What's In Store for Spanner in 2013

Looks like I took an unintentional break from editing Spanner Chapter 14 over the extended New Year's weekend. Anyway, now it's the year before the story actually begins, and I'm still editing Book 1. So what are my plans for the series this year?

1. I'm going to finish the final edit of Book 1, of course. I'm just over halfway to the end. Unlike with Revision 3, I want to get all the way to the end.
2. Complete the first draft of Book 2, then do a full edit before I start posting installments.
3. Plot Book 3 and begin writing a first draft — sure, there's scenes written, but right now they're just fragments.
4. Complete the Book 1 ebook and get it ready to sell through the online bookstores. This means not just the expensive parts such as buying what I need to keep full creative control, but also the covers and possibly inside illustrations.
5. Get my drawing skills back to the level at which I can finally do the long-delayed task of designing my characters.

For the remainder of Book 1 Revision 4, there's many new elements I've decided to throw in that were completely absent from R2. Here's how I plan to do it:

1. Expand the "anonymity is freedom" theme to include people with one-word or even one-letter or -character names, plus the most important names of all: the numbers the Imperial American government gives pretty much everybody on the planet it claims to rule forever by divine right.
2. Take Book 3 characters Shane Chantry (from the mid-1990s Project Notebooks), Oz Bean (the black rodeo cowboy from Texas), and Radica Maxx (Shira's jealous archrival in hoverboard racing, always sick and tired of being number 2) and insert them in the later stages of Book 1. I've already done this to Shane in 13.5 and 14.1. Oz will make his first appearance in 15.2. Radica... where should I put her? I'll figure it out sometime soon.
3. Expand on certain neglected characters from previous chapters, including those new to R4: Daisy Kwon, Irina Lanskaya, Zac Finney, Hope Reston, the librarians and other dissident teachers, etc. The third-act "homestretch" (Chapters 16-23) should give me plenty of room to do so as I prepare to clear out certain Book 1 characters to make way for the Book 2 supporting cast.
4. Escalate both the "cyberpunk" and "Orwellian" aspects of the story.
5. Weaponize "the power of rock": on the government side, the Patriot Metal superstars and their battle copters; on the other, the Rockers with their instruments (lead guitars, electric violins, circuit-broken Casio SK-1s, Roland 808 bass cannons, etc.) connected to sound cannons. Combine this with "the power of love" weaponized by Shira and Leila starting Chapter 15, and CPMC may die from "rule of cool" alone — but the point of Chapters 16-23 is that "rule of cool" is not enough without the masses taking action on their own behalf.

And so this is my plan for Spanner in the year before the story begins. As I myself am impatient as to how the story's going to turn out, I get the feeling I'll be following this plan to its completion, unlike previous years. And it starts tonight, as I've started editing the second half of Chapter 14. 14.4 will post on Friday because my muse refused to work during the extended New Year's weekend. But she's back on duty now and attacking the story again as we speak. It continues...