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A hub for the "Book of Masks" universe. |
The Interactives "The Book of Masks" ![]() "The Wandering Stars" ![]() "Student Bodies" ![]() For non-WdC Members "The Book of Masks: Archives" ![]() "The Book of Masks (Abridged)" ![]() Community "BoM/TWS Message Forum" ![]() "BoM/TWS/SB Wiki" ![]() Current Polls None The Latest 7/1: Interactive: "Solving Other People's Problems" ![]() 7/1: Public: "Solving Other People's Problems" ![]() |
Whew! Today is complicated in the BoM multiverse. In this just-completed chapter run, Will has assumed the identity of David Kirkham, the school bully who was hassling him into breaking up with Sydney, and made a hash of it by accidentally forcing his compliant doppelganger into for-really and for-true breaking up with Sydney's doppelganger. So what comes next for Will and Sydney? Yesterday's chapter— * Interactive: "Like a Boss" ![]() * Public: "Like a Boss" ![]() —gives Will entertaining three options for "getting back together" with Sydney (who is at the moment impersonating Kelsey Blankenship). The first is to slip Sydney into a girlfriend for Will/Kirkham. The second is to turn Sydney into a girl who can date Will's pedisequos. The third is for Will to give up on Kirkham and find himself a new identity that can date Sydney's pedisequos (as well as Sydney herself). And there is now a poll that asks readers to choose one of these options: [Poll completed and deleted] Today's chapters— * Interactive: "A Girl for Kirkham" ![]() ![]() ![]() * Public: "A Girl for Kirkham" ![]() ![]() ![]() —expand on these three choices, giving candidates for Will to choose from. Each of these chapters also comes with a poll: * [Poll completed and deleted] asks which girlfriend for Kirkham he should give to Sydney, assuming that he puts her in for a girlfriend for Kirkham. * [Poll completed and deleted] asks which girlfriend for pedisequos-Will he should put her in for, if he decides to pair her with the pedisequos. * [Poll completed and deleted] asks who he should turn himself into, if he's going to date Sydney's pedisequos. You are allowed to vote in all the polls, so that you can influence the ultimate direction of the storyline even if the results for the first poll don't move it down a branch that you prefer. Why all the complicated polling? Because two big decisions have to be made back-to-back, and I don't want to have to pile a dozen or so choices into a single poll. That would just fragment into the kind of confusion where no meaningful plurality would be possible. So I want to channel it. First, by asking which of the three general choices should Will make? And then, for each of those choices, which ultimate choice should he make? There's also a commentary thread for the just-concluded run: "Commentary: "From Bitch to Bully"" ![]() * * * * * "But what comes next?" I hear you cry. Well, it ought to have been a run of chapters in the Doppelganger storyline, the sequel to the last chapter where you voted to see Kendra Saunders next replaced. But the last week has been way too frantic and I've not got nearly enough chapters written for it, so I'm going to publish something else I've been working on. It starts off with "A Conspiracy of Two" ![]() These are very early days in the story. Will has been messing around with the book a little and has shown it to his best friend, Caleb Johansson. Together, they have made two masks. But they are leery about experimenting with them, and need a guinea pig. Who will they use it on? Themselves? A friend? An enemy? Three choices have already been made and explored. Tomorrow I will post a fourth. |
I lost my Kindle last week. It seems to have ... evaporated. I have no idea where it went. So, I have had to order a new one, which ate up a huge percentage of the Gift Card balances I have accumulated over the years. I am now very interested in rebuilding that balance, so I am very interested in doing commissions. (The way I do commissions, I typically ask to be paid with Amazon Gift Cards.) I do have old emails from people with commission ideas, and I'm not rejecting those -- I'm going back to look at the ones I still have in my Inbox. But I am making a general announcement so that anyone who had or has an idea they want to commission from me can send it in. My standard commission contract can be read at "Commission Contract" ![]() |
Today's chapter— Interactive: "Flirtations with Disaster" ![]() Public: "Flirtations with Disaster" ![]() —almost didn't get published today on account of me having so much else to do. But I managed to squeeze it in during a spare 30 minutes, and I even have enough time before I take off to make a blog post. Anyway, today's chapter rounds off the latest run in the "Keith's Konspiracy" branch. This was written in gratitude to a reader who dumped a million-plus GPs on me during my hiatus. I'm not done trying to give him his GPs' worth, but I'm not going to pursue this branch any further for the time being. So there's no new poll today. * * * Speaking of polls, we have another set of poll results to announce. It was a very tight race in the public results, and no surprise that it was the three female candidates bunched up far in the front. And there were no dramatic come-from-behind victories by numbers four and five. But the final result wasn't even close, because almost all the GPs went to a single choice. (And because it was a run-away, I don't feel guilty about closing the poll an hour early on account of some scheduling conflicts on my end. Unless someone came in at the last second and dropped a giant GP bequest, the results weren't going to change.) Kendra Saunders: 17,350 Catherine Muskov: 5,610 Olivia Byrne: 4,590 Ian Patton: 1,530 Anthony Kirk: 510 But one GP voter did make off like a bandit. Because he was the only one to vote for a losing choice (Olivia), he gets all the GPs voted in this poll. Meaning his 500 GP investment turned into 12,750 GPs. BTW, there's a thread in the forum talking a little bit about the mechanics of these polls, what they are intended to do, and how they are not simply "buy a winner" contests: "GP Polls" ![]() * * * And what comes next? A new branch in the Will-and-Sydney storyline. Background: Will and Sydney are impersonating Kelsey Blankenship and Amanda Ferguson, but both hate the way David Kirkham has been persecuting Will, both he himself before the switch and his doppelganger afterward. They have lured Kirkham out to the Donna Motel to turn him into a pedisequos. In the already-written branch, Sydney took over Kirkham's identity, but in the previous-to-the-last poll, a couple of passionate voters were able to send the story down an alternate path where Will impersonates Kirkham. The new storyline will branch off from "Ambush at the Donna" ![]() * * * Finally, my thanks to Puuuuuth, Easy, and Wordsmitty for GP tips for chapters written in the just-concluded thread! |
... so I'm not sure I'll even be able to publish. EDIT: Company is coming in ... the house needed a last-minute tidy ... the dog had to be boarded ... a neighbor has to be taken to a doctor's appointment ... I haven't even eaten anything yet today ... But I did find 30 minutes to revise and edit today's chapter and get it published. |
Today's chapter— Interactive: "A Junior Partner" ![]() Public: "A Junior Partner" ![]() —concludes the latest stage in the Doppelganger Plot. There's a thread about it in the forums: * "Commentary: "A Coup Quashed"" ![]() And a poll for where the storyline should go next: [Poll completed and deleted.] Next up is a return to YouTuber shenanigans with "Crushing It as Cindy" ![]() * * * * * As for the just-concluded poll ... Ho ho ho! It seems that some people learned from last time, when some heavy GP voting gave Yumi Saito the win; and it appears that many others didn't. Or maybe most of the readers and voters were ambivalent about their choices, so they didn't try backing up or defending those choices with GPs. Whatever the explanation, this poll was an even more dramatic repeat of last time, with the leader in the Free Vote (that would have been Kim Walsh) getting badly skunked by some come-from-behind favorites, to finish in third place. But the upsets aren't over there, for the number two Free Vote getter, Alana Ocampo, also fell to an onslaught of GPs, to finish in fourth. Only poor Blake O'Brien, stuck in last place in the Free Vote, remained mired where he started, despite a hefty GP gift that at least made his last-place finish slightly more respectable. For much of the voting period, it looked like Mindy McAdams was going to win the vote, albeit narrowly. But in the end, two giant GP bequests rocketed David Kirkham, who in the Free Vote was a distant fourth-place finisher, to a very comfortable win. Final standings: David Kirkham: 31,120 Mindy McAdams: 20,680 Kim Walsh: 17,800 Alana Ocampo: 16,740 Blake O'Brien: 9,780 Kirkham wouldn't have been my own first choice, but I'll admit I'm intrigued by the possibilities of a Will-as-Kirkham storyline that moves in counterpoint to the Sydney-as-Kirkham storyline, so that we get an idea of how much of the development and choices reflect Kirkham's imposed personality, and how much reflect those of the people impersonating him. So while this isn't the line I would have picked for myself, I'm actually pretty excited by it. * * * * * Finally, but not least, my thanks to ThePrussian, Easy, Wordsmitty, and Puuuuuth for some GP tips during this last run of chapters. They seemed to like stories about parliamentary procedure, but I remain wary of turning this interactive into a kind of CSPAN with magic beans. |
Wow, what a wild poll that last one was! Stephanie Wyatt scored tops in the Free Poll, and she spent most of the week maintaining a healthy lead there. And maybe that led to her supporters getting complacent, so they didn't spend many GPs on her. If so, it was a big mistake, because in the final tabulation Stephanie got absolutely wrecked, finishing a very distant third. In fact, she was in third place almost from the moment the poll went up, as lots of readers dumped huge GP gifts onto other choices. For awhile it was touch and go who would win the top spot, but in the end one choice pulled away for a fairly decisive win. Final standings: Yumi Saito: 61,000 Andrea Varnsworth: 48,991 Stephanie Wyatt: 20,209 Kendra Saunders: 12,436 Kelsey Blankenship; 6,218 I guess one reader spoke for many when he wrote, explaining his GP vote: "We never get to somebody else impersonating [Yumi], so could be interesting." * * * Meanwhile, I'm halting the current storyline with today's chapter— * Interactive: "The Girl at the Drive-Thru Window" ![]() * Public: "The Girl at the Drive-Thru Window" ![]() —even though I have written past this point with a further six-chapter run. But I'm going to give readers a chance to pick another path in this area. So, that's the subject of the next poll, whether to continue the story with Will and Sydney as Marcos and Alana, or to back up to a different choice earlier in the branch. To keep things manageable, I'm giving specific alternate choices at specific places: [Poll completed and deleted.] This poll will run a little shorter than the others, through July 2. * * * And where do we go from here? Back to the doppelganger plot, which ended last time with "The Hunger" ![]() |
If you send GPs in the latest poll, but you send them through the anonymous system so that I don't know who you are, your GPs will count in the final tally. But if your choice loses, I will not be able to return those GPs or send you a "loser's bonus" (if any). |
Today's chapter— Interactive: "Crushing It as Cindy" ![]() Public: "Crushing It as Cindy" ![]() —rounds out the storyline that started with "Your Two Faces" ![]() Commentary thread in the forum: "Commentary: "Cindy for the Win"" ![]() New poll: [Completed and deleted] The poll of course has to do with the choice at the end of today's chapter: Keith has given Will a number of names of girls he might impersonate, and left it up to Will to choose. I'm giving the choice to you guys. Same rules as in the last poll: Each voter gets a single vote in the poll, but you can add weight to your votes by sending GPs via the tip forms in the chapters linked to in the poll. Poll closes on June 27. * * * Speaking of polls, the results in the last poll surprised me, not only by the fact that one choice was the runaway favorite among the voters individually, but who it was: Michelle Estrich. She was the winning choice, but the weighted vote was much closer than the basic poll would show. After GPs were factored in, here are the vote totals: Michelle Estrich: 8750 Victoria Rodriguez: 7917 Laura McGregor: 2917 Christian Padilla: 2083 Meghan Farris: 2083 Two more votes for Victoria, and it would have been a tie between her and Michelle. * * * Meanwhile, what comes next? A sequel to "The Cherry, Hung with Snow" ![]() This is a storyline with Will and Sydney. They're building themselves a Brotherhood of Baphomet, and have replaced three classmates so far. Will is currently impersonating the chilly Amanda Ferguson, while Sydney (after impersonating Kelsey Blankenship) has assumed the identity of David Kirkham. (Kirkham was hassling Will; this was their way of taming him.) At the moment Will (Amanda) and Sydney (Kirkham) are still at the Donna Motel, where Sydney has gotten drunk on Kirkham's testosterone, but they are getting ready to part for the day, and are looking forward to Will's next impersonation. * * * Finally, my thanks to Easy, Tal, and Puuuuuth for the Gift Points they donated me during this storyline. It was my pleasure. |
I do my best to keep BoM consistent, but of course it's impossible to be perfectly consistent across thousands of chapters. But I hope I don't regularly introduce blatant continuity issues in back-to-back chapters in a storyline I'm currently writing. Well, that's what happened with today's chapter and yesterday's. And it was only on accident that I caught it, right after publishing today's chapter. Anyway, if you're wondering why some characters are hanging around in today's chapter after yesterday's chapter said they went home ... well, there's now a slightly different story told about them in yesterday's chapter. And now I'm paranoid about where else there might be issues. |
As promised, today's chapter— * Interactive: "Cindy for the Win" ![]() * Public: "Cindy for the Win" ![]() —returns to an old storyline. I picked this one because while I was on hiatus I got a huge number of GPs dumped on me from a reader who liked a lot of chapters, but mentioned that Cindy was their favorite character. So this storyline is for that reader. And speaking of GPs, I want to thank a number of people who sent GPs over the past week or so, highlighting the chapters I was publishing: Easy, Puuuuuth, and Wordsmitty, who awarded me points for "scruffmonster." Also, the poll is still open, and will be for another week: "Invalid Item" ![]() |
Today's chapter— * Interactive: "The Hunger" ![]() * Public: "The Hunger" ![]() —wraps up this storyline for now. What will happen next here? Vote in the poll!: [Poll completed and deleted.] Note that I'm running this poll using the complicated, gift-point system. Basically, you can vote for free in the linked vote. But if you want to give your vote more weight, go to {chapter:}, scroll down to the choices at the bottom, then click on the choice you want to see continued. In the page that opens, use the Tip feature at the bottom to send me WdC Gift Points. This will increase the number of votes for that choice; and the more GPs are gifted, the more votes it gets. If your choice wins, you forfeit your GPs. (It's like you're paying for a writing commission.) If your choice loses, you get your GPs back, plus a proportional share of the GPs that were voted for the winner. So, if you vote using GPs, you increase the chances that your choice will win; and even if you lose, not only will you get your GPs back, you might earn bonus GPs as well! * * * What will tomorrow bring in terms of new chapters? I'm going to gamble on the branch that I'm currently writing, and hope that I write to a stopping point before the publication schedule catches up to me. It starts with "Keith's Confliction" ![]() Will gave away the book, but it has since reentered his life by falling into the hands of friends of Will's friend Keith, and they have recruited him into a plot wherein they will impersonate and replace some other people at school. (They are doing it under the excuse that it's some kind of sociological experiment.) Will and Keith, on their own, however, have decided to use the scheme as a way to get back at Seth Javits, a bully who persecutes them both. The plan is for one of them to impersonate Seth's girlfriend, the cheerleader Cindy Vredenburg. But which of them is going to impersonate her ...? Note: The Archives broke off this storyline with "Special Effects" ![]() ![]() |
The chapter I had for yesterday is now up: * Interactive: "Dinner and a Side Plot" ![]() * Public: "Dinner and a Side Plot" ![]() It came 24 hours late because yesterday was a mess. I was concentrating on getting writing something else for the website, and then out of nowhere I was called away. By the time I got back to where I could publish something, it was too late in the day to really make it worth it, so I just skipped the day. What else was I writing for the site? I've been pushed to say something more about that old renegade Stellae, Hieronymus von Gersdorff, so there is now an entry on him in the wiki, done more or less in Wikipedia style: "Characters: -V-" ![]() |
Yesterday I poked my head up and said something about being back. Today I'm going to try to actually be back. I have some storylines in the backlog that were leftover from when I disappeared, but I'm going to start with chapters I wrote last month as I was trying to get back in. They start with: Interactive: "Dropping the Masks" ![]() Public: "Dropping the Masks" ![]() The back story: This is the area where Will is attempting a mass replacement of Westside students with doppelgangers, so he can run it secretly from a hidden location. He has been acting the part of student council president Kim Walsh, but has decided to switch to a different face (that of a doppelganger he's already made) and recruit a junior partner who will have a doppelganger gang of their own to manage (under Will's supervision). This was the subject of a poll, which I closed and deleted yesterday. The vote was pretty tight between Chelsea Cooper and Kelsey Blankenship as the face he switches into, but Chelsea won by a pert nose. So that's where things pick up now. * * * My daily schedule is probably going to be up in the air for a bit. I may have mentioned at one point that I have an elderly neighbor I've been helping out. Well, he got hospitalized then moved into rehab. He's going home in a couple of days, and I've been helping arrange that, and I will be probably be helping him out more after he's home. I don't know what my schedule will look like. I have traditionally been very punctual and regular about my posting hours, always shooting for noon Eastern time, but I will probably be posting stuff several hours earlier than that until I know what my sched going forward is going to look like. |
I always hate writing a blog entry after I come back from an extended absence. I never know what to say. Well, I guess some kind of explanations are in order. First off, I didn't die or go through any kind of emergency. I was going to try coming back online after Christmas, but the holidays hit hard in a couple of different ways, and then I needed to recover. And after that ... Well, among my Xmas gifts were some volumes of "The History of Middle-Earth," which is the multi-volume series collecting and commenting on Tolkien's rough drafts of LotR and the Silmarillion and other works. Isn't there a line in LotR about "the lesser spider being caught by the greater spider"? Anyway, that's what happened to me. I enjoy world-building, I was entirely ensnared by Tolkien, and not only got lost in the Xmas volumes I got, but in the additional volumes I ordered. I even got into some really deep-diving podcasts on Tolkien and the "History," listening to them while reading the "History." To top it off, I was inspired enough to try writing some additions of my own to the historical corpus -- filling in corners of Gondorian history, for instance, or composing alternate versions of Silmarillion stories [*]. All of which scratched an itch to write while not working on BoM. And in truth my own interest in BoM waned considerably over those months. It looks so petty and ugly next to Tolkien. Still, I did miss BoM, and I spent the last month trying to get restarted with it with some new and resumed storylines. It's been hard, though. After some struggling, though, I've decided that I just need to get back online here and see what happens. There has been a very encouraging community around BoM, which humbles me and for which I am very grateful. Though we'll have to see how many are still left after that embarrassingly long absence. I especially want to thank those who sent in GiftPoints while I was gone -- those are the ones I can't quite bring myself to look in the eye. Some of the gifts were Anonymous, and I have no way of thanking you except here. Those whose names were attached to their GPs will have a suitably red-faced email expressing my gratitude. |
* Interactive: "A Chill in the Air" ![]() * Public: "A Chill in the Air" ![]() That chapter brings this branch to a halt. There are actually two more chapters, but they go with each of the choices, and neither of them seemed very compelling when I reread them, so I'm not going to post either of them. Truth to tell—as I confess in "Commentary: "Betrayals, Backstabs, and Possible Boyfriends"" ![]() Tomorrow I return to an area that hasn't been touched since ... Oh, gosh, around about the time that BoM started being posted? Okay, it got touched a few years ago, when I sent a bunch of chapters to the Non-Canonical BoM, but it's a place that hasn't been looked at since I introduced it at the very start of this whole thing. As "The Man in the Wheelchair" ![]() The chapter linked above is a new version of what was originally there, so even if you remember Andrew and his wheelchair, you should probably go read it. I'll pick things up from there tomorrow. |
For the most part I've been keeping up with publishing schedules, but I've been completely ignoring everything else. Part of this is another BoM enthusiasm crash I've been trying to manage, and part of it is because of a recent fascination with other things. I tend to plunge down rabbit holes when I trip over an interesting one, and lately I've gotten fixated on box-office statistics. If you pay even a small amount of attention to the movies, you'll know that theatrical box office hasn't exactly recovered from the Recent Unpleasantness, and over the last few weeks I've gotten weirdly interested in quantifying the damage. This has involved pulling together box office data from over the last thirty years to examine trends and construct base lines. I've discovered all sorts of little tidbits along the way. For instance, did you know that: * Year in and year out, no matter how many movies are released, the top 200 movies always account for 98% to 99% of the box office. In 2019, for instance, the top 200 movies generated 97.9% of box office revenues, leaving the other 910 movies released that year to fight it out for the remaining 2.1%. And the top 100 movies regularly generate 90% of ticket sales. This means that approximately 85% of movies released in given year will perform "below average." * The major studios (and their art-house divisions) never release more than 15% of all movies in a given year, but routinely capture 80% (or more) of the box office. * In 1990, only 16% of the box office went to "franchise films" (sequels, remakes, reboots, "cinematic universes," etc.). By 2019, that percentage had risen to 61%. * Typically, a major studio will release 20 to 25 movies a year. Typically, half of its box office gross will come from just four of those movies. And typically its single best-performing movie will account for 20% of its box office. * Wanna play like you're a movie mogul? Shuffle a regulation deck and "buy" twenty cards (face down) from it for $100. Roll two die and add that amount to the $100 spend. Then, for each number card (2 through 10) in your twenty-card hand collect $3. For each jack in your hand collect $8; for each queen collect $10; for each king collect $15; for each ace collect $30. This, approximately, is the kind of gamble a studio chief faces each time he assembles a slate of movies. * The Recent Unpleasantness may have kicked the struts out from under the movie business, but those struts have been wobbly for some time. Sure, US-Canadian box office receipts rose 24% between 2002 and 2019, but ticket sales fell 22%, and the rate of movie-going (the number of times the average US-Canadian goes to the movies in a year) fell 31% during the same time frame. In fact, in 2019 the rate of movie-going (3.78 times a year) was lower than had ever been recorded. Put it this way: people probably went to the movies more often back when Germany had a Kaiser than they did the year that "Avengers: Endgame" came out. * As for how bad the damage has been to the domestic box office: We won't have official numbers until January 1, when the last of the holiday would-be-blockbusters have opened and the books on the year can be closed, but at the moment things are on track to a $7 billion box office. That would be down almost 40% from 2019 (the last pre-pandemic year), and if you factor in ticket-price inflation, it's closer to a 50% drop. Pretty scary, considering that theaters are supposed to be fully open and unrestricted. Not even during the Great Depression did movie theaters experience such a high-to-low contraction. Anyway, that's what I've been doing. I think I've gathered and saved up most of the data I've been seeking, so now I'm going to try catching up around here. |
Today's chapters— * Interactive: "Class and Cluelessness" ![]() * Public: "Class and Cluelessness" ![]() —are part of a branch that was written for a commission. I composed it in a weird way. I started with the idea, then fed the buyer one chapter at a time, each time asking which choice to take at the end. It breaks off kind of abruptly here because the buyer decided he wanted to back up to an earlier chapter and take an alternate path. I'll be coming back to this area soon, continuing with that alternate path, but for now I'm going to break away and pick up another branch. Commentary thread on this branch is here: "Commentary: "A Dopey Trade"" ![]() Tomorrow, the story brings the Will-Chelsea partnership back with "Finding Mr. Right" ![]() |
I had a dental appointment yesterday, and then some other stuff that had doing, so I missed publishing. I'm making up for it today with two chapters. And something actually happens in one of them! |
Today's chapter— * Interactive: "An Overwhelming Question" ![]() * Public: "An Overwhelming Question" ![]() —brings the current branch to a climax, and boy that's a cliffhanger if ever I saw one. And that's where it's going to have to stay for awhile, until I return to writing BoM instead of just publishing from the backlog. But for now, suffice it to say this has encompassed part of a commission, and in order to fulfill that commission I'm going to have to continue it at some point, so you won't be left hanging forever. Commentary continues here: "Commentary: "The Mystery Box"" ![]() Tomorrow brings the start of a different commission, one that picks up with "A Clash of Values" ![]() |
Yesterday and the day before were a little weird, so there weren't two chapters. I'm making up a little for the shortfall by publishing two chapters today. |