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Round Robin Ends

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.