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 |  A hub for the "Book of Masks" universe. |
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The Interactives "The Book of Masks"  : A high school student discovers a grimoire that can make magical disguises."The Wandering Stars" : Sequel to "The Book of Masks.""Student Bodies" : A high school student is turned into a blue goo that can possess people.For non-WdC Members "The Book of Masks: Archives" : Dodges the "Servers Busy" barrier!"The Book of Masks (Abridged)" : Introductory storylines for new readers.Community "BoM/TWS Message Forum" : Community for readers of the interactives."BoM/TWS/SB Wiki" : Notes and documentation for authors. Spoilers!Current Polls None The Latest 5/3: Interactive: "Tongues of Fire" 5/3: Public: "Tongues of Fire"
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| The editing continues, and tonight wound up in a mess. If you've seen chapters appearing and disappearing, it's because I messed up. But by the time you read this post, it should have reverted to the way it was. With one very important edit to one chapter. I'm working in the branch where Will swaps places with Gary Chen. It's one of my favorites, but if I'm going to stick to my principles, I find that I am going to have to chop about two hundred chapters out of it. There's big continuity issues with it, as I worried there would be. One problem is with the mask-memory lore. This branch was written before it became canonical that people other than Will have a hard time getting the memories when a mind-band is glued into a mask. As I went through, I was able to fudge the issue at a couple of points with some light edits. But "Criss Cross Consequences" could not be fixed with edits: at this point the plot requires that one of the confederates get a lot of memories pretty quickly.I suppose that a complete rewrite of the chapter, and revisions of subsequent chapters, could have handled it. But there was a much bigger problem. Frank and Joe. When I wrote this branch, I didn't worry or wonder what they were up. I was uneasily aware that they were loitering in the background, but powered through anyway. Eventually, though, when it came time to write "The Sophomore Candidates" and its sequels, I decided I couldn't ignore them any longer. They play basketball at Eastman, which means they would be privy to gossip about the WHS team, and Gordon Black's personality change would naturally catch the attention of the EHS squad -- and it would excite the interest and suspicion of the Durrases. So in "The Sophomore Candidates" I bit the bullet and gave them an entry point: by a certain date (October 20) they would be enrolled at WHS and sniffing around the body-swapped Gordon and Dane.As I was reading the "Gary Chen" branch, then, I was keeping track of dates in order to make sure that I kept consistent with "The Sophomore Candidates," and I discovered that I would actually have to move the Durrases' arrival up by a week, because Gordon's quitting the squad occurs a week earlier in the "Chen" chapters than in the "Sophomore" chapters. (That's a knock-on effect of Will fighting with the real Chen.) And that meant that the Durrases would be entering sooner rather than later, forcing a massive and unavoidable change in the story. Because that change was coming up fast anyway, I have decided that it will be better to break off the branch with "A Musician's Transposition" , which is the last chapter that will not run into serious continuity issues.I have not lopped off the rest of the branch yet. It will be the work of several days moving chapters over the NC-BoM version. |
| Today's chapter is posted: Interactive: "How to Scare a Girl for Fun and Profit" Public: "How to Scare a Girl for Fun and Profit" And the Archives now includes all the chapters that lead up to today's chapter, starting with "Tackling a Teacher" . So if you've been using the public version of the story to keep up, you've got a bit of reading to do! Eighteen chapters plus today's!I said yesterday that today would start an eight-chapter run. I didn't like where the eighth chapter ended, so I wrote some more. It's up to 9 chapters now, and it will go to 10 and maybe to 11. |
| Today brings the latest commission to an end, in two chapters: Interactive: "Return to Self" + "The Bit That Comes After the Credits" Public: "Return to Self" + "The Bit That Comes After the Credits" Well, one-and-a-half chapters. The first is the actual conclusion. The second is the denouement. I couldn't fit both into one chapter, so it's split. This was a challenging commission. It was inspired by a comment I had made about the YouTube crew getting ahold of the Libra and using romance and rom-com tropes to push people into becoming a couple. Originally the commissioner wanted it to be Will and Stephanie as the couple, then wrote back to offer some other alternatives. I did set up some of those alternatives at the start of the commission proper but decided to go with Kelsey Blankenship (one of the alternates) instead of Stephanie. It was tough, and I knew it would be, and I think I cautioned the commissioner that I might not even be able to set them up with the desired "couplehood" conclusion. Will and Kelsey are not a very compatible couple, not without some personal growth. (Will needs to mature and get some self-confidence; Kelsey needs to temper her sense of privilege.) Did I succeed? Shrug. That's not for me to judge. I will say that I surprised myself at being able to write something that resembled a romantic conclusion for them. That was after a weird twist in yesterday's chapter (whose title I have since changed), which I know threw the commissioner for a loop. Why'd I do it? "Intuition," I told him when he asked, and couldn't explain further without divulging spoilers. And it really was just intuition that led me to write it. I got to "No Strings" and "The Things You'll Do to Not Be Lonely" and thought, This is too smooth of a landing. There has to be one final twist. One disaster that threatens to destroy everything at the last moment.If you want a reason other than "intuition," then I think the answer has to be found in one of the "Storytelling Catechisms" that I have in my portfolio: "Three Ways to End a Story (Good and Bad)" . A story's has to be a disaster for the protagonist from which he is rescued by a miracle that is in its own turn motivated by a change in the protagonist—the change that was the point of the story. That is, the protagonist has been evolving through the course of the story, so that by the end he or she is able to make a choice that he or she couldn't have made before. The reward for this growth is, first, a disaster that threatens to permanently blot their existence, followed by a miracle that reverses the disaster -- but it's a miracle that itself is caused by the character's growth and evolution.If I had to justify what I wrote, I would say that Will has grown to acquire the maturity and self-confidence that he needs, and that by his example (sometimes his negative example of acting with Kelsey's own overweening self-assurance) he has also caused Kelsey to evolve. (And she has influenced his evolution as well.) At the very end, Will makes the kind of disastrous choice (sleeping with Patterson) that Kelsey would make, but now he has the wherewithal to try reversing it by running back to Kelsey. Her forgiveness of him is a kind of miracle, but it's one that reflects her own evolution away from selfish arrogance. And so the final disaster is what propels the final, happy ending. Now, I did not plan any of that out. As I say, it was intuition. But when I analyzed the intuition -- when I asked myself "Why does it feel right for Will to screw up at the end, only to have it turn out miraculously right?" -- the above is the answer I came back with. Maybe it works formally. (Maybe!) Does it work aesthetically? That's a different question, and again I can only shrug and observe that it's not for me to decide. But that's the longer answer I need to give to the commissioner, and it's one that I'll share with other readers because they might have had the same question. * * * What comes next? I need to get back to my Spider-Man project. But I do have an eight-chapter run that is finally (for once) not a commission. It picks up where I truncated an earlier branch as part of the recent pruning: "It Could Be Magic" . I said that some of the branches I lopped off might get new versions, and this is one.The story so far? Will has been playing around with the "Libra", and has successfully made a mask of a P. E. coach. But he has lately been distracted by an unexpected romance with a basketball player, Katy Conlee. She and her friends are planning to prank another girl with some fake voodoo, which has led Will to think that maybe he should share his own book of magic with them. In the original branch, it led to Will showing the book to Stephanie Wyatt, and the story went in one direction. I didn't like that evolution. I think I like the new one better. |
| Earlier today I lopped off a chunk of chapters in the branch that starts with "Tackling a Teacher" . While keeping the earlier half, where Will copies a P.E. coach, Cathy Schell, I took out the chapters where he got caught up first with Katy Conlee and then with Stephanie Wyatt. I never much liked those chapters. They felt like they wandered off, and I didn't much like the way things developed with Stephanie. It felt like a wrong turn. I got a little pushback in the comments to the last entry in this blog, so I went back and read forward a little more, and found the spot where I felt that the branch had first started to weaken. I rewrote that bit, and then found that after polishing another chapter there were half-a-dozen further chapters that with no changes to only minimal changes could be (IMO at least) salvaged. So the run of chapters that I just published -- "Picking a Brain the Old-Fashioned Way" through "It Could Be Magic" aren't new chapters, they are just old chapters that have been edited and relaunched.Most of the changes reduce the amount of "magic" involved -- it was the pointless use of a mind-band on Yumi that I thought marked the first place where the branch weakened -- and I have set up different choices in some chapters. The main change comes at the end of "It Could Be Magic" . That was, for me, the second and decisive place where the story weakened, because it took the focus off Katy (where it has been building) and shifted it onto Stephanie, for no better reason (that I could see) than to pull her into hijinks.So these six chapters now serve a different function. They are a transitional sequence where the focus changes from Will as he probes the early spells in the book, to Will as he begins to formulate motives and goals that don't have anything to do with the Libra but which might be served by it. The particular through-line that I've followed is one that aims Will pretty decisively at Katy. So, to me at least, it feels like it has more focus. (That being said, there are off-ramps in the middle of sequence that would make it a transitional phase that reorients Will toward Stephanie. Just in a different way.) |
| Those of you who visit the forums have probably seen the thread about the seventh spell in the Libra (and the debates about what to even call the Libra), and might have detected in my own posts a prickly unhappiness with the state of canon in BoM. I do think that I (and everyone else -- thank you all!) have done a pretty good job of keeping this gigantic hulk reasonably consistent over the decade. But enough gunk has crept into it that I've finally decided to give it a bit of a scrub. This is not going to be a short job, and it's not going to be a very thorough job either. Shoring up BoM is going to be a bit like painting a suspension bridge. You start at one end and you keep going until you reach other end, by which point it's time to start over again. It's going to be done a little bit at a time. I've already made a start with some chapters, going through and fixing some of the lore (and polishing it up in places) and this will be a long, slow job -- maybe at the rate of four or five chapters a day -- whose results I hope will be largely invisible. The big changes will be in the branches that I saw off. Yes. I am going to get rid of some chapters and storylines. Some are ones that are too hopelessly out of step with the current lore to be salvaged, while others will be branches that I am just unhappy with and wish weren't there. Branches that trailed off into nothingness, or just didn't work out. Branches that embarrass me when I find them. I don't want to get rid of them completely, because I understand that some people might still enjoy them. So although they are disappearing from this, the "authentic" interactive, I am preserving them in a new interactive: "The Non-Canonical Book of Masks" . It will include not only the branches that I cut off, but also the chapters that lead up to those branches, so that the complete storylines will still be available and in their original forms. And here in the authentic interactive, I will edit in a link at the cut-off point, so that readers can find their way to the de-canonized branches.For instance, if you go to "Braydon's Big Distraction" , you will find that it now includes a link to "Hijacking Gillian" in NCBoM so that you can continue the story that was originally published. The choice "Turn Gillian into a golem" meanwhile has been restored to an unwritten state so that it can be continued in a way that is (maybe this time) an improvement on what had been there before.My plan is only to remove branches that I'm unhappy with. I do know that there are other authors who are unhappy with some of the stuff they've written, and they are free to move some of their chapters to NCBoM. (Or to ask me to move them.) I might also ask some of those authors for permission to move some of their branches, but if so it will be for lore/continuity reasons, not because of quality. Also, NCBoM will open and available for people to post chapters in. Just be aware that I won't be reading it, nor will I be publishing anything there -- unless I publish it in BoM and subsequently decide to move it. I hope this will be a reasonable compromise between preserving some possibly beloved warts, and cleaning the place up a bit. |
| I haven't run a poll in a while, but rugal has one for you guys: [Poll completed and deleted.] It's part of his "Getting Izzy" branch. There's a mystery afoot, and it's up to you guys to decide if it gets tackled by Will as he's pretending to be Ophelia Wilmot or Mary Occam. |
| Yeah, I missed yesterday, but it wasn't my fault. There was a 36-hour internet outage in my neighborhood. I'm back, for good I hope. Here's the chapter I would have posted yesterday: Interactive: "Homework for a Body Swap" Public: "Homework for a Body Swap" But I see that other authors kept you entertained in the meantime. |
| Today's post completes the linking chapters I needed to write before reaching the commission proper. I haven't finished writing the commission, but I've written most of it and I've outlined the rest, so I'll start the story proper tomorrow. You can probably guess from today's chapter what kind of a story it's going to be. Interactive: "Cursed!" Public: "Cursed!" |
| Today's posting looks like a two-fer, but it's actually a one-and-a-fifther. The day's chapter should have ended with a lot more than five choices, so I had to split the "pick a person" chapter into two chapters that would run along parallel tracks. I've only posted one of them, however -- the one I intend to follow. Interactive: "Theater of the Absurd" + "A Bitch Slap" Public: "Theater of the Absurd" + "A Bitch Slap" |
| Today I start a new branch, which might go long or it might go short. It depends on how much writing I get done in the next few days. Interactive: "The Wrong Kind of Party Crasher" Public: "The Wrong Kind of Party Crasher" Background: After losing his magical grimoire in a scrum with some bullies, Will Prescott has mostly forgotten all about it and his life has been pretty normal. Normal, that is, until some cheerleaders—Eva Garner and her sister Jessica—start paying attention to him. As the chapter opens, he has been cornered by Eva and invited to go out to the Warehouse (an infamous party spot) with them. These chapters are related to a commission that I have accepted but not completed, and the branch will go long if I'm able to get it done in time to my satisfaction. I have had to write a couple of chapters to set up the commission's situation, though, and if I'm not able to get the commission done, you'll have to content yourselves (for now) with the linking chapters. |
| After duplicating a title yesterday, I made sure to go in the opposite direction today: Interactive: "Invalid Chapter" Public: "Invalid Entry" And that finally brings this branch to a conclusion, where the commissioner wanted it to end. And next? Um ... There's another commission I'm supposed to be writing, and I have been working on it, but it's not nearly done yet. It's another case, though, where I have to write some connecting chapters before we get to the point where the commission itself can properly launch. Those connecting chapters are written, so I'll start posting those tomorrow, at least. |
| So, I didn't mean to disappear for a few days, but I am back (knock wood), with the next-to-the-last chapter in this commissioned branch. Interactive: "Thimbleriggery" Public: "Thimbleriggery" Not that anything was wrong. It started with one day where I was too busy with other stuff to remember to post the chapter. Then that night I didn't sleep and was too useless to do anything the next day. And then I discovered that I just needed kind of a short break from even looking at BoM and WdC. I can't explain it, but sometimes it just happens. Anyway, one more chapter to post in the commission and then I'll ... be doing something. I don't know. This short vacation was started by a bout of insomnia, but I think my enthusiasm needs a more serious recharging. I'll have to just see what comes next. EDIT: Fixed "Public" link. |
| Sometimes you have to get a project entirely out of your head before you're able to work on something else. I have a feeling it's going to turn out to be that way with the "Incredible Hulk" script. TBH, I'm having a hard time reading and polishing my BoM chapters— Oh, latest now up: "Memories From Another Me" (interactive) and "Memories from Another Me" (public)—while I've got this script inside my brain. Never mind writing new BoM stuff. The script that I published as part of BoM was based on a watching of a single episode of the series. But I went back onto Daily Motion afterward and watched a bunch more, and found that my script was somewhat out of continuity with the rest of the series. I also found that both my version and the original episode didn't quite capture the nature of the relationship between Bruce Banner/Hulk and Rick Jones, at least as it is dramatized in the other episodes. So that left me dissatisfied with what I'd written. Then, too, I discovered that, far from being too short, my script was far too long. I did a partial transcription of an episode -- writing it out in the same format and degree of detail as I'd used in my script -- and found that it was working out to about 1 minute of screen time per page. [**] At 29 pages, my script was way too long for a 22-minute cartoon. So I spent yesterday and today revising the whole thing. I started by shortening dialogue and tightening conversations. Then I ruthlessly chucked out a couple of scenes and radically truncated others while adding some new ones. By the time I was finished, there was little left from Michael Reaves's original script save for the Puppet Master's ability to spy on and copy people on the streets. It might still be slightly too long, coming in at 22 1/4 pages instead the 22 even that it should be at. I've left the BoM version up, and posted the revised version as a standalone item in my Portfolio, for any that are curious: "Invalid Item" [**] The one-page-per-minute rule is a common one when judging movie scripts. Apparently TV scripts tend to run a little longer. There seems to be very little consensus on how long an animated-TV script should run. Many cartoon scripts are typically very detailed on shot breakdowns, which means they run closer to a rate of 2-pages-per-minute. But because I'm eschewing as much "shot" detail as possible, my script wound up running closer to the usual length. |
| I'm supposed to working on a new commission, and I am working on it. Here and there, a bit at a time. But I've had a strong itch recently to work on non-BoM stuff, so that's where I've been concentrating. Using writing prompts, I've been adding short stories to my WdC portfolio. And yesterday I wrote an action-cartoon script. No, it's not a "Spider-Man" script, though I am still working on that project. But it is going slowly, as I have to first outline a 13-episode arc; then outline the particular episodes; then write the scripts. In the meantime, though, I decided to have some fun with a similar but smaller project. I'm putting the SPOILER WARNING up here, in case you want to read the script before hitting the spoiler-heavy commentary track. Yes, it is in script format, though I've tried to keep it as readable as possible. I have also interrupted it in spots with embedded images taken from the original animated cartoon, with some captions. Anyway, the script takes the form of another entry in that weird fiction collection that Will finds in Blackwell's bedroom, and it starts here: "The Puppet Master Strikes!-1" So how did I come to write it? A few days ago I stumbled on an episode of the 1982 Incredible Hulk animated series: "Bruce Banner Unmasked." The Puppet Master was the villain, so, as with "Superior Spider-Man," this was a story that is right in my wheelhouse. For fun, I decided to reimagine it in a case of Let's Pretend: "Let's pretend the series' story editor handed me Michael Reaves's script and told me to revise it however I thought fit." So that's what I did. No, the Puppet Master doesn't win in the end -- there's a conventional ending -- but I had a little malign fun with it in places. Also, because it is meant to be an adaptation of a 1982 cartoon, it is intentionally much cheezier than anything I'd normally try to write. If you want to watch the original, before or after my version, you can find it on Daily Motion: "Bruce Banner Unmasked" Okay, another spoiler warning before hitting the commentary track, which follows ... Now: So, the original episode is an intersection of two plots. In the first, the Puppet Master is trying to use puppets to control both Mesa City and The Hulk; in the second, General Ross and his men are trying to discover The Hulk's identity, and they succeed! I had a real problem with the story. The first problem is that the two stories are not intrinsically related. Yes, it's the Puppet Master who causes Banner to accidentally reveal that he's the Hulk, but that's the only way they connect. Worse, neither story really develops itself. As soon as the Hulk is revealed, the Puppet Master takes control of the Army, which freezes the Hulk-identity story: Betty and the others aren't themselves, so there's no development of what happens when they learn of Banner's secret identity. And after the Puppet Master takes control of the city and army (which happens in quick order) there's his story devolves into a lot of running around and technobabble. Also, having revealed Banner's identity, the story then has to go to work finding a way to give Betty and everyone else amnesia. So I decided to start by cutting out the "revealed identity" story, and made Banner's plot a simple one: He has to sneak physical evidence linking himself to the Hulk out of the base, with the ironic disaster that, as soon as he succeeds, that evidence is seized by the Puppet Master and used in the attempt to enslave the Hulk. This required another change, one to the lore. In the Marvel universe, it is enough for the Puppet Master to make a clay likeness of his victim in order to control him. I find this too absurd even for comic book hoodoo. (Not even the excuse that the clay is "radioactive" works.) The Puppet Master is plainly using a variety of sympathetic magic, and sympathetic magic typically requires something of the victim's own in order to work. So I rewrote the lore so that the Puppet Master also requires the victim's hair be mixed with the clay. This had the added advantage of pointing to an easy "trick solution" to save the day at the end. Otherwise, most of my changes were attempts to simplify the story and give it a little more forward momentum. I made the story move toward the Puppet Master's plot to control the Hulk, instead of giving him the ability at the start, and I made it move toward his getting control of the army base instead of giving him that control in the middle. I eliminated the character of Alicia and gave her (expository) part to the character of Rio, who in the original just disappeared after being used to menace the heroes. And although Alicia has a theoretically interesting relationship to her step-father, it's a relation that isn't used to real dramatic effect in the original, and eliminating her snips off an unsatisfactory dangly bit. As a result of these simplifications, there are fewer action scenes, many of which didn't lead anywhere in the original. But I think an episode about mind-control can be forgiven for leaning a little more strongly on atmosphere than on Hulk-smashing. With fewer action scenes, I'm not certain the script would actually be long enough for a twenty-two minute action cartoon. I'm just going to pretend that with less frenetic action, there would be more time for mood and atmosphere in the chase scenes. I also added a few bits to better explain the Puppet Master's quick and far-reaching success, and some personality switching, because people seem to like that kind of perverse mind-screw. |
| I'm starting a new branch today, and a commission. It starts here: Interactive: "The Unusual Suspects" Public: "The Unusual Suspects" The background: Will has made a mask and used it to copy the face and body of Maria Vasquez, cheerleader. But he has used up all his cash on supplies, and can't get further into the grimoire without a cash infusion. He could take a job at his dad's work, or show the project to a friend. But instead he has decided to break out of his social rut by showing the project to a relative stranger, and to make them a partner. But who? Today, at school, he alertly weighs some possibilities. This will be a relatively long branch—seventeen chapters, and counting—but not because it's jam-packed with incident. It's going to be fairly leisurely, because it's going to take Will out of his comfort zone and into a social world that's quite different from his usual one. |
| Did yesterday's entry in the Archives edition—"Hurly-Burly" —end with the promise of a continuation? I think it originally did! But now it ends with a That's all for now. It was my turn to write a chapter for the Round Robin, and I did write it, and I was going to post it this morning. The document was opened up and I was all ready to paste it into BoM. But I've changed my mind. I'm going to leave the branch suspended with Masktrix's "Hurly-Burly" Why here, and why now? Because the chapter I wrote ended the branch. Frank and Joe came swinging in, and they not only put an end to Will and Caleb's hijinks, they took all their stuff and left our protagonists tied up in the theater without so much as an explanation of who they were or how they knew about what was going on. It was a chapter with no choices and no continuations at the bottom. Just a fat, all-caps THE END. I wasn't trying to be a jerk when I wrote it. I went round and round with myself after I got Masktrix's chapter, but I couldn't see a way not to end the branch here and in that way at. Will and Caleb had been so careless that they couldn't help turning themselves into Criminal Suspects Number One and Two for the investigating Stellae, and it would have been the easiest thing in the world for Frank and Joe to tail one of them to the theater, find the magical fire burning on stage, and drop the curtain on our protagonists. But even though I wrote and rewrote the chapter, it didn't sit well with me, and not only because I got a little pushback behind the scenes when I told the other authors what I was going to do. The logic was cold and inescapable. But I didn't want to follow thru. So I'm not going to. I'm stopping time; I'm freezing the scene with the off-age shit hurtling toward the off-page fan but not yet hitting it. Maybe someone will find a way to redirect it. Until then, I'll leave things here. * * * In the meantime, I do have a commission that I've been writing, and I can start publishing it. But I'll save that until tomorrow. |
| With today's BoM chapter— Interactive: "Retrieval Mission" Public: "Retrieval Mission" —we complete one round-robin of five authors. But this isn't the end of the story. We've got one more round already written, and are working our way through a third one. Stay tuned! |
| Today's chapter in The Wandering Stars—"Kenandandra Comes to Oswego" —completes my latest commission. It was fun to write, but there's no denying that it was repetitive. I hope the variations, and the hints of what Will might look like with different ousiarchs, was at least diverting. And what's up next? Well, Masktrix has launched a new branch in Book of Masks. Interactive: "A Night in the Basement" . Public: "Making a Break for It" -> "A Night in the Basement" You should definitely check it out, because this one is going to be interesting. Awhile back, in a branch set at St. Xavier's, Masktrix and I wrote a storyline by batting alternate chapters back and forth between each other. We didn't have a plot in mind, nor did we have an end point. We just each wrote a chapter, sent it to the other, and waited for a new chapter to come back. It was a lot of fun, so last week I organized a bigger version of the same thing, with more authors: Masktrix, Nostrum, rugal, WordSmitty, and myself. (I invited imaj and smitch to join, but they declined.) We've got nine chapters written so far, and it's been interesting. Unpredictable. A lot of fun both to write and read. And today we're launching it. Background, so you'll know what's going on: Will Prescott has bought a book on making magical disguises, and he and his best friend, Caleb Johansson, have been playing around with it. They've made a mask of Will, and Caleb has put it on and gone back to Will's house to spend the night there while Will camps out in the basement of the old elementary school in his neighborhood. But Will was accidentally spotted by some friends of his kid brother. After running home to find Caleb, Will and Caleb are now returning to the school, and from a distance they see that the basement door is open ... Oh, and how did we settle on this area to continue? Well, Masktrix chose "Keep investigating the book" at the end of "The Fake Book"; Nostrum chose "Show the book to Caleb" at the end of "Making a Mask"; rugal chose "Test the mask on yourself" at the end of "A Conspiracy of Two"; I chose "Go along with Caleb's plan" at the end of "You Yourself and Him"; and WordSmitty chose "Try to get home without being seen" at the end of "The Two of You." Masktrix then got to figure out how to get out of the hole that Kenny had dug at the end of "Making a Break for It," and we were off. |
| If you've been following me for awhile, you might be aware that I'm something of a Minecraft addict. There's just something very restful about the game -- maybe because it's a good visual/tactile distraction for me while listening to podcasts and such-like. The trouble is, I don't much like vanilla Minecraft. It's much too grindy for my tastes. So I play it with mods. Two years ago, Mojang dropped a MASSIVE update that made huge changes to the under-the-hood stuff, such that mod-makers had to reconfigure their mods from the ground up to make them compatible. The changes were so big that some of the biggest and most popular mods are only NOW getting their updates out. Only was yesterday that my personal favorite -- the Thermal Expansion series -- dropped the Beta for its mods. But now it's out. So, um, I might have harder time meeting my commitments around here for the next few days. Or weeks. Or months ... |
| As foreshadowed in yesterday's post, today's chapter comes in "The Wandering Stars" : "Arbol Comes to Oswego" I'm afraid this series will be a WdC exclusive, because there is no short path to connect it to the public Archives. There's not a lot of background, except what can be read in the chapter immediately before. In this branch, Will has only one ousiarch -- Sulva -- and is considering which of the others he might add. To help him decide, he is being given visions of alternate worlds in which he had an additional ousiarch on a recently completed mission. To it's not going to be a story so much as a series of one-off short stories. I had the idea for it a long time ago, but never wrote it. A reader commissioned me to continue, and I'm grateful for the opportunity and stimulus. |
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