I have just discovered, long after I should have, just how extremely difficult it is to plot a novel as complicated as Spanner Book 1 without a spreadsheet. Until now I've had this stubborn notion, dating way, way back to the Apple II days of VisiCalc, that spreadsheets are for business calculating stuff no different from the paper ledgers that inspired the original spreadsheets. So for the last 3 years or so I was trying to wrestle this unwieldy plot into shape without a spreadsheet until I finally gave up.
This is the kind of thing that makes me feel old.
Anyway, I have started a spreadsheet for Spanner Book 1. Already my mind has started making the connections that evaded me when I was still trying to do everything in the HTML files. My writing may have improved by leaps and bounds because of all that editing, but plotting has been a lot more difficult. The spreadsheet is already making a difference.
And so I'm going to take a break from the rewriting for a while, though here and there I'll still slip in a few new scenes (one set at the end of "act 2" even contains a huge cliffhanger), until I've entered all the chapters and scenes into the new spreadsheet.
Some things just have to be done. It's a wonder I avoided doing it for so long.
Showing posts with label procrastination. Show all posts
Showing posts with label procrastination. Show all posts
Sunday, January 18, 2015
Friday, October 10, 2014
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...
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...
Saturday, April 12, 2014
Spanner R5 Update: The #amediting Resumes; Plus, the New Chapter 4 Plan
It's been a while since I've done any actual edits on Spanner. Since FAWM began, to be exact. I was so busy writing 28 songs and agonizing over my inadequate singing and playing skills that I dropped the Revision 5 edit altogether. I'm returning to the script with only the first section of Chapter 3 scripted. The R5 version will be roughly like previous versions, especially once I get it novelized.
However, Chapter 4 R5 will be very different from previous versions. Most of it, starting with section 2 or 3, will be a single sequence with several intercut threads, dominated by a completely new thread called "Capital Day" focusing on the Party's corporatist replacement for the American version of Labor Day, the very idea of which the Corporates revile as "commonist". I intend to introduce several major series themes in this chapter. The most important, though, is "the second half of the end of the Cold War", better known as "the fall of the American Empire", an America that declined into the corporatist version of Stalinist Russia and is about to suffer its fate despite the Herculean efforts of America's future (as of Chapter 15) superhero dictator. Introduced along with it: the "foregone conclusion" motif involving the story brazenly spoiling its own endings, whether they're inevitable (the aforementioned imperial collapse, already far advanced when the Conservative Revolution attempted to prevent it starting in 2012) or self-fulfilling prophecies (Henry Becket, the superhero dictator, bringing the end about by trying to prevent it).
To get the new Chapter 4 organized, I'm going to have to break open a pack of index cards for the first time in years, write the scenes on them, and fling them around. Some older scenes likely won't make it into the final version. Whatever scenes survive will surely be the most interesting.
Meanwhile, I've started the tedious process of editing all the Revision 4 chapter and section posts to read "Revision 4" instead of "Final Revision", because R4 is not the Final Revision. The actual Final Revision (i.e. Revision 5) is turning out much different from previous versions. Since Revision 5 is already turning out to be far superior to the posted Revision 4, I'm editing the posts accordingly. This will probably take a few days.
However, Chapter 4 R5 will be very different from previous versions. Most of it, starting with section 2 or 3, will be a single sequence with several intercut threads, dominated by a completely new thread called "Capital Day" focusing on the Party's corporatist replacement for the American version of Labor Day, the very idea of which the Corporates revile as "commonist". I intend to introduce several major series themes in this chapter. The most important, though, is "the second half of the end of the Cold War", better known as "the fall of the American Empire", an America that declined into the corporatist version of Stalinist Russia and is about to suffer its fate despite the Herculean efforts of America's future (as of Chapter 15) superhero dictator. Introduced along with it: the "foregone conclusion" motif involving the story brazenly spoiling its own endings, whether they're inevitable (the aforementioned imperial collapse, already far advanced when the Conservative Revolution attempted to prevent it starting in 2012) or self-fulfilling prophecies (Henry Becket, the superhero dictator, bringing the end about by trying to prevent it).
To get the new Chapter 4 organized, I'm going to have to break open a pack of index cards for the first time in years, write the scenes on them, and fling them around. Some older scenes likely won't make it into the final version. Whatever scenes survive will surely be the most interesting.
Meanwhile, I've started the tedious process of editing all the Revision 4 chapter and section posts to read "Revision 4" instead of "Final Revision", because R4 is not the Final Revision. The actual Final Revision (i.e. Revision 5) is turning out much different from previous versions. Since Revision 5 is already turning out to be far superior to the posted Revision 4, I'm editing the posts accordingly. This will probably take a few days.
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
NaNoWriMo 2013 Update 1: The Slow, Slow Start
Hey, muse! Yeah, you! Won't you get away from Spanner for a moment and help me write my NaNoWriMo novel? You're getting like Willa's gossip about trendy architect Zaha Hadid in Chapter 4 R5, about how she turned Holy City Arcology's brand new Hall of Heroes into Mount Rushmore-cum-With the Beatles for tyrant superheroes:
Yeah, I'm starting slow again this NaNo. Yes, I'm afraid there will be a Panic Time. I'm having such a hard time just starting that I can't even do my "rapid badwriting" technique because the muse remains monomaniacally obsessed with editing Spanner and throwing me new scenarios faster than I can even write. Looks like I won't have a NaNoFiMo either, since next month's going to be another SpaNoEdMo.
It's way past time to kick the muse into gear. Looks like I'm going to have to use force. (takes out paddle, prepares to tie muse to bed)
Please, muse, will you at least help me write a first draft for Freefall that sucks, except of course for the clever dialogue that seems to flow from me spontaneously like, well, Zaha Hadid's architectural effusion of fangirlism in Spanner Chapter 4 R5?Shira: (takes deep breath) Oh my god what the hell is that?Jennifer: (mouth gaping) That's supposed to be the Hall of Heroes?Willa: (smiling ironically) Yes, I'm afraid that is indeed Zaha Hadid's temple of hero worship. That blob behind the wall of faces is her grand effusion of love. Drusilla was complaining about how Dick was flirting with Hadid right in front of her, and I'm sure the architect had great fun putting the blush in Dru's pale face. Reliable sources tell me he says she made him feel like a Rock Star, and she felt like she fucked a god. She's gone on to hero-worshipping lesser would-be Napoleons, while he's gone back to hitting on me.
Yeah, I'm starting slow again this NaNo. Yes, I'm afraid there will be a Panic Time. I'm having such a hard time just starting that I can't even do my "rapid badwriting" technique because the muse remains monomaniacally obsessed with editing Spanner and throwing me new scenarios faster than I can even write. Looks like I won't have a NaNoFiMo either, since next month's going to be another SpaNoEdMo.
It's way past time to kick the muse into gear. Looks like I'm going to have to use force. (takes out paddle, prepares to tie muse to bed)
Monday, October 28, 2013
Spanner R5 Update: Chapter 1 Complete; or, The Author beheld his creation, and lo! it was Insanely Great.
It pays to edit. The fifth and final version of Spanner Chapter 1 took me months to edit, but it was very much worth it. Maybe throwing in the ghost of Steve Jobs in the first draft worked like a lucky charm (he was still alive then, but still)? He was renowned for his combination of perfectionism and impeccable design sense. Sure enough, I find myself playing Steve Jobs on my own work, fine-tuning here and radically revising there, reading it over and over to find anything that was even remotely not-right, making multiple passes to find all the errors and inconsistencies and any opportunities to strengthen the plot and reinforce the themes until it was as close to perfect in my mind as I could possibly get it. I am now convinced he would agree that the result is, in his immortal phrase, Insanely Great.
Oh, and what you think is Steve Jobs (the character in the story) isn't really the ghost of Steve Jobs at all, but my own monumental "Ego" speaking my own words and getting poetically clobbered in the third eye with my own monkeywrench. In my plan for the "Pilot Episode" ebook cover, it will be not Jobs' face but mine digitally altered behind the hand holding the wrench. Even my "Marius" (the Victor Hugo self-insert character in Les Misérables), Keenan Sasser (basically me as the grown-up "real Tommy Westphall" from the last five minutes of St. Elsewhere), is less "me" in Chapter 1 than the giant face of Steve Jobs is, complete with a symbolic warning from (and to) the Author about the dangers of letting success and power go to your head. Or, as the soap-opera announcer would put it, "The ghost of Steve Jobs will be played by Dennis Jernberg's ego."
In contrast to the climax, I added a new opening, a "Propaganda Reel" which retells the story of the Conservative Revolution from the revolutionaries' perspective in the form of the opening credits to a jingoistic superhero cartoon. I organized the requisite tropes in rigid conformity to the fifteen obligatory beats in Blake Snyder's Save the Cat! beat sheet as imposed by Hollywood studio executives in the form of a rigid template screenwriters and directors must conform to Or Else; then I associated images accordingly and translated it into movie script and song lyrics. I forced myself to let the thing suck at least somewhat, to symbolize the limits of the antagonists' worldview. The resulting script, I believe, reflects quite well the worldview Shira and her friends and allies must fight against when the story actually begins.
And now to go deeper into the details...
On the Editing Process
At first I thought it would be simple. Take out Karen and Hope, insert Elle and new "decoy hero" Rico X, all would be fine and dandy, right? I never thought I'd take several months editing it, and I never thought the final version would be so vastly improved over the fourth draft I thought all but perfect. But there you have it.
Karen: I realized she's already so heavily involved in what becomes the School Arc that she's got no time for Spanner incidents. Besides, she's too idealistic to take money from a group of corporations just to throw a monkeywrench with a plasma disruptor in its jaws. Edited out.
Hope: Shira's mother makes fewer appearances than she did in Revision 4. She pretty much comes with Willa and is not quite as needed. Presence reduced.
Elle: I fell hard in love with this character while I was writing Chapters 22 and 23 for Revision 4. As she embodied so well everything so deliciously wrong about Rockerdom, she made a superior replacement for Karen. Edited in.
Desiree: She not only replaces Hope in most of her flashback appearances from R4, she ended up playing a role in the episode finale. Edited in.
The new guy: Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age starts from the perspective of the Standard Cyberpunk Hero — and kills him off at the end of the first chapter. So I figured I'd do the same thing to the Standard Shounen Anime Action Hero (like, say, Ikki in Oh!Great's Air Gear) in Chapter 1 of Spanner. So I threw him in. At first he was just a handle: Blackflag. Then I made him a Brazilian hoverboard racer and the real name Oscar Ribeiro. Then I ditched both names and just called him Rico X, which Shira latched onto, calling him "X-boy" and "X-baby". Putting him in and killing him off also had the effect of making J.T. Sparks a villain for the first 2 chapters, which will allow me to greatly increase the WHAM! at the end of Chapter 2. Rico stays; edited in.
The Achievements: Since the original unnamed "Team Spanner" are hoverboard racers and because of the series motif of "Tournament", I decided to throw in some gamification, complete with achievement badges. You want to make your cyberpunk contemporary? Gotta throw in gamification and achievement badges along with your augmented reality.
Dreams into poems: In Chapter 1 R4, one vision scene and the climax are written in blank verse as "Bester moments", narrative distortions in the text of the kind used by science fiction grandmaster Alfred Bester, particularly how he depicts synaesthesia in Tiger, Tiger a.k.a. The Stars My Destination. That kind of text manipulation is all but impossible in CSS2 (used by EPUB2 ebooks), so I settled on free-verse poems in the Surrealist and Beat style. Then when I was doing the final edits on Chapter 1, I realized: they make italicized dream scenes in the dream-journal format look boring to me. I'm a poet and a CSS hacker too. Solution: convert the remaining dream and vision scenes into poems. Not only do they look better on the page, they allow me to write them more easily because I can capture the weirdness of dreams and visions better. Except for a very few selected dream sequences and the lucid-dream scenes, this will be my approach from now on.
Plus I made some changes to certain formats. For example, Shira's videoblog entries are now prefaced by one single italicized "Posted to LocaFantoma99's Profile..." line without the "Technosphere" location tag, and the whole entry is double-indented. I hacked up a new batch of styles for new R5-specific elements such as the achievement badges and the script-formatted new opening scene. I threw in some little nuggets of foreshadowing throughout the text and changed some of the wording to make many major themes stand out more.
Conclusion
And that does it for Spanner Chapter 1. It's done, it's finished, it's perfect at last. Like the Intro and most of the Interludes so far, it needs no more editing. It is now ready to blow minds. Only one thing is needed before I unleash the Pilot Episode (Intro + Chapter 1 + Interlude 1) onto the online bookstores, and that's the cover.
I'm breaking out the champagne. I'm taking a short but well deserved break. And then I'm throwing myself into Chapter 2...
Oh, and what you think is Steve Jobs (the character in the story) isn't really the ghost of Steve Jobs at all, but my own monumental "Ego" speaking my own words and getting poetically clobbered in the third eye with my own monkeywrench. In my plan for the "Pilot Episode" ebook cover, it will be not Jobs' face but mine digitally altered behind the hand holding the wrench. Even my "Marius" (the Victor Hugo self-insert character in Les Misérables), Keenan Sasser (basically me as the grown-up "real Tommy Westphall" from the last five minutes of St. Elsewhere), is less "me" in Chapter 1 than the giant face of Steve Jobs is, complete with a symbolic warning from (and to) the Author about the dangers of letting success and power go to your head. Or, as the soap-opera announcer would put it, "The ghost of Steve Jobs will be played by Dennis Jernberg's ego."
In contrast to the climax, I added a new opening, a "Propaganda Reel" which retells the story of the Conservative Revolution from the revolutionaries' perspective in the form of the opening credits to a jingoistic superhero cartoon. I organized the requisite tropes in rigid conformity to the fifteen obligatory beats in Blake Snyder's Save the Cat! beat sheet as imposed by Hollywood studio executives in the form of a rigid template screenwriters and directors must conform to Or Else; then I associated images accordingly and translated it into movie script and song lyrics. I forced myself to let the thing suck at least somewhat, to symbolize the limits of the antagonists' worldview. The resulting script, I believe, reflects quite well the worldview Shira and her friends and allies must fight against when the story actually begins.
And now to go deeper into the details...
On the Editing Process
At first I thought it would be simple. Take out Karen and Hope, insert Elle and new "decoy hero" Rico X, all would be fine and dandy, right? I never thought I'd take several months editing it, and I never thought the final version would be so vastly improved over the fourth draft I thought all but perfect. But there you have it.
Karen: I realized she's already so heavily involved in what becomes the School Arc that she's got no time for Spanner incidents. Besides, she's too idealistic to take money from a group of corporations just to throw a monkeywrench with a plasma disruptor in its jaws. Edited out.
Hope: Shira's mother makes fewer appearances than she did in Revision 4. She pretty much comes with Willa and is not quite as needed. Presence reduced.
Elle: I fell hard in love with this character while I was writing Chapters 22 and 23 for Revision 4. As she embodied so well everything so deliciously wrong about Rockerdom, she made a superior replacement for Karen. Edited in.
Desiree: She not only replaces Hope in most of her flashback appearances from R4, she ended up playing a role in the episode finale. Edited in.
The new guy: Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age starts from the perspective of the Standard Cyberpunk Hero — and kills him off at the end of the first chapter. So I figured I'd do the same thing to the Standard Shounen Anime Action Hero (like, say, Ikki in Oh!Great's Air Gear) in Chapter 1 of Spanner. So I threw him in. At first he was just a handle: Blackflag. Then I made him a Brazilian hoverboard racer and the real name Oscar Ribeiro. Then I ditched both names and just called him Rico X, which Shira latched onto, calling him "X-boy" and "X-baby". Putting him in and killing him off also had the effect of making J.T. Sparks a villain for the first 2 chapters, which will allow me to greatly increase the WHAM! at the end of Chapter 2. Rico stays; edited in.
The Achievements: Since the original unnamed "Team Spanner" are hoverboard racers and because of the series motif of "Tournament", I decided to throw in some gamification, complete with achievement badges. You want to make your cyberpunk contemporary? Gotta throw in gamification and achievement badges along with your augmented reality.
Dreams into poems: In Chapter 1 R4, one vision scene and the climax are written in blank verse as "Bester moments", narrative distortions in the text of the kind used by science fiction grandmaster Alfred Bester, particularly how he depicts synaesthesia in Tiger, Tiger a.k.a. The Stars My Destination. That kind of text manipulation is all but impossible in CSS2 (used by EPUB2 ebooks), so I settled on free-verse poems in the Surrealist and Beat style. Then when I was doing the final edits on Chapter 1, I realized: they make italicized dream scenes in the dream-journal format look boring to me. I'm a poet and a CSS hacker too. Solution: convert the remaining dream and vision scenes into poems. Not only do they look better on the page, they allow me to write them more easily because I can capture the weirdness of dreams and visions better. Except for a very few selected dream sequences and the lucid-dream scenes, this will be my approach from now on.
Plus I made some changes to certain formats. For example, Shira's videoblog entries are now prefaced by one single italicized "Posted to LocaFantoma99's Profile..." line without the "Technosphere" location tag, and the whole entry is double-indented. I hacked up a new batch of styles for new R5-specific elements such as the achievement badges and the script-formatted new opening scene. I threw in some little nuggets of foreshadowing throughout the text and changed some of the wording to make many major themes stand out more.
Conclusion
And that does it for Spanner Chapter 1. It's done, it's finished, it's perfect at last. Like the Intro and most of the Interludes so far, it needs no more editing. It is now ready to blow minds. Only one thing is needed before I unleash the Pilot Episode (Intro + Chapter 1 + Interlude 1) onto the online bookstores, and that's the cover.
I'm breaking out the champagne. I'm taking a short but well deserved break. And then I'm throwing myself into Chapter 2...
Friday, June 28, 2013
#amprocrastinating #amediting: I Took a Break from Spanner R5, But The Procrastinating's Over Now
For the last couple of weeks, I've found myself blocked in my editing for Spanner Revision 5. For a week there, I was completely offline altogether.
I think my muse had enough and collapsed in exhaustion.
The most I got done was printing the two Chapter 1 scenes that currently have two versions. My challenge is to combine the two versions of each scene into a single version that's both shorter and consistent with the new Fifth Revision continuity. I'd already completely rearranged the entire first half of Chapter 1, completely rewritten several of the flashbacks, and composed new scenes introducing major characters and themes. But after about of month of this my muse keeled over and spent the last two weeks in a coma. The ideas didn't start really coming until today.
What broke the icelock? As I put it in my first blog post in weeks, I pretty much said "Screw this" and went online. I got back on Twitter and Google+, did a lot of housekeeping on Chrome and my blogs, and got back into the mindset. Now I'm going to take those two scenes, read them (both versions, of course), and finish editing them. At least I'm able to do it.
And so it resumes...
I think my muse had enough and collapsed in exhaustion.
The most I got done was printing the two Chapter 1 scenes that currently have two versions. My challenge is to combine the two versions of each scene into a single version that's both shorter and consistent with the new Fifth Revision continuity. I'd already completely rearranged the entire first half of Chapter 1, completely rewritten several of the flashbacks, and composed new scenes introducing major characters and themes. But after about of month of this my muse keeled over and spent the last two weeks in a coma. The ideas didn't start really coming until today.
What broke the icelock? As I put it in my first blog post in weeks, I pretty much said "Screw this" and went online. I got back on Twitter and Google+, did a lot of housekeeping on Chrome and my blogs, and got back into the mindset. Now I'm going to take those two scenes, read them (both versions, of course), and finish editing them. At least I'm able to do it.
And so it resumes...
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
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.
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.
Saturday, April 20, 2013
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.
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.
Thursday, April 18, 2013
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.
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.
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
NaNoWriMo 2012 Approacheth; Plus Spanner Chapter 12 Fridays in November
NaNoWriMo 2012 starts tomorrow! It'll be my seventh, and this time I'm determined to make sure there will be no Panic Time. Also, I'm doing something completely different for a change: writing by the seat of my pants, and something non-Spanner-related. So no Chaos Angel Spanner volumes, prequels, or side stories. All new characters, none having anything to do with the "Spannerverse" or engaging in its typical political, criminal, and sexual shenanigans. The reason is so I can get it published through something like Smashwords or Lulu as a first novel I can make a few bucks from. With those bucks I'm going to buy the ISBN numbers that will allow me to keep full creative control over all Spanner publications (those that aren't fan publications, anyway; the fan publications will naturally belong to the fans). So expect something new and hopefully fresh. The editing into something readable is what NaNoEdMo is for.
As for Spanner itself: the new Interlude 8 and the Final Revision version of Chapter 12 will resume on a weekly schedule for November. As it stands now, I've been able to write the new Interlude 9 (which comes before Chapter 14), but the already written Interlude 8 (it was originally an incomplete short story from AugNoWriMo 2010) has been a bitch to edit. Chapter 12 has been no less difficult because the Revision 2 version (Revision 3 stopped at Chapter 10) is more a crude outline than a finished story, and a large number of elements new to Revision 4 are absent. Writing a new and unrelated NaNo novel naturally cuts down on my editing time. And so I'm posting new installments on Fridays at the usual time (5pm PST) until sometime in December when I feel I can catch up.
The first Spanner Friday installment will be the new Interlude 8, which I've finally managed to finish! Taking its cue from Interlude 7, it (and Interlude 9 after that) is written in a song-derived structure. Spanner's still a going thing, faithful readers!
As for Spanner itself: the new Interlude 8 and the Final Revision version of Chapter 12 will resume on a weekly schedule for November. As it stands now, I've been able to write the new Interlude 9 (which comes before Chapter 14), but the already written Interlude 8 (it was originally an incomplete short story from AugNoWriMo 2010) has been a bitch to edit. Chapter 12 has been no less difficult because the Revision 2 version (Revision 3 stopped at Chapter 10) is more a crude outline than a finished story, and a large number of elements new to Revision 4 are absent. Writing a new and unrelated NaNo novel naturally cuts down on my editing time. And so I'm posting new installments on Fridays at the usual time (5pm PST) until sometime in December when I feel I can catch up.
The first Spanner Friday installment will be the new Interlude 8, which I've finally managed to finish! Taking its cue from Interlude 7, it (and Interlude 9 after that) is written in a song-derived structure. Spanner's still a going thing, faithful readers!
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
WriMo Burnout Strikes Again
You may be wondering why Spanner chapters 22 and 23 never came out. I can sum up the reason in two words:
WriMo Burnout.
I've experienced this malady before. Back in 2008, starting on the first day of AugNoWriMo, I suffered it so long that I nearly failed to even start NaNoWriMo. Fortunately, this time it only lasted two weeks. What brought me back was this little keyboard I just got at Goodwill. That got me back into FAWM after skipping the first week.
I'm now recovered from my latest bout of WriMo Burnout. However, it hit me in the middle of JanNoWriMo and robbed me of the victory, even keeping me from finishing the last two chapters of Spanner Book 1 and the first draft of Book 2. I'll get that done this month and during NaNoEdMo next month.
Now to pick up where I left off last month...
WriMo Burnout.
I've experienced this malady before. Back in 2008, starting on the first day of AugNoWriMo, I suffered it so long that I nearly failed to even start NaNoWriMo. Fortunately, this time it only lasted two weeks. What brought me back was this little keyboard I just got at Goodwill. That got me back into FAWM after skipping the first week.
I'm now recovered from my latest bout of WriMo Burnout. However, it hit me in the middle of JanNoWriMo and robbed me of the victory, even keeping me from finishing the last two chapters of Spanner Book 1 and the first draft of Book 2. I'll get that done this month and during NaNoEdMo next month.
Now to pick up where I left off last month...
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