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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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| So I put up a poll at the end of the latest chapter: "Invalid Item" (public) / "The Company That Misery Keeps" (interactive) [EDIT: FIXED LINK] mostly because I'm not strongly committed to any of the choices and thought I'd let the audience have a say. But I should caution you that it's not going to make a strong, immediate difference to the storyline. I know where this is going, and I also know that the choice I've presented will have only a negligible influence on what comes next. But it will obviously have a very long-term impact on however this branch develops from here, so it's not a useless vote either. There's a high risk that I won't know the vote's outcome until late in the day tomorrow, so there's a high probability there will be no chapter tomorrow. If not, I might post a one-off somewhere else. |
| It's been awhile since I've posted a chapter the same day that I've written. Longer still since I've posted a chapter only 20 minutes after composing it. So I'm not sure whether I really want to call your attention to "Invalid Item" (public) / "Gaming the Game" (interactive). But at least I didn't miss posting something today, even if it is late. Of course, it also means I'm doing very badly at accumulating that backlog I wanted to build. In happier news, you all might be interested in checking out some pictures that AchillesRedux made, illustrating a scene from a BoM chapter with Will and Stephanie Wyatt: One Steps In, Another Steps Out . Graphic content warning; also, you'll need to log in to DeviantArt to see all the images. |
| The two most recent chapters in the current storyline are kind of flashback heavy. I'm not a fan of flashbacks, but I prefer them to exposition dumps. But that still makes them tricky to write and fold into the narrative. A single day of writing had given me the three chapters that I have now posted, but they required some heavy revision before I was reasonably happy with them, and that took an extra day. Having cleared that mess away, though, I think I see easier writing ahead. Anyway, for the record: "Invalid Item" (public) / "Of Friendships and Fouls" (interactive). |
| So here is the start of the new branch: "Invalid Item" (public) / "Hijacking Javits" (interactive). The contest that inspired it was a commission to write a storyline based on a choice that did not receive a lot of votes when we were voting on choices to take, so I'm not sure how popular it's going to be. As I said yesterday, I'm not going to open the continuations to voting, so even though I will be publishing a copy in a public form, I won't feel obliged to flog each chapter appearance here on the blog. If you want to follow the story but have trouble accessing the interactive, consult "Invalid Item" . Links to current chapters will appear there under the heading "Current Storyline." If I forget to update with links there, check the most recent link in that section for a link to the next chapter. |
| So, today's chapter is up, though it's not the one I expected to win: "Invalid Item" (public) / "Unexpected Dates" (interactive). That's alright, it gets me to where I wanted to go: a stopping point for this branch. So there's no poll at the end of it, and there's not even a choice. What comes next? That's a decision I put up for bid a couple of weeks ago. Those of you who didn't submit a bid will find out tomorrow what the winning choice was. Those of you who bid and lost will be getting an email later today returning the GPs you bid along with a little extra dividend. And if you bid for the winning choice, then you'll know what will be coming next because you won't be getting your GPs back. I don't know how long the new storyline will run for -- at least a week, I hope, and maybe more. (The chapter choices will NOT be open up for polling, so I can write multiple chapters a day and build up a backlog.) I'm not sure what will come after that. I'm planning to take all of November off to write something not for BoM, and I'd like to get a backlog of chapters written to cover that month, but I don't know where in BoM/TWS I would be doing that. It might be in the "alternate BoM" that I planted a few weeks ago; it might even be a regular, non-interactive story. But I don't think it will be in the "sophomore" section, which I want to take a break from. |
| I was up early to drive someone to a medical appointment, so today's chapter is going up a few hours early as well: "Invalid Item" (public) and "Action Under Cover" (interactive). The next few days are going to be a little weird for me, so even though I know what will come next (for both choices) I'm not certain I'll be able to write them and post them in a timely manner. |
| So, the final vote did end decisively in one direction, but it was late breaking that way, which didn't give me a window to compose a sequel. So it'll be tomorrow before a new chapter goes up. The good news, maybe, is that I've a pretty good plan for the sequel chapter, the alternatives that will follow, and the sequel even to one alternative. So I think I can get multiple chapters written today. |
| I won't tell you whether you guys voted wisely or not yesterday, but there is a new chapter today: "Invalid Item" (public) / "Piled Higher and Deeper" (interactive). |
| So I had kind of a bumpy two weeks there. I had to do some housesitting, which wound up complicating my schedule in a way that wrecked my concentration, and I had some other things to get done as well. I also had a hard time with "Invalid Item" (public) / "The Brain Twister" (interactive). I got the first 2/3rds written pretty quickly, but then got stuck. Part of the problem is that a chapter like that feels both necessary and like wheel-spinning. For genre reasons it feels necessary; also, given Grant's characterization, it seems like something that needed to be written out explicitly. But it's a chapter that doesn't really advance things, and the choice at the end doesn't look like an obvious advance either. I actually do have one of the choices written, so if you guys vote wisely, you will definitely get a chapter tomorrow. If you don't vote wisely that will probably be okay too, because I'm pretty sure I know what would happen in the alternate. |
| Well, that totally didn't go as I expected. Not that I had the alternate chapter written. The poll was neck-and-neck from the very start, so I didn't put any time into writing a chapter that wasn't clearly going to win. So it'll be tomorrow before I have the sequel written. |
| So I'm a little late getting today's chapter up, but here it is: "Invalid Item" (public) / "What Paulina Had to Say" (interactive). I had no idea where it was going to go until Paulina said that Kaylee was "a sweet girl." Then I had the same thought that Will had. I won't tell you what that thought was, though, because, y'know, spoilers. But that's my compositional technique in an anecdote: Characters say and do things, and that's where the plot comes from. I suppose I should start writing the sequel now. This might be the first chapter where the winning choice garners 100% of the vote. |
| It'll be another day before I can post a sequel chapter to the current storyline. In the meantime, there's this: "A Prank Present" and following. It's an idea I'd been noodling with off and on for a long time now—recast and restart BoM with a different protagonist. It's the same setting, the same cast of characters, the same year. Only it's a different character who finds the "Libra". I don't know how much variation can be worked into it, so it's kind of an experiment. What difference does it make if it's not Will who is in the middle of it all? Instead of a new interactive, though, I've attached it inside the weird anthology book that Will has found inside Blackwell's house. That makes it more of a dream than an actual "alternate reality" to BoM. I have no immediate plans to add on to the three alternatives that I've begun there, but I might jump back into it, on and off, on days like yesterday when I don't want to crush out a new chapter in the current storyline. I am going to try to keep the chapters in this alternate-BoM shorter than usual, though: to 1000 words instead of the ~1700 words I usually run. This is also going to be a place for me to try practicing some other techniques. |
| So, that was kind of an unexpected absence. I started writing the sequel to "Saving Yourself ... " -- Now published, BTW: "Invalid Item" (public) / "Two Ambushes" (interactive)-- and at the halfway point I got stuck. So I went away for what I thought would be one day of subconscious writing, but it turned into a week. Anyway, it's up now. There's a potential stopping place looming up ahead, but I'm not sure how I'm going to hit it, or even if your choices are going to let me hit. I'm also unsure about what's going to happen between now and when that stopping point is finally atop us. I do know I'd like to get to know the sophomore class better, but that's kind of hard to do via the POV of Cindy Vredenburg. |
| So you guys wanted a sex scene. Okay, here it is: "Invalid Item" (public) / "Saving Yourself, If Not Your Virtue" . I'll be interested to see the votes for the next chapter come in, not because I'm invested in the sequels but because I have no idea what the popular choice will be. I can see it being close, or it being lopsided in either direction. I suppose I'd better start preparing two chapters then, for either eventuality ... |
| Today's offering on the theme "What It's Like to Write an Interactive Like This and How Much Trouble Do I Get Into While I'm Writing It" is on the topic of endings. More specifically (since very few of the threads in this interactive have actual endings) it's about the kind of choices that are used to end a chapter. I like to offer choices that are significant, to use a word that is a little vaguer and (paradoxically) for that reason more precise than "meaningful." The best choices are the ones that are significant to the psychology and development of the character. So Andrew has the chance to steal some money that he can use to treat his crush to a fancy meal in an expensive restaurant. Does he take it? Or does he leave it, and content himself with trying to make the bargain burger meal at McDonalds look good? Or, to take a more famous example: Peter Parker has a chance to use his Spidey-powers to stop a fleeing criminal. Does he do the responsible thing, or does he let the guy run past because, meh, he's an entertainer, not a cop. Of course, character is destiny, so character choices will flip the plot in one direction or another. But emotionally we become invested in the character who has made the choices, not the story that results from them. That's not always possible, though, so failing that kind of significance, I try for plot significance -- choices that send the story careening down one boulevard rather than another. That's usually not very hard to arrange. But sometimes nothing seems to work. Today's chapter -- "Invalid Item" (public) / "A Magical Motel Mugging" -- is a case in point. That's the third set of choices I have tried using to climax it.When I started writing it, I had one idea for the kind of choice it would climax in. But I reached that point and found that I was nowhere near setting that choice up; and besides, I found myself writing away from that choice so that it wouldn't even make sense as a choice. So I stuck a "Continue" onto it, wrote a Part 2, and wrote my way to a different choice. But when I reread the chapters before publishing them, I just didn't like the pacing or the psychology that was on display. It was all too quick. So here I am sticking a third choice onto what had been a "Part 1" (and no longer is) with no real sense of what that choice's significance is. If it points toward character development, the choices will take a very long time before the divergence shows up. And I think it will only create a trivial difference to the plotting. Complicating things is a plot twist that looms on the horizon. Long-time readers who know the signs will understand exactly what is coming. Or what is threatening to come. I'm not sure it will happen, though. It will depend on (a) the choices you guys make and (b) how I write those choices. It's possible that that plot twist might be diverted, subverted, or indefinitely delayed. But the fact that it's out there threatens to render any and all plot or character choices futile. It's like setting a love story at Pearl Harbor in December of 1941. |
| Well, yesterday's voting results were no surprise, which is why I had "Invalid Item" (public) / "The Guy Who Would be Queen of the School" (interactive) ready to go. But it was a surprise to see "Pick Steve Patterson" do as well as it did. I guess he has his fans. (I'm one, I confess.) * * * * * Meanwhile, I've been getting a few comments privately that grumble ever so slightly at the recent poll results. The familiar (senior-level people like Cindy and Steve and Kelsey and Seth) is popular, and that's okay. But a few people would like to see something new, like was promised in some of the other choices. I'd like to oblige them, but I'd also like to keep obliging the majority. (And for the record, I've been enjoying writing these chapters in these familiar settings; I'm more than quite happy with the choices that you guys are putting to me.) It's a hard square to circle. Meanwhile, I got a related suggestion from a commenter: Instead of weighted voting, why not open votes up to bidding? That way the really ardent voters, by putting GPs up, would be able to get what they want, even if it's not a popular choice. Well, that idea (even offered as a semi-joke) didn't appeal to me. It seems a recipe for resentment: "Pay to get things to go your way" plus "No return on investment if you lose." Ugh. But I started thinking about it, and I think I see a way it *might* work. I wouldn't want to do it regularly, but it might be fun and interesting as a one-off. So here's the deal: I've set up a bidding contest for a storyline to be written ... at some point. Maybe after the current storyline, maybe the storyline after that. But the competing choices are for the lowest-scoring choices thus far in this branch of the story. That's right: the stuff that has only been popular with a few people is the stuff in competition. Here's a chance for the minority to vote their passion. To bid for one of those storylines, go here: "Invalid Chapter" . Then click on the choice that you want to vote for. In that chapter, scroll to the bottom and send me a tip.Whichever choice brings in the most tips, that's the one that gets written. But I'm not going to keep the GPs. The people whose choices lose will get their GPs back. And they'll get more than that back, because I will also divide the remainder (tips from winning votes) equally among the losers and pass it back to them as well. So, if your choice wins, you pay the GPs and get your preferred storyline. If your choice loses, you get back more GPs than you paid in. Hmm. Those of you uninterested in the voting but who like to gamble might still want to bid, because it might pay off in GPs if you pick a loser. Note: Only one bid (the highest) per user will be accepted. Others will be returned and not counted when making the final tally. |
| So, I guess people don't much care how the polls are conducted? There weren't a lot of votes in the poll on weighted polling, which suggests indifference. But the few who did vote were overwhelming in favor of the "Special" option, which was also my own preference, so that's the way we'll do it. Normal polling for continuing a chapter, but weighted polling when voting on which storyline to jump to. Today's chapter ["Invalid Item" (public) / "The Bold and the Beautiful" (interactive)] was one that could have ended with a lot of generic choices, but I'm tired of teasing you guys so they are all specific, even though there are more candidates mentioned in the chapter than there's room for in the poll. I left out a very popular choice, which might surprise and discomfit some of you; but I figure she is such a popular choice that she is likely to show up as a choice in whichever sequel gets written.And did you feel a slight lurch beneath your feet as you read it, as though the plot were about to do a twist? |
| So, to the post below, Kenny asks: I didn't know Gordon was making the most out of his situation after Dane basically ruined his (old) life. I wasn't expecting that plot point, to be honest. I don't remember if you did something similar on a previous arc or this was where you saw the current arc moving towards. ... One more question: are Sean and Terry two of the new names you made up for this arc or were they featured before? I gave tl;dr answers in an answering comment. Here are longer answers that noodle around talking about technique, and how and why the interactive (at least when it's me writing; rugal and others would have to speak for themselves) evolves the way it does. I've lived with these characters for a long time, and some of them have a very vivid presence in my imagination, so that (a) I know things about them they don't even know about themselves; and (b) I don't even have to think about it to know how they would react in a given situation. So, for instance, I know that Gordon is not going to roll over and die if he gets trapped in Will's mask; he's going to do what he can with it when he sees a chance. So I don't have to be "inspired" to imagine Gordon making the best of his situation, or to write it down in notes that that's what he'd do. He just does it. I don't know the specifics of what he's doing off-page in these chapters, beyond what I've written, but I know the sort of thing he's likely to be doing, and can invent the details if the time for those details comes. And no, I haven't written much about what he's doing. To write a story is to pick and choose what is important, and what's going on with Gordon has been pretty much irrelevant to Will's adventures, so I haven't even alluded to him much; I only allude to him here in order to set up a possible storyline where he does become important to Will. And in those sequel branches where he doesn't become important? Then this is just a passing glance through a window into his life. (But having glanced through that window, Will may return to it even if he doesn't choose to involve himself with Gordon's new life.) Picking and choosing what to include, by the way, is pretty hard, especially when you have to figure out afterward why a newly created detail that should have been crucial to earlier chapters wasn't mentioned in them (because that detail hadn't been invented when those chapters were composed). I have (you might have noticed) developed a few tricks—running gags, almost—to handle these things. One of those tricks is Will's persistent inability to remember who he knows and who he doesn't: hence, Caleb's wisecrack about him having the mind and memory of a sparrow. It's also one of the reasons Will has turned out to be a fairly introverted, almost anti-social animal with very few friends: that way, when new people are invented, it's plausible that he hasn't paid much attention to them, which would explain why a story told from his POV hasn't mentioned them. People like Sean Wilcox and Terry Colson. * * * * * Speaking of new people: I've actually got stacks and stacks of them in my notes, some of them put together by me, some by rugal. A common writerly trick, when it comes time to invent characters, is to simply look around and notice people. It's pretty easy to do these days with the internet, when a cursory Google search can turn up thousands upon thousands of photographs of interesting, evocative faces and circumstances. Little stories suggest themselves; character traits get daydreamed over; a sketchy character comes into semi-focus; a name gets applied; and a quasi-character goes into the files to be pulled out when there seems a call for them. Terry and Sean are two of these; it was this way with Bhodi and his sophomore friends; it will have been this way with the other new names that might pop up in upcoming chapters. * * * * * And one final thought-that-follows-on-another: Sean's gossip to Will hints at some plot movements going on in the background, and I mentioned yesterday that tectonic plates were moving, even if they couldn't be felt. As I look at the poll results at the current hour, and try to anticipate where they will go and what the sequels will have to look like, it occurs to me that I should issue a caution: Some choices for an alias will lead quickly to that choice being acted upon; others, as with Lindsay Cho, may be delayed with ground-space preparation and foreshadowing; and others may get knocked askew as the plot twists beneath them. |
| So that was a really interesting experiment with the weighted voting. I'm not sure it changed the outcome -- "Stay in the senior class with Caleb" won pretty decisively in all three polls -- but they each returned a different internal result, which means that many people were using them to distribute their vote by weight. It was interesting enough that I'm doing another poll on whether to keep using weighted polling: "Invalid Item" . Keep using weighted polling for all votes? Just when changing storylines like yesterday? Or go back to one-vote polling in all cases? Those are the three options that make the most sense to me, but I don't want to impose anything without consulting you guys. Anyway, here is the chapter that resulted: "Invalid Item" (public) and "Clouds of Fame and Glory" (interactive). Yes, the choices are "general" rather than specific. But three of the sequels will end with specific choices; the fourth will end with a mix of two specifics and a further "general" choice.And I want you to know that it's not easy writing the same scene a second time so that it's both plausibly the same and also plausibly different from the first version. |
| New chapter posted: "Invalid Item" (public) and "Identity Roulette" (interactive). Okay, that was a shabby trick at the end. What the hell, right? Well, the short answer is that I ran out of ready-made aliases for Will. See, as I've been writing these chapters I've also been gaming out the alternate storylines, including possible IDs for Will (and for Caleb, when those are relevant). I've got thirty-three aliases tentatively in place in all the sequels, the sequels-to-sequels, and the sequels-to-sequels-to-sequels to "Discarding Dwayne." Some names are familiar; a few are well-used; most are brand-new, never-before-seen. There are so many because I didn't want to repeat any of them. I wanted every choice after "Discarding Dwayne" to eventuate in a name that doesn't appear elsewhere in this part of the story. But I also didn't want to end every storyline with a specific alias. The sophomore class is not well populated with ready-made characters, and I wanted at least one storyline to be open-ended, a place where an author could brute-create a choice after new characters had been developed. And guess which rabbit hole you guys went plunging down. So here we are in a place where it makes no sense to run a poll on how to continue. This storyline can only continue when an author has an idea for a character to insert here. So today's poll is a meta- one. Which chapter shall we backpedal to, and take an alternate direction? Here are the four choices I've culled for you; each of them leads to a chapter that I've already written and archived, so there should be no delay in publishing them tomorrow. "Invalid Item" : Become Lindsay"Invalid Item" : Pick Melanie Heath"Invalid Item" : Stay in the senior class with Caleb"Invalid Item" : Yeah, that's a great plan!To make things even more interesting, though, I'm going to run multiple, identical polls featuring these choices, and ask you to vote in each one. But if the polls are all identical, what's the point in voting in all of them? I hear you cry. The point is that you don't have to vote the same way in each poll. I'm going to pull all the votes from all three polls into a single pot, and the choice with the most votes across all the polls wins. And this means that you can weight your vote. If there's one choice you badly want, vote for it three times (vote for it in each poll). If there is one you want, but another you'd like to support as an alternate, vote twice for your first preference and once for your second favorite. If you are okay with three of the choices but not keen on the fourth, vote for all except that last one. This way, we not only get raw numbers for each choice, but also the intensity of feeling for each one. The polls are here, here, and here: [EDIT: Polls closed and deleted. Final tally: * Stay in the senior class with Caleb: 36 * Become Lindsay: 20 * Pick Melanie Heath: 14 * Yeah, that's a great plan!: 4] Vote early and vote often! [And before you ask: Why not include "Pick one of Leslie Osbourne's friends" (the runner-up in yesterday's poll) as an option? Because in writing it (yes, that chapter has been written), I discovered that I had to include a spoiler that I'm not ready to reveal yet. Yes, things are happening in the background that will impact future developments, and in that chapter one of them exploded. But after writing the reveal I decided that I wanted to save it, as it would have a much greater impact if it were unveiled to you guys in another section of the interactive. So, that choice is off the table for now.] |
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