NaNoWriMo 2013: In Which I Shoot for Consecutive Victory #8

It's that time of the year. NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow. Since I've been offline most of the last month or two, one would figure I haven't bothered to come up with a novel to win with. Not true! Unlike last year, I've got a very strong idea of what to do.

It's called Freefall. It starts and ends with the first-person villain protagonist falling to his death off a skyscraper. The all-important Dramatic Question: how did Eddie van O get himself thrown off the top of a skyscraper? The answer involves ex-wife Kelly with whom he has a passionate love-hate relationship, a would-be restorer of the tyranny destroyed at the end of Spanner Book 5 name of Martin Becket, various Spanner special guest stars, Eddie's long career as a hitman turned secret policeman turned hitman, and a city population that refuses to act like idiots just because villains Martin Becket and Eddie van O assume they are by definition.

Freefall is a far more straightforward thriller than I've attempted so far, though it's plenty convoluted. I was getting bored by all the moralistic conventional thrillers featuring government connected heroes who are cops or something similar and battling evil terrorists and serial killers and other stock supervillains on that order. Well, I decided to go noir on the ANSI Standard Thriller establishment and pit the serial killer against the terrorist. And they both lose because their Author has vowed to avoid David Brin's definition of the Idiot Plot. Roger Ebert coined the term to mean the all-too-common Hollywood plot that cannot progress unless the protagonists act like idiots. Brin's version is the one where all the bystanders act like idiots so the heroes can be heroic, also a standard Hollywood bad habit and one of the central conventions of the ANSI Standard Thriller, replicating the professional class's typically technocratic contempt for the working masses. And so we have our two stuck-up professionals, the professional killer and the professional mercenary, trying to bring back the good old days of Spanner's Conservative Revolution when the common people were required by law to be idiots, a requirement backed by brute force inflicted by professional thugs such as Eddie van O and Martin Becket. And the people have not forgotten. Specifically the people of Seattle, the city trashed by the Conservative Revolutionary terrorist Rev. Byron Scofield in Spanner Book 2, who takes over at the end of Chapter 23 (and Book 1) when Rev. Luke Everson of the infamous Fearsome Foursome and ultimately gets killed by — Eddie van O.

I'm taking a different approach to writing this time. Instead of using trusty old MS Word, I'm writing it in the heavy-duty text editor Vim in a wiki-derived text format called Markdown. Vim makes writing Markdown documents easy by allowing you to collapse and expand all the text contained under a heading. And to edit it I won't be using yWriter5; I'll stick with Vim and endure its considerable learning curve so I can tap its awesome power; and I suspect this will be the fastest edit job I've ever done.

Simultaneously, I'm doing the first preliminary work on an interactive fiction (text adventure) game called Dead City Radio, which is a prequel to Freefall containing many of the same characters and incorporating a "wide open sandbox" structure and multiple endings only one of which (called the "canon ending") leads into Freefall. And you can be sure I'll throw any ideas for Spanner I get this NaNo into their yWriter5 projects, the last three of which (for Books 3, 4, and 5) I'll have to create.

*takes deep breath* NaNo victory number eight, coming up! Here goes...

More Thoughts on the Political Thriller

As I write this, I've just finished editing Spanner Chapter 14, and the final two installments are ready and scheduled to post. 14.5 is still the "heavy metal gang war" episode, and 14.6 is still something of a breather episode. But looking back, I marvel at how much I've changed them to fit the final continuity. They're much more a part of the greater political thriller plot than their second-draft versions.

I've found myself seriously annoyed by the great mass of thrillers these days. Most psychological thrillers strongly imply that only the police can save the day. Most political thrillers these days, unlike their 1970s counterparts, are right-wing plots that state straight out that only government superagents can save the day, and they're usually FBI, CIA, or Navy SEALs. I've criticized the left-wing political thrillers in an earlier post for exalting a hero, usually either a guerrilla or an investigative journalist, at the expense of mass action; in Spanner, I'm striving to correct this by making it clear that against the American Empire, Echelon-NORAD, and every giant corporation in the world including the Chinese government a.k.a. Chinese Communist Party (Holdings) Ltd., the mere heroes of Team Bremelo or even Team Spanner don't stand a chance unless they can somehow wake up the masses; it all comes down to "the sanction of the victim". The current flood of right-wing political thrillers takes this to its logical conclusion: assuming the absolute passivity of the masses, heroes cannot succeed without the government, and therefore the government and its all-powerful neoconservative establishment are not only the true heroes but the only possible heroes. Going one step further, you have the Evangelical Christian thrillers written by the likes of Frank Peretti, in which the heroes are helpless against absolute evil until Jesus and his angels take over their fight. Paradigmatic of this rightward shift is the quick and easy conversion of a left-wing thriller into a right-wing one by the ghostwriter of Glenn Beck's The Overton Window. If Beck ended up (co-)writing one of the worst thrillers ever, something like Zero Dark Thirty is exactly what he was aiming to create.

So the usual assumption is that either the masses are passive, as in most political thrillers on the left as well as the right, or downright evil, as Spanner's Conservative Revolutionaries blatantly state following the example of Ayn Rand. Thing is, the thriller-writing establishment is as conservative as Glenn Beck, which is why he fit right in so easily despite his (and his ghostwriters') lack of writing skills. Hollywood is just as conservative: considering my low opinion of Hollywood awards, I'm willing to bet money that Zero Dark Thirty will sweep the Oscars in particular, as a love letter to the lords of Military-Industrial Complex by their fellow Corporates in the Intellectual Property monopoly cartel. This is exactly what I call #msmfail.

And so I'm writing my own political thriller my way. Naturally, it's starting as a blog novel, and its next incarnation will be as an ebook. The Corporate "lamestream" won't touch it with a ten-foot pole because of its political incorrectness. No doubt the Corporates are criticizing me in Stalinist terms of "false consciousness" since thinking for oneself is and has always been by definition a crime against the divine right of Authority. To which I reply as always: À bas les néoconos! Right-wing Stalinism of the ultra-rich is the only possible form of government today? I'll continue to think otherwise. Call me utopian, but I still think the old order is doomed. The only question is whether humanity wants to survive long enough to create a new democratic order. Me, I'll just keep writing.

Our Cyberpunk World: Now You See Me, Now You Don't

The article: Invisibility cloaks: Now you see me, but for how much longer?

Invisibility cloaks. Science fiction, right? Even better, fantasy! (see: The Arabian Nights or Harry Potter, etc., etc., etc....)

Think again.

Like the jetpack, aircar, and hoverboard, the invisibility cloak is now a reality. You can't buy them now, of course; the technology's still in the research stage, and the military and police demand first dibs Or Else. However, the cloaking device is more cyberpunk than those other sci-fi cliché technologies. Like teleportation as used in Alfred Bester's 1950s proto-cyberpunk classic Tiger, Tiger a.k.a. The Stars My Destination, cloaking is the wet dream of assassins and terrorists. Just look, for instance, at Spanner Chapter One...

Here's how it works. You're a terrorist, secret police agent, black ops super soldier, or serial killer. You put on an invisibility cloak (or your uniform is a cloak) and switch invisibility on. Now you can kill without anybody knowing you're there; your victim will look like Abu Alhazred being eaten alive in the middle of the souq by the demon Yog Sothoth.

There's three problems. One, no cloaking device will ever be able to hide your fingerprints or footprints. Observant Trackers and CSIs will still be able to see what you left behind and follow the clues all the way back to you. Two, cloaking involves materials that bend light rays, so it will never be perfect; you'll still be visible to the trained eye or special goggles. Third and worst of all, you never know if you yourself are being tracked...

Soon the cyberpunks and other science fiction writers will lose control of this technology. Very soon, it'll be all over the spy, terror, and police thrillers...

The Right-Wing Pundit Political Thriller Fad

Some articles on and reviews of Glenn Beck's The Overton Window mention that before Beck, Bill O'Reilly wrote a political thriller of his own. In the last few days, I've noticed political thrillers by Oliver North and Ralph Reed in the remainder piles at my local Barnes & Noble. It hit me that right-wing political thrillers by Fox News pundits have become the latest fad. They're bestsellers, of course, with the Conservative Book Club playing the role of the Church of Scientology (which bought most of the copies of L. Ron Hubbard's later books) by gaming the sales figures. I acknowledged this in one of my short stories intended for print publication: a publisher complains about right-wing pundits jumping on the political thriller bandwagon when their left-wing counterparts have enough sense not to join them. These thrillers have two things in common: 1) they're ghostwritten 2) they're badly ghostwritten. This fad runs the risk of ruining the political thriller subgenre forever. But will these guys realize that writing stories is best left to real storytellers? I think not. Meanwhile, I'll go back to writing mine...

Bad Company: Corporatism Is a Satanic Cult!

Over the past couple years, I've posted Bad Company- and Spanner-related entries on what I call "political horror":

• Political Horror, or Governments as Living Gods and Corporations as Hostile Alien Lifeforms
• The Problem with Political Thrillers
• The Horror, The Horror; or, America Is God and Dictel Is Cthulhu
• What Is This Dictel Corporation, Anyway?
• The "Spanner Cyberpunk Gothic" series:
  
  • Spanner as Yuri Manga: "Precious Bodily Fluids" and Cyberpunk Gothic Gone Berserk
  • Part 2: Corporations as Gods, Robbery as Vampirism
  • Part 3: Corporatism as a Fanatic Cult

However, one element evaded me — until today. If, as the political-horror subgenre premise states, corporations have become the god-bodies of demons, then what kind of "fanatic cult" is corporatism, anyway? The answer is:

Corporatism is a satanic cult!

Cedric and Willa Flip Through "The Overton Window"

NOTE: This is not my review of Glenn Beck's new novel. That will come once I actually get my hands on a copy, and first I need to find one. I've read previews and reviews, though. This scene emerged full-blown in my imagination while I was walking to the store the other day. These two particular characters of mine are even less impressed by Glenn Beck than I am, and I've always though he was more than a little over the edge. And that was before he started getting really paranoid and obsessed with conspiracy theories I myself dropped like a rock after 9/11. And I call myself a libertarian. Anyway, here's my non-review, a preliminary impression in the form of a story...

Update: The official reviews are out. The reviewers are all either laughing or groaning at the ineptitude of Beck and his self-plagiarizing ghostwriter. Sometimes first impressions are not wrong...

The Problem with Thrillers in General

I recently read that Glenn Beck loves the thriller genre so much he has become the "Oprah" whose word sells them. This is a major problem for me, since I write thrillers (like Bad Company and Black Science) yet despise the demagogic right-wing extremist Beck. And since Beck is the supreme champion of the thriller in America right now, this means there must be something fundamentally wrong with the thriller as such. Might there be something wrong with even the left-wing political thriller as practiced by the likes of Costa-Gavras and Oliver Stone as well?

My task in this entry is to figure out what the problem is, and find a solution for it. In other words: how do I make Bad Company and Black Science the kind of thriller that Glenn Beck will hate?