#Spanner R5 #amediting Update: "Enter the Monkeywrench" Final Chapter Lineup, Part 1

As of today, all the chapters in Enter the Monkeywrench Part 1 now have their final titles:

Intro
Interlude 0: The Monkeywrench Cometh
0. First Blast of the Trumpet
1. On the 13th Floor
2. Red Skies in Morning
3. Angel of Chaos
4. Your Mission, if You Choose to Accept It
5. Herald of the Coming Race
6. The Man with the Plan
7. The Pattern Emerges
8. Storming the Temple
9. The Fuses Have Been Lit

These chapters are the ones that will be in the Part 1 ebook. Now that I'm planning on an initial five-part serial release for Enter the Monkeywrench, I'm ending not just the book but every section with a cliffhanger, partly in homage to the old movie serials I loved as a kid and the serial novels that ran in the science-fiction magazines during the same era.

Interestingly enough, I also have the final chapter lineup for Part 5:

Interlude 4: City on the Edge of a Dream
37. The Empty City
38. Meet the New God
39. The Secret Meeting
40. Into the Underworld
Interlude 5: You Have Lost the Game
41. Stalking the Rotten Apple
42. Prepare for Ascension
43. True Sacrifices
44. Spanner in the Works
Interlude 6: The Virus Has Been Spread

Finally, I have the final Interlude lineup for the complete book:

0. The Monkeywrench Cometh (formerly 6)
1. The Top Five
2. The X Factor
3. The Coming of the New Flesh
4. City on the Edge of a Dream (formerly 9)
5. You Have Lost the Game (formerly 8)
6. The Virus Has Been Spread (formerly 1 "Rocket Ready")

Out of Book 1, I currently have the Intro and Chapters 0-4 and 7 complete. I'm currently working on Chapter 9; I'm writing most of it from scratch. After that, I'll give Chapter 8 the few edits it needs and a new ending that's a cliffhanger in itself. I should be able to finish them both tonight. Soon I'll have something I can at least release to beta readers. It's coming, sooner or later...

#Spanner R5 #amediting update: 9 (But Really 12) Chapters for the Serial Novel's Part 1; or, Some Rough Plotting

I've finally settled on the number of chapters in Enter the Monkeywrench part 1 (9, not counting the 3 chapters numbered "0") and their final order. Now complete: the Intro and Chapters 0 and 1.

I switched the order of Chapters 2 and 3. In Chapter 2, we find out the violet-eyed girl (Leila in earlier revisions and later volumes) not only is scheduled to be sacrificed in order to turn a dead man into a god, but actually wants to be; and I realize, I need to evoke a feeling of dread. Chapter 3 is where we see the vision driving the COPCO Crime Prevention Division's precogs mad; in a new ending, we'll find out that the sacrificial priestess who intends to sacrifice the violet-eyed girl just happens to be the division president, and even the company CEO is afraid of her. I think this order works better.

Chapter 4: Shira, chief "troubleshooter" for the Wilder Foundation, gets her mission from the Foundation chairman (Thurston), meanwhile fending off African witch hunters as only a level-4 Charmer can.

Chapter 5: the series' major antagonists panic. Chapter 6 is the section "The Man with the Plan" from the old Chapter 1, expanded and revised; sure enough, a plan is involved, to deal with not only the "angel of chaos" killing the precogs but Shira too.

Chapter 7: Shira, Thurston, and the blond girl (Jennifer) have to explain a few things to the others. They hammer out some rough preliminary plans and do a few experiments. And they prevent an attack by the left-wing terrorists of the Socialist Revolutionary Organization — including Shira's "squib" half-sister Talia.

Chapter 8: The first phase of the villains' plan is set into motion.

Chapter 9: And Shira and company fend it off in what should be spectacular fashion. And Shira takes the mission. End of Part 1.

There's my own rough plan. I'll be deleting some scenes, writing some new ones, even importing one from Chapter 2 R4. After that, I'll smooth the continuity so everything leads to the cliffhanger ending.

Speaking of the cliffhanger, I added one new scene to the end. Will Becket, the vampire super soldier who sank his fangs into Osama bin Laden's neck (and the series' Char Aznable figure), makes his first ominous appearance in the story. And all he says is, "It has begun."

#Spanner R5 #amediting update: The New Plot of "Enter the Monkeywrench" Part 1, With Cliffhanger

The new opening section of Enter the Monkeywrench, originally the longer chapters 1-4 but now numbered 1-7, has a distinct plot with a cliffhanger ending. What Hugh Howey did with his now famous Silo Trilogy was revive the Golden Age science-fiction serial-novel tradition in ebook format. Such A.E. van Vogt novels as Slan and The World of Null-A actually read like Saturday-matinee movie serials in prose; Jommy Cross and Gilbert Gosseyn wouldn't be out of place alongside Commando Cody. I realized, I can do this too. Movie serials, and the short '70s TV revival of the format in the series Cliffhanger!, are actually a major influence on my writing. Of course, unlike the classic Republic and RKO serials, and much of Van Vogt's work, I go out of my way to avoid the plot contrivances that are a danger of the serial format, whether in movie serials or serial-format TV shows.

The final Enter the Monkeywrench Chapter 1 turned out to be entirely new material. I introduced a new character (a corrupted Edison Carter whom I named "Jack Campbell" after a certain SF magazine editor whose public decline is infamous) and killed him off. I introduced characters I'd previously saved for later. I established the stakes for the novel. In the previous chapters — the Intro, Interlude 0, and Chapter 0, in that order — I established the stakes for the entire Chaos Angel Spanner series.

I decided to split those four long long chapters I'd novelized out of comics issues and TV episodes into shorter chapters that focus on single characters or groups of characters. In the new Chapter 7 I'll combine the threads as they converge into a monster cliffhanger.

With the Intro, the new Interlude 0 ("The Monkeywrench Cometh", the actual introduction of the character Spanner to the series, reworked from Interlude 14 R2 and Interlude 6 R4), and new Chapter 0 ("First Blast of the Trumpet", a reworking of my original R5 Chapter 0 idea) at the beginning and the new Chapter 7 with its cliffhanger at the end, I could release this part as an ebook in itself, possibly even for free, with the four sequels that make up the rest of the novel priced at one dollar (or pound, or euro) apiece.

In fact, this is how I'm rewriting each part of Enter the Monkeywrench, leading up to the biggest cliffhanger of all, the one at the end of the novel, which has remained substantially the same through all the versions of Chapter (now Book) 1 since 2010.

Come to think of it, I may still be doing that comics/TV serial-novelization thing after all...

#Spanner R5 #amediting update: Final Plot Reorganization: The Path Is Now Straight

I had something of a dry period. I added and subtracted some things, but I never finished a chapter except for the Intro. Suddenly I realized that the flashback-heavy structure of Chapter 1 R4 was not suited to a full novel. So I've made one final reorganization of the plot so that all its events occur in order, making the plot both less confusing and more relentless. Those "fixed patterns" Jennifer sees in the beginning? They will relentlessly converge until they collide in the final chapters.

I'm also shortening the chapters. Each chapter will follow one plot thread or series of related threads at a time, another way of uncomplicating the plot. It won't seem so indigestible. By shortening the chapters, I should be able to shorten the book as well, even though there will be more chapters.

As a bonus, I decided to throw in a terrorist faction I hadn't thought of using for at least a decade and a half and which previously existed only in a series of index cards and a few scattered entries in a mid-90s Project Notebook. That faction is one of many that Brinkman sends after our heroines in the new Chapter 1.

I'm doing all this because I intend Enter the Monkeywrench to be the introduction to the Chaos Angel Spanner series. I want it to go down easy. Once I've seduced my readers into this strange world, then I can get as complicated as I want, starting with the dual timelines of Book 2 (Rock City Blues). Besides, Enter the Monkeywrench takes place on a single day; the other volumes stretch over weeks or even months.

Next comes the actual throwing around of scenes. Now that the Intro and Enter the Monkeywrench Chapters 0 and 1 are all but perfect, I've already started.

Spanner R5 #amediting Update: Mid-Book Part 2: Later Additions Force Early Revisions

This seems to happen to me a lot: something I add to a later chapter requires that I retcon earlier chapters to fit the newly changed continuity. In this case, newly revised events in the final two flashback chapters (13 and 15) have just put events taking place in earlier chapters later in the timeline (Chapters 2-4) out of continuity. Specifically, the scenes involving two new villains added to Chapters 2 and 3 are now out of order, and one thread in Chapter 3 now takes place in the present rather than the past (earlier the day of the story i.e. as part of the flashback arc).

There's a bigger reason for this. The flashback chapters include a thread involving the COPCO agents starting in Chapter 7 and another which starts each flashback chapter, and both have tight plots. In its current state, the main thread is just a mess of expository dialogue interrupted by a few major events. The way the sideplots turned out made me realize that I need to give the flashback arc the tight plot it currently lacks. The mess is a carryover from Chapter 1 R4, in which the flashback arc was just a series of quick flashback scenes, each dedicated to a single reveal. But when I expanded Chapter 1 into an entire book, this no longer worked. Hence, the new plot.

It's the events of this new "earlier today" plot that are making me rewrite scenes in the earlier chapters. This is all for the better because it'll make for a stronger plot.

Spanner R5 #amediting Update: Halfway Through the Final Draft, With Ebook

Remember that plot spreadsheet I said I'd make?
Well, I made it, but it ended up taking too long for me to map the plot threads and character arcs with it, so I deleted it. However, thanks to Sigil, I am now building up the ebook chapter by chapter. With 10 chapters (counting the Intro) out of 21 (including Interlude 1) now complete, I'm halfway through the final draft at last. And it took me like forever?

Karen, the sweet Buddhist cousin, is now one of the flyers surfing the raging storm over New York on her hoverboard and laying Spanner tags. Amanda, the pretty TV reporter, now has a plot thread of her own, complete with character arc. Two of the characters I created around the time I came up with the final series name (in 1999) or the five-volume series plan (2000), the Treece brothers I based loosely on the Bogard brothers of the Fatal Fury videogame series (while I was in the middle of watching the anime at Cliff's Comic World, in fact; Adam = Andy roughly, and Kevin = Terry) finally got a reason to exist as independent characters in their own right — as hoverboard racers, Kevin laying his own Spanner tags from LA to Pittsburgh and leaving the "Climinal Team" flyers to take over from him in New York.

And yes, they are indeed calling themselves "Climinal Team", after a certain selectable team in what Shira calls simply "an old shmup" (specifically Armed Police Batrider; and yes, it's misspelled that way in the game), to signify in typically facetious Shira fashion that they're technically the villains in an America built on the supremacy of heroes. (Note: Batrider's excuse plot just happens to be set in Manhattan, in 2014, just as the dénouement of Enter the Monkeywrench was before I moved the timeline forward to 2018 last year i.e. in 2014.)

Getting halfway through the final draft is an achievement in itself. But that still leaves the other half of the book incomplete. I can't stop until the draft is finished and ready for my beta readers. There's also the matter of the Enter the Monkeywrench cover and the Chaos Angel Spanner series logo, both of which I'm continuing to procrastinate so far. So back to the edit it is. And the distraction I was hoping to avoid, namely NaPoWriMo, which my capricious muse won't let me avoid anyway. Oh well...

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: 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: Abandoning the "Non-Novel" for a Coherent Flashback Structure

In the original version of the new Spanner Book 1, I split not just the old Chapter 1 apart but various chapters from all over Book 1 R4 into shorter new chapters made up mainly of single sequences, then trying to organize them on the order of John Brunner's "non-novel" Stand on Zanzibar. After I moved the timeline forward to 2018, enough major plot elements changed along with the characters' ages that I find myself combining chapters again. Here's a short rundown of the first five chapters alone:

• Intro: To the end of the original version, which hadn't changed all that much in 4 years, I tacked on Chapter 1's date tag ("19 August 2018") and its associated epigraphs, followed by the new R5 scene in which Shira gets her mission which becomes the Spanner Incident that is the focus of the new Book 1.
• Interlude 0: To the already unorganized mess that is Revision 5's new Interlude, I'm merging the chapter that previously followed it, called "The Age of Unreason". I plan to reorganize so that the entire "old Jennifer meets young Jennifer" thread becomes a single scene followed by the flash-forwards that gives this Interlude its name, "Foregone Conclusions". I may move some villain scenes into the next chapter, or not, depending.
• "The First Blast of the Trumpet": From "Welcome to Spanner's World", I moved the short Leila scene and expanded it. A new action sequence introduces the myth arc I borrowed from Jack the Giant-Killer (which the title references) and has our distaff Jack, Shira, killing her first "monster" in the series, here a transhuman mercenary with multiple Bioroid bodies. The double epigraph to the original Chapter 1 are now here; previously it was in a chapter I'm not keeping, "The Beginning of the End"
• "Welcome to Spanner's World": In addition to the various epigraphs to various later chapters in Book 1 R4, I inserted some epigraphs and character quotes taken from "The Age of Unreason". In place of the Leila scene I moved to the previous chapter, I inserted the entire chapter "Escape from Harmony", which is basically her escape scene from Drusilla's "halfway house". Spanner himself became the focus for a new opening intended to foreshadow the very last chapter ("Spanner in the Works") and an extended version of this chapter's final sequence with added backstory.
• "The Point of No Return", formerly "The Day of Destiny": The original chapter is now a framing sequence for the series of flashbacks that used to be the chapters "Beauty Queen on the Television Screen" (containing Leila and Shira backstory) and "The Bright-Eyed Girl" a.k.a. "Bright-Eyed Captive" (Amanda's backstory), then rearranged things to my satisfaction. But the result is that this has become quite a long chapter.

What I did was abandon the "non-novel" approach with its single linear continuity intercut with its related short stories, essays, and collections of "happening" fragments for a coherent flashback narrative. I abandoned the nonlinear structure of Stand on Zanzibar for that most complex of flashback structures, the one which structures David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. The structure of Enter the Monkeywrench is far from identical to Mulholland Drive's, but I'm modifying that template even without the content (since I plotted what is now the final chapter, "Spanner in the Works", along with the Intro before that movie even came out). Thus, the flashback and background chapters I wrote for the first version of Book 1 R5, I'm either incorporating into other chapters in their entirety or breaking up to put in more than one chapter. That's how, for instance, the entire chapter "Escape from Harmony" became the replacement Leila sequence of "Welcome to Spanner's World". I've settled on long chapters this time, not short ones; "Spanner in the Works", after all, is one of the longest chapters in the book.

So far, of the first five chapters, I've finished all but Interlude 0. I'm continuing to stick to my decistion to abandon chapter numbers in the Fifth Revision, since I'm no longer doing Spanner as a comics or TV novelization but simply as a novel.

Spanner R5 #amediting Update: The New Direction

Resetting the first four books of Chaos Angel Spanner four years in the future has changed some things, some in major ways. Admittedly, the new Book 1 had become something of a mess in the edit. I was attempting my own version of the complicated structure science fiction author John Brunner used in his 1967 masterpiece Stand on Zanzibar. Shifting the timeline forward allowed me to remove the backstory and pseudo-essay chapters that were getting me in trouble. Now I'm combining chapters and putting parts of some chapters into others. Even the Intro, which I thought I got completely finished two years ago, isn't untouched; parts of what was to be the following chapter got moved there, including both the prologue and the quote section from Chapter 1 R4.

I've simplified Book 1's structure. I'm building on a flashback-narrative structure that alternates "present day" and "earlier today" chapters for the first two-thirds to three-quarters of the book, after which I may alternate the long climactic chapters with shorter chapters containing crucial backstory reveals. Various character threads get introduced in the second story chapter ("Welcome to Spanner's World") and split apart in all directions only to collide in the final two chapters ("Prelude to Ascension" and "Spanner in the Works") and the explosive climax. All the main story chapters will remain, but I'm adding a few new scenes and moving some of the backstory there. Moved into the story chapters, backstory flashbacks will need to serve as important reveals or Shocking Revelations, or I'll move them elsewhere or edit them out. My goal is to make it more readable for the casual reader who's used to similarly structured thrillers.

I'm expanding Leila's role in Book 1. Originally I had her appear in three scenes: one toward the beginning, one in the middle, and one near the very end. This worked when the new Book 1 was merely Chapter 1, the equivalent of a television pilot episode. It doesn't work so well when what was a chapter expands into an entire novel. She's one of the most important characters in the entire series, more important to the action than just being Shira's love interest, so she deserves an expanded role in the volume that introduces her. And so instead of just sending her off toward Seattle sleeping in the back of her aunt Ariel's car at the very end, I'm putting her front and center in the climax. She wasn't in the original "Spanner in the Works" from 2010; now she's one of the reasons it happens.

So far I've added to the Intro and finished the first story chapter, "First Blast of the Trumpet" (the name's a reference to the folktale Jack the Giant-Killer, in which Jack begins the battle against the final giant by calling the villagers to his aid with his horn, and from which I'm taking the series' myth arc). I have three scenes left to do in "Welcome to Spanner's World", two existing scenes to edit and one expansion of the final scene. I've taken several quotes, from both characters and real-life people, from the now omitted chapter "The Age of Unreason" and inserted them in "Welcome..."; other parts will go into Interlude 0 and into later chapters.

My goal is to get as much of Book 1 edited before NaNoWriMo as I can. Here goes...

Spanner Update: A Completely New Publishing Plan in Not 5 (or 6) Volumes, but 7

In a flash of inspiration while waiting for my mother at the dentist's office, I realized that I've been doing this Spanner thing all wrong. Not the writing, actually; most of it's at least good enough. Mostly it's the editing, for this reason: the five-volume plan I came up with back in 2000, to which I later added a Book 0, has proved inadequate for what I've written so far.

And so, while Mom and I were eating lunch, the new plan began to emerge in my mind. The chapters, threads, and arcs scattered like the cards in a game of "52 Pickup", and here's how they settled:

1. Enter the Monkeywrench: the Intro, the new Interlude 0 ("Foregone Conclusions", with the "two Jennifers" sequence from Interlude 6 now framing a sequence of flash-forwards), Chapter 1, and Interlude 1. As it's already a complete novella, it's fitting that this should serve as the "pilot episode".
2. Banned in Japan: (temporary working title) The Japan arc originally planned for Book 0, now a flashback thread; the first four chapters from the original Book 1 including the complete uncut Rebel Styles thread and representing the "present time" following from the new Book 1; a few later scenes as "flash-forwards"; and the relevant Interludes (by their current numbering): 2 ("The Brown Note"), 3 ("One Nation Under Copyright, All Rights Reserved"), 5 ("Approaching Solstice, December 2012"), 8 ("Rebel, Rebel"), 9 ("City on the Edge of a Dream"), and 15 ("Six Degrees of Keenan Sasser"). All flashbacks related to the Shira/Leila relationship line will be moved here.
3. Love Terrorists: the complete School Arc from Chapters 5-21, plus Interludes 6 (as the new opening, to be renamed "Previously On..." and rewritten), 4 ("The Rules of Tournament"), 7 ("Pop Will Eat Itself"), 10 ("You Have Lost the Game"), and 16 ("The Ego and His Own"). I may want to merge the events of Chapter 15 into Chapters 22 and 23.
4. Rock City Blues: Chapters 22 and 23 from Book 1, all of Book 2 except for the Pretty City Arc, and Interludes 13 ("This Is Not America") and 14 ("The Crisis") as a frame.
5. Mad Frontier: the original Book 3 plan, now condensed, centering on the pivotal Phoenix Arc.
6. Business Is War: the original Book 4 plan with the Pretty City Arc from the Book 2 plan now added.
7. Revolution Rock: the original Book 5 as planned, beginning with the final Interlude and ending with the Outro.

The new vision for the series is as a novelized 6-season TV series with a pilot movie. The chapters will be shorter and (from the new Book 2 onward) be renumbered by volume/season (e.g. the original Chapter 5 is now 3-1). Each volume will have its own plot in addition to the series continuity. And I'm going to make each book much more coherent, though just as head-spinning as ever.

So what's my new plan for the new Books 1 and 2?

• Work out the complete Book 2 and transplant various scenes from the old Book 1.
• Edit the original Chapter 1 (now unnumbered) accordingly.

In fact, I've already started doing it. I've started editing this blog's Spanner series page to add the new series plan; when I'm done with it, I'll tell you here.

And thus does it begin again...

Spanner R5 Update: Leila Shelley on a Road Not Necessarily Made of Yellow Bricks

As I begin the final edit on Spanner 2.1, I'll be dealing with the most important character besides Shira herself in her only Chapter 2 appearance, one of the chapter's oldest scenes.

Leila Shelley, the series' primary love interest character, may possibly be its secret hero. I already have Shira as a catalyst hero whose roles alternate between trickster and herald. The first named character she appears as herald to is Leila, the girl she's in love with. What's Leila's "hero's journey"? I found the clue in my absolute favorite David Lynch movie, Mulholland Drive. That film uses Sunset Boulevard to turn the plot of The Wizard of Oz into a tragedy. My favorite Lynch character happens to be Audrey Horne from Twin Peaks; Leila is, among other things, Audrey with a bob cut, except at the same time younger (sixteen) and far less innocent, with a past as dark as Mulholland Drive's Diane Selwyn.

Now let's put Leila on the Yellow Brick Road, so to speak. At once several elements of her character arc fall into place:

1. Drusilla Becket is, as her enemies (including who knows how many ex-husbands) nickname her, the Wicked Witch of the West.
2. The corresponding Good Witch is Leila's aunt Ariel Shield, who is (except of course for the white stripe) black-haired like herself. (In The Wizard of Oz, the movie, both Dorothy and Glinda are redheads; the corresponding character in Mulholland Drive happens to be Diane's aunt.) As the Grail Bearer, she brings in a completely different myth system, particularly the version found in the books of Margaret Starbird, a real-life mentor she invokes by name.
3. Shira, of course, corresponds to Dorothy's inseparable companion Princess Ozma in the Oz novels.
4. Seattle has many nicknames, but the most famous of them is "Emerald City", named after not the architecture but the forested surroundings. The name of the city AI, OZMA, is a blatant pun.
5. Once in the Emerald City, what "great and powerful" Wizard does she meet? Zardoz, of course, in the form of King Patriot. (The song in Interlude 11 samples Zardoz's speech in the notorious 1970s cult movie.) And she kills him — because there is in fact no man behind the curtain. That sequence is the origin of a major Spanner theme, the mystery of the Ego.
6. Leila's counterpart to the tornado that swept Dorothy to Oz is the "tornado" of scandal that destroyed her modelling career and which she barely managed to escape with her life. Another version is the Spanner Incident, in which the series' title character appears and disappears in a whirlwind.
7. Her version of the poppy-field crisis that Glinda has to rescue Dorothy and her travelling companions from may be the name crisis of Chapter 12 (R5 version), in which she fights for her life against her very name itself (which, due to Corporate customs, has trapped her in an arranged marriage to one of the story's nastiest villains). Another character plays the Glinda role here: Angela Coyne, Shira's cousin, lawyer, and fellow redhead. There's another poppy-related connection: it's in Chapter 12 that Leila leaves behind her old heroin habit forever.
8. The Spanner versions of those travelling companions are already experienced heroes unlike the originals, so they don't need to earn their brain, heart, or courage. In fact, there's two versions: three bishounen at Bangor High (Team Bremelo's Connor, Cory, and Kio) and three nameless women from the revolutionary underground (now introduced in Chapter 2).
9. The name of one gang, "Flyen Monkeez", reveals the Klownz to be a version of the Wicked Witch's flying monkey minions.
10. Who corresponds to the Munchkins? Why, the "little people" as the Corporates call them, the mass of ordinary working people against whom the Conservative Revolution is crusading in the name of "the best" (hoi aristoi, as in aristocracy). Thus do I make explicit the Populist themes that are only implicit in L. Frank Baum's original novels, though I drop the old Populists' silver-against-gold (or greenbacks) crusade and ask why, if money turned out to be ichor (the blood of gods) as the Social Darwinists' occult secret doctrine states (so theorizes Bram Dijkstra), there is any need for it at all. The Corporate robber barons and Patriot terrorists with their giant-monster Egos are in fact Nephilim, invoked under their alternate name "Anakim", Hebrew for "giants". Starbird's name for those the Anakim oppose and oppress, those whom Jesus (and the Grail Bearers after him) vowed to defend? Anawim: "little ones".
11. If Leila is a darker take on Dorothy who is in fact a witch, then her counterpart to Toto needs to be that classic witch's familiar, a black cat, a stray who charmed her way into Leila's life back when she was a young girl in her native Ireland.
12. The Spanner version of the "yellow brick road" (the golden road of heroes) will lead Leila not toward "home" (wherever that is) but into legend. She chooses this path by choosing the human version of the red pill from another cinematic mythology.

Of course, the Wizard of Oz plot doesn't sum up all of Leila's character arc. For one thing, Dorothy has nothing resembling Leila's signet ring (the sign of her enslavement to her aristocratic clan that she throws away in Chapter 16) or power crystal (which Shira returns to her). Also, I haven't figured out any counterparts to the ruby slippers (that mentor's gift which gives Dorothy the power to return home) or the Emerald City's famous Horse of a Different Color (that obvious dream symbol of radical change to come). But it definitely serves as a good ready-made template I can model Leila's character arc on (at least in Book 1). David Lynch followed the template in Mulholland Drive, even adding a Princess Ozma figure in Camilla Rhodes; but this Hollywood Ozma proves as totally corrupt as Zardoz (an evil Wizard of Oz), so Diane murders her and ends her journey in tragedy. I'll make my own variations, of course. And it all becomes obvious when you remember that Seattle's nickname is "Emerald City".

Spanner R5 Update: Chapter 1 Almost Perfect, Just One Brand New Scene to Go

I thought it would take just one pass. I found myself going back and forth through Chapter 1 making major changes to a lot of scenes and then making tweak after tweak after little tweak until now it's all but perfect. All the typos and continuity errors are fixed, all the foreshadowing and revealing character moments inserted, all the words made right. I even converted all the dream and vision sequences into embedded poems, simply because I got bored with just italicized and double-indented narrative prose that looks like I copypasted it out of a nonfiction book on dreams, and because I found I can write dreams and visions better when they're in formatted free verse.

All this means: I'm finally finished editing Chapter 1! The final edit on it's almost done! Except for one scene: the new opening.

This new opening is formatted like a movie or TV script. I call it the "Propaganda Reel". Filmed, it's the bombastic opening to a patriotic superhero cartoon, with America itself the ultimate superhero, far greater than even the series' (antagonist) superhero team the Liberators. It's full of Hollywood Blockbuster bombast and the utter lack of originality caused by studio-enforced rigid conformity to Blake Snyder's Save the Cat! beat sheet. I realized I could map Christopher Vogler's hero's journey beat sheet to the Snyder template so that the Reel spins out an entire hero's journey for main antagonist Henry Becket (costumed as the superhero American Crusader in the Reel) telling of his 9/11/01-12/21/12 rise as he would have us see it in just 7-800 words of script, with the series itself being in part the tragedy of his fall, his fatal flaws being self-righteousness (an ever present danger for superheroes) and paranoia (a flaw that reaches deep into his backstory). The Reel's soundtrack is a pounding and bombastic military-metal theme song inspired by such songs as the G.I. Joe cartoon theme "A Great American Hero" and "America, Fuck Yeah!" from Team America: World Police. The Reel's plot? The deeply fascistic "Annihilation Plot" of Fort Apache and the movie version of World War Z.

The whole Propaganda Reel serves as an ironic counterpart to Chaos Angel Spanner itself, whose main plot commences with the first scene, Shira's defiant trash-talking videoblog post (and the plasma disruptor her brand new unlicensed 3D printer is building up). What better to show just what Shira and her friends and allies are up against? And Becket's actual appearances in the story reveal that he just might not be the hero he thinks he is; he might even be what his ex-wife and nemesis Willa (Shira's Rocker psychologist aunt) calls him, a mad-scientist villain who thinks he's the only sane man left alive.

One more scene left. I'll take a break to give the muse a rest (unless of course she has no intention of resting), and then I'll attack. One more scene...

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 R5 Update: Close to the Edit, or Chapter 1 Almost Complete

It's been a long time since I posted an entry or even used Twitter and Google+, so it's like I'm coming back into the world again. My severe case of Editor's Block is over, and I'm ready to return to the world. Fortunately, I've made progress on Chapter 1 and elsewhere in the final draft of Spanner Book 1. So here's my progress so far:

Chapter 1:

• Leila's introduction scene now contains forward references to 1.7, Interlude 5, and her decision to go nameless in Chapters 12 and 13.
• Shira's introduction scene (her videoblog post) is completely revised. I realized I had her ever so slightly out of character in all previous versions, so I corrected that. And now she issues an even more provocative challenge.
• The later villain Admiral Currie who enters the story in Chapter 20? His name now opens his reporter daughter Amanda's intro scene, since after all he destroyed her life and now rules it (see: Interlude 12).
• Most of the flashbacks and several scenes in present continuity now fit in Revision 5 continuity.
• Remember Rebel Styles from Chapter 2? She's now in the "Newark ghetto" scene in Chapter 1, scaring right-wing militia types to death and making the survivors panic right into the waiting SRO squad.
• I added a new intro screen for Richard Becket, Chapter 1's main antagonist. He now represents the fusion of high finance and dark wizardry. His failure in Chapter 1 is what begins his brother Henry's rise to supreme power.
• I added one new character, a "shounen hero" who I kill off the same way Neal Stephenson kills off his "typical cyberpunk hero" in the first chapter of The Diamond Age. This new character is a Brazilian hoverboard champion named Oscar Ribeiro who goes by the handle Blackflag.
• A "propaganda reel" serves as the new second scene, to reveal the official Party line in the style of the opening credits to a superhero cartoon.
• I rearranged the order of the early scenes completely, and I'm probably going to reorder them again, possibly even more than once.
• Last but not least, I finally found a way to edit together the two versions of Jennifer's and Henry Becket's long intro scenes, the task that's been stymieing me for so long.

It's not complete yet, but I'm closer than ever and ready to take on those two big scenes.

Later Chapters:

• Chapter 2: I decided I'll completely rework this one. I've added new scenes and plan to shorten some older scenes and throw others out.
• Chapter 4: 4.4 is now much better than the original. Up to Revision 4, I left it largely unchanged. I condensed the opening 3-paragraph exposition to just one shorter paragraph, gave Desiree an aura of superstitious terror among the Russian gangsters befitting her "electrifying" superpowers, gave the Italian mobsters a priest who's after the Gnostic gospel Desiree's trying to deliver to Ariel, and added a new tension between Desiree and Ariel. Desiree now gives Ariel an ultimatum: bring Lucie back to me, or you won't get your gospel and Uncle Richard might even kill me to steal it.
• Chapter 12: when Leila renounces her name at the end, she gets a new dream scene signifying a major change in her character.
• Chapter 15: I'm restoring the Jennifer videoblog post I originally planned for Revision 4. I've already moved the "precogs go mad" prelude back to the beginning of Chapter 14, where it was in Revision 2 and the R3 plan. I have new plans for major revisions to 15.6.
• Chapter 23: In retrospect, there were certain important scenes in the R4 plan that I ended up not writing. I'm adding those scenes to R5. Meanwhile, I intend to make the super battle in the sky much clearer.
• I'm tracing several threads, not just new ones but ones I was still neglecting in Revision 4, so that I don't drop them in the final version. Since I put so much new stuff in Revision 4, I'm moving scenes around, adding new ones to develop the final continuity, and throwing away any scenes that don't fit.

So that's what I've been up to while I was in hiding. I've set for myself a hard deadline for Chapter 1: the end of this month. I want to get at least up to Chapter 8 fully edited before NaNoWriMo. And I'll continue to update right here. My plan is to whet your appetite by publishing Chapter 1 online first.

Stay tuned...

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...

NaNoEdMo 2013 Begins! Initial Plans for Spanner Chapter 18, Interludes 11 and 12

It's edit-till-you-drop time again! That means NaNoEdMo, and the ambitious plans I have for the rest of the final version of Spanner Book 1. And boy, do I have plans.

First of all, there's my attempt to edit all of Chapter 18 in one weekend. It begins with something I haven't done since around Chapter 5 or so: print out the chapter to be edited, one page per sheet (normally I print on both sides), then attack the printout with a red pen, a pair of which I just picked up for a buck. I will admit that the reason I took so long to edit Chapter 12 had a lot to do with forgetting to print it out. On the front, I'll do all the copyediting (mostly crossing out at this stage); on the back, I'll make most of the new additions. As always during this long edit process, I'll be throwing scenes all over the chapter and even swipe scenes from others. In the case of Chapter 18, I'll be throwing out scenes entirely in order to cram in a bunch of scenarios from the Project Notebooks, most of which I either wrote for Book 2 originally or haven't even used yet.

Then there's Interlude 11, which I'm posting tomorrow (March 2; I was going to post it today). I actually wrote it as a song first with the rudiments of a music video script, inserted it into my yWriter5 project, exported it in RTF format, and converted to HTML. The next step after cleaning up the file is to format is to format the sections of the video (scenes, samples, lyrics) and expand the video script. Once the ebook version is finished, I'll convert the markup into the format I use on this blog so I can post it. The tricky part turned out to be the expanded music video part with its sampled footage (implied to be stolen from various media companies or censored by the MSM) and esoteric footage of the band's "members" (the Memetic Terrorists are actually a one-man band consisting of myself).

Interlude 12 is another tricky one, since it began as some vague ideas I then turned into a song, which I'll then translate into a combination of free verse and prose poetry involving the characters of Keenan Sasser and Amanda Currie in the aftermath of the Conservative Revolution and 12/21. Basically it's Amanda's complete mental breakdown in the form of art photographs, the result being the strangely cheery newsbot who appears in Chapter 1.

My ultimate goal is to finish editing the rest of Book 1, six chapters and three Interludes in a single month, and possibly Interlude 14 and Chapter 24 as well. 50 hours and EdMo victory? All too easy. Here goes...