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 A hub for the "Book of Masks" universe. |
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The Interactives "The Book of Masks"  : A high school student discovers a grimoire that can make magical disguises."The Wandering Stars" : Sequel to "The Book of Masks.""Student Bodies" : A high school student is turned into a blue goo that can possess people."Student Bodies: Transfer Students" : Reboot of "Student Bodies."For non-WdC Members "The Book of Masks: Archives" : Dodges the "Servers Busy" barrier!"The Book of Masks (Abridged)" : Introductory storylines for new readers.Community "BoM/TWS Message Forum" : Community for readers of the interactives."BoM/TWS/SB Wiki" : Notes and documentation for authors. Spoilers!Current Polls/Contests None The Latest 6/30: Interactive: "Golems Three-ish" 6/30: Public: "Golems Three-ish"
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| So, today is October 1. I'm supposed to be done with BoM. But thanks to that publishing hiatus I took at the start of the September, I've got a backlog of chapters still to post. Also, I feel like I owe you guys thirty chapters minimum. So even though I'm still short that number, I'm going to continue writing BoM chapters into early October until I get to thirty. One way or another, I'll give you the month's worth of chapters that I more-or-less promised. I've got a non-BoM project I want to work on, though. Not the Spider-Man thing, though I do intend to return to it eventually. A novel. And just as I wrote the Spider-Man thing in public, I'm going to write this one in public too. I'm going to start writing it today, and I'll post the first chapter tomorrow. What is it? I'm not going to say. I'm just going to post it and see if people get interested. |
| An early post today (because I had time) and a late post yesterday means there's a bit of an overlap. New storyline starts here: "Double Dealing and Double Dates" (public) + "Double Dealing and Double Dates" (interactive)Last storyline ends here: "Party Favors" (public) + "Party Favors" (interactive)The new one is going to be on the short side, running for about a week. |
| Oops. I forgot to post a chapter yesterday and I nearly forgot to post a chapter today. But here it is, late: "Party Favors" (public) + "Party Favors" (interactive). And that's it for that storyline. Tomorrow I shift over to another storyline, a sequel to "Teases for Two" . That's a closely related chapter to the storyline I just got through with. Background:Will is working with Keith, Philip Fairfax, and the others, after discovering that they've been trying to improve his reputation. He has taken on the guise of Jenny Ashton in order to help them with that project, but he has also talked them into launching a second project: Switching Yumi Saito and Chelsea Cooper without the two girls realizing what is going on. Will has his own private agenda, though: He wants to arrange it so that Chelsea (inside Yumi's mask) starts going out with his beta. As the sequel opens, Will has to get Yumi into a place where the switch can be made without screwing up the date that he has arranged for Yumi and his beta. |
| Okay, so, I really and for true did not intend to vanish for a couple of weeks. But I hope I'm back now. It wasn't anything big that caused that unexpected hiatus. It's just that my schedule has changed recently, and that threw posting schedules and writing times out of whack, with the result that I fell behind in my writing schedule. After a week of struggling to catch up, I decided to sit things out until I had finished a storyline, that way there wouldn't be any more day to day hiccups. But it took longer for me to get a batch of chapters written than I thought it would. But I do have a backlog now, so there shouldn't be any interruptions going forward. I am also going to give you guys thirty chapters at a minimum, publishing into October, even if I have to spend the first week or so of October getting them written. So, here's the resumption of the story that I was working on: "Frenemies in High Places" (interactive) + "Frenemies in High Places" (interactive). It's for a commission, and I've written all the chapters owed in that commission, and that will run through the 28th. After that I will be publishing another short commission (also completed) of six chapters that will take us into early October. |
| So, here it is: "What Goes Up Should Come Down" (public) + "What Goes Up Should Come Down" (interactive). It's the first chapter in what should turn an arc that was commissioned from me. I'd say more, but I'm only one chapter ahead, composition-wise, and I need to get to work writing more. |
| So, here are the revisions that I talked about yesterday: "Happy Birthday to the New You" (public) + "Happy Birthday to the New You" (interactive) and the chapters that follow. The big changes are in the linked chapter and the one immediately following, but there are some tweaks even unto all the sequels thereafter. Tomorrow I return with brand-new chapters of BoM, in that general area. The background: Will has been roped into the group of guys (the AV Club, basically) who wound up with the Libra. They have been using some cheerleading identities to improve his popularity and social standing, and he has joined them by adopting the identity of Jenny Ashton. But they are now interested in adopting a second set of spare identities and in using them for a new sociology experiment. What will that experiment be? Tune in to find out ... |
| I'll be back onto "Book of Masks" come Sunday—and I see that rugal has something new going as well—with a new BoM chapter, which I wrote yesterday. But tomorrow I'll anticipate things with a revision to some previously published chapters. I was reading the chapters that presage the storyline I'll be writing, and I decided to break one of them in half and expand it into two chapters. So I'll be posting that revision and republishing the sequel chapters. That will also help give readers a running start on the place I'll be resuming. I also wrote a "Spider-Man" treatment yesterday. I might be able to get one more treatment scribbled out before the month ends, for whatever that is worth, but I'm not going to publish any more until such time as I resume that project. |
| September is one of my designated months for writing BoM chapters, so if you're following me for those chapters—and I'm not sure why else you would be frequenting something called "The Book of Masks Homepage"—here's a reminder that I'll be back to doing that in a few days. I hope to hit the ground running with chapters that were commissioned from me. |
| So it's been awhile since I've checked in. Usually when I check out it means that I've been goofing off, but really, I have been working on my Spider-Man project. I just haven't had anything to report because it's been slow and rough. I've said it before, and recently: I am not an outliner by nature. For me, outlining is hard. Outlining is hellish. It was all I could do to outline 20-minute standalone episode ideas that used material from the actual animated series. But I didn't know what Outline Hell was until I hit the seven-episode arc I had planned for this alternate series, and it was an arc using mostly new material. My God, it has been like trench warfare, and it has taken me the equivalent of four or five days' work on each of those episode ideas to get them written, and in the middle of the work cycle I had to tear it all apart and rearrange episode ideas in order to get the plot to progress properly. And the rough stuff isn't over yet. I've got another three-part, mostly original episode idea looming before I finish the first season, and the second season includes another seven-episode arc, four episodes of which will be mostly new material. And that's just to get me to the point where I can start thinking about my own "Superior Spider-Man" idea. So there is no way that I'm going to meet my original goal of getting that written before the actual Superior Spider-Man arc debuts on Disney XD. Oh well. Still, I'm not giving up on it. I'm going to do what I can before August ends, then turn to BoM in September. After that we'll just have to see. In the meantime I had stopped publishing new episode treatments because I didn't want to run into the stuff I was working on. I can already tell that some of my written-but-unpublished treatments are going to have to be revised in light of changes to my plan for the rest of the season. That means I'm going to have to wait until I've written episode 25 (I'm currently finishing up episode 20) before I do those revisions and can start publishing again. But I have the impression that very few people are waiting with bated breath for my Spider-Man treatments. * A little housekeeping: The author of the most recent BoM chapter emailed me yesterday to request that I delete that chapter so he can revise and repost it. Done and done. |
| No "Spider-Man" update today. I do have treatments, but this is the day I would have published "Mark of the Jackal" if I hadn't published it early. I have updated the terms of my "Commission Contract" . Yes, I've raised my rates considerably, because the WdC gift points just aren't worth that much to me. On the other hand, I've also added a condition that allows you to pay me with an Amazon Gift Card instead, and my Amazon rate is much less than my WdC rate, though it is still a little higher than what I had been charging in WdC currency. |
| Show notes for "S01E08 "How to Rise Above It All"" : This is actually a Season Two episode, moved up and tweaked to make it fit. As with yesterday's outline, there's one major change to the villain, and one minor change to a supporting character. In the IRL episode, the Vulture starts by trying to take down the Wake Riders, but at the end of it they flatter him into joining the gang as their leader. I thought this was a cheap way of pulling down a character who had little reason to fall and who was very sympathetic up until that point, so I changed it. Also in the IRL episode, Miles is already a second Spider-Man and partners with Peter, so for this one his knowledge and interest in the situation had to be reoriented. And with today's entry, we hook up to the "preview" treatment ("S01E09 "Mark of the Jackal"" ) that I posted awhile back.* I worked pretty hard yesterday at a new treatment, but I only got it outlined, and even then I'm not certain I've got it nailed down. I was bothered throughout by the sense that the plot was turning into just a lot of hoop-jumping: Peter has to go here, so let's invent a crisis for him; now he has to go over there, so let's invent a new crisis for him. It all felt arbitrary. I worry that it is still arbitrary and hoop-jumpy, and I spent the day fighting toward a deeper understanding of what Peter wanted and needed in the story. I also had to shake free of a belief about writing that was starting to harden into a prejudice, to wit: In any scene, you should be able to identify what a character wants and why he wants it, and his desire should be for something concrete and specific: for a particular jewel or armored shipment of cash, say, and not just for "money"; for the love of a particular girl and not just for "a girlfriend." So I have spent the last two days fighting in the trenches, trying to figure out which particular person Spider-Man had to fight, and for why and when, trying to nail down the specifics. And that, I eventually realized, was why it felt like so much hoop-jumping. I was giving him a reason to jump through a particular hoop, but there was no reason for him to go "hoop jumping" in general. So I backed up and figured out what kind of psychic itch he was scratching by doing what felt like a lot of busy work. That's something for me to remember from now on: the character needs both specific motives and a general motive that is realized by the specific motives. |
| Show notes on today's treatment: "S01E07 "House of Sand" " The shape and structure of the reimagined episode is close enough to the original that, as with the previous three treatments, it needs to acknowledge the original script, but there there is one huge change and one small one. In the IRL episode also Keemia rejects her father and prefers Hammerhead, but she's already a sand-creature and spends the last third of the story battling her father. I disliked that choice, mostly because the story stopped DEAD for the extended, narrated flashback necessary to set up that plot twist, so I simplified it. I also made Marko more of a villain. Of all the episodes in "Marvel's Spider-Man" this is the one that comes closest to feeling like an episode of "Batman: The Animated Series" but for that reason it fell deepest into the uncanny valley, so with those changes (including Hammerhead's near self-sacrifice) I tried hauling it up the other side of the slope. The minor change: Here we see Miles Morales making his first steps toward replicating Peter's powers, but by using tech rather than by having an identical accident. * I did some more thinking but no more writing. I have a nasty feeling that one of the plot lines I wanted to adapt for this part of the season isn't going to work. |
| Today's Spider-Man entry—"S01E06 "Party Animals"" —is another close adaptation of the IRL material, right down to the title. Changes, FWIW: * In the original, Sytsevich is a student at Horizon who is intentionally infected by Raymond Warren. I wanted to remove Warren's villainy (see below) which means the Rhino needed a new origin. Also, Sytsevich being a cheerful and friendly student who is cured at the end made it very awkward for the IRL series when they tried bringing the Rhino back. Returning Sytsevich to something like his comics origin (but spying for a crime boss rather than the East Bloc) makes it easier to give him the traditional treatment later on. * In the original, Warrren is an outright villain, already transforming between Jackal and human form, and he infects Sytsevich as a demonstration project for Osborn. This is me again feeling the tug of BTAS. I don't like Warren's unabashed villainy in the IRL series and wanted to give him an origin closer to, say, Two Face in Batman. I also wanted to remove Osborn's complicity, as it hardly seems in character for him to accede to a dangerous plot being executed in a situation where he knows his son will be. * In the original, the diagnosis and cure are entirely concocted without adult supervision by Peter and friends. This is far and away the most annoying facet of the IRL series. What is it with contemporary stories and their "Science, be-yotches, boo-yah, amirite?" garbage? As one YouTuber put it recently, they sound like frat bros trying to imitate what they think scientists sound like: "They talk like it's beer, hookers and sports ball but with, y'know, technobabble instead." Having high school students (no matter how bright) concocting Stark-level technology on the fly is another aspect of the same thing. My own revision still strains credulity, but at least (I hope) it's better for letting a putative expert in the field (Warren) do most of the brainwork. There are additional, minor changes here and there. Kingpin, for instance, does not appear. * I got a new treatment written yesterday, but it wasn't much of a victory, as it closely models an actual episode. But I had to get it out of the way before pushing myself into the really new territory on the other side of it. |
| I don't have much to say about today's Spider-Man entry—"S01E05 "Ghost in the Machine"" —except that it is very closely adapted from an IRL episode. The big difference is the excision of the Symbiote, which played a big role in episodes 6 and 7 of the series and played a similarly big part in episode 8, "Stark Expo." But the Symbiote to me feels like too big an element to be accorded such a small part in the animated continuity, so I took it out, which meant I had to take it out of this episode, which I otherwise preferred to leave in my reimagined series. (Not because it's awesome, but because it's inoffensive and pretty good padding.) Taking out the Symbiote meant having to fiddle with other elements. So Octavius gets a bigger role; the Kingpin makes an appearance; and Harry tries to be a hero only to be pre-empted by Spider-Man. But the Ghost and most of the other plot elements and developments are taken straight from the episode. Oh, and Flash is toned town and made much less of a buffoon. In the IRL episode, he's the one who enters the baking-soda volcano. * Yesterday involved some more mulling of plots for the second half of the first. I need to start writing again, though. "Mulling" is beginning to turn into procrastination, and I think I've got enough settled that the rest of the details can be worked out in the treatments. |
| Today's Spider-Man entry—"S01E04 "Ring Around the Spider-Man"" —is the first to be almost entirely new, with virtually no debts to the IRL series. So, that was the challenge there, to try coming up with something very new. What choices went into it? I've been reading early runs of "The Amazing Spider-Man" while also researching characters in those issues that I've not read and can't find, and have been jotting down every possible character, storyline, plot idea, etc., with the idea that they could be used to pad out an episode or be planted for later development. So in Wikipedia I found a reference to "The Circus of Crime," which is an awesome name for a group of bad guys, and in "The Essential Spider-Man, Vol. 4" I found an annual about a charismatic politician named Richard Raleigh trying to manipulate himself into the mayoralty. These went into the stewpot, and Richard Raleigh and the Circus's Ringmaster (who used hypnosis to manipulate his victims) merged into a single person. Here, it seemed to me, was a good, long-term play: a character who over the course of the series could slither toward political power. I also found a Spider-Man story with the Kingpin trying to steal a cuneiform tablet containing some kind of mystical secret, and I introduced that as one of the elements that Raleigh needs for some long-term plan. The rest was action, some ideas filched from the "Batman Beyond" episode "Spellbound," and a way to get Peter a job selling photos to the Daily Bugle. Now, where this is going, I haven't exactly decided yet. Raleigh does show up again in one treatment that I've written, and he does figure in the complicated multi-parter I'm still writing, but his payoff is still timed for sometime in the Superior Spider-Man storyline or after, which is the main reason I added him. (In the IRL series, there don't seem to be a lot of adversaries left over Season One and so there are no obvious hooks for the Superior storyline to hang on to.) But I will have to wait until lots more pieces are in play before I see the ultimate design for him. * I spent yesterday finishing the last of the "Essential Spider-Man" books I got from the library (Vols. 4 - 7) and letting ideas simmer in the back of my head, so I don't have anything really interesting to report as far as actual writing progress. To fill an otherwise empty space, I'll make just one comment: Nothing dates a story like slang. It is hard not to flinch every time Mary Jane Watson or some other character in an early 70s Spider-Man comic says something like, "Can you dig it?" |
| I've posted a new episode treatment in the summer project: "S01E03 "O Spider, Here Is Thy Sting"" . This one, like yesterday's, starts with the idea of an IRL episode but does a lot of different stuff with it. Like The Lizard, The Scorpion is another character with a potentially interesting past that the animated series just kind of tosses away, and I wanted to see more done with him. I gave him a different origin story than in the comics—more tragic and accidental; the BTAS influence, I suppose—but also tried lightening his initial appearance a little so that he wouldn't come across purely as a guy with a free-floating grudge. I'm also trying to better motivate the sheer number of mad scientists that show up, in both the comics and the animated series. Maybe it's not much more realistic to have them all come pouring out of Oscorp instead of arising independently, but at least it focuses the ridiculousness in one place—Norman Osborn's company—instead of positing a lot of coincidences. Making them all serpents slithering out of a pit of vipers, carrying their grudges with them in their coils, I hope also amps the interpersonal conflicts a little more, making the fights personal and not merely maniacal. * It's really hard coming up with multiple plots to weave across multiple episodes. But that's probably not a surprising observation. Maybe it would be more interesting to say that it's very hard to concentrate in a sustained way upon the problem. I don't think I went more than ten minutes at a time yesterday thinking about the second half of the first season. It gives you a headache, trying to work out a complex plot in your head, and you're always worried about following it down some twisting rabbit hole that won't be able to intersect with the other plot lines that you'll have to come back to. That's another reason I kept skittering around in ten-minute chunks—I had to spend ten minutes on one plot area, then ten minutes in another, and ten minutes in a third, with twenty or thirty or sixty minutes in between to clear my head of what I'd just been working on. Also, I was doing more, um, research. By which I mean, I was reading comics for ideas about what to do. There's nothing wrong with that, particularly in the context of an animated series that was already freely adapting such Spider-Man storylines as "Spider Island." So "The Return of the Sinister Six" will figure in what I'm writing, alongside stuff I'm taking from the animated series itself. I got quite a few ideas down: I've now a pretty good idea of the shape of the next twelve stories, and the motivations that will carry the characters through them. Today's goal will be to put some preliminary detail onto them. |
| Today's Spider-Man fanfiction is now up: "S01E02 "Here Be Dragons"" . It's mostly new and only borrows elements from the IRL "Horizon High, Part 2": Peter angering Otto Octavius by not recognizing him; Harry asking Peter to bring him his old experiments in defiance of protocol; a fight with a spider-slayer that tries stealing Harry's goods; Raymond Warren being Gwen Stacy's uncle. The rest of it is my own invention, or me folding in other elements from the series or the comics. I mentioned a few weeks back how surprised I was that J. Jonah Jameson doesn't show up in the first season of the show. He is such a mainstay of the universe that it's like leaving out Aunt May. So he shows up early, and I've tried to take some care in motivating his anti-Spider-Man animus without making it some huge, complicated deal. It also astonished me that this animated series gives Curt Connors only the most perfunctory treatment in, as he's one of the most interesting and sympathetic villains in the early comics. (He shows up late, almost as an afterthought, as a Godzilla clone to be beaten into submission.) I'm all the more surprised considering that Eric Radomski is on the series's staff, and Radomski was one of the big creatives on "Batman: The Animated Series," which is renowned for its relatable villains. Spider-Man is too chatty a hero, and his universe too packed with supporting characters with soap opera stories, for it to really resemble BTAS, but I tried keeping BTAS in mind when such an obvious BTAS-like character as Connors comes along. |
| So it starts today. Quick links first, followed by some discussion: The project itself: "Marvel Spider-Man: The Alternate Series" Today's installment: "S01E01 "The Tilting Horizon"" Bonus link: The original episode * Today's installment is based pretty closely on the original episode. I've altered the villain's motivation, built things toward a different climax, and introduced a few elements that are supposed to build in later episodes. But in its main outlines, the plot is pretty close to the original. About half of the treatments I'll be posting will be like this: a skeleton much like the original, but with musculature that twists it about to give it a different thrust and theme. How much else is supposed to be carried over from the original series? Well, no treatment (and not even a script) can capture the mood, tone or color of a finished piece of cinema. The written documents can only tell the story, and it's up to the other craftsmen to give it flesh and life. But there are a few things I would say. There is already a note in that episode about how to characterize Flash Thompson, who I find borderline unwatchable in the IRL cartoon. More generally I would prefer a series with a lot less goofy slapstick, though overall I do like the light touch. The only other thing I'd stress (if you're familiar with the Disney XD series) is that I'd put in a lot less science technobabble. This is something I have some little control over in the treatments, and the science and engineering projects I allude to should be a lot less over-the-top than in the IRL series. The assumption should be that nowhere are there moments of high school sophomores using "quantum genetics to reconfigure the polarity of the computer code so as to set off a reverse vibranium reaction in order to stabilize the decaying orbit of the neutron-positive singularity"--stuff that the IRL series is otherwise bloated with. But yeah, there will still be robot spiders and man-wolves. It's a superhero cartoon for the young-at-heart. |
| Today brings the last of the BoM updates. In this minor climax, we see Dee's reaction when Will and Sydney entertain adding him as a partner: "The Man from Lemuria" (public) + "The Man from Lemuria" (interactive). * So what am I going to do for you instead of BoM updates? For most of you, I suppose the answer is "nothing." For some subset of you, the answer is: Spider-Man fan-fiction! That is a sentence I never thought in a million years I would write. But you find your practice and training where you can. I am not by nature or instinct an outliner, and I doubt I ever will be. But for the past week I've been diligently constructing and churning out detailed outlines for Spider-Man episodes, and I think the experience is good for me. Although improvisation is what stimulates my creativity, I think I do wander around too much without grappling with such core story issues as "What does this character specifically want, and how are they going to get it?" and that's the sort of thing that outlining really forces on you, or on me, at least. Anyway, I've already posted one of my treatments, and tomorrow I will start posting more of them, a day at a time. In terms of writing, I've got two weeks' of material already on hand, and I shouldn't have much problem staying ahead. Sometime in late August we would then hit the place I want to get to: my anticipation of the series' upcoming "Superior Spider-Man" arc. |
| So, in yesterday's chapter Will and Sydney met a most unexpected kind of person. It ended with a choice: partner with the guy, or tell him to go dangle. You're going to get both sequels, but we'll start with the second one, as I suspect that's the one you guys would have chosen if we put it to a vote: "Of Wardrobes and Ley Lines" (public) + "Of Wardrobes and Ley Lines" (interactive).* I had two treatments outlined from Sunday, and I got those written up, so I guess that means I averaged one treatment a day over the last two days. I might be able to get two more written today, which will put one-third of the way toward my goal, but after that it will be probably be ten days of one-per-day to get me to the end of Season One. It surprises me how long it takes me to turn an outline into a treatment, and how hard it can be. I guess it has to do with trying to invent details to fill in the sketch, and worrying about transitional moments. |
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