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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 5/14: Interactive: "The Family of Heather Dow" 5/14: Public: "The Family of Heather Dow"
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| I am supposedly working on a non-BoM project, but I am still working on BoM in odd moments because I would like to have a backlog of chapters in place when I resume it in December. The current storyline is one I want to continue, but I'd like to give the readers a say in where it goes. Besides, it's fun taking polls—I like knowing what you want. So let's have some polls to see what you'd prefer to see in this branch. I'm going to give us a running start, though. The first poll doesn't have to do with the choices at the end of today's chapter, but with the choices at an earlier chapter. We'll then move down the branch until we reach the terminal point. The first poll is for "The Popular Kids" : Will is disguised as Lindsay, and he has just learned that Andy Jensen, who is disguised as Andrew Webb, want to date Lindsay. Does Will go along with this, or does he look for another option?There are two ways of casting a vote: Free poll: To vote in this poll, go here—[Poll completed and deleted] GP poll: To give your choice more weight, click on one of the chapters below send me a tip through the form at the bottom of the chapter. * Start dating Andrew: [Voting choice deleted per completion of poll] * Find another option: "The Complicated Love Life of Lindsay Cho" In the final vote tally, each vote in the Free Poll will be worth 1/2 the average of the GPs contributed during the round. GPs voted for losing choices will be refunded in full to those who voted. GPs voted for the winning choice will be divided among those who voted for losing choices, in proportion to their share of GPs voted for losing choices. In other words, if you vote GPs for a losing choice, you will get your GPs back and will likely collect a dividend proportional to the size of your GP vote. If you vote for the winning choice, your GPs will count as a kind of commission payment for seeing that storyline continued. The poll closes at 3:00 PM (EDT) on Wednesday. |
| So, the story resumes elsewhere: "The Homework Party" (public) + "The Homework Party" (interactive). Yesterday's entry gives the backstory. Oh, and I'm sorry if I quickened interest yesterday with another new chapter, only to disappoint y'all with the news that Saratoga Falls has acquired some new neighbors. I tried folding those details into the "Settings" chapter, but it was already full so I had to make a new one. |
| Today's chapter -- "Anne and the Air Head" (public) + "Anne and the Air Head" (interactive) -- brings that thread to a conclusion for now. Tomorrow I jump over to a very different place: a sequel to "The Complicated Love Life of Lindsay Cho" (public). Background: Will and Caleb are entangled with a bunch of sophomores, and have been working to give those boys some new identities while taking new identities of their own. (This has been after a number of recently concluded adventures.) Will has been worried that one of the boys' friends, Lindsay Cho, will discover the body swapping, and in order to keep Lindsay under control has secretly swapped lives with her. But Lindsay's friends have also decided to keep close tabs on her, and have hit on the plan of having one of their disguised friends try to become Lindsay's boyfriend. Will has been fighting off their attentions while working with Caleb (also hidden in the sophomore class with him). But Will has had just about enough, and has been casting about for some way of handling it. EDIT: Meanwhile, I have still been writing BoM chapters. I think I'll wait till Monday to make a fresh start on the project. |
| So I sat down yesterday to write chapter three of the new book, and realized in short order that: 1. While writing the first two chapters I had invented more than was on the page. 2. What I had invented but not written would be necessary for the two chapters that were to follow. So I realized I was going to have to revise those first two chapters, and maybe even throw them out and start over. And after I realized that I realized I was probably going to have to do this multiple times with the first few chapters of the book. Because I am literally making everything up as I go along, and so am apt to create stuff that will be needed in the chapters that are already written. This is probably another reason not to post chapters until I've got things well under way. So I didn't write a new chapter yesterday, I just daydreamed out the sort of stuff that I'm likely to need. Then I wrote another chapter for BoM. |
| So in my last entry I said I would be publishing chapters of the new project. I've got two of them written, but I'm going to wait until I've got a week's worth before I start publishing. That's to give me a little bit of a buffer in case I change directions early on in the project. I'm not totally writing into the dark with this one. I've an idea for what it's about, where it's going to go, what sort of obstacles the characters are going to meet, and how it's going to resolve. I've even got a pretty good idea about how long it's going to be. (I haven't set a word count target, but I get the impression it's going to be about 75K words, which is about 45 BoM chapters.) Now it's just a matter of making up the stuff to go inside that shell. |
| So, today is October 1. I'm supposed to be done with BoM. But thanks to that publishing hiatus I took at the start of the September, I've got a backlog of chapters still to post. Also, I feel like I owe you guys thirty chapters minimum. So even though I'm still short that number, I'm going to continue writing BoM chapters into early October until I get to thirty. One way or another, I'll give you the month's worth of chapters that I more-or-less promised. I've got a non-BoM project I want to work on, though. Not the Spider-Man thing, though I do intend to return to it eventually. A novel. And just as I wrote the Spider-Man thing in public, I'm going to write this one in public too. I'm going to start writing it today, and I'll post the first chapter tomorrow. What is it? I'm not going to say. I'm just going to post it and see if people get interested. |
| An early post today (because I had time) and a late post yesterday means there's a bit of an overlap. New storyline starts here: "Double Dealing and Double Dates" (public) + "Double Dealing and Double Dates" (interactive)Last storyline ends here: "Party Favors" (public) + "Party Favors" (interactive)The new one is going to be on the short side, running for about a week. |
| Oops. I forgot to post a chapter yesterday and I nearly forgot to post a chapter today. But here it is, late: "Party Favors" (public) + "Party Favors" (interactive). And that's it for that storyline. Tomorrow I shift over to another storyline, a sequel to "Teases for Two" . That's a closely related chapter to the storyline I just got through with. Background:Will is working with Keith, Philip Fairfax, and the others, after discovering that they've been trying to improve his reputation. He has taken on the guise of Jenny Ashton in order to help them with that project, but he has also talked them into launching a second project: Switching Yumi Saito and Chelsea Cooper without the two girls realizing what is going on. Will has his own private agenda, though: He wants to arrange it so that Chelsea (inside Yumi's mask) starts going out with his beta. As the sequel opens, Will has to get Yumi into a place where the switch can be made without screwing up the date that he has arranged for Yumi and his beta. |
| Okay, so, I really and for true did not intend to vanish for a couple of weeks. But I hope I'm back now. It wasn't anything big that caused that unexpected hiatus. It's just that my schedule has changed recently, and that threw posting schedules and writing times out of whack, with the result that I fell behind in my writing schedule. After a week of struggling to catch up, I decided to sit things out until I had finished a storyline, that way there wouldn't be any more day to day hiccups. But it took longer for me to get a batch of chapters written than I thought it would. But I do have a backlog now, so there shouldn't be any interruptions going forward. I am also going to give you guys thirty chapters at a minimum, publishing into October, even if I have to spend the first week or so of October getting them written. So, here's the resumption of the story that I was working on: "Frenemies in High Places" (interactive) + "Frenemies in High Places" (interactive). It's for a commission, and I've written all the chapters owed in that commission, and that will run through the 28th. After that I will be publishing another short commission (also completed) of six chapters that will take us into early October. |
| So, here it is: "What Goes Up Should Come Down" (public) + "What Goes Up Should Come Down" (interactive). It's the first chapter in what should turn an arc that was commissioned from me. I'd say more, but I'm only one chapter ahead, composition-wise, and I need to get to work writing more. |
| So, here are the revisions that I talked about yesterday: "Happy Birthday to the New You" (public) + "Happy Birthday to the New You" (interactive) and the chapters that follow. The big changes are in the linked chapter and the one immediately following, but there are some tweaks even unto all the sequels thereafter. Tomorrow I return with brand-new chapters of BoM, in that general area. The background: Will has been roped into the group of guys (the AV Club, basically) who wound up with the Libra. They have been using some cheerleading identities to improve his popularity and social standing, and he has joined them by adopting the identity of Jenny Ashton. But they are now interested in adopting a second set of spare identities and in using them for a new sociology experiment. What will that experiment be? Tune in to find out ... |
| I'll be back onto "Book of Masks" come Sunday—and I see that rugal has something new going as well—with a new BoM chapter, which I wrote yesterday. But tomorrow I'll anticipate things with a revision to some previously published chapters. I was reading the chapters that presage the storyline I'll be writing, and I decided to break one of them in half and expand it into two chapters. So I'll be posting that revision and republishing the sequel chapters. That will also help give readers a running start on the place I'll be resuming. I also wrote a "Spider-Man" treatment yesterday. I might be able to get one more treatment scribbled out before the month ends, for whatever that is worth, but I'm not going to publish any more until such time as I resume that project. |
| September is one of my designated months for writing BoM chapters, so if you're following me for those chapters—and I'm not sure why else you would be frequenting something called "The Book of Masks Homepage"—here's a reminder that I'll be back to doing that in a few days. I hope to hit the ground running with chapters that were commissioned from me. |
| So it's been awhile since I've checked in. Usually when I check out it means that I've been goofing off, but really, I have been working on my Spider-Man project. I just haven't had anything to report because it's been slow and rough. I've said it before, and recently: I am not an outliner by nature. For me, outlining is hard. Outlining is hellish. It was all I could do to outline 20-minute standalone episode ideas that used material from the actual animated series. But I didn't know what Outline Hell was until I hit the seven-episode arc I had planned for this alternate series, and it was an arc using mostly new material. My God, it has been like trench warfare, and it has taken me the equivalent of four or five days' work on each of those episode ideas to get them written, and in the middle of the work cycle I had to tear it all apart and rearrange episode ideas in order to get the plot to progress properly. And the rough stuff isn't over yet. I've got another three-part, mostly original episode idea looming before I finish the first season, and the second season includes another seven-episode arc, four episodes of which will be mostly new material. And that's just to get me to the point where I can start thinking about my own "Superior Spider-Man" idea. So there is no way that I'm going to meet my original goal of getting that written before the actual Superior Spider-Man arc debuts on Disney XD. Oh well. Still, I'm not giving up on it. I'm going to do what I can before August ends, then turn to BoM in September. After that we'll just have to see. In the meantime I had stopped publishing new episode treatments because I didn't want to run into the stuff I was working on. I can already tell that some of my written-but-unpublished treatments are going to have to be revised in light of changes to my plan for the rest of the season. That means I'm going to have to wait until I've written episode 25 (I'm currently finishing up episode 20) before I do those revisions and can start publishing again. But I have the impression that very few people are waiting with bated breath for my Spider-Man treatments. * A little housekeeping: The author of the most recent BoM chapter emailed me yesterday to request that I delete that chapter so he can revise and repost it. Done and done. |
| No "Spider-Man" update today. I do have treatments, but this is the day I would have published "Mark of the Jackal" if I hadn't published it early. I have updated the terms of my "Commission Contract" . Yes, I've raised my rates considerably, because the WdC gift points just aren't worth that much to me. On the other hand, I've also added a condition that allows you to pay me with an Amazon Gift Card instead, and my Amazon rate is much less than my WdC rate, though it is still a little higher than what I had been charging in WdC currency. |
| Show notes for "S01E08 "How to Rise Above It All"" : This is actually a Season Two episode, moved up and tweaked to make it fit. As with yesterday's outline, there's one major change to the villain, and one minor change to a supporting character. In the IRL episode, the Vulture starts by trying to take down the Wake Riders, but at the end of it they flatter him into joining the gang as their leader. I thought this was a cheap way of pulling down a character who had little reason to fall and who was very sympathetic up until that point, so I changed it. Also in the IRL episode, Miles is already a second Spider-Man and partners with Peter, so for this one his knowledge and interest in the situation had to be reoriented. And with today's entry, we hook up to the "preview" treatment ("S01E09 "Mark of the Jackal"" ) that I posted awhile back.* I worked pretty hard yesterday at a new treatment, but I only got it outlined, and even then I'm not certain I've got it nailed down. I was bothered throughout by the sense that the plot was turning into just a lot of hoop-jumping: Peter has to go here, so let's invent a crisis for him; now he has to go over there, so let's invent a new crisis for him. It all felt arbitrary. I worry that it is still arbitrary and hoop-jumpy, and I spent the day fighting toward a deeper understanding of what Peter wanted and needed in the story. I also had to shake free of a belief about writing that was starting to harden into a prejudice, to wit: In any scene, you should be able to identify what a character wants and why he wants it, and his desire should be for something concrete and specific: for a particular jewel or armored shipment of cash, say, and not just for "money"; for the love of a particular girl and not just for "a girlfriend." So I have spent the last two days fighting in the trenches, trying to figure out which particular person Spider-Man had to fight, and for why and when, trying to nail down the specifics. And that, I eventually realized, was why it felt like so much hoop-jumping. I was giving him a reason to jump through a particular hoop, but there was no reason for him to go "hoop jumping" in general. So I backed up and figured out what kind of psychic itch he was scratching by doing what felt like a lot of busy work. That's something for me to remember from now on: the character needs both specific motives and a general motive that is realized by the specific motives. |
| Show notes on today's treatment: "S01E07 "House of Sand" " The shape and structure of the reimagined episode is close enough to the original that, as with the previous three treatments, it needs to acknowledge the original script, but there there is one huge change and one small one. In the IRL episode also Keemia rejects her father and prefers Hammerhead, but she's already a sand-creature and spends the last third of the story battling her father. I disliked that choice, mostly because the story stopped DEAD for the extended, narrated flashback necessary to set up that plot twist, so I simplified it. I also made Marko more of a villain. Of all the episodes in "Marvel's Spider-Man" this is the one that comes closest to feeling like an episode of "Batman: The Animated Series" but for that reason it fell deepest into the uncanny valley, so with those changes (including Hammerhead's near self-sacrifice) I tried hauling it up the other side of the slope. The minor change: Here we see Miles Morales making his first steps toward replicating Peter's powers, but by using tech rather than by having an identical accident. * I did some more thinking but no more writing. I have a nasty feeling that one of the plot lines I wanted to adapt for this part of the season isn't going to work. |
| Today's Spider-Man entry—"S01E06 "Party Animals"" —is another close adaptation of the IRL material, right down to the title. Changes, FWIW: * In the original, Sytsevich is a student at Horizon who is intentionally infected by Raymond Warren. I wanted to remove Warren's villainy (see below) which means the Rhino needed a new origin. Also, Sytsevich being a cheerful and friendly student who is cured at the end made it very awkward for the IRL series when they tried bringing the Rhino back. Returning Sytsevich to something like his comics origin (but spying for a crime boss rather than the East Bloc) makes it easier to give him the traditional treatment later on. * In the original, Warrren is an outright villain, already transforming between Jackal and human form, and he infects Sytsevich as a demonstration project for Osborn. This is me again feeling the tug of BTAS. I don't like Warren's unabashed villainy in the IRL series and wanted to give him an origin closer to, say, Two Face in Batman. I also wanted to remove Osborn's complicity, as it hardly seems in character for him to accede to a dangerous plot being executed in a situation where he knows his son will be. * In the original, the diagnosis and cure are entirely concocted without adult supervision by Peter and friends. This is far and away the most annoying facet of the IRL series. What is it with contemporary stories and their "Science, be-yotches, boo-yah, amirite?" garbage? As one YouTuber put it recently, they sound like frat bros trying to imitate what they think scientists sound like: "They talk like it's beer, hookers and sports ball but with, y'know, technobabble instead." Having high school students (no matter how bright) concocting Stark-level technology on the fly is another aspect of the same thing. My own revision still strains credulity, but at least (I hope) it's better for letting a putative expert in the field (Warren) do most of the brainwork. There are additional, minor changes here and there. Kingpin, for instance, does not appear. * I got a new treatment written yesterday, but it wasn't much of a victory, as it closely models an actual episode. But I had to get it out of the way before pushing myself into the really new territory on the other side of it. |
| I don't have much to say about today's Spider-Man entry—"S01E05 "Ghost in the Machine"" —except that it is very closely adapted from an IRL episode. The big difference is the excision of the Symbiote, which played a big role in episodes 6 and 7 of the series and played a similarly big part in episode 8, "Stark Expo." But the Symbiote to me feels like too big an element to be accorded such a small part in the animated continuity, so I took it out, which meant I had to take it out of this episode, which I otherwise preferred to leave in my reimagined series. (Not because it's awesome, but because it's inoffensive and pretty good padding.) Taking out the Symbiote meant having to fiddle with other elements. So Octavius gets a bigger role; the Kingpin makes an appearance; and Harry tries to be a hero only to be pre-empted by Spider-Man. But the Ghost and most of the other plot elements and developments are taken straight from the episode. Oh, and Flash is toned town and made much less of a buffoon. In the IRL episode, he's the one who enters the baking-soda volcano. * Yesterday involved some more mulling of plots for the second half of the first. I need to start writing again, though. "Mulling" is beginning to turn into procrastination, and I think I've got enough settled that the rest of the details can be worked out in the treatments. |
| Today's Spider-Man entry—"S01E04 "Ring Around the Spider-Man"" —is the first to be almost entirely new, with virtually no debts to the IRL series. So, that was the challenge there, to try coming up with something very new. What choices went into it? I've been reading early runs of "The Amazing Spider-Man" while also researching characters in those issues that I've not read and can't find, and have been jotting down every possible character, storyline, plot idea, etc., with the idea that they could be used to pad out an episode or be planted for later development. So in Wikipedia I found a reference to "The Circus of Crime," which is an awesome name for a group of bad guys, and in "The Essential Spider-Man, Vol. 4" I found an annual about a charismatic politician named Richard Raleigh trying to manipulate himself into the mayoralty. These went into the stewpot, and Richard Raleigh and the Circus's Ringmaster (who used hypnosis to manipulate his victims) merged into a single person. Here, it seemed to me, was a good, long-term play: a character who over the course of the series could slither toward political power. I also found a Spider-Man story with the Kingpin trying to steal a cuneiform tablet containing some kind of mystical secret, and I introduced that as one of the elements that Raleigh needs for some long-term plan. The rest was action, some ideas filched from the "Batman Beyond" episode "Spellbound," and a way to get Peter a job selling photos to the Daily Bugle. Now, where this is going, I haven't exactly decided yet. Raleigh does show up again in one treatment that I've written, and he does figure in the complicated multi-parter I'm still writing, but his payoff is still timed for sometime in the Superior Spider-Man storyline or after, which is the main reason I added him. (In the IRL series, there don't seem to be a lot of adversaries left over Season One and so there are no obvious hooks for the Superior storyline to hang on to.) But I will have to wait until lots more pieces are in play before I see the ultimate design for him. * I spent yesterday finishing the last of the "Essential Spider-Man" books I got from the library (Vols. 4 - 7) and letting ideas simmer in the back of my head, so I don't have anything really interesting to report as far as actual writing progress. To fill an otherwise empty space, I'll make just one comment: Nothing dates a story like slang. It is hard not to flinch every time Mary Jane Watson or some other character in an early 70s Spider-Man comic says something like, "Can you dig it?" |
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