Spanner R5 #amediting update: Goals for April, Despite the Death of Script Frenzy

Now that I've shifted my focus from a particularly gruelling FAWM to the much easier (i.e. no singing and guitar playing required) NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), I've decided I can return to the Spanner Chapter 3 script again with intent to finish. I'm not doing Camp NaNo and Script Frenzy's dead, but I'll do more than just finish one chapter: I'm going to script at least to the end of Chapter 5, and maybe even as far beyond as I can get depending on whether my muse is willing to cooperate. All I have to do, you see, is write one poem a day, and scripting is just as easy for me. In fact, I'm going to complete at least one section of Chapter 3 tonight, and maybe even two or more depending on how pleased to return to Spanner I find myself.

Not that I'm going to abandon my FAWM songs or my singing and guitar practice. I do, after all, have to prepare for July 4, when 50 Songs in 90 Days begins. But I have a series to script and a novelization to publish. Spanner will introduce me to the world. I can't give up on it.

NaPoWriMo Update: Poem #1 is "Dead Rocker Song". I still haven't gotten over this year's FAWM agonies, you see, and there was this book on the "27 Club" of dead rockers, so I wrote it in a style inspired by my reading of the Beat poets...

Spanner R5 #amediting Update: The #amprocrastinating Is Almost Over

When FAWM came around this year, I decided to take a break from editing Spanner Book 1. That "break" lasted into the next month, making it two months I haven't done a single edit. Maybe a few notes, but no editing. I've decided to end the break soon, even though starting tomorrow I'm doing NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), which takes place the same month the now defunct Script Frenzy used to. It won't exactly be Script Frenzy, though considering how fast I script, I could easily write a full 100+ pages of Spanner TV series script (the basis for the final Revision 5) even while I write 30 poems.

Here's another way Script Frenzy, NaPoWriMo, and Spanner intersect in my mind: in the Final Revision, I'm writing all dream and vision sequences in the form of poems. I originally made the decision last year during the long and difficult Chapter 1 edit because I was bored with dream sequences that read like I plagiarized them out of self-help dream books and it struck me that the best way to apply the Rule of Cool to them was to rewrite them as surrealist poems (the Surrealists, remember, were big into dreams). NaPoWriMo will give me a lot more practice writing poems, and I intend to apply whatever I learn to Spanner wherever I can. However, that goes in the novelization; for the script version, I'm following Alfred Hitchcock's example and using avant-garde film techniques, or as close to them as you can put into a TV script (the director, cinematographer, and editor will of course have to help your humble showrunner do the rest).

And so while I'm writing 30+ poems for April (and incidentally practicing singing the 28 FAWM songs I write), I'll be doing a one-man Script Frenzy on the Spanner Series 1 script as well. Here goes...

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 #amediting Update: A New Attack on the Chapter 2 Mess

Every time I look at the current state of Spanner Chapter 2 in yWriter5, I have to admit it's a complete mess. Out of frustration, I took an alternative solution: adapt it back into a TV script in Celtx! It worked like a dream on 2.1. Then, looking back at the Revision 4 version, I had a sudden realization: 2.2 and 2.3 are in the wrong order! The events in "Ghost Hunting" properly follow those of the "homecoming" sequence in the final version of 2.1 and what in R4 is 2.3, especially since it covers a six-day period. So I picked through the many potential scenes that had been piling up over the past year, picked the ones I judged were the best fits for the R5 continuity, and turned them into 8 pages of script.

Now the script versions of 2.1 and 2.2 are complete. Some of the changes:

1. The "Leila comes to Bremerton" sequence that has been in the story since Revision 1 is no longer a group of scenes put together (dream, two flashbacks, and a scene in the present), but an intercut thread that takes all place in the story present. Now I slap my forehead and wonder why I didn't do that in Revision 2.
2. I made 2.1's victim, Tremayne, the villain of the week instead. Not only did I change the identity of the villain Rebel Styles kills through the TV screen in 2.1, I had her do it at the end of the opening scene, as a true TV-episode "teaser".
3. It's no longer just Leila who gets a dream scene. Shira does too, as part of the new "coming home" thread. Nike — that is, the victory goddess whose body is the corporation — tries to attack Shira in her own dreamspace. Followed by...
4. The "Call to Adventure" in the form of a literal phone call from Teachers Guild president (and Hope's archnemesis) Dr. Jenna Hunter to Shira. Shira accepts, of course, in the expectation that their respective plans will eventually collide. This is the first event in what will become the School Arc in Chapter 5.
5. The interrogation scene I put after "Ghost Hunting" in R4 is still the penultimate scene of 2.2, but now part of the "coming home" thread rather than the sequel to "Ghost Hunting". Shira tells her future Javert or Zenigata exactly why she pulled off the Spanner Incident — and why she'll get away with it.
6. In Chapter 1 R5 (finished but not yet posted), I turned Shira, Desiree, Elle, and Akimi into hoverboard racers. After the interrogation scene, it's not COPCO or CPMC that punishes them for the Spanner Incident, but the CEO of the Xtreme Racing League. And it's not for doing the crime, or even getting one of their number (R5 new character Rico X), but for doing it without his permission (read: the opportunity for him to profit off it, Corporates being Corporates). He fires them and claims their racing handles as his "intellectual property" which he's now forbidding them to use. This is Shira's cue to bring up Kitsap Kouriers:
   

   Elle: What'll we do now?

   Shira: Remember that courier place at Seventh and Park [in Bremerton]? They'll be more than happy to hire some off-season superstars.

7. And, looking at the unused yet named "index cards" in the Celtx project, 2.3 is about to begin with the end of the Leila thread, the actual homecoming in the "coming home" thread, and the introduction of the first of the nameless women (the mysterious Asian one; conveniently, as the new manager of Shira's apartment building).
8. Last but not least, the chapter name itself. Up until R4, it was "Sex Bomb". That's now the name of 2.6. The old name for 2.6 is now the chapter title: "The Dangerous Type".

Then there's "Ghost Hunting", which began as the entire Chapter 2 in R1. For 2.3 R5, I'm going to cut it apart into its constituent scenes and intercut in a series of new short scenes of Shira being interrogated by Locke, Diana, or J.T. in which she simultaneously denies being part of Rebel's assassination-by-TV of (now) minor villain Jesse Jameson and reveals just what kind of threat Rebel really is. So that's next up. After that, 2.4 and 2.5 should be easy enough before I get into the third and final real challenge of this editing session: 2.6, with its many flashbacks and its ending sequence from R4 that I'll be intercutting into it.

And so it continues...