Spanner R5 #amediting Update: Shira's 15th Birthday and the Second Radical New Plot Change

Spanner main character Shira Thomas turns 15 today. The first volume (originally chapter) of the series, dated August 19, has already taken place. Considering how much time I've been taking to write and edit this thing (four years already?), it looks like events have already overtaken the story. Therefore, I must make one more radical change to the series.

• The first radical change: turn Chapter 1, Chapters 2-4, and the School Arc of the old Book 1 into three separate volumes, the new Books 1-3.
• The second radical change: Move the series start date forward 4 years, to 2018.

Now that Spanner begins in 2018, I can solve two major problems with the original 2000 plan:

1. the fact that so many of the major characters were underage, making them overly precocious in intelligence and maturity, and causing a potential legal problem around their sexual libertinism; now they're all 18 or over (or in Elle's case almost 18), which also eliminates the added potential problem of this story potentially being swept into the "YA ghetto";
2. the fact that the story is no longer "twenty minutes into the future," as I don't intend to write an alternate-universe story set in what is now the past.

It also eliminates the plot complication from the old Chapter 2 of Shira seducing private cop J.T. Sparks and then blackmailing him over her being underage, and reduces what was the major turning point of 12/21/12 nearly two years before the story began into a relatively minor backstory event 6 years in the past. But oh well, sometimes tradeoffs must be made.

In the new Book 3, containing the complete School Arc, the cousins Shira, Jennifer, and Karen are now plausible college students, though Karen can no longer be Bangor High's head cheerleader now that she's being aged up to 21. The Shelley twins likewise make more plausible fallen fashion models at 19 (turning 20 at the beginning of the new Book 4). Team Bremelo now become credible adults for the students to envy or hero-worship. And Shira can get away with an all-nude all-Rocker 19th birthday, though she'll still be agitating to lower the voting age to at least 16.

The new Spanner Book 1 now takes place on 19 August 2018. Book 7 will end in November 2020. Now I have some leeway so I can spend more time editing and formatting Books 1-3 to my liking. But I can't take too long. I want Book 1 over, done, and ready to publish before NaNoWriMo.

So it begins again...

Spanner R5 Update: Chapter 1 Progress on Our Heroine's 14th Birthday, Plus Newest Stuff I Threw In

Shira is fourteen today. That's the age she is when Spanner begins just over 11 months from now. Among other things, this is a reminder for her author to hurry up and edit Book 1, Chapter 1 especially.

Those two long scenes that resisted editing so long are now complete and vastly improved. 5 of Chapter 1's 8 sections are finished as well, except for the new opening I haven't yet written (it's still in outline, a 15-part outline based on the plot points declared obligatory for Hollywood movie scripts by the late Blake Snyder in Save the Cat!). I finally got it into my story-crammed head that yWriter5 has a global search function I could use to change the name of R5 new character Oscar Ribeiro and his handle Blackflag to "Rico X" (real name unknown). I even reread Shira's opening videoblog post and found new improvements I could make in a scene I thought was already done. I do still have challenging scenes to edit later, especially in 1.7; but except for the new opening I've now conquered all the hardest parts. It should be easier from here on out.

The Name Game
Turns out the deliberate namelessness of certain female characters is only half the story. The other half, sure enough, involves names. When the first nameless woman to appear in R5 (in 2.3, to be exact) claims (in a new scene in 3.1) that names are masks and traps, she's referring to the oppressive social constructions built around naming conventions. On the Conservative Revolutionary side, you have these:

1. the long names and multiple titles of High Corporate aristocrats, in imitation of royalty and feudal nobility;
2. the Patriot, Syndicate, and terrorist practice of warrior men using their names as their war cry;
3. in conservative traditional societies, the traditional patriarchal power of naming and renaming, so beloved of cult gurus;
4. the technocratic tradition of identifying people by numbers, used as a marker of lower caste by the Party, formalizing the class divide between Corporates and "mundanes" into rigid castes called Names and Numbers; and
5. name magic, or the ability to control any human or spirit by controlling their names, for which Byron Scofield has the talent and main antagonist Henry Becket has the skill.

I decided to research name magic further and discovered that the ancient Egyptians put special emphasis on the magic power of one's name, or ren. They believed that if one's ren was erased, one's ka (basically, soul) would be destroyed and one would cease to exist. This is what the enemies of Pharaoh Ikhnaton tried to do to his name, and it was the dire punishment reserved for tomb robbers. Gods and pharaohs bore many names as a matter of policy, as a security measure to prevent the memory of them from being erased. Likewise, the city of Rome in ancient times kept its occult name a state secret as jealously guarded as the US nuclear launch codes lest enemy cities and kingdoms use it to curse the city.

Originally I had in mind the ceremonial magicians who summon spirits by name in order to force them to do their will, a staple of spellbooks from ancient times. In Japan, the onmyouji call this kind of name magic kotodama, in which one can gain complete control over any entity using its true name.

Leila in particular brings these two together. In 13.6 Scofield discovers he has no power over her because by then she has erased her name and therefore no longer has a name for him to control her by. In the following scene, she announces to her hated grandfather Governor Brinkman that by erasing her name she has freed herself from his power. His reaction? In R4 he freaks out, uncontrollably shifts into werewolf mode, and howls at God. In the R5 version he tells her why: by erasing her own name — her ren — she has committed soul suicide. She replies, yes, she has slain her Ego and is now a free woman, and now she will follow her True Will into ecstatic self-annihilation in the arms of her true love. And remember that in Spanner mysticism always has political consequences. Brinkman's reaction, in both Revisions 4 and 5, is to declare martial law, evacuate Metropolitan Seattle, and bring the Party elite to perform a massive spiritual-warfare ritual — this is Chapter 15, the Party's first major setback on the home front.

From Egyptian mythology I went forward in time to do that research on Aleister Crowley's magical philosophy which I intended to do for mystical king of bankers Dick Becket but procrastinated, which lead to...

Edits Outside Chapter 1
If you've studied enough Crowley or Enochian magic, you'll know who/what Babalon and Choronzon are. If you haven't, I can sum them up as respectively the Great Whore and the entity of absolute entropy. Dick Becket has become convinced that Shira is the "Daughter of Babalon" and Spanner is the "earthly manifestation of Choronzon". Since he's not fond of either entity, his mystical assumptions will drive his adversarial actions. Shira, unbeliever that she is, takes full advantage. (Note: I'm starting to think this series will end up gaining a hardcore following among chaos magicians...)

Elsewhere, I'm culling scenes in 2.1 and editing 2.6 to fit the final continuity. I've changed the character who has Shira tracking Talia's latest terror attempt in 4.1 from rocker Simon to the nameless woman who is now building manager in R4 the Asian woman from Chapter 12; elsewhere in Chapter 4, I'm turning long scenes into sequences and planning a conclusion as intercut as 4.1. Chapter 4 has a new ending; Chapter 5 has a new opening. I'm mapping more plot threads. And I've given Shira a bullet pendant and making it a prominent prop, plus I'm giving her back the flight jacket I gave her in the Project Notebooks but failed to give her so far in the script and novelization.

And that's what I've been doing on Shira's 14th birthday. Come to think of it, I ought to celebrate her birthday with a slice of carrot cake and a glass of wine...

Spanner R4 Update: Scaling Chapter 14, and a Dream of Jennifer's War

My next task: Chapter 14! It has a new name, "City in Flight", replacing the Revision 2 title ("When the Cat's Away", now the title of 14.4) and the R4 working title "Plots and Plans" (now 14.6). After finishing Chapter 13 and Interlude 9, then scheduling the posts, I took a day off to rest my brain. That's because Chapter 14 R4 will have the most complex structure of any chapter in Book 1. I'm combining an anime-inspired mid-season "clip show", a flashback episode (with the flashbacks embedded in the "clips"), and straight exposition. One major character will appear a chapter earlier than she did in the Second Revision. And though Irina Lanskaya is one of the earliest Team Spanner core characters I created (as early as 1993), she's far more important than she was in earlier revisions, for now she's a major figure in Jennifer's backstory...

Yesterday morning I dreamed an entire story. Shortly after the Conservative Revolution of 2012 that overthrew American democracy, America goes to war. On the southern European front in the war against the Caliphate, we focus on a band of child soldiers, all female, all 12 to 15 years old, all naked starving and cold yet heavily armed. They belong to "Alice Company", made up of juvenile delinquents and the daughters of imprisoned and executed dissidents. In a manor or mansion, they wait in ambush for their Russian counterparts, led by a 14-year-old girl known only as "Blondie" (who is really Jennifer). They kill a few, but brutal Corporate mercenaries force the enemies to join forces. The Russian girl soldiers' commander is a redhead the same age, later revealed as Irina. They are soon joined by a band of very young kunoichi from Japan led by a 13-year-old called "Nana", which means simply "seven" in Japanese. To seal their alliance, the three young commanders become sworn lovers. Then the Caliphate sends waves upon waves of jihadi hordes, and the girl soldiers spring into action. But then comes the soul-crushing gut-punch revelation of the horrific and disgusting real reason the military commands conscripted and sent those girls in the first place...

This is what you get when you cross a brutal war movie with, say, Lyrical Nanoha, or play something like Strike Witches or Sound of the Sky like All Quiet on the Western Front directed by John Woo. I vividly dreamed it all yesterday morning, and I wrote it all down. It could make a NaNoWriMo novel in itself, but I think it would work better as a graphic novel (the most grimdark and depressing yuri manga ever?). And it proves more significant to Jennifer's backstory in Spanner itself than the "Blake Island incident" (her, alone, against 52 hitmen and serial killers out to get her) referenced throughout the story. Irina first appears in Chapter 14 R4. It triggers Jennifer's memories, which she will relate to Leila in the crucial main scene that ends 16.2. And we will discover over the next several chapters just how her Kriegserlebnis (her word: war experience) impacted her entire worldview, and just how politically radical it made her. The thread's name: "The Return of Alice Company".

Like the new thread of the nameless beauties, this dream-spawned backstory is a major new addition to the Fourth Revision. Unlike the Second Revision original, this new Spanner is starting to look extremely interesting indeed...

Spanner R4 Update: The Hard Work Done So Far, The Easy Stretch Begins

Editing Chapters 4 through 8 for the Final Revision turned out to be harder than I thought. Turning Interludes 3 and later into neo-modernist storytelling experiments didn't help. I barely finished Chapter 8 and Interlude 6 in time. But now the hard work's done for now; after this, it's smooth, uh, editing for the next four or five chapters. Parts of Chapters 9 and 10 were substantially finished in Revision 3; even in Chapters 11 through 13, which only made it to Revision 2, have large sections that won't need much editing. I'm hoping to speed up the edits because...

I've decided to completely revamp Chapter 14. Some of the Revision 2 scenes go on way too long; some scenes I can put anywhere between Chapters 9 and 21. Chapter 14, now called "Plots and Plans" for the Final Revision, will have two parts, intercut using yWriter5 like so much else in Revision 4: the present-day (i.e. 10/4/14) "plots and plans" of the title, each one followed by a series of flashbacks to previous chapters and even the still unplotted Book Zero and running backwards. This should make Chapter 14 an impressive enough lead-in to the monumental Revision 4 version of the pivotal Chapter 15.

It continues...

Spanner R4 Update: Where Did I Get Some Of These Characters?

While editing Chapter 8 for the Final Revision, I got to thinking about the origin of some of my characters. Some of them are riffs on characters of other stories. Some of these riffs date all the way back to 1992, when I created the original group around Shira.

Diana Shockley: I created her as early as 1991 because I hated Appleseed's Deunan Knute when she killed Chiffon in the first graphic novel. The concept: what if Deunan were a villain?

Henry Becket: Her father was the second villain I created. He's basically the original Battlestar Galactica's villain Baltar without the smirk and with a fedora and thick glasses and the invincible delusion that he's the last actual hero in existence. When borrowing public-domain superheroes, I made him the Bronze Age version of the American Crusader from the Nedor comics.

Richard Becket: His younger-looking older brother is basically the Corporate version of Eblis, the Satan figure from the same show. He also thinks he's the good guy; since he's the story's supreme elitist, that means the masses are by definition the villain. His superhero identity is the Bronze Age Scarab — and for him I borrowed the idea of superhero lineages from The Phantom. The original Scarab was a Frenchman in Napoleonic Egypt, and the lineage has occult origins. Dick Becket is the seventh Scarab (the Golden and Silver Age originals being the fifth and sixth), and he has to fight his own successors, the eighth and ninth Scarabs. The Scarab lineage is central to the mystery of Spanner.

Drusilla Becket is the answer to the question, what if Erica Kane from the soap opera All My Children were a guru like, say, J.Z. Knight (of Ramtha fame) or Elizabeth Clare Prophet? For one thing, like them and other gurus, she made an enemy of Shira's grandmother Eleanor Richter, the children's author and witch.

Will Becket: If Diana is Deunan Knute as a villain, her younger brother is Mobile Suit Gundam's Char Aznable as an extremely ambiguous antihero. There will be hints of another antihero inspired by Char, Lelouch Lamperouge of Code Geass, especially come Book 5.

Colonel Tom Becket: I didn't get a good grip on the Dictel Corporation chairman until I saw James Cameron's Avatar. Then I realized he's basically the villain, Colonel Quaritch, as the chairman of Blackwater.

I just noticed that these are all Beckets. One of the characteristics of the Cromwell Becket clan is their stubborn resistance to change. They are more archetype than character. They claim divine origin, descent from the Norse, Celtic, and Egyptian gods. More than the other dominant clans in the Conservative Revolutionary Party, they remind people of Unseely Fae with their inhuman morality and their lack of respect for human lives.

This in contrast to my more protean heroes, and especially heroines. Shira is a chameleon. Jennifer has a whole arsenal of personae she can summon at will. Surviving Leila or Melody, even when they're not at full power, may depend entirely on what mood they swing into. The only heroic character who is genuinely archetypal is Ariel, with the striking white stripe in her black hair and her Holy Grail obsession. She's the one who puts the heroines' doings into some mythical context and puts them on heroes' journeys. She traces her own ancestry (and therefore her niece Leila's) through the female line ("bar sinister" in heraldry) to Mélusine, Morgan le Fay, and ultimately to Mary Magdalene. And of course she's a mentor character like, say, Willa Richter-Thomas, Zac Finney, or (looking to Chapter 16 R4) Dr. Hiram Whistler. Shira herself has multiple origins.

I'm not actually cloning any characters. I'm too good a writer to let myself be that lazy. But some of my own characters were inspired by characters in other works. Of course, creating them is only the first step. After that, their job is to grow away from their origins so they can help the other characters take the story away from their author and run amok.

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...

Sexbots 3: Sexbots of the Human Kind

To sum up the previous two posts, real sexbots are nearing mass production, and somebody will hack some into rapebots. There's already speculation about an even more dystopian scenario: in the future, there will be people implanted with some mind-control device that will turn them into human robots, or "meat puppets". I'll eventually post something about specifically that. But right now there's one particular use I'm concerned with. If people can be physically hacked into robots, some of them are bound to become human sexbots.

You know the Man will spin robotization of humans as the ideal way to dispense with criminals without killing them. To the corporations, they'll sell it as the ideal workforce; certainly the prison-industrial complex will try to profit huge from this. But some Corporates and political types will see through the spin...

What is the feminine ideal for the male power luster? Beautiful, insatiable, naked, and utterly obedient to his commands. Stereotypes are always misleading. Most women have at least some sense of dignity. But what the man of power wants is a harem of pliant beauties who worship his every sexual craving and bear his children unquestioningly. Since humans are as unreliable as they are sexy, the way to make them perfectly reliable (not to mention pliable) is to hardwire their brains so that they become soft-fleshed sexbots. Then they'll have no will but his own. He won't have to worry about them leaving him, much less turning feminist, ever again. If he's especially ruthless, he could do the same to his own wife, or even his daughters. Being Corporate, you know he'll get away with it. Turning your wife and daughters into your own personal sexbots could even become all the rage among the overclass, just like in Ira Levin's Stepford...

And of course you'll see rich women doing that to men. Human sexbots made out of dangerous criminals could become a hot commodity among Corporate women.

Sure enough, science fiction has dealt with this, even before The Stepford Wives. But now we're already living in the cyberpunk universe; so much of what we take for granted today was science fiction then. And most of science fiction has dealt with the dark side of technological advance. What makes the dark side so dark is that there are people the dark side strongly appeals to. Nuclear war? Generals masturbate over it. Panoptical surveillance? The voyeur's wet dream. Rapebots and human sexbots? Hentai manga's already running away with this kind of stuff.

You know I'll throw it into Spanner sometime...

Spanner: Morality Is Not the Point

Lately I've been paying too much attention to a site called Television Tropes & Idioms and listing the tropes relevant to Spanner in a Microsoft Word document. When I got to Character Alignment, I realized, for the first time since I started my first preliminary work on this story in 1992, that in a story about a revolution sparked by a monkeywrencher against an oppressive technocracy, morality is not the point. In most stories, the vertical axis on the alignment chart (good vs. evil) is the focus, and most writers (and moralists) conflate "order" with "good" and likewise "chaos" with "evil" (hence the trope Anarchy Is Chaos and its twin, Democracy Is Bad, which Spanner puts in the mouths of Lawful Evil villains but utterly rejects). Spanner is about freedom, not morality.

Future Shock

Remember future shock? It's the shock that overcomes you when you can't handle what you perceive as too much change in too little time. The term was coined by futurist Alvin Toffler, and it's the subject of the book that made him famous. If anything, the speed of change has accelerated since the book came out in 1970, and the shock registered by those who can't handle it has become more extreme, to the point of madness. The ultimate expression of that madness is 9/11 — so far. But far more people have come to adapt to the accelerating rate of change; some of us can even be said to surf evolution. The 21st-century world we live in today was nothing but science fiction in the 20th century.

In this entry, I'll be dealing with fiction as well as society. We tell ourselves who we are through the stories we tell.

Spanner and the Incident at Wold Newton

On December 13, 1795, a meteor fell near the village of Wold Newton in the Wolds of East Yorkshire, England. According to the late Philip José Farmer, science fiction author (of Riverworld fame) and genealogist, these people were nearby at the time:

• John Clayton, third Duke of Greystoke, and his wife Alicia (né Rutherford), sister of...
• George Edward Rutherford, eleventh Baron Tennington, and his wife, Elizabeth Cavendish;
• Honoré Delargardie and his wife, Philippa Drummond;
• Fitzwilliam Darcy and his wife, Elizabeth Bennet;
• Sir Percy Blakeney (the Scarlet Pimpernel) and his second wife, Alice Clarke Raffles;
• Sir Hugh Drummond (Philippa's brother) and his wife, Georgia Dewhurst;
• Dr. Siger Holmes and his wife, Violet Clarke Raffles (Alice's sister);
• Sebastian Noel, a friend and student of Dr. Holmes; and
• four coachmen: Louis Lupin, Albert Lecoq, Arthur Blake, and Simon MacNichols.

The radiation from the meteor mutated these people, who became the ancestors of several of the greatest heroes in literature and pop culture. Farmer focuses in particular on three of them: Sherlock Holmes, descendant of Siger, and two Greystoke scions: John Clayton-Wilder, the eighth Duke of Greystoke, better known under the name Tarzan; and Dr. James Clayton "Doc" Wilder, Jr., whose adventures were fictionalized first as "Doc Ardan" (in French) and then, more famously, as Doc Savage.

Spanner Cyberpunk Gothic Part 2: Corporations as Gods, Robbery as Vampirism

There's just 31 days remaining till JulNoWriMo begins, and the Spanner story ideas are getting wilder by the minute. In this post, I explained the Corporates' paranoia as the logical result of fanatical belief in an "occult physiology" that would strike anybody who knows anything about how the human body works as completely ludicrous, if not insane. Basically, the "bindu" cult claims that blood, semen, brains, money, gold, and oil are the same substance, not materially but spiritually. This belief, once widespread throughout America and imperial Europe, had some nasty political consequences, up to and including the Holocaust. Well, if blood, semen, and brains are (magically) the same in rich white men, then it follows logically that corporations are actually true posthuman beings whose blood consists (physically) of money and oil. Now, if money is the blood of an actual lifeform called a corporation, then to rob a corporation (such as a bank) is then by definition an act of vampirism. The "political horror" of Bad Company is based on such a notion, that the corporation is a parasitic alien lifeform; in Spanner, this becomes what I've come to call "cyberpunk gothic".

Spanner as Yuri Manga: "Precious Bodily Fluids" and Cyberpunk Gothic Gone Berserk

Last week, in the state of half-sleep before I wake up during which I get most of my best ideas, I realized that the lords of the Corporate Empire in Spanner may believe in the least scientific form of the deadliest pseudoscience in history, eugenics, the form exposed and denounced in the two most famous books of Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity and Evil Sisters: in essence, a cult, likely borrowed by the infamous proto-Nazi Ariosophy cult from the Brahmin priests of Hinduism (who call it "bindu"), that identifies blood, semen, brains, gold, money, and oil (petroleum) as the identical substance. Not materially — Ariosophy is consistently "spiritualist" in accepting Plato's notorious claim that matter is a corrupt reflection of supernatural absolutes — but "spiritually", in that they allegedly share the identical supernatural "essence". This they call "occult physiology". As usual, the supernatural is used as a weapon to silence rational and scientific inquiry and pawn off lies as fact. The cult's effect on the Corporates is hysterical antifeminism, hysterical racism, hysterical homophobia, hysterical class bigotry, hysterical authoritarianism, even hysterical misanthropy, and a paranoid obsession with "vampires". The Corporate ideology turns out to have a very unexpected side effect: middle- and upper-class mothers, to prevent the Corporates from kidnapping their daughters and turning them into mindless breeding slaves, marry them (this is one of the two primary yuri elements in Spanner).

Bad Company: The Horror, The Horror; or, America Is God and Dictel Is Cthulhu

In my previous entry on political horror, I said that in Bad Company and other entries in the Spanner cycle I would depict governments as gods and corporations as hostile alien lifeforms. But then I read this blog post on how government has annihilated privacy (and, just as important, the comments), and I realized: my political horror scenario is real! It is our reality. So the horror elements of BadCo are in fact realistic!

In the spirit of Alfred Hitchcock, I'm giving out the big spoiler even before the novel is published. Here it is:

• The United States Federal Government is the Second Coming of Christ, but only in the sense that the cruel and vengeful Old Testament God is returning as the merciless Christ of the Book of Revelation.
• Dictel Corporation is the vessel of Cthulhu; in fact, the world's largest military conglomerate is the ideal form in which the dread god can reincarnate.

Why am I doing this? Because BadCo's big shock revelation will shock you anyway, even if you know it's coming.

But now I know that when I unmask the US government as Jehovah and Dictel as Cthulhu, I'm being perfectly realistic. We live in an animistic world more terrifying than we can currently imagine. My job in the Dictel trilogy is to show it to you and make you believe it. Is this one objective justification for Karl Marx's theory? Sure, and some people will interpret it that way. But now you will know why libertarians and anarchists believe government is evil, and why Marxists and other socialists believe capitalism is evil.

Now my next task is to figure out exactly where in BadCo to put this big revelation...

Spanner: Context and World Building

Script Frenzy was, as you'd expect from the name (and the 100-page-in-a-month goal), frenzied. As I focused on writing 170 pages of the Spanner script in the last 2 1/2 weeks (my total page count till then being 1), I didn't put much time or thought into the full context in which Shira and her friends, lovers, and enemies live, love, hate, and otherwise do their thing. Now that Script Frenzy is over, I'm dedicating the next several Spanner-related entries to world building.

What kind of government do they live under and have to deal with? What are the political dynamics of Spanner's world? The class relations? The economy? Are people starving in the streets and rioting for the right to eat, and why (or why not)? What are the pop culture phenomena in Euro-America in 2014? What technologies and Internet crazes are sweeping the world in the next six years? What is the Euro-American Union, how did it come about, and why is it all but permanently at odds with the New Chinese Empire and the New Caliphate? What religions are vying for supremacy, and to what lengths are they willing to go to achieve it? What is the relationship between the two rising phenomena of secularism and fundamentalism?

These are just some of the world-related questions I need to answer in order to put Spanner into its full context. Also, I need to keep in mind that everything has a history, and everything is connected to everything else. I will not allow anything in Spanner to be superfluous or gratuitous. So I'm dedicating the next several entries on Spanner to answering these questions and filling in the story's context. Once I've done that, and after I've fixed up the script for the first 5 issues, I'll start up again on the character notes.

I intend to create the best comics I possibly can. World building is a necessary step.

Character Profile: Shira Thomas (revised 8/25/2010)

Shira Miranda Thomas, main character of Spanner, was born on September 9, 1999 to Cedric Anthony Thomas III (the legendary rocker Ric Thomas/"Red Mercury") and Hope Maureen Reston. This red-haired, dark-skinned, large-nosed beauty was a wild and mischievous child who attracted all kinds of controversy and scandal to herself. Today (i.e., during the Spanner timeline that starts in late August 2014), Hope Reston is the liberal Populist mayor of Metropolitan Seattle, making Shira a major player in the struggle to keep Seattle and the entire State of Cascadia from falling under the theocratic tyranny of the reconstituted Confederate States of America and still escape the rival tyranny of the United Corporations cartel that rules the EuroAmerican Union under the state-socialist system of Corporatism. As a leading champion of democratic Populism, Shira strives to rally people to her side through music, dance, style, and direct persuasion. But those who try to stop her in the name of Authority will find out that she is a legendary prankster for a reason...

Sketch of Shira from 2002