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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 6/26: Interactive: "A Rescue and Retreat" 6/26: Public: "A Rescue and Retreat"
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| Change of plans. I've closed the latest Plot Plinko Poll early, and the result is ... Everyone's a winner! I was looking at the post I made yesterday, and it occurred to me that it was ambiguous. What I meant to write was that the next time I started a Plot Plinko Poll, I would be reweighting the Free Votes. But I think some people must have thought the reweighting would start with yesterday's poll. If so, that wouldn't be fair to those who sent in GPs. So I've decided to go with both choices. I will be composing a sequel for the unwritten choice "Continue helping these girls", and will also be writing a sequel to the alternate branch, "Assertiveness". It will be awhile, though, before either one gets published. I have a very fat and happy backlog now. "Assertiveness", though, still needs a poll, so here it is: [Poll completed and deleted.] Also, to make it absolutely clear, I am going to reweight the Free Votes starting with the above poll After playing with some values to get a better sense of the weight that I want, I'm setting so that in this poll the Free Votes will be worth 1/5 of the average of the GPs sent to me. This will make it easier for GPs to change a result. Rule of thumb (this isn't absolute, only a rough guide): If Choice A has 150% of the votes of Choice B, but Choice B has twice as many GPs as Choice A, then Choice B can narrowly nose out Choice A for a victory. But there will be other factors (such as the number and size of the GP gifts) that will complicate this calculation. This should make the voting more unpredictable and hence more fun for everyone. In the poll leading up to this point, a small lead in the Free Votes tended to outweigh even large GP bequests. |
| The competition was fierce, with several choices getting GPs. But the Free Vote totals of choice He continues searching the school gradually built an insurmountable lead and took the victory anyway. If you voted GPs for a loser, I'll soon be sending you a refund, as well as your share of the GPs voted for the winner. [Poll completed and deleted] Will, while searching the school for someone to test a magical mask on, has been dragooned into helping some girls. He now has a choice of going off one-on-one with Yumi Saito, who is a cheerleader; or he continue helping two of her classmates. What's his decision? The poll closes on Tuesday, August 2, at 12:00 ET. The current storyline continues with— Interactive: "On the Outside, Peering In" Public: "On the Outside, Peering In" BTW, the next time I do some kind of story-writing poll, I'm going to change the weighting so that Free Votes are worth somewhat less in the final result. Even when the results are fairly close, it takes too many GPs to push a lower-ranked choice to the top. I think that GPs, which are voted by people who are passionate, should punch harder. |
| The Plot Plinko poll is getting competitive. Not only has the vote been close this time around, but Gift Points are now being deployed. So if you're looking at the current results, don't assume that the vote is going the way it looks. There's other votes coming in behind the scenes where you can't see them! |
| The choice Someone else at the school after a random search was so overwhelming in the early vote that I am closing the poll early and moving on to the next one: [Poll completed and deleted] Will has decided to find someone at school to test the mask on. He could pick a teacher, a girl he spotted in the tutorial offices, or someone backstage in the theater. He could leave campus, and look inside a local department store. Or he could take another look through the school. What does he do? Unless there's another overwhelming early consensus, the poll closes on Sunday, August 1, at 12:00 ET. The current storyline continues with— Interactive: "Piled Higher, So Digging Deeper" Public: "Piled Higher, So Digging Deeper" |
| The choice Will uses it on a friend won the third poll and it wasn't even close, so now it's on to the fourth: [Poll completed and deleted] Will has decided to test the mask on someone at school. Who does he choose? His friends Caleb or Keith? A random stoner? Or a random anyone-else he might trip over after classes let out? Poll closes on Saturday, July 31, at 12:00 ET. And current storyline also continues with— Interactive: "A Double Game of Doubles" Public: "A Double Game of Doubles" |
| The choice Keep the book a secret won the second poll, so now it's on to the third: [Poll completed and deleted] Will has made a mask, and he needs to test it onto someone. Who does he pick? Himself? His brother? Or a friend? Poll closes on Thursday at noon ET. And current storyline also continues with— Interactive: "Bets and Bluffs" Public: "Bets and Bluffs" |
| Just a reminder that there's a poll running: [Poll completed and deleted] At the moment the results are pretty close. If they remain close, GPs could tilt the results one way or another. |
| The choice Keep investigating the book won the first poll handily, so now it's on to the second: [Poll completed and deleted] Here there are three choices: Does Will keep working alone, or does he find himself a partner? And if he does look for a partner, does he choose his best friend, Caleb, or does he look for someone else? Poll closes on Tuesday. The current storyline also continues with— Interactive: "A Second Chance at Leah Simmons" Public: "A Second Chance at Leah Simmons" |
| You know what we haven't had in forever around here? A Plot Plinko Poll! If you don't remember what that is, that's where we get really interactive. We start at the beginning of "Book of Masks," and you guys vote on which path to take. We continue down the branches, plinking between chapter choices, until we arrive at an unwritten choice. And that's where I take over, continuing the story from there. We've done this before and it's been fun (at least for me). There will be two ways for you to vote. The first is in a poll that I will post, giving the chapter choices. The second will by awarding Gift Points (GPs) to your preferred choice. You can find a fuller description of the process in the poll here: [Poll completed and deleted] That poll, and all subsequent polls, will be open for 48 hours, then closed and a new poll posted. Today's poll, naturally, starts at the beginning of the story, and you've got five choices of path to take ... |
| Today brings the last chapter in my return engagement to BoM: Interactive: "Fun and Games" Public: "Fun and Games" It wasn't a huge story, but it's always fun writing for Chelsea. I also enjoyed getting some of Jessica Garner in there, even if she was a fake and probably ramped up to 110% by Chelsea. Tomorrow I shift over to a radically different branch with a storyline that takes off from "The World Smashers" . The story so far:The Personae, after slipping from Will's grasp, has wound up in the hands of some high school YouTubers, and Will has lately joined them in mischief. As the story opens, they are looking for a "research project" (aka, "an excuse to screw around with masks and disguises") and Will has pitched the idea of swapping people unawares and watching how the victims react. But who to switch? One choice has already been launched. Which of the other four will get started tomorrow? Tune in to find out. This is one that I started writing before I took that super-long sabbatical, and it's the first one I continued when I started getting back into BoM. It was originally going to be for a commission, but I don't remember the details of the commission or who asked for it, so I am presenting it as a freebie, just because I loved the idea that I was pitched. This is a longer one, and will run for 2 weeks. |
| I mentioned yesterday that I started writing again about six weeks ago. But I delayed making a formal return (at least in part) because I wanted to make my return kind of splashy with what I hoped would be popular content. And who's the most popular character in BoM? I think it has to be Chelsea Cooper. So my return storyline takes place in the same general branch where rugal was last writing: Chelsea got ahold of the grimoire after her boyfriend accidentally golemized himself, and she and Will have partnered with it to conduct experiments and mischief. Chelsea has been impersonating Gary Chen (!) while Will has been spying for Chelsea from under a mask of Yumi Saito. By the time of "Occupied Territories" Chelsea has won some important battles: she has forced Eva and Jessica Garner off the cheerleading squad and crippled a planned coup against her leadership. But she has also promised Will some extra masks, so that she and he will have the same number of potential impersonations, and Will is contemplating some possibilities. Today, he makes a choice in * Interactive: "Grabbing a Garner" * Public: "Grabbing a Garner" (NOTE: The public Archives now include the run "A Banquet of Babel" --> "Occupied Territories" , which lead up to today's chapter.)Note: I made some important changes in "Occupied Territories" and in the four-chapter run "Debts and Acquisitions" through "The Shopping Trip" , though they don't affect much outside of those chapters. TL;DR: In the original versions, Chelsea talked Will into giving her masks to enslave some of Chen's gangster bosses. I removed that, as nothing was done with that plot development, and it limited the amount of subsequent fun to be had. |
| So, it's been a couple of months since I've checked in here -- not even so much as a log-in. I suppose explanations are in order. First of all: No, nothing happened to me. No health issues, no life issues, no monsters crashing in through the front windows to send me screaming out the back door. Okay, from my point of view, there was kind of a monster ... Like a lot of things in life, creativity is cyclical. I think over the years I've done pretty well at providing daily content around here. Yes, I've taken some weeks off, usually with prior notice. That need for a break is one of the regular cycles. Comes about once a year or so. But there's also a longer, deeper, nastier cycle. A mega-crash. It doesn't happen all that often -- only once every couple of years -- but it has happened with me before. It's the kind of cycle where I don't just take a break from writing. It's the kind of cycle where I scrape off everything to do with creativity and invention and don't come back. Let me put it this way: If I was the kind of person who took, uh, "stimulants" and/or "depressants", this is the kind of crash that where I would crawl into a bottle or up inside a needle. That's how far away I need to get from the writing game. Fortunately, I never acquired a taste for those particular kinds of vices, so I find other ways of coping. I'll leave it to you to judge whether Civilization is a healthier habit than whiskey, and Minecraft a safer addiction than morphine. Suffice it to say that I am now a much better player of both those games. It also happens that this kind of mega-crash occurs without warning. It starts as nothing worse than severe procrastination, and in this case it was a couple weeks or before I even recognized what was going on, at which point (I have to confess) the crash had gotten so deep and so hard that I didn't even give enough of a shit to come back and post a short "Gone Fishing" notice. It was that bad. But about six weeks ago I started to come out of it, and started to get my feet under me again. I had to rebuild my confidence and stamina, practically from scratch, though, and instead of coming straight back here -- when I had no confidence that the return would even take -- I spent that time writing some storylines. Getting myself in shape. So, am I back now? I'm still shaky enough, and humble enough, that I can't promise there won't be any hiccups going forward. In the meantime, I have written enough content to fill about four weeks, and I'll start publishing it tomorrow. During that time I hope to finish rebuilding. I am most definitely back enough that if I feel the ground going out from beneath me again, I will say something. I know I have left some people in the lurch with this disappearance, and I am all about making amends and catching up. I have a giant backlog of emails I need to shovel out, and that may take some time. For now, I beg your patience. |
| So, it's the first of February, and I'm coming off my BoM writing sabbatical. I've also got a new branch to publish. Let's start with that. I wasn't sure what was going to be coming out today—I had been talking with Masktrix about giving him an exclusive publishing run—so I didn't post anything yesterday about what today would bring. Turns out, it brings "The Ally of My Ally" That is a sequel to "Friends and Anti-Friends" , and because that's part of a branch that wasn't in the Archives, readers of the Archives will find a bunch of new chapters have been posted, starting with "When Ambitions Collide" and running through "The Ally of My Ally" . The background to these chapters:Shortly after buying it, Will sold the grimoire to his friend Caleb, so he is surprised when he discovers that Chelsea Cooper, the head cheerleader, has somehow gotten ahold of the book. Will has started reinvestigating it, and has read it through up to the spell that empowers a kind of body-swap. Chelsea wants to use that spell for her own nefarious purposes, and Will has surrendered to the temptation to help her out. Without spoiling things too badly for reader of the Archives (who can get the details in today's published chapters), Will has taken over the identity of a junior girl as he searches for a possible girlfriend down in the junior class. But he feels sorry for the girl whose life he has borrowed, because she has major health issues. And as today's chapter opens, Will has found out that Chelsea has already begun using the masks to make replacements around the school ... This branch will run through February 9. * * * Meanwhile, how did last month go, with my "Superior Spider-Man" project? Well, I discovered that I really hate writing scripts. Okay, "hate" is too strong a word. Let's just say it was like banging my face into a wall. Scripts are insanely demanding in terms of storytelling. For that reason they are probably very good practice, but man are they hard. The audience—particularly for a kids' action cartoon—are not going to stick around for any frippery, so every single scene has to do some work and has to land with a serious impact, which means you can't be creative by improvising and hoping that something eventually turns up. (Which is my preferred method.) You have to know what each scene needs to do, and you can't waste your time getting it done. Also, it's hard to write action scenes. That really ought to be the province of the director or the storyboard artists (IMO), but at the very least I think a script should indicate some possible action. And you definitely have to provide dialogue, particularly if it is for a chatterbox like Peter Parker, so you need some action for the dialogue to bounce off of. The result was that I spent a whole lot of January staring at my computer screen. And there were many days where I couldn't bring myself to do anything more. I was unpleasantly paralyzed for many days on end. I did manage, ultimately, to force out two scripts, and I'm going to spend the first few days in February trying to force out a third, in addition to some q&d BoM writing. That will at least give me four scripts that I can show off, and they will round off a four-part storyline that is meant to open the thirteen-episode "Superior Spider-Man" arc that I still hope to get written. But I'll start today by publishing my transcript (with slight revision) of the climax of the IRL series: "S02E13 "Revenge of The Living Brain"" . The commentary on it is in another post down below.Now I've got to go catch up on some other BoM-related business that I've been ignoring. |
| "S02E13 "Revenge of The Living Brain"" is another close transcript of an IRL-episode, in this case "The Living Brain." The major changes: 1. In the IRL-episode, Anya Corazon changed into her Spider-Girl costume and entered the Raft along with Miles, where she handled all the fighting, making Miles redundant. In my continuity, Anya Corazon does not have spider powers, so I had to make some adjustments there. 2. I tweaked the end to amp up the fake-out. In the original, the new Spider-Man just swings away after destroying the Living Brain, and a little later there's a cut to him, perched alone, gloating maniacally about having pulled off the body heist. But I wanted to make the ending a little creepier. I also wanted to parody the kind of scene that usually climaxes these kinds of stories. In any other show or storyline, the good guy would fight off the bad, and afterward there would be a little bit of banter between the hero and his friends. For this one, I wanted to play it exactly in the typical manner before throwing the stinger/reveal in at the very end. |
| Today's chapters— * Interactive: "A Date With Himself" * Public: "A Date With Himself" —round off my latest branch. Tomorrow I start on a branch that will take up the rest of January. It's a branch that hasn't appeared in the Archives yet, so today also brings a bunch of new-to-the-Archives chapters starting here: "Your Friend, Who Is More Responsible Than You" . Background: Will has been exploring the magic by himself, and has victimized his best friend, Caleb, by stealing money from him. This is the area in which Will meets Sydney McGlynn, but in this branch he narrowly misses making her acquaintance, and continues his experiments solo. For those who know the story through the interactive, it previously ended with Will discovering the means to do a full identity swap by making lackeys. Tomorrow I will continue the story from where I last left it. |
| Stuff was happening yesterday around the time I usually post a chapter, and by the time I was done with it the day was pretty far gone, so I just skipped the day. Yesterday's chapter is now today's chapter: * Interactive: "Personalities on Parade" * Public: "Personalities on Parade" |
| Today ends the, mm, controversial series of chapters I've been publishing. It also ends a sequence of storylines that I wrote last month in response to various polls. On to something else! Tomorrow brings a sequel to "The Inside, Looking Out" . Will has made a mask, and inside he has made a new face -- literally the face of someone who doesn't exist, combining his own features and those of his cousin Umeko. He went shopping under this new face, and accidentally got himself some new friends. (Well, some of them are new. Some, like Cassie Harper, are people he was already acquainted with.) The question he now faces is, does he keep this new and popular identity in circulation? Or does he get rid of it as being a lot of trouble? (Among the troubles that come with it: his new friends are under the impression that the new guy is gay.) This sequence will run for six chapters. |
| Today's chapter— * Interactive: "Party Surprises" * Public: "Party Surprises" —is the last in the short branch I wrote in answer to last month's Plot Plinko Poll. As I warned, it's mostly transitional, designed to clarify the group dynamics and set up some possible relationships. I'm trying to publish all the polled items before publishing my freewriting—no reason to make you guys wait on what you asked for—so tomorrow I'll pick up where I left off last time: "Boys Will Be Boys" . You voted to have our anti-heroes, Will and Sydney, infiltrate and replace another family, so that's what will come next. |
| Really? That's the place you guys want the storyline to diverge? After "How to Replace an Absent Friend" , by taking the "Keep Chelsea all to yourself" choice? Well, okay. But that's the only chapter where I didn't have an alternative development in mind. When I wrote that chapter I was desperate to come up with a choice to end it with, and settled on "To text Keith or not to text Keith; that is the question" because I had some vague idea that Keith being a witness to such a meeting might be important later. It didn't become important as I improvised forward, so you're asking me to diverge at a place where ... Well, where my first assumption is that the exact same thing will happen regardless of Will's differing choice. Well, maybe I can come up with something. But (LOL) this is literally the hardest possible place you could have voted to make a divergence! * * * Meanwhile, and topically related, I've taken the last few days off from the "Spider-Man" project. I got the first act of Episode 2 written, and got halfway through the second act, and then I decided the act break wasn't dramatic enough. After one day of noodling around with it, I decided to put it aside and return to it later. That's my project for today, and we'll see how it goes. The situation here (how to end an act) recalls that of writing BoM chapters -- striving to end a chapter on the kind of cliffhanger that impels the reader/viewer to find out what happens next. Relatedly, there's a "commentary" post below on the last "Spider-Man" item that I published. While rereading things and getting back up to speed, I realized I hadn't provided a commentary for it. |
| "S02E12 "The Master Planner"" is an almost-exact transcript of the IRL-episode "Brain Drain" from Marvel's Spider-Man on DisneyXD. The only changes come with some technical terms, some adjustments to the way Peter reacts to The Living Brain (which in the IRL-series wasn't introduced until this episode), and a dialogue-tweak here and there. So why is this one a script and not a treatment, like the previous entries in this project? Well, first, because all the entries from this point on will be scripts. I started this project because I wanted to do my own adaptation of the "Superior Spider-Man" arc, to see how it might compare with the IRL adaptation, and the closest comparison (short of recording and animating it myself, which is impossible) would come by writing a script. Previously I wrote treatments because I only needed to record the changes to the animated continuity that I wanted and needed to set up my own adaptation. But why transcribe a script, in this case, that is so close to the original? That was so that I could get an idea of how many pages a script for an animated show should be. I know that the usual rule of thumb is "one page equals one minute of screen time," but I've also read that the rule of thumb is different in animation—and I've read inconsistent things about what that rule of thumb is. So I figured I should make a close transcript of a couple of IRL-episodes, to give myself a rule of thumb to follow. |
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