Spanner Chapter 10: Fashion Meltdown (Revision 4)

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Chaos Angel Spanner — Book 1: Rock City Blues
Chapter 10: Fashion Meltdown (Revision 4)

Minty Fresh is back — for revenge! Shira puts a “lust song” on the Darknet just to bait her, and she answers with a Challenge to a song war. But Shira has to deal with more than just one angry pop idol. Unwanted fiancé Oliver wants to steal Leila back, preferably violently. The head of Seattle’s Russian mob wants to steal Leila from both. The Klown gang known as the Badd Boyzz want her just plain dead...

Table of Contents:

0. Interlude 7: Pop Will Eat Itself (August 4, 2011, Final Revision 8/30/12)
1. Song for Minty (July 30, 2011, Final Revision 12/10/12)
2. Exploding Youth (July 31, 2011, Final Revision 9/15/12)
3. She’s Got the Look (August 1, 2011, Final Revision 9/17/12)
4. For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge (August 2, 2011, Final Revision 9/19/12)
5. Battle of the Pop Idols (August 3, 2011, Final Revision 9/19/12)
6. Vengeance and Fashion (August 4, 2011, Final Revision 9/20/12)

Moved from Chapter 4: the “exploding Klownz” scene. New major characters: Frank Becket, Misty Everson Thorwald, Christina Lopez (final appearance), and Vitaly Rodchenko (first appearance). New thread in Fourth Revision continuity: Shira’s new neighbours introduced in 10.1, who will become important starting in Chapter 12.

The original introduction and revision notes:

First Revision (2010): Here’s the first major episode in the “Fashion War” plotline that will be running throughout Spanner. Once again, I’ve cobbled together several fragmentary scenarios and pulled them into a coherent whole. The music video (narrated, of course) and the “fashion war” itself are new; but the “school shooting,” “serial killer clique,” and “Pie Kill” scenarios, the “Wild Style” idea, and the characters of Arvid Shield, Minty Fresh and Lala Sun-Microsoft come from the early-’00s Project Notebooks (numbers 11-14) from before I started doing NaNoWriMo.

This is the last chapter of Spanner Book 1 that I wrote during the 2010 editions of JulNoWriMo and AugNoWriMo. Starting next chapter, I’m using NaNoFiMo (National Novel Finishing Month) as my excuse to finish the rest of Book 1. This is, in fact, the first new chapter to use material written during FiMo. (The expanded Chapter 2 contains the first material I wrote for FiMo ’10.)

This time, I’m not just throwing in the usual wild plot pyrotechnics here. Now we’re getting into Wild Style!

Oh yeah: this time there’s songs, too...

Second Revision (2011): Minty Fresh returns, and she wants revenge! So she Challenges Shira to a Song War. Shira being Shira, all chaos proceeds to break loose. Meanwhile, Shira and Leila find themselves forced to defend their love for each other, and Shira uses her Charmer power on a pair of heavily armed delinquents hellbent on a massacre...

Unusually, I wrote the opening Interlude last. It was hard to write, since my intention was to write it in a pop-musical style (actually swiped from Barry N. Malzberg’s psychedelia-influenced 1973 New Wave science fiction novel The Men Inside), but I’m convinced it was worth it.

Second Revision Update: The introduction to the original chapter remains almost perfectly relevant [Revision 4 note: not quite so much anymore], except for two things: 1) I renamed the Fashion War plotline to the Pretty City Arc; and 2) I never finished the first-draft version of Chapters 22 and 23, so I never posted them (I’ll finally be posting the revised and expanded [Second Revision] versions in October 2011 [which I finally did]).

Note: This was the last chapter in the incomplete Third Revision. Everything from this point on is revised from the even more inferior Second Revision. Some of the Revision 2 chapters are half the Revision 4 length, so the difference in places will be vast. Just so you know...

Chapter 11 (Revision 2) →

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Copyright © 2011, 2012 Dennis Jernberg. Some rights reserved.