The Book of Masks Homepage

Done and to Come

Today brings the latest commission to an end, in two chapters:

Interactive: "Return to Self"  + "The Bit That Comes After the Credits" 
Public: "Return to Self"  + "The Bit That Comes After the Credits" 

Well, one-and-a-half chapters. The first is the actual conclusion. The second is the denouement. I couldn't fit both into one chapter, so it's split.

This was a challenging commission. It was inspired by a comment I had made about the YouTube crew getting ahold of the Libra and using romance and rom-com tropes to push people into becoming a couple. Originally the commissioner wanted it to be Will and Stephanie as the couple, then wrote back to offer some other alternatives. I did set up some of those alternatives at the start of the commission proper but decided to go with Kelsey Blankenship (one of the alternates) instead of Stephanie.

It was tough, and I knew it would be, and I think I cautioned the commissioner that I might not even be able to set them up with the desired "couplehood" conclusion. Will and Kelsey are not a very compatible couple, not without some personal growth. (Will needs to mature and get some self-confidence; Kelsey needs to temper her sense of privilege.) Did I succeed? Shrug. That's not for me to judge. I will say that I surprised myself at being able to write something that resembled a romantic conclusion for them.

That was after a weird twist in yesterday's chapter (whose title I have since changed), which I know threw the commissioner for a loop. Why'd I do it? "Intuition," I told him when he asked, and couldn't explain further without divulging spoilers. And it really was just intuition that led me to write it. I got to "No Strings"  and "The Things You'll Do to Not Be Lonely"  and thought, This is too smooth of a landing. There has to be one final twist. One disaster that threatens to destroy everything at the last moment.

If you want a reason other than "intuition," then I think the answer has to be found in one of the "Storytelling Catechisms" that I have in my portfolio: "Three Ways to End a Story (Good and Bad)" . A story's has to be a disaster for the protagonist from which he is rescued by a miracle that is in its own turn motivated by a change in the protagonist—the change that was the point of the story. That is, the protagonist has been evolving through the course of the story, so that by the end he or she is able to make a choice that he or she couldn't have made before. The reward for this growth is, first, a disaster that threatens to permanently blot their existence, followed by a miracle that reverses the disaster -- but it's a miracle that itself is caused by the character's growth and evolution.

If I had to justify what I wrote, I would say that Will has grown to acquire the maturity and self-confidence that he needs, and that by his example (sometimes his negative example of acting with Kelsey's own overweening self-assurance) he has also caused Kelsey to evolve. (And she has influenced his evolution as well.) At the very end, Will makes the kind of disastrous choice (sleeping with Patterson) that Kelsey would make, but now he has the wherewithal to try reversing it by running back to Kelsey. Her forgiveness of him is a kind of miracle, but it's one that reflects her own evolution away from selfish arrogance. And so the final disaster is what propels the final, happy ending.

Now, I did not plan any of that out. As I say, it was intuition. But when I analyzed the intuition -- when I asked myself "Why does it feel right for Will to screw up at the end, only to have it turn out miraculously right?" -- the above is the answer I came back with.

Maybe it works formally. (Maybe!) Does it work aesthetically? That's a different question, and again I can only shrug and observe that it's not for me to decide.

But that's the longer answer I need to give to the commissioner, and it's one that I'll share with other readers because they might have had the same question.

* * *

What comes next? I need to get back to my Spider-Man project. But I do have an eight-chapter run that is finally (for once) not a commission. It picks up where I truncated an earlier branch as part of the recent pruning: "It Could Be Magic" . I said that some of the branches I lopped off might get new versions, and this is one.

The story so far? Will has been playing around with the "Libra", and has successfully made a mask of a P. E. coach. But he has lately been distracted by an unexpected romance with a basketball player, Katy Conlee. She and her friends are planning to prank another girl with some fake voodoo, which has led Will to think that maybe he should share his own book of magic with them.

In the original branch, it led to Will showing the book to Stephanie Wyatt, and the story went in one direction. I didn't like that evolution. I think I like the new one better.