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...

#amediting Spanner R5: Distractions, Slow Going, and At Last, Clarity

Things are starting to get clear in Spanner Revision 5. For one thing, Shira finally has her big provocation in 1.1: she sets money on fire, right in front of the camera while predicting the death of not just the American Empire and its Conservative Revolution but capitalism, period. She's wearing nothing but a ripped Doc Savage type shirt in a different color. She just threw her Challenge: prove me wrong, or I'll laugh at your wails when your Empire burns. I facepalmed: how come this never came to me in four entire drafts? Now I finally have an explosive start to the main story equal to the future destruction of Earth in the Intro.

Otherwise, it's been slow going. Mostly, I've written notes, suggestions on how to revise that may or may not become obsolete as I finish chapter after chapter. I'm mostly done with the Peter Ross of SPEC scenes, though that inspired new idea for 1.1 may get me changing the Ross scenes in 5.6, 6.2, 6.6, and 21.6 yet again. I hacked the stylesheet so that I have the High Corporate characters speaking as if they were gods on Olympus, with Chapters 1, 2, 5, and 6 edited accordingly.

And distractions. Not from books, videogames, or TV shows, but entirely new stories. Three short stories plus ideas for one more story and two books. So of course I wrote them down. Here's the opening sentences:

1. He was about to scream the Shahada and attack when the guitar hit his face with the force of a hundred fists.
2. These days only headless nude waitresses served the tony restaurants where Chinese Communist Party (Holdings) Limited executives power lunched.
3. Anastasia Blaise was born with the anonymous beauty of the surgically Resculpted and the aristocratic gift of no conscience.

And one cover idea for one of the novels: instead of the standard "running man" motif found on the covers of way too many standard thrillers, a man flailing in mid-air as he falls to his death off a skyscraper (the setting of the novel's framing scene), with Shira herself apparently mirrored in all the motion-blurred windows.

Meanwhile, for Spanner R5 I'm working the two main villain-related themes more into the story: the death of capitalism (the Corporates) and "pride goeth before a fall" (the revolutionary hubris of both Corporates and Patriots). One more new R5 theme I'm kicking myself for not coming up with during the first four drafts: the class divide between "freemen" and "workers" in which "freedom" is defined in Platonic and therefore aristocratic terms as freedom from work. Right now I'm editing a scene in 1.2 where I plan to introduce the new theme. It continues...

Spanner Side Story: The Assassination of Satan Claus

Boy Satan is one of the most absurd Spanner villains that I haven't yet put into a script. Every year he goes a-grinchin' as "Satan Claus", trying to ruin everybody's holiday, at least online. And every year he becomes an irresistible target for Spanner, the mischievous Angel of Chaos, who uses everything from BFGs to tactical nukes in her quest to assassinate him.

Shira Thomas, the heroine of Spanner, tells the tale. One of her taller ones, to be sure. But in virtual reality, anything is possible...

The Assassination of Satan Claus:
A Yule-Wrecking Supervillain Story

The spy looks, talks, and acts like any other spy. If he didn't, he'd lose his job. The United Corporations don't like puny humans putting their grubby hands on their holy holy holy patents. And they patent everything. Normally they send the usual Keystone Gestapo to hunt down any and all violators. But this guy isn't EuroSec. He's from the Ministry of Intelligence. These guys hunt down suspected foreign agents. If he's one of their cyberenhanced elite superspies, I've got a special trick just for him.

He rattles off my name, rank, serial number, all that command and control crap. The Synarchy have a hierarchy fetish that drives us civilians up the wall. He takes his sweet old time before he starts trying to grill me, just to unnerve me. He fails: I keep my calm.

He intones in the typical spyboy monotone, "It seems you have come into possession of something very important that just happens to be ours."

"What, did I steal your boss's mistress? I hear she's got a thing for jailbait supersluts."

"Enough with the stupid jokes, Miss Clayton-Wilder." The Cartel lords may play nasty pranks on mere humans, but their agents are uniformly humorless. "This is a matter of National Security. The penalty for selling our secrets to the enemy is much worse than death."

"Yeah, yeah, I know all your penalties by heart, right down to the legalese detail. Thing is, they won't work. You can fine me, but your funny money's worthless. You can try putting me in one of your quote-unquote 'inescapable' superprisons, but there's no way you can hold an angel of chaos."

"Our prison technology is advanced enough to hold even Satan. But if you have stolen our most classified secrets as we strongly suspect, our revenge against you shall make it look like Satan got off easy."

"Au contraire, mon frère. I stole your precious thingie from Triad couriers your agents whacked. Your secrets? You swiped 'em all from the Chinks. Once again you're claiming something that's not yours. Just Corporatism acting like the troll on the bridge yet again. If you punish anybody, just try to punish the Chinese government you stole it from in the first place. Me, I got deniability, and you people know it."

"We can revoke your—" I interrupt him with a big kiss. He stands there stupidly. Prude.

"Sorry, massa, but I'm losing points right now, so I'm outta here yesterday." I throw a self-destructing one-way portal between us and slip through it. And I'm gone.

Stupid agent. Robots are more effective. Someday I'll use some of their own bots against them. Little do I know he's slipped a HyperTracer™ on me.

But I'm not concerned with that right now. Satan Claus is out grinching again. He's on a search and destroy mission to find any holiday party online and wreck it, leaving a lot of people out mucho moolah. He's hunting down and terminating every Santabot, elfbot, and angelbot he can find. One of my avatars just happens to be a Super Sexy Santabot. I switch to it.

Keenan Sasser in: Trope Overdose, or TV Tropes Will Ruin Your NaNoWriMo

For AugNoWriMo the past couple years, I’ve been writing metafictional short stories about a writer named Keenan Sasser. It all started back in ’09 with a title (“Any Monkey with a Typewriter”), a name (Keenan Arthur Sasser), and a sentence (“Any monkey with a typewriter can write fifty Keenan Sasser stories a day”). The results can be found in the AugNo anthologies for 2009 (“Any Monkey...”) and 2010 (“Mindsets”). Well, here’s another, just to distract myself from writing Spanner during NaNoWriMo 2010 (Twitter hashtag: #amprocrastinating). Needless to say, I drop the names of both TV Tropes and NaNoWriMo in the title, and all boldfaced terms in the story can be found on TV Tropes. Go figure...

Cedric and Willa in: Revenge of the Badfic Merchants

NaNoWriMo is approaching rapidly, so I figured I'd whip out another "Cedric and Willa" short story, in which those glamourous and gleefully incestuous fortysomething siblings get into the "write 50,000 words and you're a winner" spirit. Both of them can write up a storm, of course, though both of them together could never match even a fifth of Kateness' November output (for those who don't know, that's somewhere around a million words or so).

But it's not all plotbunny-munching happiness in NaNoLand. Cedric and Willa have enemies, rivals, and ex-friends who write, too. Badly. A few are creative writing professors, or at least write in order to become creative writing professors. Others ghostwrite for right-wing media celebrities such as recurring character Bram Savage. The problem: our protagonists have much more trouble getting published than those two groups. But at least they complain about it entertainingly...

Note: NaNoEdMo is also mentioned in this story. Just so you know.

AugNoWriMo: The Muse Gets Off Her Duff Again

Once again, it took me until the middle of the month to really get started. No problem, really; I'll still win AugNoWriMo. After all, I won JulNoWriMo the same way, almost. But the key turned out to be, once again, a completely different story. It was the short story I want to submit to this year's AugNo Anthology. I wrote it in two hours and edited it in two hours on Monday (the 16th). Yeah, that did the trick.

AugNoWriMo: Spanner the Novel, Phase 2, With Short Stories

Now that I've won JulNoWriMo with Spanner, the next step is — you guessed it — AugNoWriMo! I've signed up and declared my intention to write 50,000 more words. Soon, I'll be ready to write again, and this time I'll keep track of my progress here, even if only every week or so.

Now, here's my plan:

1. Read what I've written and figure out what plotlines I'm using.
2. Map out the plotlines for book 1 (and some of book 2; scenes from the end of that are already coming to me today) with these plotlines and the new ones I've written out this week.
3. Reorganize the scenes some. (Not too much; this is not the time for serious editing yet.)
4. Write!

Cedric and Willa Go to Perez Hilton's Execution

And now for another installment of the adventures of Cedric and Willa, the beautiful and witty fortysomething siblings pretending to be married. Why a short story now? To distract myself from my JulNoWriMo agonies, I guess... Anyway, this one's a hypothetical near-future scenario involving our protagonists, a certain annoying gossip columnist, an infamous tweeted Miley Cyrus picture, a social taboo, a fanatical bunch of "justice crusaders", and a pop star and his fans. Hint: It starts with scandal and ends in war.

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...

JulNoWriMo 2009 Progress: Panic Time with a Vengeance!

It's about time for me to stop whining and start writing. I've been so busy following links on Twitter that I haven't bothered to write anything for JulNoWriMo since at least last Thursday. And I use the current heat wave in Seattle as an excuse? It's only an excuse. I need to face up to the fact that I've been avoiding writing. Since I'm still only halfway to 50,000 words, I need to do some serious writing. Maybe I can use the heat wave as an excuse to get in front of my computer, fire up Word, and write. But I'll have to write a lot of words in the next five days.

This is Panic Time with a vengeance.

First of all, I've announced on my Twitter account that I'm going to start a cyberpunk Twitter novel called Headhunter. That's right: I'm going to start writing a cyberpunk novel, then posting it in a series of tweets. I'm starting this tonight.

Also, I have a plan for another Spanner side story, this time involving Shira's alleged "evil eye" in relation to its origin in African-style magic wars. The basic plot: an African cult goes on a terrorist rampage that even the cops can't stop because it's so ultraviolent. Enter Spanner. She does a big "voodoo" performance that kicks off a big "magic war" battle which ends badly for the bad guys. That's because Spanner's a master of psychological warfare. If Christian and Islamic terrorists can't stand up to her use of their faith (not religion but superstition) as a deadly weapon against them, these voodoo killers don't stand a chance.

Finally, I'm returning to Black Science after weeks of neglect. I want to at least finish Willa's part of the prologue and the chapter in which Willa, Desiree, and their friends use cellphones and Twitter to hunt down a serial killer whom one of Willa's enemies has sent after her. I intend to finish at least those, and maybe write one more chapter, before JulNo is done.

Now I need to stop allowing myself to get distracted, by Twitter or anything else, and start writing. I'm starting now.

Cybugs: A Spanner Side Story

This has nothing to do with insect-shaped robots, or simulated bugs for kids, or the war machines in a videogame called AI Wars. Rather, it’s about cyborg insects developed by the military, as revealed in a LiveScience article. This time Spanner herself tells the tale, something that doesn’t happen very often in the (still) proposed webmanga. The year is 2021, five years after the end of the series. During a series of cybug attacks — not just murders but mindjackings — Spanner searches for what's behind it and attempts to stop the attacks. (Note: The "Crusader" mentioned in this story is based loosely on [or is my "Silver Age version" of] a public-domain superhero by that name. Tech note: a “daemon” is not one of those programs that runs in the background, but a robot made entirely of energy; a force field is one of its functions. Too futuristic for 2021? Probably. Still, with the current force field revival, it could happen...)

[Revision 1.1, 11/25/10: Revised formatting, corrected dates, corrected two character names to the final versions in Spanner.]

Mind Bomb: A Spanner Side Story

Want to know just how powerful Spanner can be? You’ll get a taste right here. This is the character's world public premiere (she's been with me in some form since 1986), and also in part a “flip side” to "Destroying Angel". Basically, after the end of Spanner, a tiny Nazi faction uses the Israeli civil war as an excuse to try to take over parts of the former US and ends up holed up in a department store with hostages. Spanner arrives just as special ops commandos are about to blow the whole place sky high and does what she did to bring down the once-powerful shadow dictator called the Crusader in Spanner. Note: All mid-sentence paragraph divisions at climax are entirely deliberate.

Destroying Angel: A Spanner Side Story

(Note: I've recently thought of loads of ideas as to how to improve this story, so I intend to revise it soon. Stay tuned...)

This is the first of the side stories set in the world of my (still) proposed cyberpunk webmanga Spanner and of the “Dictel trilogy” of novels I’m writing which currently include Bad Company and Black Science. This story takes place a decade after the events of Spanner. I took the technique of telling the story from the villain's first-person point of view from Bruce Sterling, but the "infernal epiphany" theme (I hope this isn't a spoiler) comes from Camille Paglia's passage on Matthew Lewis' gothic novel The Monk (a major influence on the English Romantics) in Sexual Personae; in homage to her, I shall conclude with a resounding "Carthago delenda est".

After the short but brutal Israeli civil war of 2016 that put the ultra-Zionist extremists in control of Israel and sent the surviving Palestinians and secular, liberal, and moderate Jews into exile in the Diaspora, merciless Israeli agents bearing the names of the angels of punishment and destruction hunt down Jewish and Palestinian exiles in hopes of exterminating them. Desiree Richter-Thomas, the almost-tragic heroine of Bad Company and (under the codename "Livewire") a major player in Spanner, is one of the exiles' fiercest and most prominent protectors. In the summer of 2025, shortly before the economic crisis and subsequent war that destroys the State Capitalist system of "Imperial" dictatorships, the two forces collide. Who is the destroying angel: Agent "Hasmed", or...Livewire?

A New Story You'd Never Have Been Able to Read

During JulNoWriMo, I found myself distracted from Black Science to work on a new story called Mind Bomb. It started out as a short story but is rapidly escalating into a serial novel. So I find myself posting the chapters on my DeviantART account. (NOTE: both chapters are now deleted from my account.) Here's a Wordle word cloud for chapter 1, which I created just because:


So why was I posting a story where hardly anybody can read it? Well, I had the account, so I figured I'd use it. Big mistake. Nobody but me would ever be able to read Mind Bomb as long as it remained posted on DeviantART. Ever.

So I deleted both chapters as soon as I could. Mind Bomb didn't belong on a site where only a very few would be able to read it. I didn't want it to be like a private vanity press with a total circulation of one. I want people to read it. So I'll have to find an alternate place to post the story. I may have to abandon it for a while and return to Black Science. *sigh*

JulNoWriMo Day 1: And They're Off...

At midnight I start completely rewriting Black Science for JulNoWriMo. I'm looking to beat the almost 65,000-word WriMo record I set with Bad Company last JanNoWriMo. And I'm doing it with not just Black Science, but with at least one Spanner Side Story ("Mind Bomb") and maybe some still unwritten scenes of BadCo as well. And all this while I'm doing 50 Songs in 90 Days and resuming my Project 365 (I'm in the Flickr group).

So what are my plans for JulNo '09?

First thing, start writing Black Science at midnight my time. I'll be writing it as if it were a brand new NaNoWriMo novel, basically a first draft of a novel of which only one scene survives from the original fiasco I wrote during NaNo '06. I want to write as much of it as I have time for before my busy July 4, in which I'm recording two songs for 50/90 and playing my first songs live (albeit in front of family members).

Second, there's the first of my Spanner Side Stories. I've decided I'm going to use my neglected DeviantArt account and post these short stories to it. "Mind Bomb" will be the first. I'll post it chapter by chapter, and of course hope there's not too many chapters to call it a short story. After that, I'll start a new one. I hope to do one a week — if I don't pour out too many words of Black Science.

Third, I intend to start drawing again. At first, I intend to spend at least a few minutes a day on practice sketches so I can get back into it again. It'll be rusty at first, since it's been so long since I've drawn anything; I've spent too much time over the past couple of years writing novels and songs.

Of course, I'll write songs.

I've got an ambitious agenda for the next month. Let's see if I can actually pull this off for the first time...

Goal before I go to bed: 1,000 words. After I wake up: 5,000 words.

BadCoFiMo Delayed...But A New Strategy Emerged From Its Failure...

Turns out that, unfortunately, there will be no BadCoFiMo in June. The strategy just wouldn't come together, at least not now. If I start editing Bad Company, I'll have to take my time doing it, since I'll be focusing on Black Science for JulNoWriMo and AugNoWriMo while taking part in the 50 Songs in 90 Days challenge. But instead of BadCoFiMo, I decided to take a different strategy: writing short stories to prepare for BadCo, Black Science, and especially Spanner. It's called "Mind Bomb", and it's the first of a new set of "Spanner Side Stories". And it's already expanding into at least a novella...

"Mind Bomb" takes place in 2025 (or 6025 by the "Neo-Egyptian" calendar), almost a decade after the spectacular ending of Spanner. Shira and Desiree are back, in a new post-"Corporate Empire" world dominated by a large collection of constantly warring imperialist governments dedicated to the economic philosophy of state capitalism. And guess what? Even despite the fall of the Corporate Empire and the leading member of its ruling Cartel, Dictel Corporation — guess what? Dictel's back, and it's up to no good yet again! This time it involves the latest version of its infamous mind-control machine, the "psychotron", the biggest project of Dictel Research since the 1950s. When word gets out, thanks in part to a new recurring character named (in a sudden spasm of geekiness) Lala Sun-Microsoft (note name of corporations used as family names, something I'll explain later), a notoriously insatiable gossip, word gets out. When the state-capitalist empires all find out, all hell breaks loose in a free-for-all over the new psychotron. So a new character I created just for this story, calling herself Lucy Williams (formerly a Russian businessman [male], now a young [and very much female] roving activist), hires Spanner and asks her to repeat the "mind bomb" trick that took down Henry Becket, only on a larger scale.

This short summary omits several elements that I created for it, of course. First there are the factions: Corporates, Imperials, Crusaders, and so on. Then there are the posthumans of various kinds, including the strange cyborg-beings prominent in Spanner and a new breed of cyber-entities who have uploaded their consciousnesses to the Internet and/or Hans Moravec-inspired robots, and thus abandoned carbon-based lifeform altogether.

Unlike the Dictel trilogy, and far more than even Spanner, "Mind Bomb" is a true science fiction story — cyberpunk, in fact.

So this is what I've been doing instead of BadCoFiMo. That and writing notes on the Spanner and its spinoffs, from Bad Company all the way to "Mind Bomb" and beyond.

I'll keep you posted here more frequently. And I'll make sure to tweet updates.