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Today's Post and Poll: The Whys and Hows

New chapter posted: "Invalid Item"  (public) and "Identity Roulette"  (interactive).

Okay, that was a shabby trick at the end. What the hell, right?

Well, the short answer is that I ran out of ready-made aliases for Will.

See, as I've been writing these chapters I've also been gaming out the alternate storylines, including possible IDs for Will (and for Caleb, when those are relevant). I've got thirty-three aliases tentatively in place in all the sequels, the sequels-to-sequels, and the sequels-to-sequels-to-sequels to "Discarding Dwayne." Some names are familiar; a few are well-used; most are brand-new, never-before-seen.

There are so many because I didn't want to repeat any of them. I wanted every choice after "Discarding Dwayne" to eventuate in a name that doesn't appear elsewhere in this part of the story.

But I also didn't want to end every storyline with a specific alias. The sophomore class is not well populated with ready-made characters, and I wanted at least one storyline to be open-ended, a place where an author could brute-create a choice after new characters had been developed.

And guess which rabbit hole you guys went plunging down.

So here we are in a place where it makes no sense to run a poll on how to continue. This storyline can only continue when an author has an idea for a character to insert here.

So today's poll is a meta- one. Which chapter shall we backpedal to, and take an alternate direction? Here are the four choices I've culled for you; each of them leads to a chapter that I've already written and archived, so there should be no delay in publishing them tomorrow.

"Invalid Item" : Become Lindsay
"Invalid Item" : Pick Melanie Heath
"Invalid Item" : Stay in the senior class with Caleb
"Invalid Item" : Yeah, that's a great plan!

To make things even more interesting, though, I'm going to run multiple, identical polls featuring these choices, and ask you to vote in each one.

But if the polls are all identical, what's the point in voting in all of them? I hear you cry.

The point is that you don't have to vote the same way in each poll. I'm going to pull all the votes from all three polls into a single pot, and the choice with the most votes across all the polls wins. And this means that you can weight your vote. If there's one choice you badly want, vote for it three times (vote for it in each poll). If there is one you want, but another you'd like to support as an alternate, vote twice for your first preference and once for your second favorite. If you are okay with three of the choices but not keen on the fourth, vote for all except that last one. This way, we not only get raw numbers for each choice, but also the intensity of feeling for each one.

The polls are here, here, and here:

[EDIT: Polls closed and deleted. Final tally:
* Stay in the senior class with Caleb: 36
* Become Lindsay: 20
* Pick Melanie Heath: 14
* Yeah, that's a great plan!: 4]

Vote early and vote often!

[And before you ask: Why not include "Pick one of Leslie Osbourne's friends" (the runner-up in yesterday's poll) as an option? Because in writing it (yes, that chapter has been written), I discovered that I had to include a spoiler that I'm not ready to reveal yet. Yes, things are happening in the background that will impact future developments, and in that chapter one of them exploded. But after writing the reveal I decided that I wanted to save it, as it would have a much greater impact if it were unveiled to you guys in another section of the interactive. So, that choice is off the table for now.]