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Something to Keep It Busy Around Here

As I mentioned yesterday, I did some writing during my hiatus, though it's nothing I'm really excited about. There's no reason not to share it, though, and good reasons why I should. It should help me get back into the saddle.

So here's one of the storylines I tried working on. It was to be for a commission, but the commissioner had to cancel on account of troubles. This is the five-chapter set-up that I wrote, leading up to the commission itself.

It starts with "Five Final Chances"  (interactive) / "Five Final Chances"  (public). It's an early chapter. Will has made a mask and has gone up to the school looking for a possible victim. Not much happens in today's chapter. When the commissioner mentioned the idea, he threw out a lot of possible victims but left the ultimate choice up to me. Instead lurching directly into my choice, I used this intro chapter to set up all the choices he had suggested.

* * *

As for the Plot Plinko contest I ran the last time I was around here. I am trying to work on that, but the line you guys chose is one of those big, wide-open spaces where almost anything could develop, which makes it hard to focus on. So that's been slow to develop. The situation is similar to the set-up above: Will has made a mask, and he's hung back after school to find someone to test it on. You guys voted that he should try it on a random girl who he spotted inside the tutorial offices.

Since I'm having trouble finding a direction, I'm going to try something a little different. I could write a chapter, post it, and ask you guys to pick a path to pursue—that would be a way of forcing myself to write, while also giving you a voice in how it develops. But I think it might be more interesting if we did it Mad Libs style, though. So instead of posting the chapters, I'm going to post the choices, devoid of context, and ask you to vote for them.

First poll is up now. It's a boring choice—a familiar situation and you can easily guess the events that lead up to it—but it's one that has to be got through before things can get interesting: [Poll completed and deleted.]