BoM/TWS Message Forum

With "Leavin’ on a (Commuter) Jet Plane" , I achieved a milestone that I wanted to do since I started writing chapters for The Book of Masks - a storyline that would be completed here, with a chance to expand it into a story in The Wandering Stars. So, you can't imagine how happy I feel that I got to this point.

When I wrote "Branch A" (the branch that starts with "Follow the Twin with the Sigil Tattoo" ), I had an idea to make a quick deviation that sounded interesting - Will, without using any more magic than the incantation to remove masks, would be able to deal with professor Blackwell. It wasn't meant to be a branch I'd follow, because I wanted to develop this branch (which I call "Branch B", starting from "The Ones Who Get Their Noses Where They Shouldn’t" ) far more than the last one. (For one, it has Will doing magic! And it has Will actually pulling off the task of reverse-engineering the Libra, which was one of my main goals; the other, of course, being to explore the Prescott family dynamic, and specifically to deal with Robert, which usually gets relegated as a nuisance to escape.) I intended to leave a few "endgame" options for those.

A bit of background story: the first draft to "From a Nightmare to a Grim Reality"  was meant to have Will decide whether to join the Stellae or drop everything, and Chapter 33 would have ended with a coda. Seuzz, however, pointed out something real important when writing on an interactive - doesn't matter what happens, you always write out with the intention of keeping the story going; stories in an interactive never have a real end. We had a little discussion where I told him some...rather personal things, but in the end, I took his advice, and simply wrote two chapters to keep as potential ways to keep those stories going. (The winning argument? "What if someone else wants to expand the story?" I think that's the moment where I was forced to think that, yes, probably someone else was enjoying this story, and if I killed that possibility, then I'd be doing a disservice to them.)

Once I finished that, I went straight into working into Branch B, and together with Seuzz, we worked up a lot of things. I feel jealous at times on the storylines that have over a hundred chapters, and I thought I'd be reaching one of those, but when I wrote this chapter, I instinctively felt it had the feel of a chapter to end one part of the story. If it's not obvious already, I was doing the chapter while listening to "Leaving on a Jet Plane", by John Denver (specifically, this version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbt2G71uT1M; interpreted by Chantal Kreviazuk, with scenes from the movie "Armaggeddon"), because the feel of Will leaving his home to join the Stellae was echoed a lot in this song. So I send it to Seuzz for revision (as I do every single one of my chapters), and color me surprised when he says, "yeah, it has an air of finality to it". So basically, I got to a point where the story reached an end.

But...is it really an end? If you've seen me a bit quiet (other than collaborating in the Round Robin), it's because I've been working on a rather ambitious sequel to this story - as I said, a "chance" to leap into The Wandering Stars. I still have a lot of kinks to work, but I'm pretty excited with the details, and I'm seriously eager to start writing up this sequel, add up new characters, and do another of the things that I wanted since I got to write chapters on The Book of Masks - to add things to this universe, add a little bit of my creativity to it.

So, I wanted to write this to a) inform that I'll keep writing stuff here, but it'll take some time to see that and b) keep this thread as a sort of post-mortem to this branch. If any of you guys have any questions or comments you wanna give, feel free to do so. In the meanwhile...I'll keep working with the sequel and the elements that compose it, so...see you when that other half of the branch begins? And thanks to everyone who, in one way or another, supported the development of the branches with a generous tip - part of the reason I wanted to write here was to develop my writing skills, and have the experience of people looking at it and see what they think. Feedback, I feel, is what motivates a writer - I feel that a story that has no audience is a sadder story than any tragedy, because it can't be heard. Even a bad story that gets published has a better fate than one that isn't written.