This opens the way for a future Life is Strange story where Max Caulfield meets her exact voice double.
4. We Know When Max Stole the Book (and When Chloe Scribbled All Over It)
I’ve written a couple of “in-universe” books by now, this and the Star Trek: Lower Decks Crew Handbook, and in both books a real challenge is simply finding the time for the characters to write the book.
Life is Strange: Reunion takes place over a single weekend, so we had a lot of conversations about how the creation of this version of the Caledon University prospectus would fit into that timeline.
The chronology we established is that the initial draft – the red pages, was put together under Yasmin’s oversight around the time of Life is Strange: Double Exposure. Then in the meantime, Owen Teller came in with his AI assistant Callie, and started reworking the entire thing to fit with “Caledon 2.0” image.
As part of that, he introduced “CloudSource”, an ingenious system where students and faculty could also make edits to the prospectus whenever and wherever they like.
The result is the unholy mess that you can imagine.
Realising his mistake, Owen printed off the whole thing so he could read through it and see what was salvageable.
This version gets left in his office, where it is stolen by Max during the events of Reunion. She leaves it out at her place where a bunch of other documents, leaflets and notes get mixed in with it. Then, naturally, Chloe finds the book and decides to deface it.
So there you have it.
5. Only People Who Went to Uni with Me Will Get These References
The rules of “Door Dash”. The use of kitchen tables from the student dorms for tobogganing. If you think that I’m going to write a fake university prospectus and not use it to relive my student glory days, you have never spoken to a 40-plus-year-old graduate before.
The bacon poem referred to in the book’s front matter is real. At this time I have decided not to share it here.
6. I Ship Moses and Chloe
It’s a Friend Ship, but I love these two together so much. There should be a future Life is Strange game that is just Chloe and Moses setting up a gig in a planetarium.
7. Finishing the Book Got Creepy
I think that actually finishing the first draft of a manuscript might be the most disappointing part of being a writer. It is, after all, the high that we are all chasing, the thing we work towards for months or years at a time. But when it arrives and you type that last full stop into place, the expected fanfare never arrives.
In fact, you’ll quickly find that as soon as all the drama of the book you’ve been working on falls away, you are sitting by yourself at a desk, on your own, often in an empty house (because how would you have got to the end of the book if everyone else in the house wasn’t out for the day?).
But finishing Life is Strange: Welcome to Caledon went a different way. For starters, I wasn’t at home. It was half-term, and so I had run away to a pub to try and find the time and quiet to actually finish the book (As Lucas would say, “Many great writers worked in bars. Capote, Kerouac, Burroughs—”
I got to the end of the manuscript where the threat of the inferno that Max has foreseen is even more imminent, saved my document. Read it through looking for any mistakes I would later regret. Saved it again. Then sent it to my editor, packed up my laptop and started walking home.
But the walk home was a bit… smoky. And siren-filled.
It turned out that while I had been writing about the fictional fire at Caledon University, the old Cat & Fiddle pub on my way home had also been ablaze.
Fortunately nobody was hurt, although it did put me in a slightly unreal mood for the rest of the day.
8. Talking of Creepy, What’s the Deal with Nebb?
I don’t remember writing the chapter on Nebb the Bowling Ball mascot. I just found it in the manuscript one day and was afraid what would happen if I deleted it.
Life is Strange: Reunion and the accompanying book, Life is Strange: Welcome to Caledon University are both out now.
