NaNoWriMo 2014: Victory #9 Achieved: or, It Was Spanner What Done It

I thought winning my ninth NaNoWriMo would be a cinch. Problem is, the novel wouldn't come. Then I realize that only one novel would come:

Chaos Angel Spanner Book 6: Business Is War. That one.

And indeed it came. I remembered several of the plot points I'd put in the initial five-volume manga plan I mapped out in the Project Notebooks back in 2000, plus several others I'd worked out or at least thought up in the years since. I found myself making references to the previous five volumes, indeed all the way back to the Spanner Incident in Book 1. My muse threw me several shocking new plot twists, including the deaths of several villains, the entire Socialist Revolutionary Organization left-wing terrorist group (with former villains as its new members), and even what is possibly the coolest character in the series, Willa (though the muse is already bringing her back in an equally shocking way at the beginning of Book 7).

I hit a surprising number of major plot points. This is a major improvement over two years ago, when I didn't get much of Book 5 written (when it was Book 3) and didn't hit most of the important plot points. I'll have to revisit Book 5 sometime soon, just to map out the plot more completely. But right now I'm taking a break after eleven days of way too much writing.

December will be my month for editing Book 1. My goal will be to edit it completely and send it out to my beta readers before New Year's Eve. It's getting ever more urgent as history catches up to my speculative fiction at an ever faster pace.

But first, I'm going to sit back and savor my ninth NaNoWriMo victory. Champagne is in order.

NaNoWriMo 2013: The Heroic Effort to Victory #8

It took a heroic effort to get me to victory in NaNoWriMo 2013, my eighth consecutive victory. I only managed to squeeze out a few thousand words in the first week and a half. After editing Spanner Chapter 1 for so long (fortunately it's finished and formatted so I don't have to do anything more to it), it took me that long to convince my muse to switch from editing Spanner to writing this year's NaNo novel.

On the 18th, I succeeded at last.

Then came what you might consider the early equivalent of Panic Time. Starting that Monday, I had, in order, 6K, 6K, 4K, 10K, 4K, and 6K days before resting that Sunday, leaving me with a word count of 41,000. I slowed down the following week; the 50,000th word came on Thanksgiving, when my family (fortunately, it turns out) did not go to the nearest tribal casino for Thanksgiving dinner.

So what's the next thing I'm going to do to Freefall? After converting the Markdown format original to RTF so I can import it into yWriter5 for editing, I'll let it set for at least a week. Once I return to it, I'll begin the edit process. As I learned from two years editing Spanner, editing is where the real art of writing exists because it's the sculpting of the raw mass of first-draft words into the finished novel.

Speaking of editing, I have two other non-Spanner NaNo novels ready to edit (2007's Bad Company: A Corporate Terror Story and 2009's Dirty Pop) that I can also import into yWriter5. However, my big challenge for the "SpaNoEdMo" in December is Spanner Chapter 2, which right now has bloated to twice its Fourth Revision size and from which I'll have to cull story elements, some of which may have been present from the original draft.

There are some NaNo contestants who now feel (as I read in one post) "a novel-shaped hole in [their] heart". Not me. When I look at all the work I still need to do, especially all the editing, I have to take a deep breath. The sheer amount of editing to be done is daunting. But still I must do it.

The work continues.

NaNoWriMo 2013 Update 1: The Slow, Slow Start

Hey, muse! Yeah, you! Won't you get away from Spanner for a moment and help me write my NaNoWriMo novel? You're getting like Willa's gossip about trendy architect Zaha Hadid in Chapter 4 R5, about how she turned Holy City Arcology's brand new Hall of Heroes into Mount Rushmore-cum-With the Beatles for tyrant superheroes:

Shira: (takes deep breath) Oh my god what the hell is that?

Jennifer: (mouth gaping) That's supposed to be the Hall of Heroes?

Willa: (smiling ironically) Yes, I'm afraid that is indeed Zaha Hadid's temple of hero worship. That blob behind the wall of faces is her grand effusion of love. Drusilla was complaining about how Dick was flirting with Hadid right in front of her, and I'm sure the architect had great fun putting the blush in Dru's pale face. Reliable sources tell me he says she made him feel like a Rock Star, and she felt like she fucked a god. She's gone on to hero-worshipping lesser would-be Napoleons, while he's gone back to hitting on me.

Please, muse, will you at least help me write a first draft for Freefall that sucks, except of course for the clever dialogue that seems to flow from me spontaneously like, well, Zaha Hadid's architectural effusion of fangirlism in Spanner Chapter 4 R5?

Yeah, I'm starting slow again this NaNo. Yes, I'm afraid there will be a Panic Time. I'm having such a hard time just starting that I can't even do my "rapid badwriting" technique because the muse remains monomaniacally obsessed with editing Spanner and throwing me new scenarios faster than I can even write. Looks like I won't have a NaNoFiMo either, since next month's going to be another SpaNoEdMo.

It's way past time to kick the muse into gear. Looks like I'm going to have to use force. (takes out paddle, prepares to tie muse to bed)

Spanner Hiatus Week: Finishing FAWM, Preparing for NaNoEdMo

While I try to whip out 14 song lyrics for this year's February Album Writing Month, I'm taking a few days off from the Spanner posting schedule to work on the difficult Interlude 11 and prepare for National Novel Editing Month. In fact, I'm combining the two by writing Interludes 11 and 12 as song lyrics (the concept behind Interlude 11 is an industrial-rock music video, like Skinny Puppy directed by Emergency Broadcast Network), and translating a few other Interludes into song lyrics as well (Interlude 9 would make a particularly perfect New Romantic synthrock tune).

The revised schedule: I'll post Interlude 11 on Friday and the Chapter 17 index page on Saturday. Then, to push my NaNoEdMo editing harder, I'll return to the original daily publishing schedule and publish a complete chapter each week:

• Chapter 18: week of March 4 (starting Monday)
• Chapter 19: week of March 11
• Interlude 12 and Chapter 20: March 18-23
• Chapter 21: week of March 24 (starting Sunday)
• Interlude 13: March 31
• Chapter 22: week of April 1 (starting Monday)
• Chapter 23: week of April 8

...which means the Final Revision of Spanner Book 1 will be complete on April 14, when the Chapter 23 index posts. Another goal is to finish editing and hand-coding the Book 1 ebook; after that, my next task will be to design the logo and covers (I have the design and the software, all I need is the time and a graphics tablet).

But it's not just the last 6 chapters of Book 1 I intend to edit next month; I've got ideas for Interlude 14 and Chapter 24 that will start Book 2 with a bang. I won't post them just yet, not until I've got a complete first draft of Book 2 written and at least the first third (Chapters 24-31 and their Interludes) edited.

Meanwhile, it's Panic Time for FAWM, and I intend to get those 14 song lyrics written no matter what it takes.

NaNoWriMo 2012: The Final Result

This year's editing of NaNoWriMo turned out to be the most difficult yet, what with the Spanner Book 1 final edit trying to intrude on it at all times. I had nothing but Panic Time left. On the final day, I found myself 10,000 words behind.

I shocked myself. I wrote those 10,000 words in just 4 1/2 hours. And I pulled off the spectacular come-from-behind to win my 7th consecutive NaNoWriMo.

Now, the actual plot refused to come. I found myself writing notes, filler, and even futile pleadings to the muse. She was too busy squeeing over all those pretty girls with no names who had started stampeding into Spanner, you see. I found Chapters 12 and 13 becoming easy to edit due to that story idea, of course, but the muse wanted nothing to do with that NaNo novel I was trying to write at the same time. I suspect she might even have been sleeping with the Inner Editor by that point. And so I decided to write around her.

It worked. Even though not much story came through till the very end (the final scene of Cascadia Rising, the Spanner Side Story I finally settled on as my NaNo novel), I found myself able to "Kateness out" those last 10K words.

And now I'm a seven-time NaNoWriMo winner. I earned my champagne, chocolate, and weekend rest.

Now back to fondling my relieved and grateful muse and finishing that Spanner final edit...

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.

NaNoEdMo 2011: My Progress So Far

It seems I've been so caught up in either editing Spanner or procrastinating editing this NaNoEdMo that I haven't given myself any time to blog about it. Well, here's my progress report for EdMo 2011 so far.

As I write this, right before I start my final Panic Time weekend session, I've been editing Spanner for 33 hours. There were some days in which I did only one hour, or didn't edit at all. Now I'm editing three hours and more.

The Intro and Chapters 1 through 5 are now complete. My task for tonight: edit Chapters 6 through 10. I've already done some editing on most of those chapters already, so it shouldn't be all that hard to finish them. I'll start editing (and in some cases actually start writing) some of the Interludes (mainly 3 through 7) if I have time.

I'm hoping to finish the entire second draft by the time Script Frenzy begins on April 1. I'm seriously considering adapting the Intro, Chapters 1 and 2, and their corresponding Interludes (1 and 2, but not in that order because Interlude 1 is an "end-of-episode omake") into a TV pilot -- for a series that may be all but unfilmable because of extremely controversial material and all those satires of real-life corporations, politicians, and celebrities.

Once I'm done with the second draft, I'll repost each revised chapter daily starting with the Intro on April 1, including all the new Interludes and, at long last, the final two chapters, which are currently still incomplete. If the revised chapter has the same name in the second draft (I've been changing a few), I'll post a short entry pointing to the revised original post; if it doesn't, I'll post the chapter anew. But I'm making sure you can read the complete second draft. The final draft will be the ebook.

Anyway, back to editing, hopefully five hours...

Spanner Is Returning To Schedule. Really.

Faithful readers will notice that I've skipped a Monday. There is one big reason for this: writer's block. The tough transition from my default Night Owl Mode to Early Bird Mode isn't helping any.

Those troubles are over. Spanner Chapter 22 will be finished and posted tonight. Then, on Friday, I'll put the story back on schedule when I post the final chapter of Book 1.

I'm still here, everybody.

NaNoFiMo 2010 For The Win!

I have now just won my first NaNoFiMo ever! I've been doing it for four years, but never won till now. All I had to write to win FiMo in earlier years was 30,000 words. This year, I decided to up my word count goal to 50,000, same as NaNoWriMo. And yet I won.

I think the change of novel did the trick.

Earlier, I focused on trying to finish my hard-to-finish '07 NaNo novel, Bad Company: A Corporate Terror Story. I failed to finish it every time, I won several WriMos after that, especially JulNoWriMo, but still I couldn't finish BadCo. So this year — two weeks into JulNo '10, to be exact — I gave up on BadCo and started novelizing my long-neglected manga project, Chaos Angel Spanner. That did the trick. I won JulNo with it, then lost yet another AugNoWriMo, resumed it during NaNo and won with it, and then won my first FiMo with it.

One thing that's been driving me to write it is the deadlines I set for myself. I'm posting Spanner here every Monday and Friday, something I started on November 1 (to coincide with the start of NaNoWriMo) and intend to continue till Book 5 ends sometime this next year. Another thing that's driving me is the years of frustration at not being able to teach myself how to draw comics, and the desire to finish a major project for perhaps the first time in my life. I'll get back to the drawing self-instruction later, since I'll be posting at least links to it here. But first, I want to finish Spanner once and for all.

Next: JanNoWriMo! My word count goal: 65,000. My real goal: finish Spanner Book 1, and then as much of Book 2 as possible.

Script Frenzy 2010: Hey, It's Panic Time Again...

It's the last week of Script Frenzy, and for the first time I find myself faced with the dreaded Panic Time. In most novel writing months (last year's NaNoWriMo being the exception), I find myself with 30,000 words left to write when the final week begins, and I have to write all that in one week. If I want to reach 50,000 words and therefore win, I have to forcibly shift myself into Panic Mode. This time, I've got 58 pages to go to reach 100 and win Script Frenzy, and I've got one week to do it. I'm not going to ask myself the question "Can I do it?" because I've come back from worse deficits.

Now here's the problem. I normally have zero trouble writing scripts. My one Script Frenzy win so far, in 2008, consisted of 171 pages of Spanner script. Never mind that I found shortly afterward that I'd have to completely rewrite #1 and ditch the three later issues; I wrote them, and easily.

The problem is that I'm adapting. And what I'm adapting is my troublesome 2007 NaNoWriMo novel, Bad Company, which continues to try to keep me from finishing it no matter what I do. This adaptation has proved much harder than I thought. Maybe that's because I've been focusing on all the new scenes that aren't yet in the novel, particularly when Dictel invades America in the final third or so of the novel. What's more, the movie version of a novel is the Reader's Digest Condensed Version in script form. I'll worry about condensing the script, though, when I get into the editing stage, which is not my concern in April.

As I write this, it just occurred to me that there's an easy way for me to secure a surefire win. In fact, it's precisely what I did back in '07 when I adapted the one good scene from my '06 NaNo novel (the scene which I'm expanding into an entire novel called Black Science). Basically, I open up the novel files in Word and the script file in Celtx. I look for a scene to adapt, one that I haven't adapted yet, and then I adapt it, replacing all the first-person narration with, well, script. I usually transfer the dialogue intact, unless I decide I want to edit the dialogue. Yeah, that's how I'm going to do it.

I'm still going to win this thing. But this time it takes a Panic Time...