BoM/TWS Message Forum

Okay, all the chapters I was commissioned to write are now up, starting with "The Needle Skips"  and ending with "Who Are Those Masked Men?" 

FWIW, the commission was to have Will wake up as himself, naked, in a room stinking of magic, and hearing voices arguing nearby. There were to be two masks nearby, one of them blank. He was to have a chance to escape out a window. Finally, he was to impersonate an older woman, and he was to be betrayed at some point by someone he trusted. I think I hit every base in this complicated ball game, though some of the touches may have been only nominal as I sprinted by.

This was a tough one to write. I knew what had been going on in the branch, and I knew how Will was going to wake up, but I had to figure out everything that had happened in the meantime, and where things were going to stand. So I spent hours playing shell games with masks and victims and perpetrators, shuffling them around to ensure that Will would be under his own mask when he woke up, and figuring out where everyone else would then have be. I had to figure out who Mrs. Whitney was and what their household was like. And I had to write a plot, which required thinking like someone waking into this very bizarre situation.

It was fun to write, but it was also a little like trench warfare.

It was worth it, though, just for the comments in this thread. Though some of them has left me wondering if there's a meme out there with the caption, "When your readers know your universe better than you ever could." If there is, it should posted here.

The commission concludes on a cliffhanger, and I'm not going to give spoilers by confirming or disconfirming any of the speculations or theories in this thread. I will only say for now that you are all very clever, far too clever for me, and almost every speculation was one I wished I had written, or is one that I now want to write.