BoM/TWS Message Forum

I have been concentrating on writing, and every time I think I'm ready to make a reply in this thread, it's gotten another reply or three. So I'm just going to jump in with some observations.

This isn't advice or argument or correction. Every author is different, and approaches his work (even collaborative work) with different expectations and hopes. I'm just testifying about what my hopes and expectations for BoM have been -- what my writing philosophy has been and how it has shaped the interactive. To the extent that anyone is supposed to take what I say to heart, take it as an apology for having constructed a thing that frustrates those with different approaches.

The first and biggest note I would make (as the author with the most chapters, and the author who is most responsible for everything flawed in BoM) is that it began as and continues as a writing sandbox for me. I like making stuff up, but for me, "making stuff up" is an incremental thing. I invent small details, which lead me to invent other small details, which lead to still other small details, until enough details have accumulated that the thing has a shape and direction and character. And even after that, it gets larger and develops and moves incrementally through the addition of further details, many of which have no obvious utility when they show up, but which I sometimes find a use for later on. I just stick bits of clay onto the thing until, sometimes, it comes to resemble a statue.

Some corollaries of this:

> I was frustrated Will never considers using the masks to escape the cauldron of high school life.
> Ultimately it is a story centered on high school drama.

The story starts with a high school student for reasons that Nostrum below explains well. "Face swapping" is (among other things; yes, there's a fetish related to it) a metaphor for "search for identity", and the late teens are when a lot of those choices get made. And high school is also a fertile setting because it is like a densely interconnected village: hundreds people each with a dozen overlapping friends and acquaintances, each relationship of a different complexion. Life in the adult world is comparatively fragmented and isolated, inside the family or workplace, so that there's not the same scope for diversity and variation. At least, not without traveling so far that the original starting point becomes attenuated.

But once the setting and central character are set, the rest of the world (given my writing style) takes shape by slowly oozing out from the starting point. Only after a lot of WHS had gotten defined did it begin to touch things not related to the high school, and in all those cases they have been slow to evolve (at least when I'm contributing) because they will require the same long, slow filling-in process.

A work of fiction that explores identity-theft and -changing in the larger world should probably be a novel, not an interactive. Or, it should be a branch in the interactive that is conceived and written as a novel. The line where Will apprentices to Blackwell, turns on him, joins Frank and Joe to defeat him, then moves to LA to study with Kali and Rick and becomes a Stellae before fast-forwarding into TWS, accidentally achieved that effect. Almost all the others chapters and branches I've written have been composed with the much more modest intentions described above.

> However, Marion Pruitt feels badly drawn.
> I don’t think there’s a lot of enthusiasm for a St X line.

I have made SO many false starts in BoM, and that's not even counting the storylines that peter out, which is all but a small handful of them. But the whole point of BoM (at least for me) is to write something in the hopes it will work out, then go find something else to write when it doesn't. I'm 70% satisfied with a storyline if I learn something positive about some of the characters, and 50% satisfied if what I learn is that I got them wrong. The first storyline I wrote with Stephanie Wyatt petered out, but I'm glad I wrote it, because it gave me a solid hold on her. And the storyline where Will partnered with Stephanie to work on the book, which I wound up disliking, was a learning experience because I learned not to write Stephanie as a character who would do that.

And this is because, like in a termite colony, every blind alley adds something to the architecture, even if it's just a spandrel or a random gargoyle, and indirectly it can come to positively influence some other part of the mass.

> Honestly, the BoM seems to work best when it is Will doing the face swapping

If this is so, it's likely because he's the viewpoint character, and face-swapping is the central conceit of the story. The viewpoint character will lack agency if he's not the one doing it.

> Brent Pruitt has had some appearances elsewhere and he is not showing signs of barely hanging in there that would make him potentially at risk without his sister’s support.

I don't think he's appeared enough to have any character at all, save what you (Masktrix) wrote for him in "The Test Dept." etc. And AFAIC, what you wrote of him there is canonical and any evolutions from his other appearances must take account of it.

----

Okay, now regarding notoriety.

It's a profitless game to compare yourself to others, though it's a game (as I know too well) no one can resist playing.

I'll start off by saying that I'm the one that knows how many views a chapter gets (at least as reported by WdC) and I know that my chapters get no more views than anyone else's, and frequently get fewer. (Not for nothing have I wryly dubbed myself "the Henry James of TF fiction!") As for BoM's external reputation, I know it sometimes gets mentioned on metamorphose.org, and a subforum at reddit linked to it a long time ago. Otherwise, like Prussian, I am flabbergasted at the idea that it gets any attention from anyone but the authors.

Specifically to Masktrix: I think Prussian is also on point when he observes that BoM is enormous; and that most of your chapters appear deep into the chapter counts, which makes them (and thus your name) harder to find. I'll add that a lot of your best additions -- Dude! You invented Fane! -- were made under account names that have since vanished. Any readers, like me, who would rank you near the tippy-tippy-top, just for giving us Fane and Hal Swann, aren't going to have "Masktrix" near the front of their forebrain when they don't know it was you!

But I'm the wrong person to preach. As creator, "showrunner" and lead author of BoM, I get mentioned when BoM does, so it's bad taste for me to say "You shouldn't care" -- like a millionaire telling someone on welfare they shouldn't care so much about money. Also, I do know that if I wanted BoM to be more well-known, I'd bang the drum for it on metamorphose and whatever other forums there might be for TF fiction. But I don't like advertising myself.

The one concrete piece of advice I would give, if you want to get credit for your BoM work outside of this forum, is to advertise on some of those other forums after you've published a branch that you're proud of. Just jump in (if you think it'll be welcome at wherever) saying "Hey, I've published a storyline in the BoM universe, check it out to see if you like it: [link]." We all want to be recognized without having to advertise -- letting our merits speak for themselves -- but the rest of the authors you name are NOT being recognized solely for our superior merit, but because of longevity and having our names on chapters right at the front of the interactive. There's no reason you shouldn't grab an advantage in order to correct for an non-meritorious advantage we got as "first movers" in the interactive. All is fair in love and war and grabbing yourself some credit.

> how about Wordsmitty?

Word. (See what I did there?) Wordsmitty was one of the first and best contributors to BoM.