Monday, October 31, 2011

NaNoWriMo Starts at Midnight! My Writing Plan for Spanner Book 3

This being Halloween, I'm deliberately avoiding the trick-or-treaters tonight and spending my time at my computer preparing for NaNoWriMo 2011. I've already decided the novel I'll be working on is Spanner Book 3, and it begins with this sentence:
Agent Diana Shockley points her pistol into a reality distortion field.
This is the opening of a scene that came to me fully formed one day as I was walking alongside a busy city street on the way home from the gym. Also in Book 3: gang wars in Las Vegas, the destruction of Phoenix in a Conservative Revolutionary Party factional war over "conservative democracy" and crashed by psycho Mexican biker gang Los Punkz, the kidnapping of Shira and Leila's desperate attempts to rescue the woman she loves, the love triangle that Kira forms with rogue cop J.T. Sparks and investigative reporter Amanda Currie, and the increasingly hysterical crackdowns by Party Chairman Henry Becket even as his superpowers become ever more unstable. It is in Book 3 that it becomes clear the conflict is between good bad guys and evil good guys (unfortunately, the masses are pretty much left out until Book 5).

My writing plan: since a typical Spanner chapter is approximately 10,000 words long (and structured like a TV show), I intend to write one chapter every two or three days. I'll also be delving deep into my Project Notebooks to dig out scenarios I planned long ago to use in Book 3, including the scenes of Leila going into dream reality in order to rescue Shira from the pocket universe Eugenics Institute chief Dr. Sig Heiler has imprisoned her in, and the Neal Adams-inspired sequence at the end in which, to get Shira's mind out of Dr. Becket's, Team Spanner provoke him into losing control of his superpowers and involuntarily letting out a huge electromagnetic pulse that reaches hundreds of miles away from the epicenter in Colorado Springs. I described these scenarios in great detail in multiple entries. There should be others there. However, the Phoenix arc is entirely new, and inspired by an episode of the anime Kino's Journey and the cult movie Intrépidos Punks, both of which I discovered only this year, the former on TV Tropes and the latter in a book on punk rock in movies, Destroy All Movies!

Meanwhile, I'll continue to edit Book 1, this time using yWriter5 so I can keep the entire book together, and posting new installments of Book 2 starting tomorrow. And, of course, I'll keep you posted on my NaNo progress.

Here goes...

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