Spanner R4 Update: Chapter 14, the Clip Episode with Extra WHAM!

Every fan of Babylon 5 and many other series is familiar with the Wham Episode, dedicated to the shocking plot twist. Now Spanner has more than enough WHAM! to satisfy any plot-twist addict, and I've spent extra time putting more WHAM! into the Fourth Revision, particularly Chapter 1, where the WHAM! (the Spanner Incident, to be exact) is what kicks off the plot in the first place.

Then there's the Japanese TV tradition of the Recap Episode, which sums up the story so far for those who came to the story late. (There's a specific reason for this that has to do with Japanese broadcasting which I won't get into right now.)

Problem: how do you plot a Recap Episode so that it becomes a Wham Episode? It sounds difficult, and it is — but it's been done before. Case in point: episode 33 of Revolutionary Girl Utena. The trick is to add a little something which will change the context of everything. Trickiest of all is doing it in such a way so that Chapter 14 will make, say, Chapters 2 and 3 look like Innocuously Important Episodes in comparison, and still be overshadowed by the major-league WHAM! of Chapter 15.

I'm going to keep roughly to the outline of the Third Revision. I'll remove some scenes, condense others, send others to earlier chapters, all to make room for the context-changing flashbacks to earlier chapters. I'll still keep certain of the new Fourth Revision scenes, but the main plot is there mostly to structure the flashbacks and add the extra context needed to prepare for Chapter 15.

The first flashback-oriented episode is Chapter 9, which tells Shira's and Leila's backstories in a way intended to drive them apart but only brings them closer together. In fact, I'm going to scatter a lot of flashbacks in Chapters 10-13, of both the backstory variety used in Chapter 5 and the context-changing kind I'm now using Chapter 14 for. By the time Chapter 15 begins, you'll realize that much of what you knew before turns out to have been wrong.

An extra character bonus comes in the assault on the gang meeting at Oliver's property. Turns out Leila was part of a couple with a bit of a "Bonnie and Clyde" reputation, and her boyfriend was Frank Becket, police chief Jack's gangster son and classmate Debbie's older brother. But now, though they still share some nihilistic-sounding premises, Leila has grown from a nihilist into a more optimistic existentialist, while Frank has remained a nihilist. This comes out during their katana duel:

Frank: What happened to you, Leila? Where's the heartless bitch I fell in love with? You've gone weak!
Leila: I grew up. Why won't you?

Of course one issue Frank has with Leila now is that she's fallen in love with a girl, a dark-skinned one at that, and he thinks it's gross. And Shira is no nihilist; philosophically, she's an "ethical slut" hedonist.

There's new character Dr. Mina Tatsumi's escape from the madhouse and army of Yakuza-girl clones, and there's the whole "Fujoshi Paradise" sequence that needs restructured, condensed, and ultimately turned into a thread which should start in Chapter 5. But first I need to completely restructure Chapter 14. The fine details come later.

Spanner R4 Update: Skipping Forward Through the Chapters

Sometimes the muse likes to lead me on a wild goose chase. Now I find myself redoing the Chapter 14 into a semi-"recap episode" with an extra dose of "wham!", and tweaking the already replotted Chapters 7 and 15, and turning Chapter 18 into the direct sequel to Chapter 15 involving the Corporatist state government's revenge against Team Spanner and the Cascadia Populists generally, which proceeds to backfire for Governor Brinkman, the Fearsome Foursome, and CPMC in Chapters 19 and 20, culminating in their ultimate blunder: somehow turning a district-wide high-school student walkout into a great big soccer fan riot. And I was supposed to be plotting the weakest scenes of Chapter 4...

The Chapter 14 idea began as the intersection of two ideas. The first is the structure of the last half of Chapter 9, which I built around a pair of flashback sequences, one after the other, involving first Shira then Leila, as two male characters try to convince each that the other is bad news (they fail: Shira and Leila love each other because they're bad news). The second is the anime tradition of the midseason recap episode, and specifically the second one in Revolutionary Girl Utena which doubles as a Wham Episode rivalling any in Babylon 5.

Chapter 15: I flipped through my notes again and found the one where I'd written the chapter's final six-part structure, then divided the scenes the way I did Chapter 7 back during NaNoEdMo, with the section numbers added to the scene names. As for Chapter 7, I added a few elements to a new scene in Section 4 ("The Birthday Party") to tie it in to a few more plot threads, including one very long one that starts in that scene.

That takes care of those three chapters for now. Now back to the problem I'm working on in Chapter 4: how to make a meeting with about a dozen characters more dramatic. Maybe I should have Shira drop one of her customary wham lines, causing a "Why didn't I think of that?" reaction in the others?

Spanner R4 Extra Update: Cascadia Has A Real Flag!

I read this article on the soccer fans of Seattle, Vancouver, and Portland, and how they've been bringing out the Cascadian flag. Well, guess what? Cascadia really does have its own flag! In fact, you can buy one!

The site where you can buy the flag defines Cascadia as the entire Pacific Northwest envisioned as a potentially independent nation. My definition in Spanner is considerably smaller, basically western Washington and Oregon combined with southwestern British Columbia, set apart as a sort of Indian reservation for liberals by the Conservative Revolutionary federal government, essentially the Cascadia of Ernest Callenbach's utopian novel Ecotopia without the California part that Callenbach was focused on.

But guess what? Even this "rump" Cascadia is still secessionist and rallies under the Douglas Fir flag a.k.a. "The Doug". That body of water in the northern part of the state, around which the urban heart of Cascadia nestles, is still called by Cascadians the Salish Sea. And the entire theme of "legal in Cascadia but not in America" just has to carry the implication of "Cascadia wants to be independent of the American Empire", and so do all those references to the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement that I threw into the Third Revision last year as they happened. And what could Chapters 21-23, the last three chapters of Spanner Book 1, be about but Cascadia trying to be independent, with the Doug waving throughout the aspiring nation?

I slapped my forehead and cried out, "But of course!"

EDIT: It turns out Cascadia has a Native American name as well: Chinook Illahee. And Illahee just happens to be the name of a neighbourhood in Bremerton, come to think of it...

Spanner R4 Update: A Subjective Approach to Love Scenes

One of my favorite love stories of the 1990s was the sweet love between the two female leads of the manga Chirality. Problem: the love scenes were the series' weak point. Too Penthouse-y! That's because author Satoshi Urushihara is notorious for indulging his breast fetish. It stopped the story cold. So I vowed to create an opposite approach to comics love scenes that would focus on the lovers' emotions and push the expressive limits of the comics medium.

I never learned to draw well enough to actually put that plan into action — in pictures. Instead, I translated it into prose, starting with Spanner Revision 3, shortly after fully discovering poetry, ironically during Script Frenzy when NaPoWriMo runs concurrently. So far in the Fourth Revision, I've written all the love scenes (and some of the action scenes) in a style derived from Surrealist, Beat, and prose poetry.

Actually, I have two approaches to love scenes: the intense and the languid. The intense style uses the surreal method in which erotic intensity breaks down language and veers into mysticism. The languid or sensual approach involves describing the erotic action in terms of the physical sensations the lovers feel. Naturally, they shade into each other. My concern is not with how a love scene looks, as the standard pornographic approach (such as Urushihara's) does it, because pornography eventually gets boring. I'm concerned with how the characters feel. At the sensual end of the spectrum, I describe how, say, a caress feels on bare skin; at the intense end, the characters lose all reason and fuse souls.

I'm not a naïve yet horny teenager anymore. Pornography just won't cut it with me. I want to show how love and sex feel. You want the Penthouse approach, there's dirty pictures and videos all over the Internet. If I can get you inside, say, Shira and Leila's bodies so that you feel what they feel, I've done my job. I'll accept no less. And so the love scenes are among the parts I edit most obsessively, the way Ernest Hemingway edited the last page of one of his novels thirty-eight times, and for the same reason: to get it right.

UPDATE: And what should I encounter but an post called "Limbic Revision: How Love Rewires the Brain" about a book related to this very subject, A General Theory of Love, which I should add to my list of Spanner's crucial sources...

Spanner R4 Update: Chapter 4 - The Meeting at Mudlark House, Take 1

Believe it or not, there's three versions of the pivotal meeting at Mudlark House in Spanner Chapter 4, and they're all unsatisfactory. One, they don't have enough of the characters; two, the plan's still too explicit like in a heist movie; three, there's not enough ominous foreshadowing. The versions are those from the Third Revision, the initial Fourth Revision outline, and the Script Frenzy script.

In addition to host Willa and her teenage relatives involved in organizing the Student Union that plays such a pivotal role in the School Arc between Chapters 5 and 21, Hope has brought several disgruntled teachers who, unlike her (and the three sexy librarians who serve as mentors to the Student Union activists), have not been purged from the Teachers Guild — yet. Problem: the Guild is using the Conservative Revolution as an excuse to transform itself from a workers' organization into a private employment services corporation which its management hope they can list on the stock exchange. Bigger problem: it's the Guild that owns the private Seattle Public Education Corporation that's already notorious for treating both teachers and students so contemptuously. Shira announces she'll be going "into the belly of the beast", meaning she plans to undermine SPEC from within.

I guess this scene will have to work like the ones in heist movies — in fact, the TV version in its final form should be in part a homage to heist movies, and to those war movies in which the heroic raiders work out their plan to, for example, bomb the bridge over the River Kwai or the Nazi gun emplacements at Navarone. But this being Chaos Angel Spanner rather than, say, Topkapi or Inglourious Basterds, anything can happen and every plan requires a Plan B. Shira's tagline is, after all, "expect the unexpected". Point and counterpoint: to properly set up the School Arc, I will need to contrast the flexibility of Shira and her crew (the future Team Spanner) with the pointed inflexibility of the management within the "revolutionary government" of SPEC. The meetings at Mudlark House and SPEC headquarters should reveal two completely opposite worldviews, the Populism and Corporatism that will clash head-on in Chapters 22 and 23, once the School Arc has come to its explosive conclusion.

There will be two more scenes related to the Mudlark House and SPEC meetings: the emergency meeting at Drusilla's cult complex to determine the succession to the chairmanship of Biotron after Shira's delivery to Dr. Thorwald blows up; and a Socialist Revolutionary terrorist action involving hostage taking and, well, a meeting to plan an even more audacious action, this time aimed at SPEC and its chairman, Peter Ross.

Ah, Peter Ross. I'm going to give him a character arc like the infamous "Papa Doc" Duvalier who started as a doctor and ended as a genocidal dictator. Ross started as a teacher whose politics were pretty liberal and who was a friend of the even more liberal Hope Reston. Now he's a militantly corrupt neoconservative Corporate, and Hope is his radical nemesis. But he personally blacklisted her, so her daughter Shira Thomas will have to serve as her point man. In Chapter 6, Ross reveals just how unamused he is.

Now back to crafting the Mudlark House scene. I want it to work, so I need to get it right.

Spanner R4 Update: Interlude 3 Complete - Weirder and More Cyberpunk than Ever!

Guest starring the clone-resurrected Walt Disney and Japanese Prime Minister Sony Corporation! With visual shout-outs to left-handed anime bass girls Mio Akiyama and Haruko Haruhara by left-handed bassist Rebel Styles. Sony makes its appearance in the form of a 900-foot Screen Gems logo (Screen Gems being, of course, a Sony division). With these additions, and heavy bromantic vibes between IP Defender Martin Martian and his adoring assistant (and later "widow") R. A. "Legs" Leggett (a villain from Chapters 4, 6, and 11), the brand new Spanner Interlude 3, "One Nation Under Copyright, All Rights Reserved", is now complete, and it's cyberpunk as hell!

Now Rebel wields a mean bass in addition to the illegal mons stored in a pair of terabyte Poké-Ball earrings. It's got five strings, it's connected to first a pair and then an array of sound cannons, and it's illegally not registered to Fender owner Sony. Now the slayer-by-television of half the Conservative Revolutionary Party leadership can more than hold her own against two of the Intellectual Property Industry's deadliest enforcers.

Disney will not get any characterization. He gets a line, but it's the standard ritual stuff you hear from Richard Becket, who is characterized, mainly because he has to deal with tricky, tricky Shira in the main story and gets his ego bruised repeatedly. Oh, and because Dick Becket's an aging superhero with a god complex. As for Sony, it's important because it holds political office like US President Goldman Sachs & Company and UK Prime Minister News Corporation, only it owns a much cooler and scarier logo, the Screen Gems "S From Hell".

Now that the single most cyberpunk of the Interludes in Spanner (at least in Book 1) is finished, my next challenge is Chapter 1. First task at hand: the meeting at Mudlark House, in which several important characters try to hammer out a strategy against the Seattle Public Education Corporation and its owner, a thoroughly corrupted national teachers' union, on the last day before the School Arc begins in Chapter 5.

Spanner R4 Update: Editing Chapter 4 and the Art of Killing One's Darlings

GLaDOS: Caroline deleted.

Just a couple weeks ago I came up with this scene to open up Spanner Chapter 4 with power, based on a real incident. I put a lot of work and heart into it.

Sorry, didn't fit the story. "Coffee Shop Massacre" deleted.

When editing, writing teachers insist, you must be willing and unafraid to "kill your darlings" — that is, edit out scenes you love, scenes that are awesome, because they detract from the story. It's like the story about the French sculptor Auguste Rodin: when he was making his statue of novelist Honoré de Balzac, the sculptor’s students raved about the magnificent hands until he got so frustrated he chopped them off. The part, he chided, must not detract from the whole. So far I've killed a number of my "darlings" in the first four chapters. This scene that quickly grew into a sequence just happens to be the biggest.

So what did I replace it with? An even newer scene, tying into Chapters 1 and 15, about how the High Corporates, billionaire oligarchs called "Incorporated", have been hogging all the celebrity. Within Chapter 4, it connects to the major scene in which a High Corporate actually appears. In the Chapter 4 context, it must underline the moral decay of Corporatist society and make it clear that the decay starts at the top. I also mention smart drugs; some Corporates chomp them down like candy, the way some Patriots take steroids. Even more interesting, here's an article by a free-market economist that says banks aren't even capitalist businesses at all; the salient point: fiat-money systems like the current American greenback eventually end in hyperinflation and must be replaced with commodity money (read: gold), preferably without government interfering to start the vicious cycle yet again. For the alliance of State and Bank is the enemy of the free market.

Another new replacement scene, related to the central Shira-Leila romance that tentatively commenced in Chapter 3, involves a Caliphate terrorist group holding hostages. A few of the women defect to the terrorists. Jennifer even cynically comments that such easy Stockholm Syndrome has become such a regular occurrence that it's become the only success Al-Qaeda in America has, since suicide bombers (like the two Shira kills in Chapter 3) only succeed in justifying enthusiastically bloody American retaliation. So what makes these women so vulnerable? American women, Jennifer scornfully explains, are relentlessly instructed by the official State ideology and propaganda to find spiritual salvation in surrender to a man in the exact same manner the man is to find salvation in the Nation. So when they get captured by enemy warriors skilled in exploiting this weakness, these will-less women are easy prey. Jennifer's explanation inevitably becomes a harsh criticism of Twilight and the Mormon doctrine of salvation through procreative marriage it's based on.

I found one later scene very hard to write: the parents' meeting about the impending School Arc beginning next chapter. Something I read yesterday provided the key, a magazine article about how the "iron law of oligarchy" inevitably destroys all populist organizations and movements; as Shira's Rocker anarchist dad, whom I'm throwing in, sums it up: "You get leaders, you end up with aristocracy." The solution, he suggests, is networking: only if the people participate in their own revolution can they prevent it from turning it into yet another Conservative Revolution.

My guideline for editing Interlude 3: pit the IP Defenders of the corrupted Corporate application of the Rule of Cool against Rule Of Cool Incarnate. The man who sends the IP Defenders after Rebel Styles is another of the High Corporate supercelebrities now introduced at the beginning of Chapter 4. And what does Rebel want? Why, to take out some Corporate supercelebrity. Or so she says. But then, every mere terrorist longs to become famous for killing a High Corporate...

Update on Chapters 2 and 3: Chapter 2, it turns out, didn't need any extra editing. It's now officially complete. In Chapter 3, I corrected the vague dialogue in one scene, tightened the wording in another, and added a word I discovered was missing; now that too is complete. So now Spanner Revision 4 is now complete up to Chapter 3.

Spanner R4 Update: Chapter 1 Final Edit Completely Complete At Last! Chapter 2, Too

When I last thought Spanner Chapter 1 was complete, my muse thought otherwise; she added new stuff I had to throw in. So I fitted it in, and now I can finally declare with absolute certainty that Chapter 1 Revision 4 is finished! The great thing is, I didn't have much to add to Chapter 2, either.

The New Myth
Myths structure many stories, whether ancient pagan myths or medieval folktales. The new myth that structures Spanner is composite: Jack the Giant Killer (of Beanstalk fame) versus the Titans from Greek mythology. "Jack the Giant Killer" is the most common myth structuring especially left-wing political thrillers. One name the Corporates have been known by since the 19th century is "Titans of Industry", and the reference is specifically to the giant gods that warred against the Olympians. But now the Olympians are dead, slain by Jesus, so the Titans have no one to turn against except humanity. Prometheus is once again a traitor, because he gave the fire of the gods to humanity.

As for Jack, the central symbol of his myth here is not the familiar axe, but the horn from earlier versions with which he summoned his fellow villagers, who chopped down the beanstalk together to kill the Giant. Since Spanner defines both superheroism and terrorism as the substitution of individual heroism for mass action (that's the "conservative" part of "Conservative Revolution"), that means Shira, normally a trickster hero, must become a herald hero if she is to bring down the Becket dynasty's tyranny. She has to blow the horn, not just throw monkeywrenches.

The original structuring myth was the descent of Ishtar. (Neal Stephenson's cyberpunk classic Snow Crash is similarly structured around a composite myth: the descent of Ishtar into the Tower of Babel.) This is still the structuring myth of Shira's character arc. But it comes into play in Book 3, so I'm not concerned with it right now.

The Replacement Flashback
There was this short flashback that had no function but to get the Wrecking Krewe hackers to the abandoned dogfight pit where they would sacrifice their iPhones to Eris. It now forms a framing device for a longer flashback in which Willa, Hope, Karen, and the old hacker Wellspring (in that order) inform the assembled Krewe what they're up against, interspersed with quotes from major villains. Stylewise, I realized I could embed one of my custom blockquote-equivalent styles from the series stylesheet within another. Yes, CSS is that powerful.

The Vampire Hero (?)
Will Becket, the vampire super soldier who drank Osama bin Laden's blood, gets a new scene at the end of the Spanner Incident: he climbs out from beneath the rubble to the top and exults, "Spanner! I accept your Challenge!" Thus starts one of the series' longest plot threads. He starts out as a villain, but will he remain one? Only he can decide...

Other Edits
I corrected a few new continuity errors that sneaked in during the last "complete" final edit, and smoothed out the clunky appearances of the "Left-Handed League" theme. After that, I found nothing left to add, subtract, or correct. Chapter 1 is now complete.

Chapter 2
In the new Revision 4 scene at Game Wars, I wanted to add something new and add back something I had removed for word count. What I put back in was the logo that appears in every chapter between 2 and 15 until it reveals itself to be the face of a secret AI ally at the end of Chapter 15. The new detail was Shira taking off her shirt in an attempt to use the trope "I Have Boobs, You Must Obey" to distract the men rioting on the sidewalk. Her attempt fails, so she laughs at them and goes in the door. I may adjust the wording one final time; but other than that, I can't find anything else to fix. Chapter 2 is complete.

Chapter 3
I put a lot of work into this chapter, too. What is there left to fix? There may be a few opportunities to drop in a few continuity references to Chapters 1 and 2. Or it may already be complete. I'll know when I do one final reading tonight.

Next: Chapter 4 and Interlude 3
With the Fourth Revision now done up to Chapter 3, I turn my attention to Chapter 4 and its accompanying Interlude. They're still in a rough state: I dropped sections of the Script Frenzy script into the Chapter 4 HTML ebook page, and I put revision reminders before every scene of Interlude 3 except the first.

Chapter 4: Some of the scenes will remain more or less intact from the Third and even Second Revisions. My challenge is to fit the new scenes into something resembling an episode continuity. I'm also going to return to the Titan myth introduced in the final version of Chapter 1, and maybe add another hint of the Egyptian mythological theme also from Chapter 1 (though something different from the "ka" or spirit double that played a role in the Spanner Incident).

Interlude 3: Rebel's strategy against the IP Defenders: connect her bass guitar(s) to a sound cannon. Old otaku that I am, I'm dropping in otaky references to the two most famous left-handed female bassists in anime: Mio Akiyama from K-On! and Haruko Haruhara from FLCL. Also, I'm giving Leggett personal motivation for revenge. Revenge is always nastier when it's personal.

This means I'm ahead of my Panic Time editing goal this month. Now that the first three chapters are finished, it'll be no problem to finish Chapter 4 and Interlude 3 by next week. Maybe I should aim for Chapter 8? I think I will.

Preparing for JulNoWriMo and 50/90: Spanner's "Pretty City Arc" and the Soundtrack

If I were doing WriDaNoJu, this would be the beginning of Panic Time. Instead, besides editing Spanner Book 1, I'm making belated preparations for JulNoWriMo and 50 Songs in 90 Days.

For JulNo, I'm going to return to Spanner Book 2 and pick up where I left off, or not long thereafter: the Pretty City Arc that takes up the middle section. Chapters 31-39 even have their own single-volume name: "Died Pretty". Shira and Team Spanner go down to LA to rescue the Shelley twins from their grandfather Governor Brinkman's final betrayal, only to find something more shocking — but I won't spoil the surprise. They'll also find out the most degrading and horrible things about the fashion and entertainment industries, leading to the violent confrontation with the Media Industry Association of America brass in the final third of Book 2.

For 50/90, I'll start work on the techno soundtrack to Spanner — as in what I've been hearing in my head (or the kind of stuff I've been writing and drawing to) since 1992. This includes the virtual-reality sequences in Book 2. Many of the fight scenes will have drum & bass soundtracks.

Meanwhile, the Chapter 1 final edit turns out to have one final pass left in it. I'm adding a few lines, putting in a couple more themes important later in the story, initiating a few more plot threads, and making major changes to two scenes. Then I can declare it complete and move on to Chapter 2, in which I'm adding one detail to one of the scenes new to Revision 4: Shira takes her shirt off — and fails to attract male attention despite being completely naked above the waist. Why? Because all the men are too busy beating each other up. Over beer. So she laughs at them. When the tear gas starts to fly, she goes into Game Wars to greet her darling cousin Karen half-naked.

July's coming up fast, so I'll want to start making my JulNo and 50/90 preparations while there's still a June. I've also set a goal for the rest of June: complete the Fourth Revision edits of Chapters 1-4 and Interlude 3. I can do it. Here goes...

Spanner R4 Update: Chapter 1 Final Edit Now Complete!

Today it took two passes to finish the final Fourth Revision edit of Spanner Chapter 1. The first was to edit in the Heteronormative Crusader trope involving every faction except the Socialist Revolutionaries and add the new idea that came to me that all the hoverboarders involved in the Spanner Incident, not just Shira, are left-handed. The second was to clear up any remaining errors I found, some of which turned out to have been unchanged since the Second Revistion. I finished at exactly 9:45 Seattle time.

First pass: I inserted one new subscene to the scene on the airplane with Jennifer and the Socialist Revolutionary hijackers in which a Corporate hostage gay-baits them and gets his neck broken by a butch lesbian (a character I imported from the Project Notebooks and added to the SRO group). Turns out her girlfriend is the older Saionji sister, Hime (not Miho as I called her in the Chapter 3 R4 jailbreak scene), another import from the Project Notebooks, now appearing several chapters before Arisa so far (Arisa first appears in Chapter 8 R3). At the end of the Shira-vs.-Oliver fight scene, Oliver now gay-baits the cops arresting him and gets beaten with cattle prods for his trouble (poor, poor serial killer!). I also added the first signs of a pair of cultural details foregrounded in Chapter 3 and involving tattoos: that Rocker culture pretty much requires tattoos (distinct from the deliberately hideous and even demonic tattoos that identify gangsters) and that Moral Enforcers and other factionalists frequently have all their tattoos removed (and it shows). The Rocker tattoo thing also comes up in Chapter 7, when it comes up that tattooing is the mark of Rocker adulthood and begins at 18 (Chapter 7 is when Shira turns 15; the Shelley twins, who have a heavily tattooed gothpunk-singer mother, will turn 16 in Chapter 24).

Second pass: I actually spent more time on this, since in addition to correcting the remaining continuity errors (and a few remaining typos), I looked for places to insert mentions that Shira, Karen, Sparks, Arisa, and Steve/Deth Pussy are all The Southpaw. These just happen to be the characters most directly involved in the Spanner Incident, and they all ride hoverboards. Which one threw the monkeywrench? To quote Shira: "If I tell you, I'll have to kill you" (she winks). The detail that Shira is left-handed becomes important later because of the notoriously unfair advantage that left-handers have in fencing and similar fighting sports; when the swordfighting turns deadly in Chapter 11, that advantage allows her to survive. It also gives her an advantage in martial arts; several rivals she fights have specifically right-handed styles which allow her to dominate them. In the first pass, I inserted the detail that Ariel is also left-handed — but what does she have to do with the Spanner Incident, or is it just another misdirection? Her left-handedness will likely become important later. (Leila, by contrast, is ambidextrous, a detail I won't even mention until at least Chapter 5 but becomes important to Chapter 15.)

Two passes, one to edit things in and one to (mainly) correct the remaining errors, and now Chapter 1 is complete at last! Even so, I'll probably make one last read-through just to be sure. There may still be a few stray errors, but nothing more needs to be edited in. It's almost ready for publication. Now to make that cover I've been procrastinating...

Next: Interlude 3. We know IP Defender Leggett is determined to keep the Richter-Thomases and their band from reclaiming creative control of their songs from the MIAA. But why does he have a special hatred for Shira in particular? Interlude 3 explains why — once I edit it.