BoM/TWS Message Forum

"Good-Bye to All That"  --> "From Plan B to Plan C" 

There's almost twenty chapters been added since this thread was created/last updated. Is there that much to talk about?

From "Good-Bye to All That"  --> "Home Sweet Hollywood" , which I wrote at a run, Will stole the identity of a minor TV actor, Paul Griffin, and got Sydney the body of Paul's teenage daughter. They then went to Hollywood, and I ended things with a series of choices of Hollywood personalities who should be next duplicated and replaced. I left it there for a long time, then asked readers in a poll where the story should go. I had lots of ideas for each of the first four choices--

--but readers surprised me by choosing to put Will and Sydney back in high school.

A series of polls after that took the story through "School Survey" , where it took another screwball turn: Readers wanted Will to put Sydney into the body of one of drama teacher Gianna Johns's friends. The chapters that followed were written to flesh out a handful of possibilities.

I'll confess that the first couple of chapters dealing with Gianna were hard to write, because I know nothing about drama classes, and the kinds of things that happen in them. That's why they are so short on detail. I knew even less about Gianna's friends, and day by day had to invent a new person until I had arrived at five of them -- four women and one man -- which is the usual number of choices that Will confronts at a major juncture.

I don't know much about these candidates except what is on the page. The exception is the male, Jackson Cobb. But if there's a lot more to him than shows up in "From Plan B to Plan C" , that's because he is basically a stranger to Gianna, and only shows up briefly.

Will I return to these characters? I suppose I should, having set them up. But there's enormous possibilities elsewhere in Hollywood. This string of chapters was, to repeat, wholly unanticipated by their author.