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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 4/24: Interactive: "Four in the Dark" 4/24: Public: "Four in the Dark"
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| 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. |
| Today's "Spider-Man" commentary (link in the commentary below) will be my last for the foreseeable future. I will have to write my "Superior Spider-Man" arc before I resume. I am ending it here though I am still two episodes short of the "Superior" starting point, and with treatments of those two episodes already written. But those two treatments—of the IRL-episodes "Brain Drain" and "The Living Brain"—formally launch the "Superior" arc by bringing Doc Ock back on-stage to execute his plan. I figure it's best, then, to save those episodes for when I start publishing my version of "Superior Spider-Man." Don't ask me when that will be. * * * In the meantime, I'll be returning to the BoM universe, this time in its sequel interactive, "The Wandering Stars" . I was commissioned to continue a side story in which Will explores what it would be like to have different ousiarchs. The chapters are going to be kind of repetitive, because they take the form of a theme and variations: Each will describe the same situation and fight, but will imagine how it would have unfolded differently with a different ousiarch for Will to use alongside Sulva.There's another storyline that may be emerging real soon, alongside whatever various solo efforts will be ongoing. It's a collaborative effort involving many of the regular contributors. It hasn't got a launch date yet, but I don't think it will be long in getting published. |
| "S02E11 "The Man Behind the Mask"" is about as close a paraphrase of the IRL-episode as is possible. I'm not fond of this version of Electro, but it does introduce her for future mayhem. The Chameleon's appearance is underdeveloped, but I like the suggestion at the end that he would play a major part in the upcoming arc, so I didn't change it. With this episode the convergence of my animated continuity and the IRL continuity is complete. |
| "S02E10 "Trick or Treat"" closely follows "Bring on the Bad Guys, Part 3," but it almost got a major rewrite. I wasn't happy to see Jack o'Lantern show up. He is very much a Green Goblin clone, and I wanted to save Green Goblin for the "Superior Spider-Man" arc, as he is an antagonist in the comic book version of that run. But I decided to make a virtue of the similarity, and to keep JoL as a one-off who sets up and anticipates the coming of the Green Goblin. So the only changes are: Acts I and II swap places. The character of Halloween Master is new. Hammerhead replaces Silvermane as the gangster (a change motivated by events in "S02E07 "A Game of Cops and Robbers"" ), and the final fight is with a cyborg henchman rather than the cyborg Silvermane. |
| "S02E09 "The Valley of Shadows"" is another close paraphrase of an IRL-episode of Season Two. The changes: In Act I, all the fighting was done by Anya Corazon in her Spider-Woman guise, with Spider-Man a helpless ping-pong ball who contributes nothing to his own survival. As I've deleted all the extra spider-people from the alternate continuity, I changed the course and climax of the fight and tried to give the series's title character more dignity while keeping the tone of Act I light. Because of those changes, I did have to invent (or at least suggest) some new business for Act I, to replace the IRL-episode's tedious grrrrl!-power bragging. Acts II and III are very close to the IRL-episode, except for the final appearance of The Master Planner and the escape of Mysterio. |
| I have little to say about "S02E8 "The Shape of Things to Come"" or the episodes that come after. This is where the IRL-series and my version of Season Two converge to set up the "Superior Spider-Man" arc. It was easiest just to bring the four-part episode "Bring on the Bad Guys" into my continuity with as few changes as necessary. In Part 1 of "Bad Guys," of which this treatment is a close paraphrase, the secondary villain was originally identified as Overdrive; I changed him to Molten Man because I thought that name better fit his metamorphic tech. Also, the bounty reveal scene originally occurred at the end of Act I; I thought it better to place it at the end of the episode, and to make Hippo/Panda-Mania's appearances a running gag. I also added an appearance by The Living Brain. I have to confess: I really like my title for this one. Besides the quotation of an H. G. Wells title, it alludes to Molten Man's shape-changing ability, and also warns that this episode is only a hint of the tribulations that await Spider-Man over the next half-dozen episodes. I am lousy at coming up with titles, so when I hit one I like, I get really pleased with myself. |
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