The Book of Masks Homepage

The Story Behind the Story

So a couple of days ago Tal asked:

"[What were the] creative origins of your writing the BoM all those years ago. What gave you the idea to create this world and it’s magic? What were some of your inspirations? I know you’ve mentioned in the past you use it as a writing tool to explore different characters, but I think it could be interesting to hear how you came up with it all."

I meant to answer it earlier, but my computer exploded. Now, with nothing else to do while waiting for some downloads to finish, I can answer.

Not that there's a whole lot to say, I think. It developed in dribs and drabs.

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I found WdC a long time ago--longer than I'd care to think--and found one of the body-swap interactives; I forget the name, but it was already a big one. I'll confess to liking body-swap stories and their variants, and I also liked interactive stories, so I registered at WdC and started adding chapters to … whatever it was called. [EDIT: CCRFan1 identifies it as "Body swap etc. collection"  No, don't go looking for my chapters in there.]

I really liked the consequence-free liberty of adding chapters to interactives--I could just make stuff up without worrying that it was going in any particular direction or toward any kind of climax. But what started as a larf quickly got more ambitious and complicated. I found I liked writing chapters with the heft and detail of actual fiction. I liked making up characters, and immersing myself in their situations. I liked motivating the shenanigans and not just reporting on them.

I eventually found a similar interactive, the "The Body Possession Powers"  interactive, which had a more ambitious hook and richer setting, so I started writing for it. Eventually I decided that I wanted to write my own interactive, my own version of BPP using the mechanics and setting and characters, so with the original author's permission I launched "Student Bodies."

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I had fun with "Student Bodies," but I soon ran into the problem that David was just too overpowered, and though I had some fun inventing some challenges for him, I soon got worn out by it. I decided to start a new interactive, from scratch, where I could set up the mechanics. I intentionally wanted them to be limited, as that would give the "hero" more of a challenge. I also wanted a structure that would allow for more variation. The trick I hit on: to go modular.

That's why the "Libra" has the structure that it does, of bits and pieces that must be made, and used, then assembled into more complex pieces. Instead of a hero instantly armed with some powerful magic tech, he starts with limited powers that are a challenge to deploy. A mask may give a perfect disguise, but it bestows no memories or personality traits. A memory-band can confer memories and traits, but not the body. A full mask can create a perfect impersonation, but how do you get the original out of the way? And so on.

I mentioned that first interactive (whatever its name was) up above because that's where I found the setting and characters for BoM. It was set at a "Westside High" (though I think I came up with "Saratoga Falls" myself) and Chelsea Cooper, Gordon Black, Jason Lynch, Steve Patterson, Jenny Ashton, Yumi Saito, Paul Davis, and Carson Ioeger were characters either established in it or which I added to it myself. (James Lamont was the protagonist.) There were probably some others that I'm forgetting. I also brought over the Eastman characters from "Student Bodies" so that I'd have a large cast to work with. Will Prescott and Caleb and Keith were IIRC original-to-BoM additions.

Some of the characters are based on people I know. Carson and Caleb are a thinly disguised version of someone I knew in high school who was exactly the kind of science-fascinated asshole who would have used the BoM masks to get in lots of trouble. Kelsey Blankenship is a girl I knew in college. Several other people are composed of traits of people I've known, in some cases shuffled and recombined. Most of them, in truth, are stereotypes inspired by selfies found online, and some (like Chelsea) are based on stereotypes, period.

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Frank and Joe Durras deserve special mention, even though I know those killjoys are not the most popular with readers. I think I've said it before, probably lots of times, but they just burst into the story. As their names attest, they were inspired by the Hardy Boys. I never liked the Hardy Boys books when I was a kid--they were far too tame, too boring--but I was reading one for research while writing BoM and wondering how to make it [the Hardy Boys story] better. Meanwhile, I was also trying to come up with an antagonist for Will, someone who could come find him instead of being (like Blackwell) someone who he would have to find. I got the idea of adding some Hardy Boys clones to BoM--it seemed like a fun, silly idea--and I also got the idea of turning the Technicolor way up on them so that they had some personality. Does this make it sound like I planned them? One might as well try to plan a Bandersnatch …

I had no idea who they were, but I liked them, and at least one other reader liked them--I got an email demanding to know who they were and when they were going to come back. But I held off on it. They felt special and I didn't want to screw them up. I knew I needed a story for them.

At first I had the idea that they'd just be affiliated with the Church, like the Inquisition, but that didn't make them enough of a challenge. I decided they needed to be "magical" themselves somehow. But I felt like they needed a "system" behind them, otherwise they would develop too arbitrarily.

I found the system, by happenstance, in "Planet Narnia," which is a scholarly interpretation of the Narnia books. It argues that C. S. Lewis wrote them according to a pattern: each book reflects the spirit of one of the astrological planets, which in classical philosophy had their own virtues and personalities. Jupiter, for instance, was the kingly planet; Mars was the martial planet; the Sun was the planet of science and knowledge and exploration; etc. So that's where I got the idea of keying Frank and Joe to the planets. I had to sweat out some theory after the fact, but just knowing which planets each one had was enough to give me a non-arbitrary way of developing their personalities and powers.

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There's lots more "magical science" that has shown up than just the Libra and the astrology, but it's just a bastardization of pre-modern science, particularly Aristotle and alchemy. The various distinctions of anima and essentia and the rest, which show up in some of the really advanced chapters, are just variations on Aristotelean notions like substance, form, essence, and so on. The science of taking these apart is just a thinly disguised alchemical theory, which promised to do the same sort of thing with the Aristotelean categories. (An alchemist is not trying to "turn" lead into gold. He's trying to separate the "leaden" qualities from the underlying substance and replace them with "golden" qualities, in much the way you might strip and replace wallpaper.) If it looks complicated, it is, but that's not because I'm ingenious at inventing it. It's because Aristotle and his followers were ingenious. I'm just tracking them.

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I'm not sure what else to say. To repeat, it's all just a lot of dribs and drabs that I improvised as needed while making stuff up.

EDIT: WordSmitty points out that BoM actually launched before Student Bodies. Now I do have a vague memory of that. I remember writing the first chapter (and maybe the first few) and then getting stuck because I had no characters except Will and Caleb and The Molester. So I guess I had the idea for a piece-by-piece mechanic early on, but then dropped it for a BPP remake (aka Student Bodies) because there was an established universe to play with. I would hazard (and this is just a hypothesis) that after I got frustrated with SB I decided to return to BoM and import the Body Swap Etc. characters in order to jump start it.