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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/Contests 4/21: "BoM Poll: "Substitute Hitter"" [Closes Wednesday, April 23, at 12:00pm ET]The Latest 4/21: Interactive: "Substitute Hitter" 4/21: Public: "Substitute Hitter"
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| Wow, what a wild poll that last one was! Stephanie Wyatt scored tops in the Free Poll, and she spent most of the week maintaining a healthy lead there. And maybe that led to her supporters getting complacent, so they didn't spend many GPs on her. If so, it was a big mistake, because in the final tabulation Stephanie got absolutely wrecked, finishing a very distant third. In fact, she was in third place almost from the moment the poll went up, as lots of readers dumped huge GP gifts onto other choices. For awhile it was touch and go who would win the top spot, but in the end one choice pulled away for a fairly decisive win. Final standings: Yumi Saito: 61,000 Andrea Varnsworth: 48,991 Stephanie Wyatt: 20,209 Kendra Saunders: 12,436 Kelsey Blankenship; 6,218 I guess one reader spoke for many when he wrote, explaining his GP vote: "We never get to somebody else impersonating [Yumi], so could be interesting." * * * Meanwhile, I'm halting the current storyline with today's chapter— * Interactive: "The Girl at the Drive-Thru Window" * Public: "The Girl at the Drive-Thru Window" —even though I have written past this point with a further six-chapter run. But I'm going to give readers a chance to pick another path in this area. So, that's the subject of the next poll, whether to continue the story with Will and Sydney as Marcos and Alana, or to back up to a different choice earlier in the branch. To keep things manageable, I'm giving specific alternate choices at specific places: [Poll completed and deleted.] This poll will run a little shorter than the others, through July 2. * * * And where do we go from here? Back to the doppelganger plot, which ended last time with "The Hunger" . Will was ready to pick a junior partner to help him with his scheme to run the school by replacing key students, and you guys voted to make Michelle Estrich that partner. Tomorrow we'll see how that starts to work out ... |
| If you send GPs in the latest poll, but you send them through the anonymous system so that I don't know who you are, your GPs will count in the final tally. But if your choice loses, I will not be able to return those GPs or send you a "loser's bonus" (if any). |
| Today's chapter— Interactive: "Crushing It as Cindy" Public: "Crushing It as Cindy" —rounds out the storyline that started with "Your Two Faces" . Two related items to go with it:Commentary thread in the forum: "Commentary: "Cindy for the Win"" New poll: [Completed and deleted] The poll of course has to do with the choice at the end of today's chapter: Keith has given Will a number of names of girls he might impersonate, and left it up to Will to choose. I'm giving the choice to you guys. Same rules as in the last poll: Each voter gets a single vote in the poll, but you can add weight to your votes by sending GPs via the tip forms in the chapters linked to in the poll. Poll closes on June 27. * * * Speaking of polls, the results in the last poll surprised me, not only by the fact that one choice was the runaway favorite among the voters individually, but who it was: Michelle Estrich. She was the winning choice, but the weighted vote was much closer than the basic poll would show. After GPs were factored in, here are the vote totals: Michelle Estrich: 8750 Victoria Rodriguez: 7917 Laura McGregor: 2917 Christian Padilla: 2083 Meghan Farris: 2083 Two more votes for Victoria, and it would have been a tie between her and Michelle. * * * Meanwhile, what comes next? A sequel to "The Cherry, Hung with Snow" This is a storyline with Will and Sydney. They're building themselves a Brotherhood of Baphomet, and have replaced three classmates so far. Will is currently impersonating the chilly Amanda Ferguson, while Sydney (after impersonating Kelsey Blankenship) has assumed the identity of David Kirkham. (Kirkham was hassling Will; this was their way of taming him.) At the moment Will (Amanda) and Sydney (Kirkham) are still at the Donna Motel, where Sydney has gotten drunk on Kirkham's testosterone, but they are getting ready to part for the day, and are looking forward to Will's next impersonation. * * * Finally, my thanks to Easy, Tal, and Puuuuuth for the Gift Points they donated me during this storyline. It was my pleasure. |
| I do my best to keep BoM consistent, but of course it's impossible to be perfectly consistent across thousands of chapters. But I hope I don't regularly introduce blatant continuity issues in back-to-back chapters in a storyline I'm currently writing. Well, that's what happened with today's chapter and yesterday's. And it was only on accident that I caught it, right after publishing today's chapter. Anyway, if you're wondering why some characters are hanging around in today's chapter after yesterday's chapter said they went home ... well, there's now a slightly different story told about them in yesterday's chapter. And now I'm paranoid about where else there might be issues. |
| As promised, today's chapter— * Interactive: "Cindy for the Win" * Public: "Cindy for the Win" —returns to an old storyline. I picked this one because while I was on hiatus I got a huge number of GPs dumped on me from a reader who liked a lot of chapters, but mentioned that Cindy was their favorite character. So this storyline is for that reader. And speaking of GPs, I want to thank a number of people who sent GPs over the past week or so, highlighting the chapters I was publishing: Easy, Puuuuuth, and Wordsmitty, who awarded me points for "scruffmonster." Also, the poll is still open, and will be for another week: [Deleted poll] |
| Today's chapter— * Interactive: "The Hunger" * Public: "The Hunger" —wraps up this storyline for now. What will happen next here? Vote in the poll!: [Poll completed and deleted.] Note that I'm running this poll using the complicated, gift-point system. Basically, you can vote for free in the linked vote. But if you want to give your vote more weight, go to {chapter:}, scroll down to the choices at the bottom, then click on the choice you want to see continued. In the page that opens, use the Tip feature at the bottom to send me WdC Gift Points. This will increase the number of votes for that choice; and the more GPs are gifted, the more votes it gets. If your choice wins, you forfeit your GPs. (It's like you're paying for a writing commission.) If your choice loses, you get your GPs back, plus a proportional share of the GPs that were voted for the winner. So, if you vote using GPs, you increase the chances that your choice will win; and even if you lose, not only will you get your GPs back, you might earn bonus GPs as well! * * * What will tomorrow bring in terms of new chapters? I'm going to gamble on the branch that I'm currently writing, and hope that I write to a stopping point before the publication schedule catches up to me. It starts with "Keith's Confliction" .Will gave away the book, but it has since reentered his life by falling into the hands of friends of Will's friend Keith, and they have recruited him into a plot wherein they will impersonate and replace some other people at school. (They are doing it under the excuse that it's some kind of sociological experiment.) Will and Keith, on their own, however, have decided to use the scheme as a way to get back at Seth Javits, a bully who persecutes them both. The plan is for one of them to impersonate Seth's girlfriend, the cheerleader Cindy Vredenburg. But which of them is going to impersonate her ...? Note: The Archives broke off this storyline with "Special Effects" . You can catch up with the interactive now with "Doubles for Pleasure" and four more chapters after that. |
| The chapter I had for yesterday is now up: * Interactive: "Dinner and a Side Plot" * Public: "Dinner and a Side Plot" It came 24 hours late because yesterday was a mess. I was concentrating on getting writing something else for the website, and then out of nowhere I was called away. By the time I got back to where I could publish something, it was too late in the day to really make it worth it, so I just skipped the day. What else was I writing for the site? I've been pushed to say something more about that old renegade Stellae, Hieronymus von Gersdorff, so there is now an entry on him in the wiki, done more or less in Wikipedia style: "Characters: -V-" . If you're interested in that, there's a bonus for you! |
| Yesterday I poked my head up and said something about being back. Today I'm going to try to actually be back. I have some storylines in the backlog that were leftover from when I disappeared, but I'm going to start with chapters I wrote last month as I was trying to get back in. They start with: Interactive: "Dropping the Masks" Public: "Dropping the Masks" The back story: This is the area where Will is attempting a mass replacement of Westside students with doppelgangers, so he can run it secretly from a hidden location. He has been acting the part of student council president Kim Walsh, but has decided to switch to a different face (that of a doppelganger he's already made) and recruit a junior partner who will have a doppelganger gang of their own to manage (under Will's supervision). This was the subject of a poll, which I closed and deleted yesterday. The vote was pretty tight between Chelsea Cooper and Kelsey Blankenship as the face he switches into, but Chelsea won by a pert nose. So that's where things pick up now. * * * My daily schedule is probably going to be up in the air for a bit. I may have mentioned at one point that I have an elderly neighbor I've been helping out. Well, he got hospitalized then moved into rehab. He's going home in a couple of days, and I've been helping arrange that, and I will be probably be helping him out more after he's home. I don't know what my schedule will look like. I have traditionally been very punctual and regular about my posting hours, always shooting for noon Eastern time, but I will probably be posting stuff several hours earlier than that until I know what my sched going forward is going to look like. |
| I always hate writing a blog entry after I come back from an extended absence. I never know what to say. Well, I guess some kind of explanations are in order. First off, I didn't die or go through any kind of emergency. I was going to try coming back online after Christmas, but the holidays hit hard in a couple of different ways, and then I needed to recover. And after that ... Well, among my Xmas gifts were some volumes of "The History of Middle-Earth," which is the multi-volume series collecting and commenting on Tolkien's rough drafts of LotR and the Silmarillion and other works. Isn't there a line in LotR about "the lesser spider being caught by the greater spider"? Anyway, that's what happened to me. I enjoy world-building, I was entirely ensnared by Tolkien, and not only got lost in the Xmas volumes I got, but in the additional volumes I ordered. I even got into some really deep-diving podcasts on Tolkien and the "History," listening to them while reading the "History." To top it off, I was inspired enough to try writing some additions of my own to the historical corpus -- filling in corners of Gondorian history, for instance, or composing alternate versions of Silmarillion stories [*]. All of which scratched an itch to write while not working on BoM. And in truth my own interest in BoM waned considerably over those months. It looks so petty and ugly next to Tolkien. Still, I did miss BoM, and I spent the last month trying to get restarted with it with some new and resumed storylines. It's been hard, though. After some struggling, though, I've decided that I just need to get back online here and see what happens. There has been a very encouraging community around BoM, which humbles me and for which I am very grateful. Though we'll have to see how many are still left after that embarrassingly long absence. I especially want to thank those who sent in GiftPoints while I was gone -- those are the ones I can't quite bring myself to look in the eye. Some of the gifts were Anonymous, and I have no way of thanking you except here. Those whose names were attached to their GPs will have a suitably red-faced email expressing my gratitude. |
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