Spanner R5 Update: Chapter 1 Progress on Our Heroine's 14th Birthday, Plus Newest Stuff I Threw In

Shira is fourteen today. That's the age she is when Spanner begins just over 11 months from now. Among other things, this is a reminder for her author to hurry up and edit Book 1, Chapter 1 especially.

Those two long scenes that resisted editing so long are now complete and vastly improved. 5 of Chapter 1's 8 sections are finished as well, except for the new opening I haven't yet written (it's still in outline, a 15-part outline based on the plot points declared obligatory for Hollywood movie scripts by the late Blake Snyder in Save the Cat!). I finally got it into my story-crammed head that yWriter5 has a global search function I could use to change the name of R5 new character Oscar Ribeiro and his handle Blackflag to "Rico X" (real name unknown). I even reread Shira's opening videoblog post and found new improvements I could make in a scene I thought was already done. I do still have challenging scenes to edit later, especially in 1.7; but except for the new opening I've now conquered all the hardest parts. It should be easier from here on out.

The Name Game
Turns out the deliberate namelessness of certain female characters is only half the story. The other half, sure enough, involves names. When the first nameless woman to appear in R5 (in 2.3, to be exact) claims (in a new scene in 3.1) that names are masks and traps, she's referring to the oppressive social constructions built around naming conventions. On the Conservative Revolutionary side, you have these:

1. the long names and multiple titles of High Corporate aristocrats, in imitation of royalty and feudal nobility;
2. the Patriot, Syndicate, and terrorist practice of warrior men using their names as their war cry;
3. in conservative traditional societies, the traditional patriarchal power of naming and renaming, so beloved of cult gurus;
4. the technocratic tradition of identifying people by numbers, used as a marker of lower caste by the Party, formalizing the class divide between Corporates and "mundanes" into rigid castes called Names and Numbers; and
5. name magic, or the ability to control any human or spirit by controlling their names, for which Byron Scofield has the talent and main antagonist Henry Becket has the skill.

I decided to research name magic further and discovered that the ancient Egyptians put special emphasis on the magic power of one's name, or ren. They believed that if one's ren was erased, one's ka (basically, soul) would be destroyed and one would cease to exist. This is what the enemies of Pharaoh Ikhnaton tried to do to his name, and it was the dire punishment reserved for tomb robbers. Gods and pharaohs bore many names as a matter of policy, as a security measure to prevent the memory of them from being erased. Likewise, the city of Rome in ancient times kept its occult name a state secret as jealously guarded as the US nuclear launch codes lest enemy cities and kingdoms use it to curse the city.

Originally I had in mind the ceremonial magicians who summon spirits by name in order to force them to do their will, a staple of spellbooks from ancient times. In Japan, the onmyouji call this kind of name magic kotodama, in which one can gain complete control over any entity using its true name.

Leila in particular brings these two together. In 13.6 Scofield discovers he has no power over her because by then she has erased her name and therefore no longer has a name for him to control her by. In the following scene, she announces to her hated grandfather Governor Brinkman that by erasing her name she has freed herself from his power. His reaction? In R4 he freaks out, uncontrollably shifts into werewolf mode, and howls at God. In the R5 version he tells her why: by erasing her own name — her ren — she has committed soul suicide. She replies, yes, she has slain her Ego and is now a free woman, and now she will follow her True Will into ecstatic self-annihilation in the arms of her true love. And remember that in Spanner mysticism always has political consequences. Brinkman's reaction, in both Revisions 4 and 5, is to declare martial law, evacuate Metropolitan Seattle, and bring the Party elite to perform a massive spiritual-warfare ritual — this is Chapter 15, the Party's first major setback on the home front.

From Egyptian mythology I went forward in time to do that research on Aleister Crowley's magical philosophy which I intended to do for mystical king of bankers Dick Becket but procrastinated, which lead to...

Edits Outside Chapter 1
If you've studied enough Crowley or Enochian magic, you'll know who/what Babalon and Choronzon are. If you haven't, I can sum them up as respectively the Great Whore and the entity of absolute entropy. Dick Becket has become convinced that Shira is the "Daughter of Babalon" and Spanner is the "earthly manifestation of Choronzon". Since he's not fond of either entity, his mystical assumptions will drive his adversarial actions. Shira, unbeliever that she is, takes full advantage. (Note: I'm starting to think this series will end up gaining a hardcore following among chaos magicians...)

Elsewhere, I'm culling scenes in 2.1 and editing 2.6 to fit the final continuity. I've changed the character who has Shira tracking Talia's latest terror attempt in 4.1 from rocker Simon to the nameless woman who is now building manager in R4 the Asian woman from Chapter 12; elsewhere in Chapter 4, I'm turning long scenes into sequences and planning a conclusion as intercut as 4.1. Chapter 4 has a new ending; Chapter 5 has a new opening. I'm mapping more plot threads. And I've given Shira a bullet pendant and making it a prominent prop, plus I'm giving her back the flight jacket I gave her in the Project Notebooks but failed to give her so far in the script and novelization.

And that's what I've been doing on Shira's 14th birthday. Come to think of it, I ought to celebrate her birthday with a slice of carrot cake and a glass of wine...

Spanner R5 Update: Chipping Away at Chapter 1, plus Those Women with No Name

One by one I've been chipping away at the remaining unedited scenes in Spanner Chapter 1. Most of them need only a few edits to put them in line with the final continuity, or bring out something more in a character, or just to fix up the language. I even changed the name of the new character in the flashback sequence (from Oscar Ribeiro a.k.a. Blackflag to the cooler-sounding Rico X). I still haven't taken on those difficult large scenes at the beginning and end, but I'm getting ever closer.

Also, I'm skipping back and forth among the chapters to edit here and there. Some scenes need just a little tweak to bring them fully into continuity. Others I'm putting into other chapters entirely, including nearly everything featuring Revision 4 newcomer Dr. Mina Tatsumi. I'm even inserting scenes I left out of previous versions, including one or two I intended to put in the incomplete Revision 1 but never got far enough to write.

One major revision surprised me. I came up with the thread about women with no name while I was in the middle of rewriting Chapter 12 for the Fourth Revision. Three major characters (love interest Leila, reporter Amanda, and Desiree's long-lost daughter Lucie) abandoned their names (in Chapters 12-13, 16, and 19 respectively) after that. Turns out my muse had bigger plans for R5. Now the nameless Asian woman who first appears in Chapter 12 of R4 makes her R5 debut in Chapter 2 as the new manager of the apartment building Shira lives in, the FEMEN scenes I threw into Chapters 22 and 23 now feature the master nudefighters who emerged out of the suppression of the topless-feminist group by Eastern European governments during the Conservative Revolution (and their first local recruit when they get to Seattle is none other than the now nameless Amanda), and the tall brown-haired woman I retconned into the Chapter 10 opening introduce the nameless women is the direct connection between them. The nameless-women thread has become a major thread in the series, precisely because Leila decided to erase her name — the original idea the whole thread grew from.

One thing I never really got around to in my haste to finish R4 was create full profiles for the nameless women. The "contextual list of descriptive tags" they replace their names with are in fact a significant subset of their character profiles, the part that conforms to rules now explained by the nameless Asian woman in Chapter 3. So, thesaurus in hand, I set out to compile the "name" lists for several characters: the aforementioned nameless woman (whose former name is now completely unknown, something she took great pains to ensure), her brown-haired and blond roommates, Shira (who never truly loses her name(s) but has a complex and fascinating profile), Leila, her twin brother Rob and younger sister Fiona, Lucie, and others. In fact, I'm going to do the same for major characters who keep their names throughout the entire series, precisely because I'll be developing their profiles to make them better characters.

One character I threw in late in Revision 4 I decided to throw back out of Revision 5: Shira's long-lost twin sister Kira, who's now back to the R3 plan in which I was going to save her for a major plot point of the Pretty City Arc in the middle of Book 2.

And so the editing continues. Now back to editing those two tough scenes in Chapter 1...

Spanner R4: Looking Back So Far: Mad Love, or Romantic Love as the Destruction of Society

I've posted on this theme before, but I never managed to fully integrate it into Spanner until Revision 4, including Chapters 22 and 23 which I'm racing to finish as I write this. André Breton, leader of the twentiety-century Surrealist literary and artistic movement, defined "mad love" (l'amour fou) as a love so extreme, so far beyond the limits even of unreason, it can destroy the entire social order itself. It drove Shira to her suicidal lover Leila, Leila to declare war against the Brinkman clan and erase her name, and the couple to copulate using a power crystal under the speaker's platform in Chapter 15 in order to fuse their boosted powers into a "binary system" that killed King Patriot. Now they are escalating their love into full-blown revolution, and bringing in Shira's blond cousin Jennifer to make their couple a threesome.

The Fourth Revision finds the couple/threesome doing insane things for the sake of mad love. In Revision 4.1, the final one-pass edit and ebook stylesheet hackathon, I intend to strengthen the last weak points in their love arc and integrate it better into the revolution and Student Union storylines which converge on the final three chapters of Book 1, as some weaknesses remain from Revisions 2 and 3; also, I should bring forward such counterpoint romances as the unstable one between Charmian and Bart that implodes in Chapter 20, or the four-sided love triangle centering on Corporate villain Oliver and involving a mad scientist, a high-school mean girl, and the world's most evil pop idol, and which used to be five-sided until Leila ditched her name and patriarch-arranged marriage and left him for her tempestuous lesbian romance with Shira.

One of the inspirations for importing "mad love" into the Shira-Leila romance was an analysis I read in a film book of Surrealist director Luis Buñuel's last film, That Obscure Object of Desire, in which the author speculated that, Buñuel being the Surrealist he was, this movie was at least in part about l'amour fou, and that though bourgeois French protagonist Mathieu and his tempestuous Spanish lover Concha (played by two actresses, one Spanish, one French, alternated at whim, sometimes even in mid-sentence) did have a crazy relationship involving mutual torture, Mathieu was too much the bourgeois Frenchman to let himself go and destroy the bourgeois French society to which he belonged. Since I had planned the Shira-Leila relationship as a lesbian romance since that fateful day in 1996 when I discovered yuri manga on the Internet, I realized the best way to fit that romance into the longer revolution plot was l'amour fou: a teenage lesbian mad romance between a prank-loving superslut and a suicidal fashion model. As Jennifer has been in love with Shira since childhood, she proved easy to suck in (and her role will be strengthened in Revision 4.1). Add the moral fascism of the Eugenics Institute and Shira's eight-year-old niece who happens to be a rare "true loli", and watch things go completely to hell — exactly (cackles the evil mad scientist) as planned.

As a side effect (whether fascinating or annoying depends on the reader), my quest for l'amour fou led me to the Surrealist poets (one of Breton's own poems is of course titled "L'amour Fou"), and from there to Allen Ginsberg and the Beats and American Modernist poetry in general (particularly William Carlos Williams and Sylvia Plath) — and when I started writing my own poetry under their influence, I suddenly found my poetic voice, and naturally it ended up all over Spanner R4, another of the ways it's so radically different from Revisions 2 and 3. For R4.1, I found myself re-editing the climactic moment of 1.6 as one of the surreal passages from a novel by science fiction writer Alfred Bester (that proto-cyberpunk who got a Babylon 5 villain named after him) in the form of a free-verse poem written by the likes of Breton or Ginsberg. Which seems appropriate enough, considering that Bester's short story "Fondly Fahrenheit", a major influence on the cyberpunks, is itself a complete Surrealist mindfuck involving wavering identity.

In La Révolution Surréaliste #12 (the final issue), the the editors posed these questions:

1. How would you judge a man who would go so far as to betray his convictions in order to please the woman he loved?
2. Do you believe in the victory of admirable love over sordid life or of sordid love over admirable life?

To which the only proper Surrealist answer is: yes.

Spanner R4: Looking Back So Far: The Nudefighters, or Fanservice as a Deadly Weapon

Here in the second of my weekend posts on plot threads that exploded in the Fourth Revision of Spanner Book 1 while I finish editing its penultimate chapter, there's the idea that I may have put into the Revision 2 version of Chapter 1 but didn't balloon into a central thread until the final version of Chapter 20: the concept of "nudefighting." In Chapters 1 and 3, it involved Shira and her martial-artist friends wearing minimal clothing that can be stripped off in a fight. In Chapter 6, they (and especially Jennifer) stripped down naked to make gangsters and cult priests irrational enough to beat. In Chapters 15 and 20, they took advantage of rainstorms because wet skin is so difficult to hold onto; if Shira had allowed Bart the traction clothes provide, she wouldn't have beaten him in Chapter 20's Team Challenge, and he knows it.

Like I said, wet skin, whether made wet by rain or sweat or other liquid, is very difficult to hold onto. Jennifer also explains that if one gets wounded by bullet or blade while fighting naked, fabric fibers don't get stuck in the wound and infect it, a traditional cause of soldier deaths.

But then from Chapter 21 on, the clothes stay off. The nudefighters leave even the minimal tearable clothing at home, neglected. They even come to school and spend the day as naked as they were when they fought off Klowns and cultists in Chapter 6. One reason given in Chapter 14 is that Jennifer got used to fighting nude when the victorious Conservative Revolutionaries made her a slave soldier and inadvertently made her a legendary warrior who killed 10,000 Caliphate jihadis and came back with a vendetta against the Party. And this dovetails with Shira's inborn perversity and the combination of hatred for her class and lack of prudery that Leila (now the anonymous beauty known as, among other things, the girl with the violet eyes) has. But somehow, as Brandi points out to Jennifer in Chapter 21, for them nudefighting has changed from a fighting tactic into a revolutionary stance against a Conservative Revolution already souring. And the nudefighters who have amazing superpowers use them to get away with it.

But of course it remains primarily a tactic to freak out raging men who hate women and drive them into the irrationality that spells easy defeat. No wonder Shira calls it "fanservice as a deadly weapon." But then, Spanner is after all a story of a revolution against a revolution...

Spanner R4: Looking Back So Far: The Women with No Name

While I'm continuing to ready Spanner Chapter 22 for its wild week ahead, I thought I'd look back at the new Fourth Revision plot threads that shocked even their author by popping into existence. My ever-perverse muse threw the first of these into Chapter 12 and proceeded to retrofit it into the beginning of Chapter 10. Three women moved next door to Shira and told her they didn't have names. By the end of Chapter 19, three major female characters, including Shira's major love interest, had ditched their names.

They call themselves "anonymous beauties" or "nameless beauties". It started with a sudden inspiration while I was idly reading through books at a local thrift store one day. One happened to be a novel called The Bride Stripped Bare, written as an anonymous diary of a woman's anonymous secret life of adultery. It was even written to be published anonymously, though the novelist's identity (Nikki Gemmell) eventually came out. The concept behind it is that anonymity in sexual matters is liberating and allows for greater authenticity. The author quotes Virginia Woolf, who described anonymity as a "refuge" for female authors:

Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still possesses them.

And so my muse latched onto the idea and threw it into the final version of Spanner. Being the compulsive thinker I am, naturally this intriguing notion that had now wormed its way into my labor of love got me thinking. So of course I got to arguing with Woolf: I took the idea of clothes as masks from Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, developed it further, nad concluded that names are masks too; then I countered Mrs. Woolf's assertion that women want to be veiled by saying that names themselves are the veils, wrapping people in social roles as surely as clothes do. Out of the original inspiration and the idea of names as masks or veils, the anonymous beauties burst into the plot of Spanner

To remain free individuals, these women rely on a kind of trick. In place of names, they use a list of descriptive terms they believe accurately describe themselves which add up to their complete characterization. In authorial terms, they've replaced their names with their character profiles. The beauty of this is that since they no longer identify with names, they're no longer vulnerable to either the siren song of Egoism (which is about deifying the ego and then sacrificing one's self to this ego-god in order to become it) or the name-magic that certain superpowered villains such as Byron Scofield use and government control ultimately relies on. In the case of the major characters who went nameless, the ones formerly known as Leila Shelley, Amanda Currie, and Lucie Stenbeck, they used a kind of cheat: Leila and Lucie had Shira's formidable lawyer cousin Angela Coyne use an intellectual-property loophole to detach themselves from their names; Amanda simply let a celebrity-stalker look-alike steal her identity and replace her in the social role contained in her name. The Asian woman (I need better descriptives for her than that in Revision 4.1) next door to Shira may or may not have been originally named Anemone Izumi, but she used Shira's trick of using multiple names before she went nameless, though how she went nameless remains a mystery.

Namelessness in Spanner represents one of two opposites: either removing the veil of name and social role in order to live an life of freedom lived without masks, or being stripped of one's identity as the sign of slavery, i.e. complete lack of freedom. The anonymous beauties, including the three major characters who stripped off their names in Chapters 13, 16, and 19, are the former. I'll deal with the latter in Book 2 when our heroines leave the school world behind and take their fight directly to the Corporate and Syndicate patriarchs. Bobbzilla the Klown may be too macho to own sex slaves; but the Russian mobster Vasily "the Rodfather" Rodchenko, left-wing terrorist Bram's brother and mortal enemy, not only owns sex slaves but has them soft-plastinated alive into necrophiliac sex dolls. This is related to the Corporate mania for polygamy. Against the patriarchs who rob women in their power of their identity, the anonymous beauties take a feminist stance in protecting their personal identities by getting rid of their names and abandoning their social identities. Freedom for them requires authenticity, and they reason that they cannot be authentic as long as they remain veiled by the social identities contained within their names.

Once Scofield starts seriously using his name magic in Book 2, expect more major female characters and even a few males to go nameless just like the nameless women who live next door to Shira. But before I plot that out, I still have those last two chapters of Book 1 and a final full-book edit to finish...

Spanner R4 Update: Where Did I Get Some Of These Characters?

While editing Chapter 8 for the Final Revision, I got to thinking about the origin of some of my characters. Some of them are riffs on characters of other stories. Some of these riffs date all the way back to 1992, when I created the original group around Shira.

Diana Shockley: I created her as early as 1991 because I hated Appleseed's Deunan Knute when she killed Chiffon in the first graphic novel. The concept: what if Deunan were a villain?

Henry Becket: Her father was the second villain I created. He's basically the original Battlestar Galactica's villain Baltar without the smirk and with a fedora and thick glasses and the invincible delusion that he's the last actual hero in existence. When borrowing public-domain superheroes, I made him the Bronze Age version of the American Crusader from the Nedor comics.

Richard Becket: His younger-looking older brother is basically the Corporate version of Eblis, the Satan figure from the same show. He also thinks he's the good guy; since he's the story's supreme elitist, that means the masses are by definition the villain. His superhero identity is the Bronze Age Scarab — and for him I borrowed the idea of superhero lineages from The Phantom. The original Scarab was a Frenchman in Napoleonic Egypt, and the lineage has occult origins. Dick Becket is the seventh Scarab (the Golden and Silver Age originals being the fifth and sixth), and he has to fight his own successors, the eighth and ninth Scarabs. The Scarab lineage is central to the mystery of Spanner.

Drusilla Becket is the answer to the question, what if Erica Kane from the soap opera All My Children were a guru like, say, J.Z. Knight (of Ramtha fame) or Elizabeth Clare Prophet? For one thing, like them and other gurus, she made an enemy of Shira's grandmother Eleanor Richter, the children's author and witch.

Will Becket: If Diana is Deunan Knute as a villain, her younger brother is Mobile Suit Gundam's Char Aznable as an extremely ambiguous antihero. There will be hints of another antihero inspired by Char, Lelouch Lamperouge of Code Geass, especially come Book 5.

Colonel Tom Becket: I didn't get a good grip on the Dictel Corporation chairman until I saw James Cameron's Avatar. Then I realized he's basically the villain, Colonel Quaritch, as the chairman of Blackwater.

I just noticed that these are all Beckets. One of the characteristics of the Cromwell Becket clan is their stubborn resistance to change. They are more archetype than character. They claim divine origin, descent from the Norse, Celtic, and Egyptian gods. More than the other dominant clans in the Conservative Revolutionary Party, they remind people of Unseely Fae with their inhuman morality and their lack of respect for human lives.

This in contrast to my more protean heroes, and especially heroines. Shira is a chameleon. Jennifer has a whole arsenal of personae she can summon at will. Surviving Leila or Melody, even when they're not at full power, may depend entirely on what mood they swing into. The only heroic character who is genuinely archetypal is Ariel, with the striking white stripe in her black hair and her Holy Grail obsession. She's the one who puts the heroines' doings into some mythical context and puts them on heroes' journeys. She traces her own ancestry (and therefore her niece Leila's) through the female line ("bar sinister" in heraldry) to Mélusine, Morgan le Fay, and ultimately to Mary Magdalene. And of course she's a mentor character like, say, Willa Richter-Thomas, Zac Finney, or (looking to Chapter 16 R4) Dr. Hiram Whistler. Shira herself has multiple origins.

I'm not actually cloning any characters. I'm too good a writer to let myself be that lazy. But some of my own characters were inspired by characters in other works. Of course, creating them is only the first step. After that, their job is to grow away from their origins so they can help the other characters take the story away from their author and run amok.

Spanner R4 Update: Mary Sue No More, or How Karen Kubota Became a Real Character (Plus: Chapter 3 Editing Strategy)

Shira’s cousin Karen Kubota is a charter member of Spanner’s original “Class of ’92”, yet for two whole decades she never fully developed into a character. She was a Buddhist “Purity Sue”, a pretty body with a pleasant manner but not much content, whose character was pretty much limited to being Compassionate, Earnest, Genki, and the Victor Laszlo to Shira’s Rick Blaine. So how did she stop being a flat Mary Sue who I avoided writing and become an actual character with an increasingly important role?

1. She developed the lacerating wit proper to a Richter-Thomas. When last night I completely rewrote an important scene in Chapter 6, she surprised me by calmly unleashing it on no less than the private owner of the Seattle-area school system, Book 1 major villain Peter T. Ross.
2. She fell in love with Shira, making the hypothetical Karen × Shira ’ship canonical at last. In the final version of Chapter 2 she now successfully convinces Shira to chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo with her by seducing her in a very sweet scene.

The second one came first. My muse, yuri fangirl that she is, pulled it on me during the massive Chapter 2 rewrite. I almost expected it. The first hit me by surprise – it didn’t sound Karen enough at first – but then I realized she’s a Richter-Thomas, and if you’re a granddaughter of two-fisted children’s author Eleanor Richter, you’d better be able to keep up with her – and if you aren’t yet, you will be eventually. Nelly Richter is the “Wicked Wit of the West”; that had to rub off on eldest daughter Reva Richter-Thomas, who in turn passed it on to at least three of the four Kubota kids: big sister Saffron, gay brother Sage, and Karen. But the key to Karen’s character remains the Japanese spelling of her name: its Chinese characters are renge, “lotus”, backwards.

Shira, Spanner’s resident canonical “Launcher of a Thousand ’Ships”, has a special weakness to beautiful women she loves, even close relatives. If she’s beautiful and Shira already loves and trusts her, getting Shira into her bed is a matter of course, if of course the woman swings that way. The Richter-Thomas women inherited a strong bisexual tendency from the Thomas side, who were German socialists and advocates of free love and Nacktkultur (nudism) during the Weimar Republic even though they were ethnically Jewish. So of course Karen got it too. Why else would she know the most effective way to touch Shira’s heart? Her relationship with her friend Colette, introduced in Chapter 3 before a villain in Chapter 5 knocks her into Chapter 13, even resembles a marriage. So when Karen’s character bloomed at last, the love quotient tripled!

This gives me hope for the remaining flat characters, including “Class of ’92” members Daisy Kwon and Marina Reyes (who now debut in Chapter 2 as tutor and student). Right now Daisy is the Korean-American version of the elegant Japanese “Yamato Nadeshiko” woman and Marina is a depressed illegal-alien girl (Mexican, of course). They’ll become more prominent when the School Arc begins in Chapter 5.

Meanwhile, my strategy for cutting down the not-yet-edited four sections of Chapter 3 is beginning to emerge. Take Part 3:

1. I combined it out of the Revision 2/3 sections “Portrait of an American Family” and “Car Song”. I was going to call it “Coming to Take Me Away” (still a scene title) but just decided (while on the pot, even; that happens) to make the final title “Car Song”. Two cars appear. I should make it three by adding one to the section’s final flashback. Willa drives one. As for the first…
2. Remember the lemon yellow Boss Mustang that Shira’s greasily tinkering with? (In the nude, even; Shira is nothing if not way too audacious to be legal for her age.) It’s now metallic cherry red, it belongs to Shira, its name is Sally, and Shira calls it “she”. Shira is notionally the daughter of Revolutionary Girl Utena heroine Utena Tenjou and archvillain Akio Ohtori. Akio has a scene-stealing car that owns you. Sally the Mustang is Shira’s version of the Akio Car, and its scene-stealing qualities are intensified by her love for it. When she finally gets to drive it in Chapter 7, Shira being Shira, the experience proves quite erotic. Just the driving, not the sequence’s concluding all-human love scene. The driving.
3. Start the section with a transitional scene. Another Shira videoblog? Lurid tabloid TV video of a wild police chase ending in a spectacular crash? Both? One then the other, or both at once?
4. Cut down the opening scene at Red House. Turn it into a sequence, in fact: Desiree tells off the Mormons, turns down a New Age cult, and with her sister and lover Charlie greets in the nude a pair of old Jehovah’s Witness ladies so that when they kiss the old ladies drop dead. That last one comes from one of the very last notes in Project Notebook #15, and this is the perfect place to put it.
5. Three bloated Revision 3 scenes to cut down: the garage, the living room and kitchen, and Willa’s car on the way to the boardwalk. Problem: too much gratuitous exposition, not enough connection with story continuity.

Talk about bloated: Part 4, “Party Crashers on the Boardwalk”, is very long indeed. Those 600+ words I need to cut? I could cut that many out of Part 4 without hurting the plot. I’ll also cut some bloat out of Parts 5 (“Your Next Trick”) and 6 (“You Don’t Know What Is What”) while changing them to fit into the stronger Revision 4 continuity.

And now to put that strategy into action…

Hypothetical Crossover: Leila vs. the Ultimate Posette

One major difference between an outlandish character that becomes interesting and one who turns into the dreaded Mary Sues that the likes of the Protectors of the Plot Continuum and the Mary Sue Elimination Society hunt is that the character you like is that way because the author put some effort into, as the 20th-century English novelist Ford Madox Ford put it, "getting the character in". As James Wood relates it in How Fiction Works, he and Joseph Conrad (of Heart of Darkness fame) loved this sentence from Guy de Maupassant's short story "La Reine Hortense": "He was a gentleman with red whiskers who always went first through a doorway." — of which Ford commented, "That gentleman is so sufficiently got in that you need no more of him to understand how he will act. He has been 'got in' and can get to work at once." Now, getting a character in may not work quite that fast, but it's the one surefire cure for Mary Sue syndrome.

Now consider the difference between Spanner's Leila Renata Shelley and ludicrous badfic creations like, I dunno, let's call her Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way (an extreme example for the sake of illustration). Leila: languid pale beauty with black hair elegantly bobbed, violet eyes, and ninja training (long story). Raven: well, "goff" (sic), with (and I quote) "long ebony black hair with purple streaks and red tips that reaches my mid-back and icy blue eyes like limpid tears"; her catch phrase is (and I quote), "Why couldn't Satan have made me less beautiful? It's a fucking curse!" To which Leila replies, "I don't care how beautiful Satan made you if you're a total bleedin' git." Sure, Leila has been known to cut herself and attempt suicide (long story), but she has no tolerance for "posettes" (feminine form of "poser"), the Rocker version of what the PPCs call "fangirls".

Now here is why I picked Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way as my counterexample: she is the supreme posette of fanfiction. Oh, and her hair is purple. Apparently even silky raven locks (to swipe a notorious bit of urple prose) such as Leila's isn't "goffik" enough for her.

Here's the scenario: After coming back from the dead after being killed by yet another Mary Sue hunter, Ebony returns to Hogwarts only to find that one Leila Renata Shelley has stolen not just her position in Slytherin House but her beloved Draco Malfoy as well. (Now here's a scary thought: if there's any character in any continuity who can encourage Draco Malfoy to Voldemort levels of evil, it's Leila Shelley.) Ebony's all "goffed" up and listening to Good Charlotte as she plots her revenge when Leila comes to her:

Leila: (switches off Ebony's iPod) "What in bloody hell is that supposed to be?"

Ebony: "That's goffik, bitch!"

Leila: "By the way, the word is 'gothic,' and Good Charlotte are not the least bit gothic. Real goths can't stand that mopey emo crap."

Ebony: "Let's hear you explain the difference."

Leila: "Gothic rock is melancholy and deep. Emo rock is wangsty and naff." (Note: You can actually hear the Author straining for words...)

Ebony: "So what are you listening to, huh?"

Leila: (leans against the wall, smiles romantically upward) "Right now I'm in love with Emilie Autumn."

Ebony: "Ew! That's not even rock!"

Leila: (crosses her arms, smiles contemptuously) "So how'd you earn your credentials as an expert on rock? Huh, 'Goffy'?"

Ebony: (shakes her urple hair indignantly) "Same to you, you bloody cunt!"

Leila: (shakes her head sadly) "Ever heard of the Damned?"

Ebony: (confused) "Who the fuck are they?"

Leila: (frowns) "Figures. They invented gothic rock. Did you know that Rat Scabies himself is my godfather?"

Ebony: "You're lyin'!"

Leila: "And you're posin'."

Ebony: (spots Draco coming) "Draco, my love! Help me! Get this bitch away—"

Draco: (takes Leila's arm in his) "Leila darling, is this stupid git twisting your knickers again?"

Ebony: "No — Draco—"

Leila: "Shut your gob, slob. Draco belongs to me now." (looks lasciviously at Draco) "Shall we go and do some... 'evil' now?"

Draco: "Your place or mine?" (waves contemptuously to Ebony) "Toodle-oo, Mary Sue." (leaves with Leila for Marty McFly's time-travelling DeLorean, making out the entire way)

...and they leave Ebony sputtering. What's a heartbroken Mary Sue to do? Of course you know what Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way will do: call her Twu Wuv, Gerard Way — over and over and over, until once again he's annoyed enough to call in the Mary Sue hunters after her.

Vampire Harry: (seeing Ebony dead, drained of blood glitter) "Here we go again..."

*clears throat* Anyway, the moral of this story is, if you're a character whose author doesn't detach themself from you that you're sufficiently got in, you'll suck hard enough that a genuinely interesting character can swoop in from some other continuity and swipe the love interest you yourself swiped from canon. Yeah.