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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.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 None The Latest 7/1: Interactive: "Solving Other People's Problems" 7/1: Public: "Solving Other People's Problems"
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| Hey, how about a fourth post for the day? So we just had one series of polls to decide where I'll continue writing BoM. But I'm ready to have another poll. Why? Because I'm not feeling particularly interested in any one storyline, so I'd just as soon let you guys pick one again, to be written after I've reached a stopping point in the "Chelsea - User" storyline. (Which, BTW, I started today and have a first chapter written for.) But the choices will be of a different sort this time. I'd like to work in an area that hasn't been developed, or which I haven't worked on in a long time. You know, to get some variety. But I am letting myself be guided somewhat by notes and comments that people have sent me privately along with their GPs. After sorting through them, and thinking about them, and weighing my own opinions and intuitions, I have settled on four choices. To vote, go to [Poll completed and deleted]. To vote with GPs, go to [Poll completed and deleted], pick one of the options, and send a tip via the form at the end of that chapter. Voting will close on Saturday, December 1. |
| So, for some reason I have lately (meaning within the last year, I think) fallen out of the habit of acknowledging the tips and gifts that readers have sent me. I'm not sure how that happened, except that maybe the pace slowed so that I was only getting a tip every 10 to 20 days, so it was easy for me to forget about them. But that's an explanation, not an excuse or justification. I do still have most of those tips in my email box, so at this very late date I can at least offer very ... very belated thanks for the tips and to the people who send them. They really do mean a lot to me, and I am grateful to those who sent them. In no particular order, the people I want to acknowledge include: Easy DonJ Clockworange Ann Man Puuuuuth Wordsmitty bori258 CCRFan1 zz AchillesRedux dreadnaught masktrix shadowguy97179 That One Guy Argamis SilverComet anijunki Tal I think there are more of you, but my email box is very deep with old correspondence, and I may have missed some. If I have, I do apologize, and I thank you anyway. |
| The vote in the second poll was actually a little closer than the public poll would indicate: Less than 600 GPs separated "User" from "Victim" in the GP vote. Those of you who voted for "User" will get a Chelsea-as-user storyline. Those who voted with GPs for Chelsea-as-victim will get your GPs back, plus a hefty dividend. The vote was close enough that I didn't start writing until I closed the poll. It'll be a week -- Saturday, December 1 -- before new chapters start going up. |
| A double-barreled publication today: "The Many Faces of Crime, Part 1" and "The Many Faces of Crime, Part 2" (interactive), plus "Invalid Item" , which combines them in a public folder. I anticipate starting a new storyline on December 1. More detail about that will come in a later post. |
| Did I say that I'd publish a chapter yesterday? Okay, I did, but I also said "if I remember." Okay, so I remembered a day late. Here's a chapter and a bonus to make up for being tardy. It's nothing too exciting -- just setting up choices for later: * "Invalid Item" (public) / "Someone to Watch Over Me" (interactive)* "Invalid Item" (public) / "The Bodyguard" (interactive)Happy Thanksgiving. |
| Face palm. I'm such an idiot. I put up the GP-poll without remembering to put the actual choices up so you could send tips through them. Anyway, they're up now. [Polls completed and deleted.] Thanks to rugal for pointing that out to me. |
| Voting in the first round is now closed. "Chelsea Cooper" is the winner. Next poll: [Poll completed and deleted] This is to determine if Chelsea will be a conspirator who uses the masks, or a victim. Voting will close on Sunday, November 25. Vote in the poll, or direct GPs toward your preference via tipping here: [Poll completed and deleted]. As before, each vote in the poll will be worth one-half of the average GP donation. (Unless no GPs are received, in which case each vote will be worth 1 GP.) * * * * * I will not disclose how the GPs broke in the first round of voting, but I will announce that, in the final tally, each vote in the free poll was worth 940 GPs. Those of you who sent GPs for the non-winning choices will get those GPs back, plus a share of the GPs that were voted for the winning choice. If you voted for more than one choice, and one of those was the winning choice, you will not receive back the GPs you voted for the winning choice, except as a share of the dividend being paid out for your votes for the non-winning choices. If all your GPs went to the winning choice, then you will not have any GPs returned to you. The dividend will be 1535 GPs. So, for example, if you voted 200 GPs for "Chelsea Cooper" and 200 GPs for "The Sophomores," you will receive 1735 GPs (the 200 for "The Sophomores" plus the dividend). As a consolation, the second-place choice will receive a role in the new storyline. In order to prevent an influence on the voting in the second round, I will not disclose what that second-place choice was. (But it wasn't "Plinko," I can tell you that.) |
| Whew! I've just written the last batch of new words for the NaNoWrMo project. (Though in this case "No" stands for "novella," not "novel.") Total word count: 28,485. That's over the course of 16 days, for a daily average of 1780 words. That's slightly more than the average length of a BoM chapter. And right now I'm suffering from word poisoning -- the sick, shaky feeling that you get when you're done with a major writing project and all the tension and adrenaline drains out of you. Anyway, that means I'm now set up to return to BoM, though it will be later rather than sooner, for we have some polls to run still. There will be another one-off on Wednesday, though, if I remember. EDIT: First poll closed. |
| So here's another one-off chapter: "Invalid Item" (public) / "The Choice for a Cho" (public). Will is looking for a new identity, and has decided that Lindsay Cho would be the best one. |
| I have the impression that some people are not voting in the [First Poll now deleted; voting completed], perhaps because they sense that the votes there will not carry much weight. So I'm increasing the weight that I'm giving to the votes in that poll. Originally each vote was going to be worth 100 GPs in the tallying. I've changed that to make it depend upon the number of GPs voted. Now, each vote will be worth 1/2 of the average GP donation size. So, if 8 people vote 10K GPs for 20 choices, then each vote in the poll will be worth 250 GPs (one-half of 10K divided by 20; the number of donors is irrelevant). I hope this will make it such that free votes will be worth casting, while still giving direct GP donations a greater weight. I'm not going to tell you what the votes are worth at the moment. I will say that each vote is currently worth at least 350 GPs. |
| I've reached the point in the novella where I'm more than slightly sick of it, and that's got me anticipating a return to BoM. I figured, though, that I'd let you guys help me figure out a where-and-what-to-do-next plan for that with a poll. Which means we need to get started early. If you go here -- [EDIT: Poll completed and deleted] -- you will find a poll setting out the choices I'm giving you. They are not chapters or even areas, but are characters or sets of characters to work with. They don't even pick out what kind of plot the characters will feature in. But I figure we can start narrowing down the possibilities by thinking about who you want to see featured in the next set of shenanigans. At the same time I have created a series of posts (starting here: [Poll completed and deleted]) that will let you vote for the same choices via Gift Points. It's the same drill as last time: Go to the BoM chapter featuring the character(s) you prefer to see, and use the "Tip" form at the bottom to send me GPs. You can vote in the poll, and you can send tips in any amount (the more you tip, the better the chance that your choice will win); or you can do one but not the other. It depends on how invested you want to be in a particular choice. If you want, you can even send GP tips for more than one choice. (But you can only vote once in the poll.) For the purposes of vote counting, each vote in the free poll will be worth a yet-to-be-determined number of GPs while GPs tipped to me will be worth their face value. So, for example, if each vote winds up being worth 100 points; and "Chelsea Cooper" gets 12 votes; and I get chapter tips for her worth 2,576 GPs, then she would have (2,576 + 1200 =) 3,776 votes; and if "Plinko" gets 7 votes and 4,290 GPs, then "Plinko" would get (4,290 + 700 =) 4,990 votes. Plink would thus beat Chelsea as a choice. How many points will each vote in the poll be worth? That will depend upon the GPs that are sent me. When the polling closes, I will give weigh each vote in the poll as equivalent to one-half of the average GP donation. So, if I receive 10K GPs collectively packaged in 20 donations from 8 people, then each poll vote will be worth 250 GPs (half of 10K GPs divided by 20; the number of people making the donations will not be relevant). As when we did this sort of thing before, GPs for losing choices will be returned to the senders; GPs for the winning choice will be equally divided among those who voted for the losing choices and will be sent to them. So, if your choice wins, you will be out whatever GPs you sent me. If your choices loses, you will get your GPs back, plus a dividend. I myself will neither make nor lose GPs on the vote. People who only vote in the poll will get nothing, as they invested nothing beyond their free vote. The poll and the GP contest will close in 7 days (on Tuesday, November 20). After that will come a second poll and contest offering a narrower set of choices within the broad choice chosen in the first poll. |
| Four days have passed, so here is the next one-off: "Invalid Item" (public) / "A Snow Job?" (interactive). It's still in the same area: Will picking a new identity down in the sophomore class. |
| So at least person asked that I publish items from the backlog. Okay then: "Invalid Item" (public) / "Spy Girl" (interactive). That's from the same general area as I was last working in -- one of those alternate chapters I prepared that didn't win a poll. That's the pool I'll be publishing from this month, and a new one will appear every three to four days. Don't expect any of them to have any sequels, though. |
| The last chapters of the storyline are now posted: "Invalid Item" (public) and "A Better Class of People" (interactive). I said earlier that I don't have anything else in the backlog, but that's not strictly true. I do have scattered chapters in various branches, but nothing that I like that runs for any sustained length of time. Still, I might pop in and out over the next month to publish a couple of these as one-offs. I have a number of unpublished chapters in this part of the interactive—choices I anticipate publishing, but which didn't get voted for—and those would probably be the ones I posted if I did. So, you might check back in occasionally just to see if anything has been added. |
| This month is NaNoWrMo, which is the reason I'm taking the month off from BoM to work on something else. I'll be reporting my progress at my tumblr blog: seuzz.tumblr.com If anyone else wants to blog about their month of writing—whether they're participating in NaNoWrMo or just doodling around with other stuff—post it here, day by day, as a Comment on this item. |
| So, I can tell you guys what the schedule looks like now, as I've written through the plot point that I intended to reach when I started this branch. That climactic chapter will (assuming I remember) be published on Monday; Saturday and Sunday will bring additional chapters as well. After that, it'll be a month at least before I publish here again. Judging by the stats, this has not been a very popular branch, but I knew going in it wouldn't be. It was commissioned from a set of low-popularity choices, and M2M branches are always less popular than the M2F ones. But I have to say that I have really enjoyed writing it. I was commissioned to do so with the explicit request that Seth Javits get some more development. I don't know that I've gone as in depth with him as one might. But I've been as true to the character as my intuition tells me he is, and I rather like that he doesn't seem like an a*****e on inside as much as he is one on the outside. I've also enjoyed getting some practice at building crises. I don't know how apparent it is to you, the readers, for whom the idea of a "climactic crisis" might mean something more comic-bookey, like the threat of imminent extinction at the hands and jaws of some giant purple planet eater. But I do feel like I did succeeded in putting Will/Seth into deeper and worse trouble in almost every chapter as a result of his choices. Some of the credit here has to go to the voters, though, who really did make a fantastic choice in the one vote I gave you, which led to a hard conflict between Cindy and Caleb. I might have some more to say about this branch, and the choices I made, when we reach the end. |
| It's November 1, which is the day I was going to lay BoM aside for a month to some non-BoM stuff elsewhere. But though I wrote a number of chapters yesterday and the day before, I did not get to where I want the current storyline to be when I suspend it. So I'm going to spend today trying to get it to that point. Though I will not be writing in BoM for the twenty-nine days after that, I will still be publishing the current storyline, which will continue for a few more days at least. I will also still be around WdC, checking emails and the like and maybe posting a couple of notes here. But I didn't get a backlog written to carry thru the month, so I won't be publishing anything until December at the earliest. So this is prior notice of a publishing hiatus. |
| And this is how come I'm glad you guys voted for Chelsea in the last poll: "Invalid Item" (public) / "Coups Within Coups" (interactive). I've got two days to write chapters that will get me to the stopping point I envisioned when I started this branch, so I might not be very communicative. |
| So, in the previous entry I said there wasn't going to be a chapter today. I spoke too soon. Immediately after posting that entry, I started working on the sequel, and it came out quickly enough that I decided that I could make it the daily post. So here it is: "Invalid Item" (public}"The Enemy of My Girlfriend Is My ..." (interactive}Now let's see if I can get tomorrow's chapter written, for it's basically just going to be the second part of today's ... |
| Sorry, I've got nothing today. [EDIT: Oh but it turns out that I do.] But I do like the choice you guys made in the voting. I started thinking about it this morning, and though I tossed Chelsea in as a bit of fan service, I see now that she would be the best possible choice to take things where I want them to go. Did those voters realize it? Or did they luck into it? Or does it matter? |
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