BoM/TWS Message Forum

I've refrained from commenting on the chapters as they came out, because the key comment was always going to be an answer to the question "Did the poll derail you again?" I'll give the answers now.

As I already noted, I did get derailed at the end of "Fröhliche Momente mit unbekannten Menschen" . I had been intending to follow the path after "Stick with these guys," and had even written six more chapters, ending with a decisive turn in the storyline, but that now goes in the backlog, to appear later.

The branch I wrote instead then followed the line laid down by "A Drive to Distraction"  and "What Happens in the Warehouse" , but I was nervous enough that I also wrote a chapter for each alternate choice. But the last poll threw another corkscrew at me. I had written two more chapters to come after "What Happens at the Warehouse," but had to write "She So Mad"  instead when that choice won the poll. Which was fine, because it allowed a quicker ending to the branch.

This was a lot of fun for me—I hope readers enjoyed themselves too—because it gave me a chance to write these characters and this situation in several different ways, giving me a deeper and better understanding of them. I don't know if it was obvious to the readers, but the first two chapters in the branch felt rather stiff to me, and were hard to write, because I myself was still trying to get a first impression of the new characters. By the end of this experiment, though, they felt very comfortable to me, so that it was almost as easy for me to write for Patrick (and for other characters, who didn't wind up being as prominent in the published branch) as for any of the regulars.

I will be coming back to this area, not only to publish written branches and continuing the one-chapter buds, but to write out choices that were not taken, and choices off of those choices, because I got a lot of ideas while writing. I'm not decided how I will publish them. Possibly I will do polls again, but I'm also thinking of publishing a great mass of chapters--a few dozen maybe--all in one swoop. So much of what I mean to write would just be stage-setting for alternate ways of reintroducing the Libra, and I'm dubious about putting readers through that. It might also be fun for readers to have a mass of chapters to navigate, the way new readers find a mass of chapters to navigate when they first find the interactive.