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...

Spanner R4 Update: Chapter 4, First Pass: Slashers, Gangsters, Jihadis, and Nihilists

First Revision 4 edit of Chapter 4, with a special focus on the villains: serial killers Oliver Thorwald, Johnny-Johnny Johnson, and Mark Bernkastel; misanthropic Corporate warlord Lars Thorwald; crime lord Arvid Shield; various Klown gangsters; the mobsters whose Syndicates are identified by ethnic slurs; the third jihadi out of the five who escaped from Bangor Jail in Chapter 3; and that nameless Nihilist who shoots up a coffee shop and tears out his own throat in the brand new opening sequence.

In that opening sequence we find out something important about Shira's Charmer power: if your faith is absolute enough, even faith in nothing, you have no defense against a Charmer as powerful as Shira (or Arvid). She'll demonstrate this over and over in subsequent chapters. Also, she explains the difference between terrorists and nihilists: terrorists want to take over (their specialty is demanding unconditional surrender Or Else), but nihilists merely want to destroy everything. During the fight scene, Jennifer shows that being a Final Girl means she has no more tolerance for nihilists than she does for serial killers (e.g., Bernkastel in Chapter 5). (Reminder to self: at least map out a rough plot summary for The Jennifer Theory so you'll have something to work with once you get to the visual novel.)

Scenes from the Script Frenzy TV episode script include:

1. the funeral of Dr. Lars Thorwald (whose cloned backup bodies were poisoned in Chapter 3), now merely the notification of his explosive death, but still introducing his research chief and sometime lover Dr. Mina Tatsumi;
2. the flight over Dictel Park in Bangor (the fictional city I placed west of Bremerton next to the nuclear submarine base) that turns into a fight between Shira and Bernkastel over a girl who turns out to be Mimi, originally introduced in Chapter 5;
3. the four scenes with Desiree's lost daughter Lucie as she escapes Drusilla;
4. the Shira/Hope love scene in which Shira warns Hope never to give in to the temptations of power in the Teachers Guild hierarchy;
5. the "Touhou Online MMORPG" scene with "Aya Shibata" and the first online appearance of J.T. Sparks as "Debaser"; and
6. the coffee shop scene in which Shira finds herself being headhunted by Corporate coolhunters she names "John Nike" and pranks them by slipping Alka-Seltzer into their Diet Cokes (remember that experiment?).

The rest of the chapter remains from the Second and Third Revisions. However, there's a few changes I want to make:

1. I want Jennifer's cousin Samantha Blair to return;
2. Polly's mother Rosalie (Shira's dad's first love) will join the family strategy conference mid-chapter;
3. Ariel's shop will be in Bremerton rather than Port Townsend, which will be a major plot point come Chapter 16;
4. Hiromatsu Fukuda, the "otaku no baka" who manages to marry the anime version of Aya Shibata, gets facetiously dubbed "Hiro-nyan" by Shira (partly a homage to flighty Yui and her Azu-nyan in K-On!; "nyan" is Japanese for "meow"); and
5. the cats at Shira's apartment need to be introduced, not only red tabby Mikan walking on the piano keyboard, but a neutered yet still fierce Angora named Tanner (named after MGM's scariest lion) who will later show an even more violent antipathy toward Dr. Becket than Mikan does in Chapter 16 and should be introduced probably purring on the bed due to his special fondness for Shira, whom animals tend to love as much as they hate Dr. Becket; there's also a dog named Catalina, one of the sweet-tempered Reston pit bulls, who is Shira's registered K-9 that she'll be walking a lot in dog-friendly downtown Bremerton.

My goal right now is just to finish scenes. I'll cut the chapter down to size (once again, to just over 15,750 words) on the second pass.

Script Frenzy Day 2: In Which the Muse Changes My Script

Script Frenzy day 2. After I got home and posted my first Screnzy entry, I started writing. But the muse refused to write my visual novel script! She's still hyperfixated on Spanner. She wants me to adapt it, and she won't let me do otherwise.

And so I put my visual novel aside for now, and started Spanner where I left off last year. In other words, episode 4 and later. So I upgraded Celtx, signed up for their online cloud service (web app and cloud storage), and resumed writing the TV scripts. Starting with yesterday's Chapter 7 preview, no less. After that, I went back two chapters to write the climactic sequence to Episode 5, which so far I haven't yet written for the novelization's fourth draft. And then I went back again to start completing Chapter (Episode) 4.

Don't worry, though, visual novel fans! I'll still get to The Jennifer Theory. Thing is, I still have to climb my way up the learning curve first, and that's going to take a little time...

Script Frenzy 2012: In Which He Attempts to Script a Visual Novel

NaNoEdMo 2012 is now finished, though my fourth draft of Spanner isn't. But now Script Frenzy has begun. And lo, what did I decide but to abandon my original plan to adapt a new batch of Spanner chapters into TV episodes in order to flirt with a new obsession: the visual novel.

What is a visual novel? It's something like a videogame version of a "Choose Your Own Adventure" novel that's recently become huge in Japan. Actually, the form is older than you think, and it didn't even start on any computer system. It dates back to the 1985 laserdisc arcade game Thayer's Quest, whose creator had the "Choose Your Own Adventure" novels specifically in mind because, well, how else do you translate the experience of Ultima or the Atari 2600 Adventure on a laserdisc system? But though the storytelling has improved greatly in the ensuing decades (just compare Thayer's Quest and the rest of the Kingdom series to, say, When They Cry or Fate/stay night), the actual gameplay system has not. Visual novel elements have been incorporated into various adventure game genres (e.g. the "conversation" scenes in the Persona series). But considering how in writing Spanner I've been mutating the political thriller genre far beyond the ANSI Standard Thriller Format, I can see that this game genre that hasn't really changed since the days of laserdisc arcade games, I can't help but try to push its limits to the breaking point too. I'm already mulling possible minigames, say, puzzle games, hidden-object games, SCUMM-language point-and-click adventures...

But I won't be concerned with that this month, not really. During Script Frenzy, my primary concern is with the script. And with its translation into an open source game system called Ren'Py. The Ren'Py site explains:

Ren'Py is a free and cross platform engine for digital storytelling. It makes it easy to combine words, images, and sounds to create visual novels and life simulation games.

Visual novels are computer-based stories that are told through words, images, sounds, and music. Many visual novels also present the player with menu choices that allow the player to control how the story is told.

Ren'Py's script language makes it easy to write visual novels, and other writing-heavy games. It's easy to learn, and scales well to the largest projects. Even without customization, Ren'Py provides the features players have come to expect from their visual novels.

Life Simulation games, such as management and dating sims, are more interactive games that mix story with gameplay. Ren'Py's screen language allows one to create complex interfaces, while its support for the Python scripting language makes allows for complex game logic, if that's what your project requires.

Now, Ren'Py's scripting language doesn't look like the standard script formats used for movies, TV shows, comics, and stage plays. Furthermore, you can add Python scripts to your visual novel's main Ren'Py script (that's the "Py" part), many of which are available online but none of which I'll add to my Script Frenzy page count even if I write some myself.

And my first visual novel? It's called The Jennifer Theory. It has nothing to do with my NaNoWriMo 2006/Script Frenzy 2007 project that quickly mutated into another novel entirely, but is a graphic novel that I've been thinking about doing almost as long as Spanner itself, as a side story or (as it eventually turned out) a prequel. I'm reworking it as a visual novel. It's a thriller that wouldn't be much of a "ren'ai" (romance) game anyway (there would be only two romantic choices for Jennifer anyway, her mother [this is a Spanner Side Story] and her favorite cousin Shira, and no way would she dare choose between them). So I'm using thriller conventions to push the limits of a game genre.

So that's what I'm doing. Now to do it...

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...

Now that I've won NaNoWriMo again...

After an excruciating battle with my archenemy, procrastination, leading up to the most spectacular comeback I've ever pulled off, I won my third consecutive NaNoWriMo victory. In my three years doing NaNo, I've never lost one. I've put too much of my ego into it to allow myself to lose one. The price is that the story I was writing — which I've decided won't be called Points of Authority after all — suffered the complete collapse and fragmentation of its plot. That should teach me not to start NaNo unorganized. But now what?