Spanner R5 Update: Leila Shelley on a Road Not Necessarily Made of Yellow Bricks

As I begin the final edit on Spanner 2.1, I'll be dealing with the most important character besides Shira herself in her only Chapter 2 appearance, one of the chapter's oldest scenes.

Leila Shelley, the series' primary love interest character, may possibly be its secret hero. I already have Shira as a catalyst hero whose roles alternate between trickster and herald. The first named character she appears as herald to is Leila, the girl she's in love with. What's Leila's "hero's journey"? I found the clue in my absolute favorite David Lynch movie, Mulholland Drive. That film uses Sunset Boulevard to turn the plot of The Wizard of Oz into a tragedy. My favorite Lynch character happens to be Audrey Horne from Twin Peaks; Leila is, among other things, Audrey with a bob cut, except at the same time younger (sixteen) and far less innocent, with a past as dark as Mulholland Drive's Diane Selwyn.

Now let's put Leila on the Yellow Brick Road, so to speak. At once several elements of her character arc fall into place:

1. Drusilla Becket is, as her enemies (including who knows how many ex-husbands) nickname her, the Wicked Witch of the West.
2. The corresponding Good Witch is Leila's aunt Ariel Shield, who is (except of course for the white stripe) black-haired like herself. (In The Wizard of Oz, the movie, both Dorothy and Glinda are redheads; the corresponding character in Mulholland Drive happens to be Diane's aunt.) As the Grail Bearer, she brings in a completely different myth system, particularly the version found in the books of Margaret Starbird, a real-life mentor she invokes by name.
3. Shira, of course, corresponds to Dorothy's inseparable companion Princess Ozma in the Oz novels.
4. Seattle has many nicknames, but the most famous of them is "Emerald City", named after not the architecture but the forested surroundings. The name of the city AI, OZMA, is a blatant pun.
5. Once in the Emerald City, what "great and powerful" Wizard does she meet? Zardoz, of course, in the form of King Patriot. (The song in Interlude 11 samples Zardoz's speech in the notorious 1970s cult movie.) And she kills him — because there is in fact no man behind the curtain. That sequence is the origin of a major Spanner theme, the mystery of the Ego.
6. Leila's counterpart to the tornado that swept Dorothy to Oz is the "tornado" of scandal that destroyed her modelling career and which she barely managed to escape with her life. Another version is the Spanner Incident, in which the series' title character appears and disappears in a whirlwind.
7. Her version of the poppy-field crisis that Glinda has to rescue Dorothy and her travelling companions from may be the name crisis of Chapter 12 (R5 version), in which she fights for her life against her very name itself (which, due to Corporate customs, has trapped her in an arranged marriage to one of the story's nastiest villains). Another character plays the Glinda role here: Angela Coyne, Shira's cousin, lawyer, and fellow redhead. There's another poppy-related connection: it's in Chapter 12 that Leila leaves behind her old heroin habit forever.
8. The Spanner versions of those travelling companions are already experienced heroes unlike the originals, so they don't need to earn their brain, heart, or courage. In fact, there's two versions: three bishounen at Bangor High (Team Bremelo's Connor, Cory, and Kio) and three nameless women from the revolutionary underground (now introduced in Chapter 2).
9. The name of one gang, "Flyen Monkeez", reveals the Klownz to be a version of the Wicked Witch's flying monkey minions.
10. Who corresponds to the Munchkins? Why, the "little people" as the Corporates call them, the mass of ordinary working people against whom the Conservative Revolution is crusading in the name of "the best" (hoi aristoi, as in aristocracy). Thus do I make explicit the Populist themes that are only implicit in L. Frank Baum's original novels, though I drop the old Populists' silver-against-gold (or greenbacks) crusade and ask why, if money turned out to be ichor (the blood of gods) as the Social Darwinists' occult secret doctrine states (so theorizes Bram Dijkstra), there is any need for it at all. The Corporate robber barons and Patriot terrorists with their giant-monster Egos are in fact Nephilim, invoked under their alternate name "Anakim", Hebrew for "giants". Starbird's name for those the Anakim oppose and oppress, those whom Jesus (and the Grail Bearers after him) vowed to defend? Anawim: "little ones".
11. If Leila is a darker take on Dorothy who is in fact a witch, then her counterpart to Toto needs to be that classic witch's familiar, a black cat, a stray who charmed her way into Leila's life back when she was a young girl in her native Ireland.
12. The Spanner version of the "yellow brick road" (the golden road of heroes) will lead Leila not toward "home" (wherever that is) but into legend. She chooses this path by choosing the human version of the red pill from another cinematic mythology.

Of course, the Wizard of Oz plot doesn't sum up all of Leila's character arc. For one thing, Dorothy has nothing resembling Leila's signet ring (the sign of her enslavement to her aristocratic clan that she throws away in Chapter 16) or power crystal (which Shira returns to her). Also, I haven't figured out any counterparts to the ruby slippers (that mentor's gift which gives Dorothy the power to return home) or the Emerald City's famous Horse of a Different Color (that obvious dream symbol of radical change to come). But it definitely serves as a good ready-made template I can model Leila's character arc on (at least in Book 1). David Lynch followed the template in Mulholland Drive, even adding a Princess Ozma figure in Camilla Rhodes; but this Hollywood Ozma proves as totally corrupt as Zardoz (an evil Wizard of Oz), so Diane murders her and ends her journey in tragedy. I'll make my own variations, of course. And it all becomes obvious when you remember that Seattle's nickname is "Emerald City".

Spanner R4 Update: New in Chapter 4: Corporations Feed on Terrorism!

Spanner Revision 4 is finally posting in time for JulNoWriMo, with the Intro revised and reposted and the 8-part expanded Chapter 1 starting later today. Meanwhile, I read this article on the violent self-destruction of ecoterrorism and came away with a new insight that sparked a new theme I'm going to underline in Chapter 4: evil corporations thrive on terrorism! How? By making corporations the victims! The predators can then hijack the lamestream media (whose owners are their friends and fellow corporate raiders) and righteously protest that the "evil ones" are destroying the jobs American workers require to live!

In fact, this is how the Conservative Revolution began. And so, starting in Chapter 4, I will show you the true genius of the Rat Bastard.

That's the nickname of Randolph G. Litton, the Cascadia Public Management Corporations' Vice President for Public Relations (read: chief propagandist). He will be introduced early in Chapter 4, by Governor-CEO Brinkman himself, and given the task of turning a turd (SPEC, the privatized school system owned by a corrupt and mobster-infested teachers' union) into a rose. That serial-killer incident late in the chapter and new to Revision 4? By saving sweet Mimi's life, Shira inadvertently interrupts a false-flag operation which was going to squeeze sympathy for SPEC out of the torching of one of the most marginal of its high schools by a fake terrorist group. The slasher doesn't know it, but Litton's using him as a patsy. When Shira tells him when he's the fake teacher of her homeroom class, he goes ballistic — and ends up destroyed by his hubris (and his ex-wife) by the end of Chapter 5.

And why should I settle for just SPEC? The meeting at Drusilla's cult headquarters after Shira inadvertently serves as the conduit of the more successful terror attack that kills the chairman of Biotron should in fact be where we meet the man in person, who introduces himself to the dead CEO's son and vice-chairman (and ex-lover):

Litton: Looks like y'all need a little help.

Oliver: You're the Rat Bastard, right?

Dr. Mina Tatsumi: We don't need your help, Mr. Litton.

Oliver: My father's just been murdered—

Litton: By terrorists! At war against the corporations that provide America with its jobs! This, my friends, is how you bounce back from such a tragedy. It's not the fate of one company that's at stake. Those cold-blooded murderers declared war against science, technology, progress, and the American Way!

Drusilla: Enough science! America needs more faith, and you—

Litton: (points at her) Dru! Are you with the terrorists? You're insulting a bereaved wife, son, and mistress!

Drusilla falls silent and glares at Litton resentfully.

Litton: Good girl. Now here's the plan...

Oliver, Mrs. Thorwald, and Dr. Tatsumi and her assistants draw closer to him.

Cut to his publicity campaign on Biotron's behalf, in which the Author demonstrates just what the Rat Bastard is capable of. Therefore, in the serial-killer fight at Bangor High, Shira ends up showing just how disruptive she can get when she finds herself disrupting Litton's arson operation without even thinking about it.

And so a major theme of Spanner, alluded to in the first three chapters, finally enters the main plot in Chapter 4: the greatest failure of terrorism is that it turns fascist oppressors and Corporate predators into martyrs. Terrorists are really violently self-righteous vigilantes who think that righteous violence is the one-size-fits-all solution to all problems. Their self-righteousness can be used as a potent weapon against them. Any government or corporate PR department that's not sleeping on the job can and will use this weapon. In fact, so does Shira — and Spanner himself, who mocks them for being gangsters with a messiah complex, Lawful Stupid, or (most amusingly to him) both.

The one "terrorist" you can't use this approach against is Spanner. He strikes only to make fools of his enemies, then he mocks them. Some experts speculate that his goal is to enrage the Corporates enough that they turn terrorist. Then he mocks the terrorists for being factions of the Establishment turned rogue merely out of childish spite. He declares that he will "own" Litton in the Rat Bastard's own field of expertise. And in Chapters 15-23, he does just that.

Spanner R4 Update: Mary Sue No More, or How Karen Kubota Became a Real Character (Plus: Chapter 3 Editing Strategy)

Shira’s cousin Karen Kubota is a charter member of Spanner’s original “Class of ’92”, yet for two whole decades she never fully developed into a character. She was a Buddhist “Purity Sue”, a pretty body with a pleasant manner but not much content, whose character was pretty much limited to being Compassionate, Earnest, Genki, and the Victor Laszlo to Shira’s Rick Blaine. So how did she stop being a flat Mary Sue who I avoided writing and become an actual character with an increasingly important role?

1. She developed the lacerating wit proper to a Richter-Thomas. When last night I completely rewrote an important scene in Chapter 6, she surprised me by calmly unleashing it on no less than the private owner of the Seattle-area school system, Book 1 major villain Peter T. Ross.
2. She fell in love with Shira, making the hypothetical Karen × Shira ’ship canonical at last. In the final version of Chapter 2 she now successfully convinces Shira to chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo with her by seducing her in a very sweet scene.

The second one came first. My muse, yuri fangirl that she is, pulled it on me during the massive Chapter 2 rewrite. I almost expected it. The first hit me by surprise – it didn’t sound Karen enough at first – but then I realized she’s a Richter-Thomas, and if you’re a granddaughter of two-fisted children’s author Eleanor Richter, you’d better be able to keep up with her – and if you aren’t yet, you will be eventually. Nelly Richter is the “Wicked Wit of the West”; that had to rub off on eldest daughter Reva Richter-Thomas, who in turn passed it on to at least three of the four Kubota kids: big sister Saffron, gay brother Sage, and Karen. But the key to Karen’s character remains the Japanese spelling of her name: its Chinese characters are renge, “lotus”, backwards.

Shira, Spanner’s resident canonical “Launcher of a Thousand ’Ships”, has a special weakness to beautiful women she loves, even close relatives. If she’s beautiful and Shira already loves and trusts her, getting Shira into her bed is a matter of course, if of course the woman swings that way. The Richter-Thomas women inherited a strong bisexual tendency from the Thomas side, who were German socialists and advocates of free love and Nacktkultur (nudism) during the Weimar Republic even though they were ethnically Jewish. So of course Karen got it too. Why else would she know the most effective way to touch Shira’s heart? Her relationship with her friend Colette, introduced in Chapter 3 before a villain in Chapter 5 knocks her into Chapter 13, even resembles a marriage. So when Karen’s character bloomed at last, the love quotient tripled!

This gives me hope for the remaining flat characters, including “Class of ’92” members Daisy Kwon and Marina Reyes (who now debut in Chapter 2 as tutor and student). Right now Daisy is the Korean-American version of the elegant Japanese “Yamato Nadeshiko” woman and Marina is a depressed illegal-alien girl (Mexican, of course). They’ll become more prominent when the School Arc begins in Chapter 5.

Meanwhile, my strategy for cutting down the not-yet-edited four sections of Chapter 3 is beginning to emerge. Take Part 3:

1. I combined it out of the Revision 2/3 sections “Portrait of an American Family” and “Car Song”. I was going to call it “Coming to Take Me Away” (still a scene title) but just decided (while on the pot, even; that happens) to make the final title “Car Song”. Two cars appear. I should make it three by adding one to the section’s final flashback. Willa drives one. As for the first…
2. Remember the lemon yellow Boss Mustang that Shira’s greasily tinkering with? (In the nude, even; Shira is nothing if not way too audacious to be legal for her age.) It’s now metallic cherry red, it belongs to Shira, its name is Sally, and Shira calls it “she”. Shira is notionally the daughter of Revolutionary Girl Utena heroine Utena Tenjou and archvillain Akio Ohtori. Akio has a scene-stealing car that owns you. Sally the Mustang is Shira’s version of the Akio Car, and its scene-stealing qualities are intensified by her love for it. When she finally gets to drive it in Chapter 7, Shira being Shira, the experience proves quite erotic. Just the driving, not the sequence’s concluding all-human love scene. The driving.
3. Start the section with a transitional scene. Another Shira videoblog? Lurid tabloid TV video of a wild police chase ending in a spectacular crash? Both? One then the other, or both at once?
4. Cut down the opening scene at Red House. Turn it into a sequence, in fact: Desiree tells off the Mormons, turns down a New Age cult, and with her sister and lover Charlie greets in the nude a pair of old Jehovah’s Witness ladies so that when they kiss the old ladies drop dead. That last one comes from one of the very last notes in Project Notebook #15, and this is the perfect place to put it.
5. Three bloated Revision 3 scenes to cut down: the garage, the living room and kitchen, and Willa’s car on the way to the boardwalk. Problem: too much gratuitous exposition, not enough connection with story continuity.

Talk about bloated: Part 4, “Party Crashers on the Boardwalk”, is very long indeed. Those 600+ words I need to cut? I could cut that many out of Part 4 without hurting the plot. I’ll also cut some bloat out of Parts 5 (“Your Next Trick”) and 6 (“You Don’t Know What Is What”) while changing them to fit into the stronger Revision 4 continuity.

And now to put that strategy into action…

Hypothetical Crossover: Leila vs. the Ultimate Posette

One major difference between an outlandish character that becomes interesting and one who turns into the dreaded Mary Sues that the likes of the Protectors of the Plot Continuum and the Mary Sue Elimination Society hunt is that the character you like is that way because the author put some effort into, as the 20th-century English novelist Ford Madox Ford put it, "getting the character in". As James Wood relates it in How Fiction Works, he and Joseph Conrad (of Heart of Darkness fame) loved this sentence from Guy de Maupassant's short story "La Reine Hortense": "He was a gentleman with red whiskers who always went first through a doorway." — of which Ford commented, "That gentleman is so sufficiently got in that you need no more of him to understand how he will act. He has been 'got in' and can get to work at once." Now, getting a character in may not work quite that fast, but it's the one surefire cure for Mary Sue syndrome.

Now consider the difference between Spanner's Leila Renata Shelley and ludicrous badfic creations like, I dunno, let's call her Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way (an extreme example for the sake of illustration). Leila: languid pale beauty with black hair elegantly bobbed, violet eyes, and ninja training (long story). Raven: well, "goff" (sic), with (and I quote) "long ebony black hair with purple streaks and red tips that reaches my mid-back and icy blue eyes like limpid tears"; her catch phrase is (and I quote), "Why couldn't Satan have made me less beautiful? It's a fucking curse!" To which Leila replies, "I don't care how beautiful Satan made you if you're a total bleedin' git." Sure, Leila has been known to cut herself and attempt suicide (long story), but she has no tolerance for "posettes" (feminine form of "poser"), the Rocker version of what the PPCs call "fangirls".

Now here is why I picked Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way as my counterexample: she is the supreme posette of fanfiction. Oh, and her hair is purple. Apparently even silky raven locks (to swipe a notorious bit of urple prose) such as Leila's isn't "goffik" enough for her.

Here's the scenario: After coming back from the dead after being killed by yet another Mary Sue hunter, Ebony returns to Hogwarts only to find that one Leila Renata Shelley has stolen not just her position in Slytherin House but her beloved Draco Malfoy as well. (Now here's a scary thought: if there's any character in any continuity who can encourage Draco Malfoy to Voldemort levels of evil, it's Leila Shelley.) Ebony's all "goffed" up and listening to Good Charlotte as she plots her revenge when Leila comes to her:

Leila: (switches off Ebony's iPod) "What in bloody hell is that supposed to be?"

Ebony: "That's goffik, bitch!"

Leila: "By the way, the word is 'gothic,' and Good Charlotte are not the least bit gothic. Real goths can't stand that mopey emo crap."

Ebony: "Let's hear you explain the difference."

Leila: "Gothic rock is melancholy and deep. Emo rock is wangsty and naff." (Note: You can actually hear the Author straining for words...)

Ebony: "So what are you listening to, huh?"

Leila: (leans against the wall, smiles romantically upward) "Right now I'm in love with Emilie Autumn."

Ebony: "Ew! That's not even rock!"

Leila: (crosses her arms, smiles contemptuously) "So how'd you earn your credentials as an expert on rock? Huh, 'Goffy'?"

Ebony: (shakes her urple hair indignantly) "Same to you, you bloody cunt!"

Leila: (shakes her head sadly) "Ever heard of the Damned?"

Ebony: (confused) "Who the fuck are they?"

Leila: (frowns) "Figures. They invented gothic rock. Did you know that Rat Scabies himself is my godfather?"

Ebony: "You're lyin'!"

Leila: "And you're posin'."

Ebony: (spots Draco coming) "Draco, my love! Help me! Get this bitch away—"

Draco: (takes Leila's arm in his) "Leila darling, is this stupid git twisting your knickers again?"

Ebony: "No — Draco—"

Leila: "Shut your gob, slob. Draco belongs to me now." (looks lasciviously at Draco) "Shall we go and do some... 'evil' now?"

Draco: "Your place or mine?" (waves contemptuously to Ebony) "Toodle-oo, Mary Sue." (leaves with Leila for Marty McFly's time-travelling DeLorean, making out the entire way)

...and they leave Ebony sputtering. What's a heartbroken Mary Sue to do? Of course you know what Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way will do: call her Twu Wuv, Gerard Way — over and over and over, until once again he's annoyed enough to call in the Mary Sue hunters after her.

Vampire Harry: (seeing Ebony dead, drained of blood glitter) "Here we go again..."

*clears throat* Anyway, the moral of this story is, if you're a character whose author doesn't detach themself from you that you're sufficiently got in, you'll suck hard enough that a genuinely interesting character can swoop in from some other continuity and swipe the love interest you yourself swiped from canon. Yeah.

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.

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: What Is Leila Doing?

Shira's gorgeous girlfriend Leila Shelley is a very important character in Spanner — but you wouldn't know it from the JulNoWriMo incomplete draft. Right now, if I remember right, I've only written two scenes for her. They're very big scenes, but still just two. The pivotal one has Shira catching her by the hand when she tries to jump off a bridge. After that, the two girls are stuck together for the rest of the story, at least.

Character Profile: Charlie Richter-Thomas (to be revised soon)

(Note 8/15/2010: This profile will soon be updated to include Charlie's appearances in the Dictel Saga [Bad Company, Black Science, etc.] and Spanner as well as Dirty Pop and its upcoming sequel Bigger Better Faster MORE!)

Dirty Pop revolves around Charlie. She's the main character, and the narrator who tells the tale of her own adventures. So who is Charlie Richter-Thomas, really? She is the star of two of the four novels I've written for NaNoWriMo, so I'm giving Charlie her first public character profile since I created her.

In Bad Company (NaNoWriMo 2007), she is the very first character to appear in the main story, and with her sister Desiree one of the two narrators. She is the fallen pop star who uncovers a monstrous conspiracy surrounding the murder of her reporter fiancé by the giant military conglomerate Dictel Corporation in the novel's opening scene, and must overcome her bad reputation in order to get the news out to an indifferent and seemingly doomed world. In Dirty Pop (NaNoWriMo 2009), she tries to build a singing career of her own, independent of her tyrannical cult-leader stage mother, only for it to be threatened with destruction by the record industry.

How Spanner Got Her Handle

Sometime in the late 1990s, I changed the name of the comic I've been working on since 1991 to Spanner, with my character Shira starring in her role as "angel of chaos". But I never gave the origin of the handle "Spanner" any thought. But then came a series of pranks that became #1 trends on Twitter. And suddenly it came to me. Here's the scene in which the handle's origin is revealed:

Shira is in a police interrogation room. It may be on a "guild violation" as she is violating the Police Guild's monopoly on disarming bombs, like those created by the fiendish "mad bomber" known as the Toymaker, which Shira routinely deconstructs. The interrogator is her archnemesis Diana Shockley, police agent of the United Corporations (and a member of the villainous Becket clan, owners of the ruling Dictel Corporation).

Diana: How did you become "Spanner"?

Shira: You wanna know how I got that handle? I'll tell you. You see, I own the Toymaker. I own him big time. I own him over and over and over. I used to jam wrenches into his cruder early jobs. So the trolls and punkers at 4chan/b/ declared me the "Spanner Queen of the Universe". That quickly became "Spanner, Queen of the Universe". The rest, of course, is history.

So now you know. And so do I.

NaNoWriMo Prep: Characters for Dirty Pop

At this point in my preproduction of Dirty Pop, I think I should give some thought to the novel's cast. After all, the characters make the plot, and I need the right balance of characters if I want the story to work. I have the right balance between our heroine, Charlie, and the archvillainess, her mother Drusilla. But their epic conflict requires various supporting characters as well. So let's see what I can come up with...

NaNoWriMo Prep: Pop Culture Research

I'm not touching my index cards for my NaNoWriMo novel Dirty Pop till just one week before NaNo begins. But that doesn't mean I can't do some Internet research on the pop culture world in which main girl Charlie is trying to make her mark in.

First of all, there's the behind-the-scenes stuff that's going to be the tricky part: managers, crew, labels, legal stuff, etc. What you see on MTV or YouTube has a huge infrastructure behind it, and it needs to be part of the story.

Second: fashion. That's always been difficult for me to imagine, much less draw. In the non-Disney pop music world Charlie is trying to break into, it's important to have the right style — and right now that style tends to be a cross between the outrageous and the science-fictional.

Third: What real-life pop-cultural figures do I want to loosely base characters on? No, there won't be any roman à clef type stuff with thinly disguised real-life characters; my imagination is too powerful and strange for that. Knowing as well as I do how I work, I'm likely to mix, match, and mutate characters till they only vaguely resemble their real-life inspirations. Case in point: Charlie's mother Drusilla, a major villain in Bad Company and Black Science as well as Dirty Pop. As a New Age cult guru, I threw together at least half a dozen real-life cult matriarchs into the blender and set it to "puree". Dru has elements of JZ Knight (of Ramtha fame), Elizabeth Clare Prophet, Sylvia Browne, and my family's ex-guru from the late 1970s and early '80s, along with the fictional character Erica Kane (from the soap opera All My Children). (My suggested casting for the role: Cate Blanchett, unless it's Meryl Streep in full "Nuclear Wintour" mode.) This is the kind of character mashup I have in mind.

A good idea to keep in mind is that sometimes even the most frivolous pop-cultural confection needs some intensive research, even if it doesn't need quite the research that a political thriller about an evil military corporation that invades America needs. Of course, it shouldn't be overdone; that way lies procrastination...

Bad Company: The Terrorist Incubus

Charlie's lovers (her sister Desiree and her ex-girlfriend Yasmin) are stolen away from her. By a man. This man is a terrorist. His name is Ramón Gabriel, and he is a former Colombian right-wing death-squad terrorist turned Dictel corporate mercenary turned Islamic terrorist who answers to Rashid. His MO: he seduces women in such a way that they become his love slaves; then he turns them into what can only be called weapons of mass destruction. This terrorist, you see, happens to be an incubus. A demon lover.

Bad Company: Desiree Takes the Initiative...

I've been reading both the stories and the testimonials at Sisters in Love (warning: adult material!), and many of the yuri manga at ShoujoAi.com (ditto!), and I find myself struck by how often it's the younger sister who strikes up the relationship. And so it comes to me that even though Desiree was too passive and even mopey to be herself when I first started writing Bad Company, still the redhead has a stronger personality than her older sister Charlie. (I'll make it up to Desi when I make her the hero of Points of Authority this next NaNoWriMo by allowing her to dominate it the way she deserves to.) And though it's Charlie whom Drusilla is threatening with the "nuclear option" of child molestation charges, it was Desiree who seduced Charlie to begin with and who dominates the relationship in the long run.

Charlie & Desiree's Crazy Idyllic Plans

Charlie and Desiree have big plans for when they get back together after the Beckets stop picking on them. The scandals surrounding Dictel and the Becket clan in the wake of Colonel Tom Becket's disastrous coup d'état attempt give them enough of a breather to be able to at least attempt to make them a reality. These include:

1. Getting married, of course, despite the fact that they are sisters.
2. Adopting their little sister Shira as their own daughter. Their oldest sister, Ruby Shears, suggests they adopt their cousin Jennifer Blair as well, in order to keep her and Shira together so they can become as inseparable as Charlie and Desiree are.
3. A special "body positive" method of childrearing they long to try out.
4. And so on...

Nearly everybody who finds out about these plans call them crazy. You probably will too. But they're sticking to them.

Forces of Antagonism

Every story needs at least one villain, or at least antagonist. The nature of life is that one has to fight for one's desire in order to get it. It has been said that story is conflict.

Here's a particularly potent example from my fiction. As you now know, Charlie wants Desiree. The problem, of course being that the two just happen to be sisters. The two have to overcome some fearsome obstacles (society, religion, the law, etc.) and fight some really nasty villains (including their own tyrannical mother) if they want to live together, happily ever after. This is the situation in Bad Company, and it's looking to be a major factor in my 2008 NaNoWriMo novel, Points of Authority, as well.

In Spanner the antagonism is provoked not because Jennifer loves Shira, but because Shira cannot conform (note to self: I'll have to write an entry on this). Conformity is considered a primary virtue in any society that mows down tall poppies and hammers down all nails that stick out. Such is the "Eurosocialism" of the Euro=American Union, the enemies of which bluntly call it "Stalinism". And so Shira finds herself forced to fight battle after battle against authority, society, and religion just to be able to be herself, and she ends up starting a revolution.

This should be a lesson to me. I have a tendency to write scenes with lots of cool witty dialogue but little real conflict, or write feverishly idyllic little love (or other) scenes not counterbalanced by the characters' need to defend their loves (etc.) against social, religious, and political forces determined to destroy them. I have to put some balance into it, and remember that story itself is conflict. In a story, it's the villains (the "rogues' gallery" in superhero-comics terms) that makes the hero; the more effective the villains, the stronger and more interesting the hero. No conflict, no story; no villains or other antagonistic force, no hero.

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