AugNoWriMo: Spanner the Novel, Phase 2, With Short Stories

Now that I've won JulNoWriMo with Spanner, the next step is — you guessed it — AugNoWriMo! I've signed up and declared my intention to write 50,000 more words. Soon, I'll be ready to write again, and this time I'll keep track of my progress here, even if only every week or so.

Now, here's my plan:

1. Read what I've written and figure out what plotlines I'm using.
2. Map out the plotlines for book 1 (and some of book 2; scenes from the end of that are already coming to me today) with these plotlines and the new ones I've written out this week.
3. Reorganize the scenes some. (Not too much; this is not the time for serious editing yet.)
4. Write!

I also have a few short stories I want to write and/or edit. I'm not going to submit them to this year's AugNo Anthology, though, unless I get something as inspired as the opening to "Any Monkey with a Typewriter". I was planning on expanding last year's AugNo Anthology short story into a full novel this year, until I switched my novel from Bad Company to Spanner last month. I'll delay the expansion of "Any Monkey" for another year, barring any similar surprises...

The short stories I'm planning to write/edit this month are somewhat too much for that anthology. And so I'm posting them here on the project blog and on my (still under construction) main project site, and I've set up a page on this blog specifically for the Spanner Side Stories. I'm planning to edit one short story and completely rewrite one incomplete one. The story I'm editing is "Destroying Angel"; for a while now, I've had better ideas for that one, and I also want to tighten up the plot quite a bit. The story I'm rewriting is called "The Assassination of Satan Claus"; I'm throwing away everything I've written for that, now that I've got better ideas, a completely new plot, and a killer opening:

Boy Satan is much older than he looks. He used to be a thirtysomething vato and shootfighter called Kid Satan, whose gleeful rampages left a trail of property damage, dead bodies, broken women, and public outrage. Then he became obsessed with a certain beautiful and charismatic teenage professional slut with cinnamon skin and wild copper hair, named Rebel Styles (among other things). He thought raping her, killing her, and raping her again would make him a Big Swinging Dick in gangland. He attacked his target only to realize too late that she was a superior shootfighter, the infamous Spanner. When he woke up, he found himself stuck in the body of an eight-year-old boy.

That new opening paragraph uses the a new idea I came up with for the Spanner novel, "clone resurrection", to explain Boy Satan's origin. From this, a whole new story emerged.

The new story started as a collection of flashbacks and between-chapter interludes for Spanner. However, it developed a life of its own. In its finished form, "Rebel, Rebel" will chronicle the turning points in the lives of Willa Richter-Thomas (a.k.a. Rebel Mudlark, New Wave rocker) and her niece Shira Thomas (a.k.a. Rebel Styles, professional slut), from 1967 to 2012, in under 10,000 words. It begins with Willa's psychedelic birth and ends with the origin of Spanner. I'm using the cyberpunk approach of Spanner in a story mostly set in the recent past, and it encapsulates and concentrates every controversy contained in the longer extended novel. It's become less a "snip this chapter" and more of a Spanner prequel.

So that's my plan for AugNoWriMo 2010. And, of course, I've already started.

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