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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 4/25: Interactive: "The Emerging Backstory" 4/25: Public: "The Emerging Backstory"
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| Today's chapter is now up, a little later than usual. But it is the holidays around here: Interactive: "Other People's Projects" Public: "Other People's Projects" Not a lot happens in this one, I admit. Will parts with the grimoire, and so it looks like his involvement with it is over. But not it's on the loose in side Westside, so I think you can guess what kind of story is likely to develop. Several stories in fact. This branch is a commission, and right after took this job on I was commissioned to write another storyline that would also be of this type, so when it comes, it will also be in the same general area. This chapter and the next few that follow are all intended to set up a common root out of which those branches will sprout. So it will be a few days before things really start rolling. In the meantime, Will's got his friends to keep him stirred up. |
| Yesterday's chapter, "That Voodoo That You Do Too Well" , ended with a tough choice for Will: tell Katy what really happened to Hannah, or let her continue thinking that she and her friends were responsible. When I came to this point, which was a last-minute improvisation, I honestly did not know which direction to go. So I went in both of them. That's why you're getting two chapters today: Interactive: "Coming Clean with Katy Conlee" & "Katy Takes Charge" Public: "Coming Clean with Katy Conlee" & "Katy Takes Charge" For now, these are the end of this line on this branch, which people seemed to like. (I got emails and some gift points from multiple readers.) And because you get two chapters today, I will be taking tomorrow off. Publishing will resume on Friday. I will be starting up another commission then. (Well, laying the groundwork for it.) It will be early in the story, a sequel to "Bids for Attention" . The background?Will has found a book of magic in a used book store. Freaked out by it, he has shown it to his dad, who has pronounced it a "trick book" with a spring mechanism that works a hidden compartment, and has asked Will to leave it with him. But Will still needs a contribution to his class time capsule, and has taken the book back and taken it to school. On the way inside, however, he has shown the book to some other people, who have shown an interest in buying it. Will now has to decide whether to sell the book, or to take it in to his teacher. |
| 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. |
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