Magic Mansion by Jordan Price (best fiction books to read .txt) 📕

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METAMORPHOSIS ELIMINATION

Who will you vote off the Red Team following the Metamorphosis Challenge?

Ken Barron 63%

Fabian Swan 37%

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GOLD TO RED

Which member of the Gold Team will you send over to the Red Team?

Muriel Broom 34%

Amazing Faye 47%

Bev the Math Wizard 19%

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FOUR PROPS ELIMINATION

Who will you eliminate from the Red Team?

Jia Lee 30%

Amazing Faye 70%

Who will you eliminate from the Gold Team?

Math Wizard Bev Austin 39%

Muriel Broom 61%

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CIRCUS ELIMINATION

Who will you vote to eliminate from Magic Mansion?

Eliminate Bev and Sue, Jia goes on to the Final Four 60%

Eliminate Bev and Jia, Sue goes on to the Final Four 30%

Eliminate Sue and Jia, Bev goes on to the Final Four10%

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About the Author

Jordan Castillo Price enjoys reality shows, though she’s always curious about how the characters’ words and actions have been edited to create a new narrative in post-production. She’s particularly intrigued by the background music that plays behind various situations to manipulate the viewers’ perceptions.

Like Ricardo and John, Jordan has taken a one-day charter flight to New Jersey and back to participate in a game show. It was a very long day, but she did win a new TV.

Jordan writes paranormal thrillers from her home in rural Wisconsin. You can find her on the web in the following places:

Jordan’s Author Site

Official PsyCop Site

Official Channeling Morpheus Site

Jordan’s Web Store

Twitter

LiveJournal

Facebook

About this Story

Originally, Magic Mansion was a 3500-word short story I wrote for a contest, in which Ricardo met his hero Professor Topaz in the flesh during an audition, and they both turned out to have True magic. Then I changed my mind about entering the contest, and my friend Emilie suggested my two magicians should both land a spot on the show…and I couldn’t let go of that idea. It seemed intimidatingly big, though. With my writing schedule being what it was, I decided that if I didn’t make Magic Mansion my newsletter story, if I waited until I had a few months to just focus on it, the darn thing would never happen at all. I’d wait and wait and wait until one day the idea faded and eventually disappeared. And so I took the plunge, wrote four more chapters to start with, and launched it.

My first concern was the size of the cast. I needed to start with twelve contestants. And then some of the contestants had characters who went along with them, such as John’s manager, his late partner…Ricardo’s high school sweetheart…Sue’s icky boyfriend. Plus, I needed some people to represent the TV show itself. I chose to be very stylized and minimal when it came to depicting the crew. Marlene, Iain and Monty are the “name” representatives of the show, and everyone else is known by their job, at least until John calls his stylist by her name to indicate that of course the crew is not a big, anonymous blob in the eyes of the players. Marlene and Iain are a mashup of various job functions: producer, director, editor, props master. I knew it would be hard enough to keep twelve players and their adjuncts straight without assigning additional characters to these crew roles, so Iain and Marlene do a little of everything.

If I was to have twelve contestants, I realized that I would need to make them all very different so that readers would be able to tell one from another. Faye was originally going to be blonde, for instance (I named her for Fay Wray) but I realized if readers thought of her as “the blonde” she’d then get mixed up with Sue. So Faye got her tacky red dye-job. And from that dye job, her personality as a female performer approaching middle age with a bit of panic and a lot of intensity was born.

Three tiers of ages are represented in the contestants: the twenty-somethings are Sue, Jia, Chip and Kevin. The thirty- to forty-somethings are Faye, Charity, Ken, and Ricardo. And the fifty-and-up group is Bev, Muriel, Fabian and John. I really enjoyed having this diverse range of character ages to play with. Initial readers have remarked on the age difference between Ricardo and John being a potential turnoff…and if the age difference were a main plot point solely for the sake of being a December/May romance, I guess I could see the potential for “yuck.” But it was never my intention for the age difference itself to titillate for no particular reason. It was more about Ricardo being star-struck over meeting his idol, and having that idol in a position to reciprocate.

Giving the players different ethnic backgrounds was another easy way that I figured could quickly differentiate one from the other, but it seemed like a slippery slope. A story populated with a group of stereotypes was definitely not what I wanted to end up with. It is typical of reality shows to have a token few minority characters, though, so I went with it, figuring that I would just need to be very aware of not writing cringeworthy stereotypes.

The decision to make John Chamorro was based on his surname rather than the desire to make him “ethnic.” I liked the ring of Topasna for his family’s original surname, researched it, and found it came from a very specific place: Guam. From that particular, John’s whole history unfolded in an unexpected and very rich way.

Ultimately, the theme that emerged was being true to oneself in the face of prejudice. John yearned to claim his ethnicity while his mother, who was spooked by 1940’s Japanese Internment Camps, struggled to homogenize him. Jia took up the mantle of Chinese conjuror because she figured if it was all she could aspire to, she could at least ensure it was done with dignity. Ricardo walked the line of being out and proud without coming off as a parody of a nelly queer. And they did this against the backdrop