Spanner R5 #amediting Update: Chapter 2 Script Finished, or: The Mess Makes Way for Awesome

As I mentioned last post, Spanner Chapter 2 had accumulated an unmanageable mess of scenes between the Fourth and Final Revisions. I thought I'd never be able to cut it away. I then realized I could make an end run around my Inner Editor by returning to the TV script version I did for the final two years of Script Frenzy. My hunch was right; it did the job. The script version of Chapter 2 is now complete.

Here's a (probably) incomplete list of the many changes:

1. 2.1: "Lethal Lolita" is now the name of the "cold open" sequence that plays before the Spanner logo descends and announces the episode name and so on. The opening news reports with the Bin Laden and Spanner video messages now segue smoothly into Henry Becket's videocall with the first local villain and then the appearance of Rebel Styles who then makes said villain her first victim in the series before she screws up the scene and the logo makes its appearance. New scenes: the goddess Nike whose body is the corporation named after her invades Shira's dreamspace only to get kicked out; the COPCO agents on the plane from New York to Seattle; on the passenger plane home, Shira takes a call from Teachers Guild president Dr. Jenna Hunter and accepts her offer at once (think Butch Coolidge in his first appearance in Pulp Fiction).
2. 2.2: Now called "Coming Home". The interrogation scene that has migrated throughout the chapter's first half in various drafts is now its centerpiece. "Ghost Hunting", the original 2.2, is now a sequence beginning here. New scenes: the homecoming at Sea-Tac Airport; Shira and the other surviving hoverboard racers getting fired by the head of the Xtreme Racing League over the Spanner incident and the death of Rico X; a phone call in which Ariel taunts her enemy Drusilla.
3. 2.3: now the section called "Ghost Hunting", not to be confused with the thread, which now extends into Chapter 3. The scene where Shira enters her apartment for the first time in the series is now here, and her older half-sister Selene now makes her debut here. The first of the nameless women, the petite Asian woman who first appeared in Chapter 12 R4, is now the apartment building manager. Shira, Elle, and Akimi, no longer racing for the XRL, take their first trip to Kitsap Kouriers (introduced in 4.4 up to R4) and get hired immediately.
4. 2.4: Now "Playing Rebel's Game". It begins with another interrogation scene, now the first personal encounter between Shira and major character J.T. (Jim) Sparks, who in Book 1 is a COPCO agent; his father Brendan Sparks owns COPCO. The shopping-arcade scene that's taken several forms over the various drafts now introduces the second nameless woman, the tall brunette ex-swimmer-cum-ex-psychologist who first appeared in 10.1 R4, who now works as the food-court espresso-cart barista; also, fellow ex-racer Liz McPhail appears here and annoys Shira into calling her "Epica"; and Shira and Leila meet eyes for the first time.
5. 2.5: still "The Rebel Sell". Another corporation-god invades Shira's dreamspace, this time AT&T, and gets the Spanner tag sprayed all over it. The one scene I actually omitted from Chapter 1 R5, "Get Ready for the Bad Endings" with Keenan and Ada, is now here in 2.5 and much shorter; it's now where Shira announces her intention to make sure nobody (especially Brinkman) interferes with the election taking place in Chapter 23, plus the "bad endings" are now specifically the ones described in Interlude 10. The "Henry Becket and his mother" scene that ended Chapter 2 in R4 is also now a thread, and it begins here.
6. 2.6: Formerly "The Dangerous Type", it's traded names with the chapter for R5 and is now called "Sex Bomb". The "Henry Becket and his mother" thread continues until it ends in the final minute of cliffhangers; the thread's name is in fact "The Angel of Chaos" and has the mother (Mrs. Abernethy) nearly die from finding out in mid-scry that Shira's completely immune to fate. The central thread is now a duel of sex and blackmail between Shira and J.T. that ends in his crushing defeat at the hands of the mistress of the "WHAM! line" in another cliffhanger. The episode of The Civet that was in R4 has been replaced by the funeral and deification of Rico X in his native Brazil (celebrities, gotta love 'em), and Minty Fresh gets her first appearance as Rico's grieving girlfriend. And now the final scene of the chapter is now the signing-on of pirate television KCUF which was previously at the end of 2.2.
7. The Leila sequence: It's now broken up into a thread recurring through the episode and culminating in Leila and Shira meeting eyes for the first time.
8. Rebel Styles' Victims: There's only one this episode now, and now it's a thread stretching to Chapter 12 or 13. Instead of being the first victim, Shepherd-Mayor Ward Tremayne will be the last, and it's this along with Leila's success in erasing her name that provokes the by-then irrational Governor Brinkman into initiating the madness that is Chapter 15.

By choosing to script the TV version instead of sorting out the prose mess, I've managed to bring to Chapter 2 a coherence it's never had before, primarily by sorting the various scenes into a small number of closely intercut threads. I'd have to say that the final Chapter 2 is now almost as perfect as Chapter 1. Like the Intro and Chapter 1, Chapter 2 now brings the awesome.

As a bonus, I've completed 3.1 as well. The "teaser" sequence is now "Stalking Minty Fresh", which used to be in 3.2. After that, Leila gets disgusted with the music available in America as she did at the very beginning of 3.1 R4, followed by Shira's dream of Kira and early-morning videophone duel with family enemy Henry Becket, whom she of course checkmates. The new additions: the two nameless women explain why they're nameless and how they manage to remain so without losing their identity (and here R5 background villain Doctor X, a Conservative Revolutionary leader who became its Benedict Arnold and can never again be named on penalty of expulsion from the Party); and Jennifer gives Shira a pre-birthday present which is in effect the Wold Newton Universe version of the Akio Car from Revolutionary Girl Utena.

Right now, instead of scripting Chapter 3 past 3.1, my Spanner edits are focused on changes to subsequent chapters, mainly in the form of notes. Since this is February Album Writing Month, I'm focusing mainly on writing and recording songs, primarily a certain few earworms that have been haunting me over the past few years of relentless Spanner edits (here's my FAWM profile). By necessity I'll be paying less attention to the Chapter 3 script, but I'll find a way to get it done this month. Stay tuned...

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...

On Spanner Book 1: Thoughts on the Fourth Revision, Plans for the Fifth

I began the Herculean labor that was the Fourth Revision of Spanner Book 1 back in February 2012, jumping the gun on NaNoEdMo that year. It's now April 2013, almost a full month after this year's EdMo ended, and it still seems hard for me to believe I just finished. It proved to be the toughest part of the job, much more difficult than merely writing it. It got even tougher once I got past Chapter 10, where the third draft ended; in places, the fourth draft became a whole lot different from the second, especially when I got toward the end (which was admittedly quite weak in the second draft).

Well, it's done now, and it's much closer to what I want despite all the crazy new ideas my delirious and overworked muse threw in (pretty girls without names, anyone?). Where previous versions were the equivalent of alpha software, this is the beta. The Fifth Revision will be the equivalent of bugfixes.

Before I finally unleash the ebook edition, there's a few more changes I want to make in one final one-pass edit. First, there's the central love arc, which revolves around Shira and Leila but isn't limited to just them. Still, I need to strengthen it so you can feel the full sublime and destructive force of their love from the moment each first appears separately in Chapter 1 until the final poetic stanza, for it's the story's driving force, the irresistible force flinging itself at the immovable object that is the Conservative Revolution. Second, I'll need to strengthen the forces of resistance: Jennifer (a relatively minor opponent, and only in the relationship line), who tries in vain to keep Shira with her and away from Leila and then throws herself into relationships with two other girls only to return to Shira in the end and make the core couple a threesome; Governor Brinkman, her grandfather and clan patriarch, who insists on marrying her off in order to form a political alliance between clans that eventually fails; Oliver, the one she's being married off to, who finds his "Intended" in the arms of another woman, who proves too dangerous an opponent; and the entire school establishment at Bangor High, to whom their love is as dangerous a political threat as the Student Union.

Beyond the relationship arc, there's the School Arc of Chapters 5-21. In Chapter 4, when the Teachers Guild dissidents and Student Union organizers first meet, I need to set up the two sides of the conflict more strongly. We need to get a sense of the kind of threat Peter T. Ross is even before he first shows up in Chapter 6. I have him described as a hedge fund manager who raises horses for the rich on the side. However, financiers have a heroic and magical aura in this series, one I'm playing up for Ross in particular in Chapter 25 (in Book 2), and they find the source of their heroism in Ayn Rand (though Rand herself would have scorned them as unproductive parasites leeching off actually productive companies, a lower form of business type than even her politically connected but still productive villain Orren Boyle). His appearances in the office behind the principal's at Bangor High in Chapters 6 and 21 are the epiphanies of a god descending to earth. Another major player who needs played up more is Henry Becket, particularly after Chapter 15 when his superhero team take over the Party.

There's a few other characters I want to give a more prominent role. Chief among them is Elle, who didn't fully emerge as a character until Chapter 22, after which I fell in love with her. I realized she makes a better player in Chapter 1's Spanner Incident than Karen does. As for Karen, I need to make her more prominent in the Student Union plot thread so as to justify her near-martyrdom in Chapter 19 and the ensuing Team Challenge in Chapter 20.

There's some other things I need to change. Some of the characters need to talk more British, including the Canadian, Australian, and Irish characters; and the Rockers should use a lot more British street language than they currently do. Some of the narration should be less journalistic and more poetic, or vice versa. There's still a bit of filler. And there's the formatting and stylesheet experiments I "pulled my punches" on in Chapter 23 R4 that I'm going to "supercharge" in R5, in not just Chapter 23 but 15 and 22 as well.

This edit will take nowhere near as long as Revision 4 did. After all, I was still throwing in all kinds of new stuff, up to and including the kitchen sink (or, more perversely, the bathroom one). I'm done with the big edit. The rest is just fixing and fine-tuning. And just like last February, I'm impatient to start.

Introduction to a Dead Blog, or The Only Post on SpannerVision

Now that Twitter's shutting down Posterous, I'll never be able to post a second entry to the "SpannerVision" blog I had there, which I neglected because I was too busy actually writing and editing Spanner to draw anything. SpannerVision was to be my series-related image blog. It was the companion blog to my alternate main blog, where I put some of the entries linked on the Inside Spanner page. All those, and maybe some more, will be reposted here once I'm done posting Spanner Book 1.

Oh well, maybe I'll have to get that Tumblr account after all...

Introducing SpannerVision

(originally posted on June 21, 2011)

Welcome to my new blog where I'll be posting images (and eventually music and video) for my (currently a) webnovel Chaos Angel Spanner and its universe. I'll be posting character designs and other Spanner-related graphics here. Some of the images will be not safe for, well, Facebook, where all my relatives are...

At least this gives me an excuse to start drawing stuff for the manga idea I turned into a webnovel...

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: The Delirious Victory Dance (then back to #amediting)

I did it. Not just some easy 50-hour NaNoEdMo win like most of my EdMo victories, but a truly heroic effort that saw me spending nearly twice as much time editing that "monster of rock", Chaos Angel Spanner book 1. It took a lot of coffee, energy drinks, rock 'n' roll, and flogging the muse into cackling insanity to pull off such a feat.

And you know what? The characters managed to surprise me yet again! Back in Chapter 12, I introduced Shira's pretty neighbours who don't bother to have names, and then in Chapters 13 and 16 two major characters did the same. Sure enough, yet another character went nameless in Chapter 19. More surprises: major villain Henry Becket, who I conceived of back in the "Class of '92" as an asexual ex-gay, had a torrid liaison with a superheroine ex-wife (who will become a major Book 2 antagonist) during the Chapter 18 riots. Shira's long-lost twin sister Kira returned at the end of Chapter 17, and in the opening of Chapter 18 suffered the Whistler Process (which I intended to import into the end of Chapter 16 in the Revision 3 plan) together with her. Sure enough, they pull a twin switch on Shira's nameless girlfriend (who was Leila Shelley until Chapter 13) in bed. Also in the Chapter 18 opening, Anonymous made a Special Guest Star appearance, while previously unused Project Notebook hero Toni Wong appears as a villainess working for Chinese Corporatist Party (Holdings) Limited. Chapter 19: the iPhone murders kill off two minor antagonists, and the death of Admiral Fleer becomes the climax (in both R1 and R2 it was in Chapters 20 and 21). Chapter 20: when Admiral Currie, father of a notoriously perky daughter, shows up for the first time, he proves even worse. Chapters 20 and 21: Charmian; and Karen isn't coming back till 24.2 in Book 2. Chapter 21: the nudefighters go public, and the new powers Shira and her girl with no name gained in Chapter 15 allow them to get away with it. And that's just the characters. They've successfully pulled "Plan Z" on me.

However, despite all my heroic efforts, I still have two chapters and an Interlude left. Before I can do the final full edit (to be called Revision 4.1) on the book, I have to whip those last two chapters into shape and that final Interlude into existence (this one was only a vague idea in Revision 1). That's my task for the first week of April. And so the heroic editing must continue...

NaNoEdMo 2012 Final: I Win! And Spanner Will Never Be The Same

I've done it again! I'm a NaNoEdMo winner yet again! But this time there's a difference. Several, actually.

First: I had a tool, yWriter5, which gave me much more flexibility in editing because it allows you to easily rearrange scenes and chapters just by dragging and dropping them. Last year I won with Spanner's second draft, yet later I would discover I'd been constrained by the limits of the traditional word processor (Microsoft Word in this case). The fourth draft has turned out radically different: there's more material, sure, but it's far more coherent, I've thrown scenes all over the place, and it's reading much more like the TV/comics novelization it's supposed to be than a fanfic to a nonexistent series.

Second: Even though I didn't finish all eight early chapters, I still made a lot of progress. The Intro, Chapters 1 through 3, and now all eleven Interludes of Book 1 are complete. Even in the incomplete chapters, I developed some pivotal scenes much more: Shira's birthday party in Chapter 7, now with a climactic confrontation pitting Shira in a feathered Carnival mask and nothing else against Drusilla showing on widescreen TV what would happen if the Wicked Witch of the West got her hands on the Great and Powerful Oz's projector; the Chapter 4 opening sequence that begins with an emergency broadcast interrupted by Spanner's first piratecast and ends with the local theocrat dying of "loli poisoning" courtesy of Rebel Styles; the April Fool's Day flashback featuring the first appearance of Spanner (Shira graffiti tagging in a costumed-vigilante costume) which became the new Interlude 6; the chapter trade making "The Bad Endings" Interlude 5 and "Four Visions of the Future" Interlude 11; and of course the massively rearranged order of scenes in Chapters 5 through 8.

Third: I felt my prose style evolve as I wrote the fourth draft. It's become more condensed, less grammatical, more style-conscious, and more metaphorical; I now feel myself bending the English language itself the way a rock guitarist bends notes. Somehow, while I was reading poetry and literary fiction, their styles rubbed off on my muse and I ran away with it and transformed it into something else, a new style all my own. My dialogue style hasn't changed, though; it was already excellent.

Fourth: In the third draft (and the first draft of Book 1, plus several scenarios I recorded in my Project Notebooks over the years), there are scenes which depict Shira as vindictive to almost villainous levels. For the fourth draft, I'm correcting that. After all, she's a Charmer; she doesn't need to beat people up, even if her fellow Slasher Hunters beg her to, except when she specifically intends to fight. She has none of her author's vindictiveness, which is really the moralism of the bullied misfit. That would be Leila. Incidentally, Shira's been more persistent in getting out of her clothes more in the fourth draft than in previous drafts...

To conclude: This has been my most productive EdMo ever, and I've learned more about both editing and writing than I've ever learned before in such a short time. My style is rapidly evolving, even transforming into something resembling rock 'n' roll. Spanner is going through massive transformations, and it will transform even more as I continue to edit this final draft. At last I'm starting to become not a merely competent wordsmith, but a genuine artist of words.

Next up: Script Frenzy! Where the camera is king...