BoM/TWS Message Forum

Chapters: "Your Two Faces"  --> "Crushing It as Cindy" 

As I think I said in the blog, this storyline was sparked by a deluge of GPs from one reader, saying lots of unnecessarily nice things about BoM, and mentioning that they liked this part of the interactive, and that Cindy Vredenburg was their favorite character. So I picked up the choice where Will has the chance to impersonate Cindy. More inspiration came from was another comment (maybe from this same correspondent, but I'm not sure; possibly it was in another email I read in my backed-up email folder), saying that they liked it when the people under the masks acted like themselves rather than the people they were impersonating. **

And a related inspiration (I guess I'll confess) was in a thread over at metamorphose.org, where posters were talking about how they liked it when the impersonators didn't have access to memories and were forced to improvise as best they could without being discovered. All of this kind of went into the stewpot without trying to separate it out or concentrate on any particular aspect: writing chapters of Carlos and Mike acting like themselves while wearing Jessica and Eva's masks, and them and Will trying to talk to others as though they were the girls without the aid of their memories and personalities. That's probably why this storyline stretches an hour or two of story time out over multiple chapters without advancing that much. But it was fun to test the boundaries of my comfort zone, since I am usually all about full-on impersonation.

** I find this kind of thing very hard to write, actually. Once I have someone inside a mask, even one without a memory strip, I find it hard not to imagine the impersonated character rather than the impersonator, and so find it very easy to slip unaware into writing in the voice of the mask rather than the person wearing the mask. I wonder if this is noticeable to readers as well. ***

*** On reflection, the problem may have something to do with the choice of attributions. I've never settled on a system of whether to refer to a masked person by their real identity or their feigned identity. In practice, I switch around, but more often than not I think I refer to them using the name/pronoun of the mask, so that the reader will visualize what they would see if they were actually there. And that may be one reason I find it so easy to slip into writing in the voice of the impersonation rather than the person doing the impersonating: I see the mask and lose track of the person under the mask. This is also why I wonder if readers also start reading the dialogue in the manner and style of the mask: because that's who they "see."