2014 Projects: Finish the Spanner Edit, Write Book 0, and Get Published

The holiday season was my excuse to slack off from editing and writing at the end of 2013. The combination of a Blu-Ray player and a new widescreen TV didn't help. That's over now. I've had my year-end vacation. It's back to work. And the muse is obliging with the craziest story ideas I've had in a long time:

1. The entire plot to Spanner Book 0, complete with new title ("Banned in Japan"). Now it begins with a Yakuza-Triad war interrupted by a certain masked prankster and graffiti tagger who goes by the handle Spanner, and ends with a political crisis that may end in a devastating war between an increasingly fascist Japan and Chinese Communist Party (Holdings) Limited.
2. A new graphic novel idea incorporating the "Blake Island incident" repeatedly referred to in Spanner Book 1, and which takes up one night during the time period of Spanner Book 0. On the night of July 14 this year, Jennifer will kill 52 hitmen, mercenaries, and serial killers. Now I know how it begins: with her and some far more broken female former child soldiers robbing the Seattle Triad (under flashy young boss Ringo Wing) of money, sex slaves, and a snuff pornographer who resembles an infamous web cartoonist, as dozens of disposable gangsters die John Woo style (I ask myself the question: how would Lone Wolf and Cub artist Goseki Kojima do a "heroic bloodshed" shootout?). Because it's so action-oriented, it will not be called "The Jennifer Theory"; I'll have to find yet another new story to match that title.
3. Three final tweaks to Spanner Chapter 1 (Jennifer's "Red Baron name" changed from Blonde Phantom to White Phantom; Shira kicking Johnny-Johnny in "his nonexistent manhood" to begin a recurring motif linked to the Blake Island incident and ending in Chapter 11; and a rewrite of the fourth flashback) and such a complete overhaul of Chapter 2 R5 that I'm even switching the positions of 2.2 and 2.3 to avoid pointless time reversals.

Getting that graphic novel off the ground necessitates, of course, that I start drawing again and actually improve my skills so I can actually draw real comics. I decided I'll even throw in a "comic within a comic", of the bad-webcomic kind, which I'll draw in the inferior style I abandoned in 1999, when I stopped trying to ape Masamune Shirow (and failing) and began developing my more recent Clamp-influenced style, which I'm now modifying in a more Takeshi Obata direction that allows me to incorporate more of my "school of Alex Raymond" influences: Neal Adams, Ryoichi Ikegami, Tony Wong, and Raymond himself (with elements taken from Will Eisner and midperiod Frank Miller).

Meanwhile, I'm going to get one non-Spanner novel published this year. In March, during NaNoEdMo, I'm going to pick one previous NaNoWriMo novel and edit it to as close to publication quality as I can in one month. I have four options: Bad Company from 2007, Black Science from 2008, Dirty Pop from 2009, and Freefall from 2013. Once I feel it's ready for release, I'll publish it online. Thus, after 25 years of practice and planning, I will become a published author at last. Then in April, now that Script Frenzy is dead, I'll throw myself into NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month) the way I do FAWM. To be a NaPoWriMo winner, you must write a poem a day for 30 days. I'll do my usual stuff inspired by the Surrealists and Beats, of course, but I'll also make my first attempts at traditional forms such as the sonnet, ode, and villanelle.

Above all, 2014 will be the year I complete the final edit of Spanner Book 1. Last year it took me 5 whole months to edit Chapter 1. One reason is that I completely changed certain older story elements (e.g. removing Hope and Karen and replacing them with Elle and new character Rico) and threw in new ones (e.g. the propaganda-video opening). I will not spend that much time on any later chapter, no matter how much I change it, not even Chapter 2 which I'm radically overhauling. Books 0, 1, and 2 are set this year, so I plan to get at least Book 1 published this year, Book 0 if I can squeeze it in.

And so it begins again...

NaNoWriMo 2013: The Heroic Effort to Victory #8

It took a heroic effort to get me to victory in NaNoWriMo 2013, my eighth consecutive victory. I only managed to squeeze out a few thousand words in the first week and a half. After editing Spanner Chapter 1 for so long (fortunately it's finished and formatted so I don't have to do anything more to it), it took me that long to convince my muse to switch from editing Spanner to writing this year's NaNo novel.

On the 18th, I succeeded at last.

Then came what you might consider the early equivalent of Panic Time. Starting that Monday, I had, in order, 6K, 6K, 4K, 10K, 4K, and 6K days before resting that Sunday, leaving me with a word count of 41,000. I slowed down the following week; the 50,000th word came on Thanksgiving, when my family (fortunately, it turns out) did not go to the nearest tribal casino for Thanksgiving dinner.

So what's the next thing I'm going to do to Freefall? After converting the Markdown format original to RTF so I can import it into yWriter5 for editing, I'll let it set for at least a week. Once I return to it, I'll begin the edit process. As I learned from two years editing Spanner, editing is where the real art of writing exists because it's the sculpting of the raw mass of first-draft words into the finished novel.

Speaking of editing, I have two other non-Spanner NaNo novels ready to edit (2007's Bad Company: A Corporate Terror Story and 2009's Dirty Pop) that I can also import into yWriter5. However, my big challenge for the "SpaNoEdMo" in December is Spanner Chapter 2, which right now has bloated to twice its Fourth Revision size and from which I'll have to cull story elements, some of which may have been present from the original draft.

There are some NaNo contestants who now feel (as I read in one post) "a novel-shaped hole in [their] heart". Not me. When I look at all the work I still need to do, especially all the editing, I have to take a deep breath. The sheer amount of editing to be done is daunting. But still I must do it.

The work continues.

NaNoFiMo 2010 For The Win!

I have now just won my first NaNoFiMo ever! I've been doing it for four years, but never won till now. All I had to write to win FiMo in earlier years was 30,000 words. This year, I decided to up my word count goal to 50,000, same as NaNoWriMo. And yet I won.

I think the change of novel did the trick.

Earlier, I focused on trying to finish my hard-to-finish '07 NaNo novel, Bad Company: A Corporate Terror Story. I failed to finish it every time, I won several WriMos after that, especially JulNoWriMo, but still I couldn't finish BadCo. So this year — two weeks into JulNo '10, to be exact — I gave up on BadCo and started novelizing my long-neglected manga project, Chaos Angel Spanner. That did the trick. I won JulNo with it, then lost yet another AugNoWriMo, resumed it during NaNo and won with it, and then won my first FiMo with it.

One thing that's been driving me to write it is the deadlines I set for myself. I'm posting Spanner here every Monday and Friday, something I started on November 1 (to coincide with the start of NaNoWriMo) and intend to continue till Book 5 ends sometime this next year. Another thing that's driving me is the years of frustration at not being able to teach myself how to draw comics, and the desire to finish a major project for perhaps the first time in my life. I'll get back to the drawing self-instruction later, since I'll be posting at least links to it here. But first, I want to finish Spanner once and for all.

Next: JanNoWriMo! My word count goal: 65,000. My real goal: finish Spanner Book 1, and then as much of Book 2 as possible.

JulNoWriMo: How I Won Without Writing "Bad Company"

I failed at JulNoWriMo. And yet I won. How did I pull it off? Simple: I abandoned Bad Company. I hardly even wrote a word of it. In fact, I might not even finish it at all.

What saved me, then? Well, on the afternoon of the 14th, I was napping in my recliner. I had a vivid dream. But it was not really a dream; it was the first chapter of Spanner. My muse had already decided to throw out the prequels and work on the original project. At once, I got onto a 5,000-word pace and wrote several chapters. When I slacked off, I invoked Panic Mode in the final week and got back up to 5K a day, finishing with a 10K day. And so I won.

Spanner, remember, is the story I started planning as a manga in 1992. Bad Company and its projected sequels were intended as novel prequels to the manga. However, 2014 is fast approaching and I still haven't been able to learn to draw comics. So, I'm writing it as a novel. Spanner's still very much cyberpunk, and it will still remain as controversial as I've always planned it. However, instead of the pretty (and ugly) pictures, what I'll be delivering is wild wordplay — at least for now.

The result is that I have 13 chapters and one prequel short story in various stages of completion. Before I start writing again, this time for AugNoWriMo, I'm going back and straightening out the plotlines. I have several plotlines from several years of the Spanner Project Notebooks (15 of them since '92!) that I want to incorporate into the story. I've already included several of the scenes and set pieces I've scripted since at least '99, if not all the way back to '92. I'm also developing the character arcs of several characters more. I'm working out new ideas in new Notebook entries (I use the Project Notebook as a workbook now that I have this project blog). I'll be scanning the Notebooks for ideas, scenes, characters, and storylines I missed last month. Then, I'll rework the plot and start writing again. Once again, it's 50,000 words.

My goal is to start serializing Spanner the novel online by the time NaNoWriMo begins in November. Watch for it!

Real-Life Bad Companies: The Empire of the Banks

(Note: The first two "Real-Life Bad Companies" posts were originally written last year. This was written first, but posted after the second entry, on mercenary corporations like Dictel.)

Sooner or later, I'll resume the hard work of editing Bad Company into something resembling a readable novel. Also, I've started drawing again for almost the first time in about 2 years, and I hope to reclaim my skills so I can draw Spanner myself. So I figure now is the time to write another little background entry. It's about "future history" and its history, so to speak. Recently I've noticed how so many "apocalyptic" novels are billed as "historical novels set in the future", and that future is supposed to be inevitable. I don't just mean various science fiction attempts at future histories (and not by the good writers, either). I mean especially the evangelical authors rewriting the same John Nelson Darby scenario. All these people have to support their claim that their scenario is inevitable is sheer blind faith. My advantage is that the events behind Spanner are already happening. My prediction: by the middle of this decade, the US, the EU, and all the other countries of the "Western" "capitalist" world will go bankrupt and get repossessed by the banks they're hopelessly in hock to. Thus the "Corporate Empire" is born, a pure corporatist dictatorship ruled by a tyrannical synarchy of not corporate bosses but of banking institutions led by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which inflict their "austerity" on the whole "Western" world. (Synarchy, remember, is Greek for "junta".) Spanner begins when America ends.

Real-Life Bad Companies: The Mercenary Corporations

In the first entry of my "Real-Life Bad Companies" series (Note: "Empire of the Banks", also written last year but not yet posted; I'll revise and post it soon), I introduced you to the thieves: the "bankster" predators who crashed the world economy and are now sucking it dry, vampirically. Now you'll meet the terrorists: the mercenary corporations the banksters intend to use against the nations they're about to repossess. These are the infamous and feared Dictels of the world: Blackwater-Xe, DynCorp, and so on. Right now they have more soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan than all the NATO governments combined. Eventually, when the banks repossess the nations, they'll privatize all the police agencies and military services under their control and consolidate all the public and private mercenary corporations into the all-powerful fist of Corporatism.

The problem with using national armies as colonial occupation forces serving corporate profit is that they run the danger of running away when the nations' voters turn against the occupation. Mercenaries like to say that government soldiers all too easily lose their will to fight. Duty, therefore, is not a strong enough motivation to oppress foreign nations. There is a force far stronger than duty, one which can drive a man to murder his mother: greed. The profit motive is a much better reason to wage unjust wars than fickle duty.

Bad Company: Corporatism Is a Satanic Cult!

Over the past couple years, I've posted Bad Company- and Spanner-related entries on what I call "political horror":

• Political Horror, or Governments as Living Gods and Corporations as Hostile Alien Lifeforms
• The Problem with Political Thrillers
• The Horror, The Horror; or, America Is God and Dictel Is Cthulhu
• What Is This Dictel Corporation, Anyway?
• The "Spanner Cyberpunk Gothic" series:
  
  • Spanner as Yuri Manga: "Precious Bodily Fluids" and Cyberpunk Gothic Gone Berserk
  • Part 2: Corporations as Gods, Robbery as Vampirism
  • Part 3: Corporatism as a Fanatic Cult

However, one element evaded me — until today. If, as the political-horror subgenre premise states, corporations have become the god-bodies of demons, then what kind of "fanatic cult" is corporatism, anyway? The answer is:

Corporatism is a satanic cult!

Bad Company: The Elusive Plotlines Finally Come Out

Something happened in the final two weeks before JulNoWriMo. The missing Bad Company plotlines that have evaded me for so long have finally started showing themselves to me. This is a very good sign. It can only mean one thing: I'm finally getting close to finishing a complete first draft!

All my previous BadCo drafts have been incomplete. It's not just that they have huge plot holes. Many entire plotlines and chapters are missing entirely. Some major characters don't even have character arcs yet. Such has been the difficulty I've had in writing it, to the point where I actually burned out twice (in August '08 and this last January).

Then, a few days ago, the character arc of one particular major character, an ambitious young reporter named Amanda, suddenly came to me during one of those half-sleep periods before I wake up during which I tend to get most of my best ideas. Her plotline in a nutshell: she begins as a celebrity gossip reporter on a tabloid TV show, sent by her boss to dig up the dirt on the main characters, sisters Charlie and Desiree, so that their mother, right-wing New Age cult guru Drusilla, can ruin them. She pursues the case only to end up taking the place of investigative reporter Bob, Charlie's fiancé, when she finds out exactly why Dictel Corporation had him murdered. And just in time for Dictel to invade America after the Republican defeat in the 2008 election. Her reporting helps defeat the corporate coup attempt.

I'm writing down these plotlines now, each in a separate Microsoft Word file. I'll do the same with the plotlines I've already written in the story itself as well. My goal is to have them all written and printed by July 1.

This is definitely good news. What's more, I may be able to post chapters before JulNo ends...

Bad Company: Revealed at Last, Dictel Corporation's Deepest Darkest Secret!

JulNoWriMo approaches, and it's almost time to write again. Meanwhile, my muse has started preparing me for it by providing me with the final key to Bad Company: the deep dark secret that Dictel Corporation wants to keep secret at all costs. And yes, it involves Dictel's late-1940s origins in the infamous Nazi Ratline. Idly thinking about how Triumph of the Will was the true sequel to Birth of a Nation, I realized the connection: 1) The KKK's burning of crosses is an ancient Satanic rite called "Christ burning", or the symbolic sacrifice of Christ to Satan as a fire offering or (in the technical term of sacrificial rites) holocaust. The Holocaust was Hitler's attempt to do the exact same thing — sacrifice Christ to Satan — by offering up Christ's entire race, the Jews, as a fire offering to the Dark Lord in the tradition of Aztec mass human sacrifices. After the Seven-Day War of 1967, when Israel proved the "true manhood" of the Jewish race (as Dictel founder Roger S. Becket put it) by clobbering all its invading Arab neighbors, Dictel dropped the anti-Semitism. After 9/11, Dictel picked up the old anti-Semitism once again, only aimed at the Arabs instead of the now revered Jews. This time Islam is considered the Satanism, and Dictel wants to force America to destroy Satan by annihilating all Muslims. For Roger Becket and his sons, this is Armageddon. Literally. And there's more...

Script Frenzy 2010: Hey, It's Panic Time Again...

It's the last week of Script Frenzy, and for the first time I find myself faced with the dreaded Panic Time. In most novel writing months (last year's NaNoWriMo being the exception), I find myself with 30,000 words left to write when the final week begins, and I have to write all that in one week. If I want to reach 50,000 words and therefore win, I have to forcibly shift myself into Panic Mode. This time, I've got 58 pages to go to reach 100 and win Script Frenzy, and I've got one week to do it. I'm not going to ask myself the question "Can I do it?" because I've come back from worse deficits.

Now here's the problem. I normally have zero trouble writing scripts. My one Script Frenzy win so far, in 2008, consisted of 171 pages of Spanner script. Never mind that I found shortly afterward that I'd have to completely rewrite #1 and ditch the three later issues; I wrote them, and easily.

The problem is that I'm adapting. And what I'm adapting is my troublesome 2007 NaNoWriMo novel, Bad Company, which continues to try to keep me from finishing it no matter what I do. This adaptation has proved much harder than I thought. Maybe that's because I've been focusing on all the new scenes that aren't yet in the novel, particularly when Dictel invades America in the final third or so of the novel. What's more, the movie version of a novel is the Reader's Digest Condensed Version in script form. I'll worry about condensing the script, though, when I get into the editing stage, which is not my concern in April.

As I write this, it just occurred to me that there's an easy way for me to secure a surefire win. In fact, it's precisely what I did back in '07 when I adapted the one good scene from my '06 NaNo novel (the scene which I'm expanding into an entire novel called Black Science). Basically, I open up the novel files in Word and the script file in Celtx. I look for a scene to adapt, one that I haven't adapted yet, and then I adapt it, replacing all the first-person narration with, well, script. I usually transfer the dialogue intact, unless I decide I want to edit the dialogue. Yeah, that's how I'm going to do it.

I'm still going to win this thing. But this time it takes a Panic Time...

Script Frenzy 2010: Bad Company, The Movie!

Those of you who know me sufficiently know that I've been struggling with a novel called Bad Company (short description: mercenary corporation invades America to reverse Obama election) since NaNoWriMo 2007. This novel burned me out twice already, maybe three times (the third being last month, when I lost my first NaNoEdMo ever). For last year's Script Frenzy, I attempted to finish BadCo as a graphic novel script, only to be interrupted by moving across town. This year, I'm finishing BadCo as a movie.

Control and the City

The small town is notoriously oppressive. It is ruled by patriarchs (mayor, police chief, pastor, banker) and through gossip and rumor. In a world made up of small towns, most people live outside town, in the country; rural people are even more easily ruled, and have traditionally been owned by lords and kings. In both cases, monarchical and hierarchical control are made easy by the fact that the ruled masses have nowhere else to go; they know their place because they are stuck there, in one spot, forever. But the absolute power that the patriarchs have held over the past 10,000 years of agricultural civilization is threatened with destruction by the inherent democracy of the city. Thus, with the desperation of the dying, they inflict all kinds of control technologies on the city in order to abolish its chaos and impose onto it the oppressive stasis of the village. Hence surveillance cameras, tracking systems, mandatory ID systems, and so on and so forth. The purpose is to reduce the city to a small town that just happens to have a lot of people. But, as the fall of Communism shows, this is easier said than done. Enter Dictel Corporation.

NaNoFiMo 2009: The Index Card Stage for Bad Company

After my first NaNoFiMo writing session last Sunday, I turned back to reading library books. I'm mining them for story ideas I can use. And I think I've got a whole bunch of good ones now. In this tweet, for instance, I announce: "The role of Keyser Soze will now be played by Blackwater." You read that right: instead of being merely the giant monster in the disaster movie of anticorporate political thrillers, Dictel is now playing the Satan of gang bosses in the form of an evil military corporation. Got it? There's more crazy ideas where that came from. And now I've finally collected enough new story ideas that I'm starting to feel that the plot of Bad Company will actually hang together. So now I'm ready to begin the long-delayed index card stage. The cards are ready.

Over the past two years since I started writing Bad Company for NaNoWriMo '07, I've built up quite a deck of index cards. I've used them to plot out scenes, apparently to no avail, since the plot still hasn't come together. Now I've started flipping through the deck, separating the useful ones from the ones I don't need anymore. Once I've removed the obsolete cards from the deck, I'll return to the AugNoWriMo '09 version of the BadCo file, match scenes with cards, and write new cards for scenes without cards. Then I can lay out my cards on the living room floor and figure out where the remaining plot holes are. Then I'll take my list of new story ideas, place them on their own deck of cards (written in a different color of ink), and then insert new cards with the new story ideas wherever they fit. And, of course, I'll use this stage to fill in the remaining plot holes.

The next step, of course, will be to start writing. But I can't start writing till I have an idea what to write. That's why I have to go through the index card stage.

Then I'll write those 30,000 words that will give me my first NaNoFiMo victory...

NaNoFiMo 2009: The Update Update

I've been reading lots of books instead of writing during the week since my first NaNoFiMo writing session. Last night, I focused on gleaning story ideas from what I read, writing them down, and organizing them. I think I have all the story ideas I need to finish Bad Company now. The next thing to do is track down my pack of BadCo index cards and complete the set.

Yes, I will finish BadCo, write 30,000 words this month, and win FiMo for the first time ever. Now I need to get the index cards and the already written scenes organized, find the plot holes, and start writing. But first, I had to get sufficient story ideas from my readings. I might not use all of them.

Next: the story is now in the cards...

Dictel Corporation and the Holy Grail

Once again, I took my usual break after an intense NaNoWriMo (which is why I usually have to do Panic Time in the final week of any WriMo). When I started preparing for NaNoFiMo '09 at last, I did it by reading books that I thought would be important sources for Bad Company. Were they ever! On the side of realism, there's Welcome to the Urban Revolution: How Cities are Changing the World by Jeb Brugmann and Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (Canadian name: The Rebel Sell: Why Culture Can't Be Jammed) by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter. On the more mystical front, I found the notorious book by Otto Rahn called The Crusade Against the Grail, which is also redirecting me toward some books that have been languishing on my bookshelves. All are transforming the plot of Bad Company. I can feel the plot actually transforming into something coherent. And, considering the trouble I've had working the various plot threads of Bad Company into something coherent since I started writing it during NaNo '07, that's saying something.

NaNoWriMo 2009: My Progress Report

Today is the last day of NaNoWriMo, and for the first time I can take a rest. Well, I did do some writing today, but I decided to stop at 85,317 words. That's more than I've written in any Writing Month, ever. I can rightly say that this time around, I was on. And at no time was I more on than on Friday the 13th, when I wrote over 11,000 words to clinch my victory, before finishing the first draft of Dirty Pop just a week later.

I've definitely made progress over previous WriMos. The first two, in '06 and '07, I got my 50,000 words in a final-week push I came to call Panic Time. NaNo '08 was all Panic Time, as I wrote all 54K words in the final week, after a nearly four-month bout of writer's block that began on the first day of AugNoWriMo while I was still struggling to finish my '07 monster, Bad Company.

As for word counts, I've been breaking personal records in the last year. In last year's NaNo, I wrote over 54,000 words in that final week. Two months later, I beat that record with 63,161 words for JanNoWriMo. And now my NaNo best, 85,317 this month.

Winning NaNo on some day earlier than November 30? Actually finishing a first draft, and without using an outline or even an index card? Those are absolute firsts for me. Forget my record word count; those are the actual firsts.

NaNoFiMo is starting now. I'm not starting it yet, however. First, I want to get out my index cards, the ones I didn't use during NaNo, and do some replotting. I'll replot Dirty Pop in order to edit it, and I'll replot Bad Company so I can find out where the plot holes are and what important characters and storylines are missing so I can finish it. I might take a break in the next few days. Maybe. But there's still writing (and editing) to do, and a book (or two) to finish...

NaNoWriMo 2009: The First Draft Is Finished!

This is a month of NaNoWriMo firsts for me. First, I wrote my 50,000th word in my long 11,000-word Friday the 13th session that lasted well into the morning of the 14th. That counts as the first time I've ever won a WriMo (one that's not FAWM or Script Frenzy, anyway) early, without a Panic Time. Here's another first: I've completed the first draft of a novel for the first time in my life! What's more, I finished it on November 21, just three weeks into NaNoWriMo!

Bad Company: What Is This Dictel Corporation, Anyway?

Now that I've slowed down writing my new novel Dirty Pop for NaNoWriMo, my mind is beginning to return once again to that '07 NaNo novel that has defeated me repeatedly: Bad Company. The novel I'm now subtitling "A Corporate Horror Story" (because, remember, the villainous corporation tried to invade America in a futile attempt to keep the collapsing Republican dictatorship in power) is about to get its third go-round in NaNoFiMo, and this time I'm determined to finish it. I'm going to make this "National Novel Finishing Month" live up to its name, at least for me and BadCo.

But first, I need to know for certain what the giant military conglomerate that gives Bad Company its name truly is. What, really, is Dictel Corporation? The first thing I'll tell you is that it's more than just some parasitic for-profit entity. Much more.

NaNoWriMo 2009: Land Speed Record!

As I write this, I've written over 25,000 words of this year's NaNoWriMo novel. I hit that mark at 11pm my (Pacific) time. That's the fastest start I've ever made during any WriMo. Usually during any WriMo, I procrastinate long enough that it takes me a last-minute "Panic Time" to win. This won't happen. The way I'm sprinting now, I'm going to write my 50,000th word and win NaNo by the end of this week, and I'll complete the entire first draft of Dirty Pop before NaNo ends. This is as new to me as NaNo itself was when I did my first one back in 2006. And Dirty Pop has turned out to be more coherent in its first iteration than any other novel I've attempted to write. I'm beginning to awe myself.

But...

Remember those other novels I've written the past three NaNoWriMos? Let's see: they're called The Jennifer Theory, Bad Company, Black Science, and Points of Authority New Race New Flesh. Yeah. Those. They're still not finished, not a one of them. And not one of them still has a coherent plot, or more than a semblance of one. So far they still resemble nothing so much as the "practice songs" Charlie and her band play to warm up before recording sessions and live shows in Dirty Pop. The rest of the year, except for FAWM and Script Frenzy, is dedicated to trying to finish all these novels, one by one.

I will finish Dirty Pop this month. First the first draft, with which I'm going to win NaNo in just two weeks; then the edited version that I'm posting online as my very first blog novel. But then I'll have to return to Bad Company one more time for one more NaNoFiMo before I can consider it ready for NaNoEdMo at last. I'll have to completely replot the story before I can write the final words of the first complete draft. And those plotlines and story arcs that still want to fly apart? I still need to tie them together so they can operate as a unit and reinforce each other. Then during JanNoWriMo, I'll be taking on Black Science and write the majority of the novel I still haven't written even after four years. Even after I start serializing Dirty Pop online, I'll still have to finish that unfinished business.

As for the "land speed record" of the title, it's my personal record, not an actual world record. Just forget about Kateness and her one million words in just one month...

NaNoWriMo Prep: Dirty Pop, the Record Companies, and the "Law" of Social Darwinism

#NaNoWriMo #writers
Lately, my villains have started invoking what they call the "Law of Social Darwinism". What is Social Darwinism? Basically, the game of "king of the hill" turned into an all-encompassing worldview. "Survival of the fittest" and all that, you know. Capitalism is based entirely on Social Darwinism, if you believe the most ruthless robber barons and the fiercest anticapitalists. When you hear the words "Law of Social Darwinism" come out of the mouth of one of my characters, especially if the character gives it a positive spin, you know you've facing a villain, and our heroes are in trouble. Case in point: in Dirty Pop, the ruthless record company chairman, based partly on the Ned Beatty character in Network, who tells our poor heroine Charlie that he owns her.