BoM/TWS Message Forum

First off Happy New year of course!

Second off, "A Girl and Her Secrets"  brings a stopping point to this branch for the time being. I'll actually reveal that it was Seuzz who gave me the idea for this branch which, as mentioned before, combined with a commission from another person who wanted to see something involving Jelena... and I apologize to that person that it kind of wound up getting away from her.

A lot of different factors all kind of combined at once to get me out of writing for a while and I wanted to really get back in so I decided to ask Seuzz to just toss an idea at me; a blurb really. So what's what he did with an idea that was basically taking the branch in the Will/Sydney storyline where Will becomes Jelena and that it involve an evaluation disguised as a performance with someone using it to try and recruit her band into Fane.

From there we bounced some ideas back and forth ultimately ending up with the character of Charlotte Dahl as the Fane agent doing the recruiting (though my take on her wound up being different from what was originally proposed) and Hermod being involved since being the Dark Stars equialent of Viritrilbia it made sense to me that they'd be inolved in things like persuasion and mind control. Maybe some people, if they've done their research, might have picked up on something funky going on too with the first mention of Macgregor Media.

Now for anyone who's a fan of Jelena or K.C. and is worried that they're now fated to be picked up by Fane well I'd personally say your fears are misplaced. I would say in pretty much any other scenario K.C. continues to shoot down Charlotte's attempts to get her to join that music festival and so Charlotte's either forced to try something else to get them in or more likely continue scouting other potential targets deeming K.C. too stubborn to ever be a good recruit. But in this, with someone else calling the shots? Well things go much differently.

This also wound up undergoing a few changes while writing. Not in overall plot but originally I'd needed a certain choice to continue but wasn't able to insert it. So I thought and came up with the idea of focusing on the college and putting Will into Lina Minkowski.which was, originally, supposed to be a kind of stopgap choice on the way to getting to the big Charlotte reveal. But it turned out I liked writing Will in Lina's life. I liked fleshing out Lina's little corner of the story in an underused location. I liked writing interactions between "Lina" and Melody. So before I knew it I just decided to keep Will under Lina's mask.

And of course the other two choices that weren't Charlotte -- to choose Lucy Vredenburg or Gwen Smart as targets -- also represent a ramping up of things for Will and Sydney for reasons that I assume are obvious for anyone who's read enough. Anyway hopefully this story came off well. I enjoyed writing it at least.