The Book of Masks Homepage

Coming Up for Air

Today's chapter—

* Interactive: "Dreams and Temptations" 
* Public: "Dreams and Temptations" 

—brings this branch to a halt. There's already some fun speculation in the forum about who is who and what is going on: "Commentary: Clover Mystery"  

As I mentioned last time, I was commissioned to write 20 chapters in this area, and the just-suspended branch gave you 7 of them; the others will come in the form of two new branches, at other points in the storyline.

I don't want to leap directly into one of those other branches, though: I like to give people a palate cleanser between closely related storylines. Trouble is, I don't have anything to give you as a palate cleanser. I do have another commission I'm supposed to be working on, but I don't have anything written for it yet. I haven't even found a divergence point to graft it on to.

So I'm going to take a short break and not publish anything for a few days. (Probably three days; no more than a week.) That will give me a chance to get ahead in my writing (I've been day-by-daying it, sometimes writing a chapter in the hour before publishing it) and to also catch up on some other, too-long postponed chores. It will also give readers a chance to clear their heads. And to further help you all clear your minds of recent developments in the Clover Mystery storyline, I'll tell you where the next branch is going to appear, so that you can review the chapters that lead up to it without (I hope) getting confused by events that happen later.

The divergence will occur at the end of "Face-Time with a Cheerleader" . Will has been badgered by Clover Mystery and by mystery dates, and he lately made a fool of himself in front of Chelsea Cooper and Maria Vasquez at a coffee shop. But the next night, when he returned there with Caleb, Chelsea made a point of telling him that she wanted to talk to him. In the main storyline, he did sit down to talk to her, and we've seen what came of that. But what happens if he bolts the coffee shop without talking to her?