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 Update: More #amediting Needed on 23.5

Turns out Spanner 23.5 is the most incomplete section of Chapter 23, with the least number of Revision 2 or previous-chapter scenes that merely need editing. 23.6 is the most complete (or was when I started editing Chapter 23), so it's going to post the day after 23.5 regardless.

What's stymieing me this time? (Darling muse, I love you to pieces, but you don't get to take a break until the chapter's over.) By plan, this is the most abstract section in all of Book 1. I'm not so much editing it or even writing it from scratch; rather, I'm constructing it, and construction takes time.

Probably the first thing I'm going to do with the Revision 5 one-pass edit is rework the formatting of Echelon's lines. I kludged the CSS so I could get 23.2-4 posted quickly. 23.5 involves a lot of CSS hacking.

I'm working on 23.5 now, and I hope to get it posted tomorrow. If not, I'll let you know. But I'm finishing Chapter 23 and Book 1 no matter what. 23.5 will post.

Spanner R4 Update: Another Difficult Installment (23.3's Coming Tomorrow)

As I continue to recover from baby week (by now my grandma has seen her new great-grandson), I find I've worked myself into a corner yet again. That baby week was also Al-Qaeda bombing week didn't help, considering how much I loathe the kind of psychopaths who would join that prison gang.

The issue with 23.3 involves structure. This should be no surprise, considering how complex 23.1 and 23.2 turned out to be. I have my scenes and plot threads laid out in handwritten ink on scratch paper laid out before me. The tricky part is putting them in the proper tricky order.

Meanwhile, I inserted a new Revision 4.1 scene into 21.3, in which a frazzled Jennifer finally answers classmate Saida Ibrahim's question in Chapter 5, "Why does everybody here hate Muslims so much?" The answer is: it's Man Rage in its purest form, exactly what nearly trashed Bangor High in the previous scene. 23.3 will have another resolution to that thread as another Arab exile tries to speak reason to her (in the new 21.3 scene, she's acting very much like a typical angry deconvert), because Muslims are fighting against the Caliphate too, to reclaim their homelands from it and its symbiotic enemy, the American Empire.

So 23.3 is my Saturday night project. I'm going to cool down, turn on the music, and structure the thing. I'm posting 23.3 tomorrow. I will finish this thing.

Spanner R4 Update: Baby Week #amediting Continues, 23.2 Will Post Tomorrow

The nephew is more or less out of the nursery, and I even got to hold him. Since he goes home tomorrow, that's when I'm scheduling Spanner 23.2 to post. I'm taking advantage of the involuntary breather to catch my breath and take a second look at the work I've done on 23.2 so far; sure enough, I've found extra room for improvement, including some things I managed to forget about in my haste, including the by now necessary duel between the Wrecking Krewe hackers and the drone-operating Tech Knights.

Meanwhile, I've begun writing notes for Chapter 1 and various character arcs of what has already transformed from Revision 4.1 into a full-blown Fifth Revision, the reason for this being one Elle Shears, Fourth-Generation Rocker Child (her self-description). All of a sudden during the 23.2 R4 edit, she blossomed from a collection of details into a full-blown character; then she took the opportunity during the current hiatus to start bugging me to retrofit her into more scenes of the final revised ebook and threw in a few surprises. And so I'll be not just retconning but retrofitting her into Chapter 1 R5, and she'll even replace Karen in many of her Chapter 2 appearances (especially those with Shira) in part because she makes a better contrast to Rebel Styles. Now that she's made herself a major character, she's even bringing in a new character (one from the Project Notebooks whom I managed to leave out) who will serve as a secondary School Arc villain and give me an excuse to shoehorn more "Elle, Mel, Belle, and Lil" scenes into the School Arc, among other things. I'm already writing the notes down.

Meanwhile, 23.2 posts tomorrow and 23.3 will follow on its heels on Saturday.

Spanner R4 Update: Chapter 23 Delayed by New Baby Nephew, Alas

Sometimes real life gets in the way. Case in point: the new nephew, who since being born yesterday has the whole extended family running back and forth and spending most of our time at the hospital and otherwise away from home, leaving us all tired and frazzled. I haven't had time to even touch Spanner 23.2 since Monday, when 23.1 posted. We'll have little time to ourselves until Friday, when the nephew finally goes home with his parents.

I am now re-editing 23.1, and then I will post it on Friday.

Spanner R4 Update: A Short Break to Catch My Breath (and Upgrade my CSS Hacking Skills)

NaNoEdMo is over, and with it the most intense editing experience of my life. I had my celebration; now I deserve a few days' break. And so I'm posting Interlude 13 tomorrow and starting Chapter 22 on Monday.

Meanwhile, I checked out a couple library books on Cascading Style Sheets, one on CSS3, thinking I could learn a few things that might be relevant to the HTML5-based EPUB3 ebook format while I was waiting for my brother to drop off a new bookcase. The Spanner book 1 ebook is in the trusty old standard EPUB 2 based on XHTML, but I'm doing book 2 in EPUB3. I also had in mind some serious CSS hacks for Chapters 22 and 23, especially when the superheroes start mind-bombing the rebellious civilians, Echelon gets its first speaking lines, and the Rockers bring out the sound cannons. I found myself neglecting Interlude 13 for a day while I worked out, by trial and error, a series of new CSS hacks for the ebook version of Chapters 1, 20, and 21. I made several changes to the ebook stylesheet, threw out the styles that didn't work, and kept the ones that did. Mostly this had to do with styling sections set off by the <div> tag and the <p> and <span> tags within <div>s. I haven't yet experimented with the font and text-box properties I'll be playing around with in Chapters 22 and 23.

So I'm slowing down the schedule again so I can take more time to work with styles in those final two style-heavy chapters. Back to the three-a-week schedule. Interlude 13 posts tomorrow; Chapter 22 begins on Monday.

Experiencing Technical Difficulties...

Right now I'm having a big problem with Part 20.1. Seems Blogger somehow autodeleted it. Hopefully it's result of a bug, and not something more.

I'm working on reconstructing the story right now. I hope to post it sometime soon. Stay tuned, faithful readers...

(Turns out the problem is that I scheduled tomorrow's installment to post today. Blogger can't post two entries at the same time, so it deleted the first. I'm reconstructing the deleted one right now.)

Spanner Is Returning To Schedule. Really.

Faithful readers will notice that I've skipped a Monday. There is one big reason for this: writer's block. The tough transition from my default Night Owl Mode to Early Bird Mode isn't helping any.

Those troubles are over. Spanner Chapter 22 will be finished and posted tonight. Then, on Friday, I'll put the story back on schedule when I post the final chapter of Book 1.

I'm still here, everybody.