The Book of Masks Homepage

Surprises

So the current storyline—currently updated to "A Girl Who's Unsure of Herself"  (public) + "A Girl Who's Unsure of Herself"  (interactive) is going longer than I had intended.

Well, they always do.

But in this case I had intended to rush through the Sydney-Kelsey swap and wrap up with a little occult business. One chapter could do it, I told myself.

Then I wrote that chapter—"A Girlfriend Becomes a Best Friend" —and it spun out on me.

Partly that's because these swaps always take more words than I think they will, and in this case I was having too much fun squeezing a little more juice out of Kelsey. But mostly it's because I surprised myself. I didn't expect it to be such an existential crisis for both Will and Sydney when another Sydney popped into existence. And yet as soon as they had that mask balanced over Kelsey I realized it was going to be a very hard thing for both of them, and for the pedisequos, to deal with.

It could have gone much longer than it actually did, and maybe it should have. But there will be other branches in which to explore what happens when Sydney meets Sydney. I cut it as short as I could after introducing the problem, and used the remainder of the chapter to deal with the faux-amnesia that everyone but Will gets when first donning a mask. And I surprised myself again at the end of the chapter with Sydney's suggestion that she isn't cut out for impersonations.

I do like surprises like that, but we're not going to take that route tomorrow. I'm writing one chapter at a time now, so I can only say with 70% certainty that tomorrow's chapter (to be written today) will put a semicolon on this branch.

I might have been able to write two chapters yesterday instead of one, but I had a mild 24-hour stomach bug, and it was all I could do to get one chapter done.