BoM/TWS Message Forum

>> In the original version of Tongues of Fire, Joe's honeypotting Melody - to give Frank the time to toss her appartment under the assumption that Blackwell still has the book. Ultimately that relationship grows and puts Joe in an interesting dilema.<<

There was a strong hint that her apartment got searched, but it was ambiguous enough -- IIRC, Will concluded that he was misremembering how messy it was -- that I decided to leave the "search" out of it. It would have been one of those "complications" I preferred to drop, and also it would have changed the story because the book was there for Frank to find. Truth to tell, I was also hoping that it was all in Will's imagination and was not a real search.

Okay, so that leaves a puzzle: Why does the search not occur in this timeline? There's no good reason on the page. I guess I'm going to chicken out and put it down to something as stupid as chance: Will's meeting with Joe outside in this timeline was just long enough to delay Frank getting to the dorm room as soon as he did in imaj's timeline, by which time a Saturday night party had spilled out into the hall, making it impossible for him to get in without being seen. Uh, sure, that's what happened!

>> This is an interesting comment, because I tend to prefer the opposite: Having a good idea of where I'm going in order to drop hints and foreshadowing along the way.<<

I usually write this way when I'm composing a branch during a particular session. For me, the chaos comes when the branch resumes but the action jogs off in another direction. The end results are something like forked lightning. Seven to 10 chapters at a time will be cohesive and have a direction and a goal, but then the next seven or so (written sometimes years later) will jog off in another direction. Do this four or five times (as sometimes happens) and by the time you get to the end of a branch, the conclusion has nothing to do with the beginning.

You can also get chaos of the kind I mean when you (or a different author) make a fork to pursue a different spin, but it remains close enough to the original run that it must or ought to be influenced by the events in that other branch -- even if it's just to explain why what happens in the original branch doesn't recur in the new one. That was the kind of thing that made me grimace when I looked at moving into this area again -- there's not just the Melody/Joe stuff going on, which is on top of the Will/Blackwell stuff, but also the fakes-at-Westside plot, and what the hell is going on with Will's love life? That's why I wanted to simplify things for this branch. Each of those other branches may be or feel fairly cohesive on its own. But taken as a group, it's a tangle.

Also, where I'm going (imagine my voice dropping as it is shadowed in hints and mysteries) has nothing to do with anything that's been going on up to now ...