Spanner R5 #amediting Update: The Sinister Plot Is Complete, Now to Give the Characters Their Arcs

I thought I'd have trouble plotting all those messy or barely even written chapters of the new Spanner Book 1. To my surprise it turned out to be easier than I thought. Even so, I knew I had to finish the plot before I could start rewriting, or I'd remain stuck indefinitely. And now I have.

I started with the seven "flashback" chapters that take place earlier in the day. Some of them I kludged up out of really short chapters which I extracted out of Chapter 1 R4. I expanded everything and added real flashback scenes and a second plot thread. I did something similar to the 13 "present time" chapters that alternate with them. I made sure the plot coheres, the continuity has as few errors as possible, and there's some conflict and suspense in every chapter.

Finally, I organized the mess that was Interlude 0 and worked out the events of the next-to-last chapter, the big flashback chapter. Plotting these also turned out to be shockingly easy. Book 1's plot is now fully worked out so that I have a complete outline to work from.

But that was just the easy part. The real work now begins. Next come the all-important character arcs, especially those of main character Shira and apparent protagonist Rico. After that, I'm going to rewrite much or most of what I've written so far, and write what I haven't yet written. Once that's done, I'll need to do a full read-through and a second pass of editing to make sure I eliminate all the typos and continuity errors that slipped through. And I want to get it all finished and ready for the beta readers this month. And so it's on to the next step...

P.S. Incidentally, as Win Scott Eckert tells us, on this day in 1795 a certain meteor fell down near the hamlet of Wold Newton in Yorkshire, England, irradiating a very special group of people, some of whose descendants include various Spanner characters whom you'll recognize by the telltale names Becket (=Noel-Moriarty), Wilder (as in Clayton-Wilder), and Holmes...

Spanner R5 #amediting Update: Why Does the Future Keep Catching Up With Me?

In the Spanner comics script I did for Script Frenzy in 2008, I opened issue 2 with a Dalek-like security robot summarily executing a one-shot character. Then in Chapter 4 R3, I gave Corporate patriarch Dr. Lars Thorwald, chairman of Biotron, a more advanced production version of a prototype robot that uses an iPod as its head and brain.

And now this:

The article: <a href="http://rt.com/usa/207395-robocop-security-silicon-valley/">5-foot-tall 'Robocops' start patrolling Silicon Valley</a> (RT.com). The subject: a security robot now policing the streets of San Francisco — and it looks exactly like the one from the Script Frenzy 2008 version of Spanner #2.

Why does the future keep catching up with me?

One thing about speculative fiction is that an author must keep second-guessing the future. My second guesses involve "friendly fascism", the technology of oppression, the cyberpunk truism that the street makes its own uses for things, and the level of tolerance that masses of ordinary people have for tyranny before their desire to live forces them to revolt (and the eagerness of elites to push that tolerance to its limits). Not superheroes, not psychics, not vampires and werewolves and shapeshifters; those belong to my critique of superhero mythology.

My problem is that I've been delaying Spanner's publication for so long that history has started overtaking my speculation. This problem has become so bad that I actually moved the years in which the series takes place from 2014-16 to 2018-20, simply because 2014 had already arrived and thus was no longer speculative. I picked the 2014 date all the way back in 1994, when I aged Shira down from her original 25 down to the Standard Anime Protagonist Age of 15; now I've aged her back up to 19 while keeping her birthdate of September 9, 1999.

Some events that occurred in the middle of writing and editing Spanner:

1. the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the ensuing invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001-3, coupled with a "USA PATRIOT" Act that almost convinced me that the "future fascism" I'd been setting the series in since 1992 (if not 1989) had already arrived;
2. the death of Steve Jobs in 2011;
3. the "Arab Spring" revolutions and Occupy Wall Street movement, both also in 2011, and both of which failed; and
4. the anti-police-state protests going on as I write this.

On the technology front, progress in aircar, jetpack, hoverboard, and sexbot technology is such that all of them will be in commercial release by 2018. Despite the failure of Google Glass, augmented reality will become common and normal just as tablet computers, which were a pie-in-the-sky technology, have become today. Another new technology I borrowed toward the end of the plotting phase (late 2000s) was the smartphone; later, in the leadup to the NSA surveillance scandal, I gave my hackers and rebels generic smartphones without tracking devices; and now the PiPhone (made from one of those tiny Raspberry Pi computers) has convinced me that, under a Chinese-style phone company/ISP monopoly with massive supercomputers dedicated just to censorship, hackers must kludge up their own smartphones and use secure meshnets for calling without the monopoly's interference.

Even the particular manifestations of the reactionary politics I would later call "the Conservative Revolution" have largely come to pass. Apparently I didn't get dystopian enough to expect the British "panopticon" surveillance policy, the growth of Soviet-style "vote for the ruling-party candidate Or Else" elections in the US, or the return of the Gilded Age capitalist predators who tried in the 1890s to destroy American freedom and are trying yet again. I did throw in a tyrannical megacomputer, but that's almost a cliché of 1960s and '70s science fiction that — surprise! — turns out to have become a reality as well, along with The Terminator's Skynet. It also took me years to realize that the "Conservative Revolution" is really just the ultimate manifestation of the American Civil War that, despite the near universal assumption that it lasted only four years in the 1860s, really started in the seventeenth century (or even the thirteenth, the century of mother country England's Magna Carta) and has never ended.

Yeah, I know, science fiction has a reputation for making predictions that turn out to be not just wrong but impossible. I throw in some impossible things myself, usually to either critique the superhero mythology or pay homage to classic SF. But too much of the SFnal speculation I've put into Spanner since 1992 has already come to pass, and I'm certain a lot more of it will by the time the story begins in 2018.

Now to edit that second-issue opening back into the third chapter of the new Book 2...

Spanner R5 #amediting Update: The Insidious Plot, or Making This Thing Coherent

There's still a lot of chapters in Spanner Book 1, especially in the flashback chapters, which are made up of pretty much nothing but exposition. Originally I compiled them out of short segments which, in their original context as scenes scattered throughout the second half of Chapter 1 R4, didn't need action. Well, now that the short segments are part of long chapters, they need to contribute more than just background exposition to the plot. And so I'm going to plot the chapters. Among other things, I'm adding action, suspense, and antagonism generally.

There are seven flashback chapters. I have at least rough plots in mind for the first four:

1. "The Emergent Pattern": what choice of action will Jennifer take, and will it clash with Shira's?
2. "Climinal Team Origin": the girls have to convince Rico to join them for better reasons than just money and thrills.
3. "Breakfast at Winkie's": the team have to fend off both terrorists and cops at the same time and still get the weaponized malware and Cold War tech they need for their mission.
4. "Welcome to the Penguindrome": they have to root out a group of "boxed crook" police infiltrators, including one who will later become a major villain whose final act sets off the plot of Book 6.

The problem here is that the remaining three flashback chapters don't yet even have plots I can connect with each other and the present-time chapters. Agent Niemeyer and Paulie the Worm, who appear in "Breakfast at Winkie's", don't return to the foreground until the last flashback chapter, "The Fuses Have Been Lit". As for the remaining chapters, "Know Your Enemy" and "The Chosen One", I haven't even decided which segments of Chapter 1 R4 go where.

I have the same problem with several of the present-time chapters as well: they remain unplotted.

So here's my next challenge: before I get back to editing the narration and dialogue, I must give all these neglected chapters the plots they require, as if they really are the TV episodes I once intended them to be. Once I give them their structure, the rest should come easier.

Spanner R5 #amediting Update: The Post-NaNoWriMo Slowdown

I haven't done much editing this first week of December. Partly, it was the expected slowdown after a particularly frenzied late-NaNoWriMo Panic Time. It was also a busy week for me, requiring this night owl to wake up early because of the requirements of his early-bird mother's schedule, meaning loss of sleep, morning lethargy, afternoon fatigue, and headaches, leaving me too confused to do much editing work at all.

But I have in fact done some editing. After the Intro, Interlude 0, and the two introduction chapters, every chapter either has its own plot or otherwise fits into the main plot. For example, the new Chapter 3 (the first chapter of the flashback thread, now called "The Emergent Pattern") used to be episodic like the two chapters before it, but now has a coherent plot involving a choice so pivotal that the character who chooses it seems to be the real protagonist for most of the story, through both the flashback and present-time sections, a choice reinforced in the last two chapters of the flashback section only to be undermined at the very end. The new Chapter 10 (the present-time chapter "Escape to New York"), by contrast, is not relatively self-contained but carries on two sets of tightly intertwined threads from the previous chapter (8: "Hunting the Hunters") to the next (12: "Last Train to Grand Central"), one involving the villains in New York, the other involving the heroines speeding from Seattle and Los Angeles toward New York. Looking over the plot, it seems the flashback chapters are more episodic and the present-time chapters are more serial.

The other thing I've been focusing on is Shira's character arc. The main character of the series needs a strong character arc more than any other character. But Shira's arc is the hardest to successfully plot because of the three primary ways she acts:

1. she misdirects and otherwise tricks people, and hides in plain sight;
2. she rapidly adjusts her strategy to changing situations; and
3. she does what one least expects even when the situation doesn't change.

"Hunting the Hunters" (new Chapter 8) is a good example. Ostensibly Shira's in Washington, DC to save a young niece (Lucie in Revision 4, now Melodie) from both a pedophile senator and a team of assassins; but though she fails that mission due to another unexpected factor (the arrival of Drusilla's most dangerous priestly acolyte), she manages to steal Leila's power crystal from one of the assassins (Oliver), the one who claims ownership of Leila by marriage arrangement and also wields NaNoWriMo's infamous Travelling Shovel of Death (whose craving for blood he of course indulges). Shira surprises him by stripping naked in front of him specifically to fight him, whipping out her lead-loaded lemon-yellow Go-Yo™, stealing the crystal while he's still disoriented, and disappearing in front of his eyes. The example I just added is toward the end of "Prelude to Ascension" (new Chapter 19), when an attack on Shira through the computer in her head forces her to adjust her strategy just a little, but enough to change the outcome of "Spanner in the Works" (the last chapter) completely.

I hope that once the weekend's over and I get caught up on my sleep, I'll get my editing back up to speed. New story ideas must be fitted in and old darlings must be killed when they don't fit. Anyway, back to the scratch paper...