#Spanner R5 #amediting Update: "Enter the Monkeywrench" Final Chapter Lineup, Part 1

As of today, all the chapters in Enter the Monkeywrench Part 1 now have their final titles:

Intro
Interlude 0: The Monkeywrench Cometh
0. First Blast of the Trumpet
1. On the 13th Floor
2. Red Skies in Morning
3. Angel of Chaos
4. Your Mission, if You Choose to Accept It
5. Herald of the Coming Race
6. The Man with the Plan
7. The Pattern Emerges
8. Storming the Temple
9. The Fuses Have Been Lit

These chapters are the ones that will be in the Part 1 ebook. Now that I'm planning on an initial five-part serial release for Enter the Monkeywrench, I'm ending not just the book but every section with a cliffhanger, partly in homage to the old movie serials I loved as a kid and the serial novels that ran in the science-fiction magazines during the same era.

Interestingly enough, I also have the final chapter lineup for Part 5:

Interlude 4: City on the Edge of a Dream
37. The Empty City
38. Meet the New God
39. The Secret Meeting
40. Into the Underworld
Interlude 5: You Have Lost the Game
41. Stalking the Rotten Apple
42. Prepare for Ascension
43. True Sacrifices
44. Spanner in the Works
Interlude 6: The Virus Has Been Spread

Finally, I have the final Interlude lineup for the complete book:

0. The Monkeywrench Cometh (formerly 6)
1. The Top Five
2. The X Factor
3. The Coming of the New Flesh
4. City on the Edge of a Dream (formerly 9)
5. You Have Lost the Game (formerly 8)
6. The Virus Has Been Spread (formerly 1 "Rocket Ready")

Out of Book 1, I currently have the Intro and Chapters 0-4 and 7 complete. I'm currently working on Chapter 9; I'm writing most of it from scratch. After that, I'll give Chapter 8 the few edits it needs and a new ending that's a cliffhanger in itself. I should be able to finish them both tonight. Soon I'll have something I can at least release to beta readers. It's coming, sooner or later...

#Spanner R5 #amediting update: 9 (But Really 12) Chapters for the Serial Novel's Part 1; or, Some Rough Plotting

I've finally settled on the number of chapters in Enter the Monkeywrench part 1 (9, not counting the 3 chapters numbered "0") and their final order. Now complete: the Intro and Chapters 0 and 1.

I switched the order of Chapters 2 and 3. In Chapter 2, we find out the violet-eyed girl (Leila in earlier revisions and later volumes) not only is scheduled to be sacrificed in order to turn a dead man into a god, but actually wants to be; and I realize, I need to evoke a feeling of dread. Chapter 3 is where we see the vision driving the COPCO Crime Prevention Division's precogs mad; in a new ending, we'll find out that the sacrificial priestess who intends to sacrifice the violet-eyed girl just happens to be the division president, and even the company CEO is afraid of her. I think this order works better.

Chapter 4: Shira, chief "troubleshooter" for the Wilder Foundation, gets her mission from the Foundation chairman (Thurston), meanwhile fending off African witch hunters as only a level-4 Charmer can.

Chapter 5: the series' major antagonists panic. Chapter 6 is the section "The Man with the Plan" from the old Chapter 1, expanded and revised; sure enough, a plan is involved, to deal with not only the "angel of chaos" killing the precogs but Shira too.

Chapter 7: Shira, Thurston, and the blond girl (Jennifer) have to explain a few things to the others. They hammer out some rough preliminary plans and do a few experiments. And they prevent an attack by the left-wing terrorists of the Socialist Revolutionary Organization — including Shira's "squib" half-sister Talia.

Chapter 8: The first phase of the villains' plan is set into motion.

Chapter 9: And Shira and company fend it off in what should be spectacular fashion. And Shira takes the mission. End of Part 1.

There's my own rough plan. I'll be deleting some scenes, writing some new ones, even importing one from Chapter 2 R4. After that, I'll smooth the continuity so everything leads to the cliffhanger ending.

Speaking of the cliffhanger, I added one new scene to the end. Will Becket, the vampire super soldier who sank his fangs into Osama bin Laden's neck (and the series' Char Aznable figure), makes his first ominous appearance in the story. And all he says is, "It has begun."

#Spanner R5 #amediting update: The New Plot of "Enter the Monkeywrench" Part 1, With Cliffhanger

The new opening section of Enter the Monkeywrench, originally the longer chapters 1-4 but now numbered 1-7, has a distinct plot with a cliffhanger ending. What Hugh Howey did with his now famous Silo Trilogy was revive the Golden Age science-fiction serial-novel tradition in ebook format. Such A.E. van Vogt novels as Slan and The World of Null-A actually read like Saturday-matinee movie serials in prose; Jommy Cross and Gilbert Gosseyn wouldn't be out of place alongside Commando Cody. I realized, I can do this too. Movie serials, and the short '70s TV revival of the format in the series Cliffhanger!, are actually a major influence on my writing. Of course, unlike the classic Republic and RKO serials, and much of Van Vogt's work, I go out of my way to avoid the plot contrivances that are a danger of the serial format, whether in movie serials or serial-format TV shows.

The final Enter the Monkeywrench Chapter 1 turned out to be entirely new material. I introduced a new character (a corrupted Edison Carter whom I named "Jack Campbell" after a certain SF magazine editor whose public decline is infamous) and killed him off. I introduced characters I'd previously saved for later. I established the stakes for the novel. In the previous chapters — the Intro, Interlude 0, and Chapter 0, in that order — I established the stakes for the entire Chaos Angel Spanner series.

I decided to split those four long long chapters I'd novelized out of comics issues and TV episodes into shorter chapters that focus on single characters or groups of characters. In the new Chapter 7 I'll combine the threads as they converge into a monster cliffhanger.

With the Intro, the new Interlude 0 ("The Monkeywrench Cometh", the actual introduction of the character Spanner to the series, reworked from Interlude 14 R2 and Interlude 6 R4), and new Chapter 0 ("First Blast of the Trumpet", a reworking of my original R5 Chapter 0 idea) at the beginning and the new Chapter 7 with its cliffhanger at the end, I could release this part as an ebook in itself, possibly even for free, with the four sequels that make up the rest of the novel priced at one dollar (or pound, or euro) apiece.

In fact, this is how I'm rewriting each part of Enter the Monkeywrench, leading up to the biggest cliffhanger of all, the one at the end of the novel, which has remained substantially the same through all the versions of Chapter (now Book) 1 since 2010.

Come to think of it, I may still be doing that comics/TV serial-novelization thing after all...

Spanner R5 #amediting Update: Mid-Book Part 2: Later Additions Force Early Revisions

This seems to happen to me a lot: something I add to a later chapter requires that I retcon earlier chapters to fit the newly changed continuity. In this case, newly revised events in the final two flashback chapters (13 and 15) have just put events taking place in earlier chapters later in the timeline (Chapters 2-4) out of continuity. Specifically, the scenes involving two new villains added to Chapters 2 and 3 are now out of order, and one thread in Chapter 3 now takes place in the present rather than the past (earlier the day of the story i.e. as part of the flashback arc).

There's a bigger reason for this. The flashback chapters include a thread involving the COPCO agents starting in Chapter 7 and another which starts each flashback chapter, and both have tight plots. In its current state, the main thread is just a mess of expository dialogue interrupted by a few major events. The way the sideplots turned out made me realize that I need to give the flashback arc the tight plot it currently lacks. The mess is a carryover from Chapter 1 R4, in which the flashback arc was just a series of quick flashback scenes, each dedicated to a single reveal. But when I expanded Chapter 1 into an entire book, this no longer worked. Hence, the new plot.

It's the events of this new "earlier today" plot that are making me rewrite scenes in the earlier chapters. This is all for the better because it'll make for a stronger plot.

Spanner R5 #amediting Update: Halfway Through the Final Draft, With Ebook

Remember that plot spreadsheet I said I'd make?
Well, I made it, but it ended up taking too long for me to map the plot threads and character arcs with it, so I deleted it. However, thanks to Sigil, I am now building up the ebook chapter by chapter. With 10 chapters (counting the Intro) out of 21 (including Interlude 1) now complete, I'm halfway through the final draft at last. And it took me like forever?

Karen, the sweet Buddhist cousin, is now one of the flyers surfing the raging storm over New York on her hoverboard and laying Spanner tags. Amanda, the pretty TV reporter, now has a plot thread of her own, complete with character arc. Two of the characters I created around the time I came up with the final series name (in 1999) or the five-volume series plan (2000), the Treece brothers I based loosely on the Bogard brothers of the Fatal Fury videogame series (while I was in the middle of watching the anime at Cliff's Comic World, in fact; Adam = Andy roughly, and Kevin = Terry) finally got a reason to exist as independent characters in their own right — as hoverboard racers, Kevin laying his own Spanner tags from LA to Pittsburgh and leaving the "Climinal Team" flyers to take over from him in New York.

And yes, they are indeed calling themselves "Climinal Team", after a certain selectable team in what Shira calls simply "an old shmup" (specifically Armed Police Batrider; and yes, it's misspelled that way in the game), to signify in typically facetious Shira fashion that they're technically the villains in an America built on the supremacy of heroes. (Note: Batrider's excuse plot just happens to be set in Manhattan, in 2014, just as the dénouement of Enter the Monkeywrench was before I moved the timeline forward to 2018 last year i.e. in 2014.)

Getting halfway through the final draft is an achievement in itself. But that still leaves the other half of the book incomplete. I can't stop until the draft is finished and ready for my beta readers. There's also the matter of the Enter the Monkeywrench cover and the Chaos Angel Spanner series logo, both of which I'm continuing to procrastinate so far. So back to the edit it is. And the distraction I was hoping to avoid, namely NaPoWriMo, which my capricious muse won't let me avoid anyway. Oh well...

Spanner R5 #amediting Update: In Which I Give Up on the Olden Ways and Start a Plot Spreadsheet

I have just discovered, long after I should have, just how extremely difficult it is to plot a novel as complicated as Spanner Book 1 without a spreadsheet. Until now I've had this stubborn notion, dating way, way back to the Apple II days of VisiCalc, that spreadsheets are for business calculating stuff no different from the paper ledgers that inspired the original spreadsheets. So for the last 3 years or so I was trying to wrestle this unwieldy plot into shape without a spreadsheet until I finally gave up.

This is the kind of thing that makes me feel old.

Anyway, I have started a spreadsheet for Spanner Book 1. Already my mind has started making the connections that evaded me when I was still trying to do everything in the HTML files. My writing may have improved by leaps and bounds because of all that editing, but plotting has been a lot more difficult. The spreadsheet is already making a difference.

And so I'm going to take a break from the rewriting for a while, though here and there I'll still slip in a few new scenes (one set at the end of "act 2" even contains a huge cliffhanger), until I've entered all the chapters and scenes into the new spreadsheet.

Some things just have to be done. It's a wonder I avoided doing it for so long.

Spanner R5 #amediting Update: SpaNoEdMo 2014! or, I'd Better Finish This Thing Pronto

In my last post, I celebrated my ninth consecutive NaNoWriMo victory, which I won with Spanner Book 6. But now that I'm done with Book 6 (until I reach it in the edit phase), it's time for me to return to Book 1 for a very special "SpaNoEdMo".

I've completed some very important chapters, but most of the rest seems stubbornly resistant to editing. So I'll need a strategy for the month. I have most of the important character arcs worked out, except ironically Shira's own. Shira's is the most important because she has to make the most impact at the end by revealing herself as the true protagonist.

The strategy I'll adopt for the final edit of Book 1:

1. Work out Shira's character arc. By the end, she reveals herself to be far more than just some amoral young "fixit girl".
2. Give each chapter its own coherent plot as if it were an independent short story in a series of interconnected ones.

These are the keys I need to finish Book 1 at last. My goal is to get it completely edited and send it out to my beta readers by December 31. If I don't get it done now, will I ever get it done? Thus the deadline.

Here goes...

Spanner R5 #amediting Update: The New Direction

Resetting the first four books of Chaos Angel Spanner four years in the future has changed some things, some in major ways. Admittedly, the new Book 1 had become something of a mess in the edit. I was attempting my own version of the complicated structure science fiction author John Brunner used in his 1967 masterpiece Stand on Zanzibar. Shifting the timeline forward allowed me to remove the backstory and pseudo-essay chapters that were getting me in trouble. Now I'm combining chapters and putting parts of some chapters into others. Even the Intro, which I thought I got completely finished two years ago, isn't untouched; parts of what was to be the following chapter got moved there, including both the prologue and the quote section from Chapter 1 R4.

I've simplified Book 1's structure. I'm building on a flashback-narrative structure that alternates "present day" and "earlier today" chapters for the first two-thirds to three-quarters of the book, after which I may alternate the long climactic chapters with shorter chapters containing crucial backstory reveals. Various character threads get introduced in the second story chapter ("Welcome to Spanner's World") and split apart in all directions only to collide in the final two chapters ("Prelude to Ascension" and "Spanner in the Works") and the explosive climax. All the main story chapters will remain, but I'm adding a few new scenes and moving some of the backstory there. Moved into the story chapters, backstory flashbacks will need to serve as important reveals or Shocking Revelations, or I'll move them elsewhere or edit them out. My goal is to make it more readable for the casual reader who's used to similarly structured thrillers.

I'm expanding Leila's role in Book 1. Originally I had her appear in three scenes: one toward the beginning, one in the middle, and one near the very end. This worked when the new Book 1 was merely Chapter 1, the equivalent of a television pilot episode. It doesn't work so well when what was a chapter expands into an entire novel. She's one of the most important characters in the entire series, more important to the action than just being Shira's love interest, so she deserves an expanded role in the volume that introduces her. And so instead of just sending her off toward Seattle sleeping in the back of her aunt Ariel's car at the very end, I'm putting her front and center in the climax. She wasn't in the original "Spanner in the Works" from 2010; now she's one of the reasons it happens.

So far I've added to the Intro and finished the first story chapter, "First Blast of the Trumpet" (the name's a reference to the folktale Jack the Giant-Killer, in which Jack begins the battle against the final giant by calling the villagers to his aid with his horn, and from which I'm taking the series' myth arc). I have three scenes left to do in "Welcome to Spanner's World", two existing scenes to edit and one expansion of the final scene. I've taken several quotes, from both characters and real-life people, from the now omitted chapter "The Age of Unreason" and inserted them in "Welcome..."; other parts will go into Interlude 0 and into later chapters.

My goal is to get as much of Book 1 edited before NaNoWriMo as I can. Here goes...

Spanner Update: A Completely New Publishing Plan in Not 5 (or 6) Volumes, but 7

In a flash of inspiration while waiting for my mother at the dentist's office, I realized that I've been doing this Spanner thing all wrong. Not the writing, actually; most of it's at least good enough. Mostly it's the editing, for this reason: the five-volume plan I came up with back in 2000, to which I later added a Book 0, has proved inadequate for what I've written so far.

And so, while Mom and I were eating lunch, the new plan began to emerge in my mind. The chapters, threads, and arcs scattered like the cards in a game of "52 Pickup", and here's how they settled:

1. Enter the Monkeywrench: the Intro, the new Interlude 0 ("Foregone Conclusions", with the "two Jennifers" sequence from Interlude 6 now framing a sequence of flash-forwards), Chapter 1, and Interlude 1. As it's already a complete novella, it's fitting that this should serve as the "pilot episode".
2. Banned in Japan: (temporary working title) The Japan arc originally planned for Book 0, now a flashback thread; the first four chapters from the original Book 1 including the complete uncut Rebel Styles thread and representing the "present time" following from the new Book 1; a few later scenes as "flash-forwards"; and the relevant Interludes (by their current numbering): 2 ("The Brown Note"), 3 ("One Nation Under Copyright, All Rights Reserved"), 5 ("Approaching Solstice, December 2012"), 8 ("Rebel, Rebel"), 9 ("City on the Edge of a Dream"), and 15 ("Six Degrees of Keenan Sasser"). All flashbacks related to the Shira/Leila relationship line will be moved here.
3. Love Terrorists: the complete School Arc from Chapters 5-21, plus Interludes 6 (as the new opening, to be renamed "Previously On..." and rewritten), 4 ("The Rules of Tournament"), 7 ("Pop Will Eat Itself"), 10 ("You Have Lost the Game"), and 16 ("The Ego and His Own"). I may want to merge the events of Chapter 15 into Chapters 22 and 23.
4. Rock City Blues: Chapters 22 and 23 from Book 1, all of Book 2 except for the Pretty City Arc, and Interludes 13 ("This Is Not America") and 14 ("The Crisis") as a frame.
5. Mad Frontier: the original Book 3 plan, now condensed, centering on the pivotal Phoenix Arc.
6. Business Is War: the original Book 4 plan with the Pretty City Arc from the Book 2 plan now added.
7. Revolution Rock: the original Book 5 as planned, beginning with the final Interlude and ending with the Outro.

The new vision for the series is as a novelized 6-season TV series with a pilot movie. The chapters will be shorter and (from the new Book 2 onward) be renumbered by volume/season (e.g. the original Chapter 5 is now 3-1). Each volume will have its own plot in addition to the series continuity. And I'm going to make each book much more coherent, though just as head-spinning as ever.

So what's my new plan for the new Books 1 and 2?

• Work out the complete Book 2 and transplant various scenes from the old Book 1.
• Edit the original Chapter 1 (now unnumbered) accordingly.

In fact, I've already started doing it. I've started editing this blog's Spanner series page to add the new series plan; when I'm done with it, I'll tell you here.

And thus does it begin again...

2014 Projects: Finish the Spanner Edit, Write Book 0, and Get Published

The holiday season was my excuse to slack off from editing and writing at the end of 2013. The combination of a Blu-Ray player and a new widescreen TV didn't help. That's over now. I've had my year-end vacation. It's back to work. And the muse is obliging with the craziest story ideas I've had in a long time:

1. The entire plot to Spanner Book 0, complete with new title ("Banned in Japan"). Now it begins with a Yakuza-Triad war interrupted by a certain masked prankster and graffiti tagger who goes by the handle Spanner, and ends with a political crisis that may end in a devastating war between an increasingly fascist Japan and Chinese Communist Party (Holdings) Limited.
2. A new graphic novel idea incorporating the "Blake Island incident" repeatedly referred to in Spanner Book 1, and which takes up one night during the time period of Spanner Book 0. On the night of July 14 this year, Jennifer will kill 52 hitmen, mercenaries, and serial killers. Now I know how it begins: with her and some far more broken female former child soldiers robbing the Seattle Triad (under flashy young boss Ringo Wing) of money, sex slaves, and a snuff pornographer who resembles an infamous web cartoonist, as dozens of disposable gangsters die John Woo style (I ask myself the question: how would Lone Wolf and Cub artist Goseki Kojima do a "heroic bloodshed" shootout?). Because it's so action-oriented, it will not be called "The Jennifer Theory"; I'll have to find yet another new story to match that title.
3. Three final tweaks to Spanner Chapter 1 (Jennifer's "Red Baron name" changed from Blonde Phantom to White Phantom; Shira kicking Johnny-Johnny in "his nonexistent manhood" to begin a recurring motif linked to the Blake Island incident and ending in Chapter 11; and a rewrite of the fourth flashback) and such a complete overhaul of Chapter 2 R5 that I'm even switching the positions of 2.2 and 2.3 to avoid pointless time reversals.

Getting that graphic novel off the ground necessitates, of course, that I start drawing again and actually improve my skills so I can actually draw real comics. I decided I'll even throw in a "comic within a comic", of the bad-webcomic kind, which I'll draw in the inferior style I abandoned in 1999, when I stopped trying to ape Masamune Shirow (and failing) and began developing my more recent Clamp-influenced style, which I'm now modifying in a more Takeshi Obata direction that allows me to incorporate more of my "school of Alex Raymond" influences: Neal Adams, Ryoichi Ikegami, Tony Wong, and Raymond himself (with elements taken from Will Eisner and midperiod Frank Miller).

Meanwhile, I'm going to get one non-Spanner novel published this year. In March, during NaNoEdMo, I'm going to pick one previous NaNoWriMo novel and edit it to as close to publication quality as I can in one month. I have four options: Bad Company from 2007, Black Science from 2008, Dirty Pop from 2009, and Freefall from 2013. Once I feel it's ready for release, I'll publish it online. Thus, after 25 years of practice and planning, I will become a published author at last. Then in April, now that Script Frenzy is dead, I'll throw myself into NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month) the way I do FAWM. To be a NaPoWriMo winner, you must write a poem a day for 30 days. I'll do my usual stuff inspired by the Surrealists and Beats, of course, but I'll also make my first attempts at traditional forms such as the sonnet, ode, and villanelle.

Above all, 2014 will be the year I complete the final edit of Spanner Book 1. Last year it took me 5 whole months to edit Chapter 1. One reason is that I completely changed certain older story elements (e.g. removing Hope and Karen and replacing them with Elle and new character Rico) and threw in new ones (e.g. the propaganda-video opening). I will not spend that much time on any later chapter, no matter how much I change it, not even Chapter 2 which I'm radically overhauling. Books 0, 1, and 2 are set this year, so I plan to get at least Book 1 published this year, Book 0 if I can squeeze it in.

And so it begins again...

Spanner R5 Update: Close to the Edit, or Chapter 1 Almost Complete

It's been a long time since I posted an entry or even used Twitter and Google+, so it's like I'm coming back into the world again. My severe case of Editor's Block is over, and I'm ready to return to the world. Fortunately, I've made progress on Chapter 1 and elsewhere in the final draft of Spanner Book 1. So here's my progress so far:

Chapter 1:

• Leila's introduction scene now contains forward references to 1.7, Interlude 5, and her decision to go nameless in Chapters 12 and 13.
• Shira's introduction scene (her videoblog post) is completely revised. I realized I had her ever so slightly out of character in all previous versions, so I corrected that. And now she issues an even more provocative challenge.
• The later villain Admiral Currie who enters the story in Chapter 20? His name now opens his reporter daughter Amanda's intro scene, since after all he destroyed her life and now rules it (see: Interlude 12).
• Most of the flashbacks and several scenes in present continuity now fit in Revision 5 continuity.
• Remember Rebel Styles from Chapter 2? She's now in the "Newark ghetto" scene in Chapter 1, scaring right-wing militia types to death and making the survivors panic right into the waiting SRO squad.
• I added a new intro screen for Richard Becket, Chapter 1's main antagonist. He now represents the fusion of high finance and dark wizardry. His failure in Chapter 1 is what begins his brother Henry's rise to supreme power.
• I added one new character, a "shounen hero" who I kill off the same way Neal Stephenson kills off his "typical cyberpunk hero" in the first chapter of The Diamond Age. This new character is a Brazilian hoverboard champion named Oscar Ribeiro who goes by the handle Blackflag.
• A "propaganda reel" serves as the new second scene, to reveal the official Party line in the style of the opening credits to a superhero cartoon.
• I rearranged the order of the early scenes completely, and I'm probably going to reorder them again, possibly even more than once.
• Last but not least, I finally found a way to edit together the two versions of Jennifer's and Henry Becket's long intro scenes, the task that's been stymieing me for so long.

It's not complete yet, but I'm closer than ever and ready to take on those two big scenes.

Later Chapters:

• Chapter 2: I decided I'll completely rework this one. I've added new scenes and plan to shorten some older scenes and throw others out.
• Chapter 4: 4.4 is now much better than the original. Up to Revision 4, I left it largely unchanged. I condensed the opening 3-paragraph exposition to just one shorter paragraph, gave Desiree an aura of superstitious terror among the Russian gangsters befitting her "electrifying" superpowers, gave the Italian mobsters a priest who's after the Gnostic gospel Desiree's trying to deliver to Ariel, and added a new tension between Desiree and Ariel. Desiree now gives Ariel an ultimatum: bring Lucie back to me, or you won't get your gospel and Uncle Richard might even kill me to steal it.
• Chapter 12: when Leila renounces her name at the end, she gets a new dream scene signifying a major change in her character.
• Chapter 15: I'm restoring the Jennifer videoblog post I originally planned for Revision 4. I've already moved the "precogs go mad" prelude back to the beginning of Chapter 14, where it was in Revision 2 and the R3 plan. I have new plans for major revisions to 15.6.
• Chapter 23: In retrospect, there were certain important scenes in the R4 plan that I ended up not writing. I'm adding those scenes to R5. Meanwhile, I intend to make the super battle in the sky much clearer.
• I'm tracing several threads, not just new ones but ones I was still neglecting in Revision 4, so that I don't drop them in the final version. Since I put so much new stuff in Revision 4, I'm moving scenes around, adding new ones to develop the final continuity, and throwing away any scenes that don't fit.

So that's what I've been up to while I was in hiding. I've set for myself a hard deadline for Chapter 1: the end of this month. I want to get at least up to Chapter 8 fully edited before NaNoWriMo. And I'll continue to update right here. My plan is to whet your appetite by publishing Chapter 1 online first.

Stay tuned...

#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...

#amediting Spanner R5: The Nonlinear Edit, or Back and Forth and Back and Forth

During the first week of the final ebook edit for Spanner book 1, I find myself settling into a pattern: going back and forth across the book, following story threads and character arcs, making little tweaks and major transformations here and there.

Remember the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg over the valley of ashes in The Great Gatsby? I had that image in mind when I decided to put a huge Big Brother-like image of the fat angry face of SPEC chairman Peter Ross over the principals in their office. And I'm putting that image in every single scene set in the principal's office. Likewise, I made major changes to Ross' own early appearances in Chapters 5 and 6: I made his first appearances in effect epiphanies of a god, a Revision 5 theme I'm working on involving all the High Corporates and not just the Beckets, then revised the confrontation in 6.2 so that Shira, Leila, and Jennifer sent him reeling. He ends the scene "shocked at the inscrutable female mind" when his problem is that he, like most High Corporates, can't even conceive of a Populist hero's mentality grounded in reality. His final scene in 21.6 seemed to be perfect in Revision 4, but now I'm going to revise all his Chapter 21 appearances in light of the Chapter 4-5 revisions and add Elle to his 21.6 scene, with her replacement of the injured Karen in that scene (she's in the first confrontation in 6.2) being a major plot point.

Most of the major edits so far have of course been to Chapter 1. As I mentioned last post, I removed Karen and reduced Jim Sparks to a minor villain who gets a lucky break, then replaced them with Elle and a new "shounen hero" character specific to the chapter. I've also been slipping in references to later threads and themes to establish them at the beginning and prepare the readers for the later events. There's still a prop and a character I've neglected in later chapters, the Gospel of the New Genesis (which by Chapter 23 becomes the center of the Dick Becket-Ariel Shield feud) and the seventh Scarab. I could always find somewhere to fit them in.

I also added a new CSS format. Basically it's for lines of dialogue spoken by High Corporate oligarchs on large video screens that reinforces the impression that they are (as their spin implies) living gods. The ones I've applied it to are Steve Jobs (or rather, his ka) in 1.7, Henry Becket in 2.1 (with Rebel Styles' lines getting formatted in another new format), and Peter Ross in 5.6 and 6.1. In 5.4 (IIRC) I've reformatted the stadium announcers' bombastic announcing in the script-type format (based on play scripts adapted to comics, not movie scripts).

In 10.1 I'm changing the identity of the first nameless woman, from the tall brown-haired one to the short slender Asian one, because the latter is Ayla's mother; the reunion is in 13.4 in Revision 4, and I'm moving that to 10.1. I plan to set up her appearance with a few cameo appearances in Chapters 7-9, after Ayla arrives at Shira's apartment. I'll introduce her roommates in minor roles in 10.5-6 (the song war and its aftermath), and after that build up this thread around Leila until she finally goes nameless in 13.2.

Not used from the Revision 3 plan: the love scene on the beach in 14.6. Now I have a study in contrasts and the perfect character for it. I'm looking for a place to put the Shira vs. Charmian tennis match. Not used from the Revision 4 plan: the scene in 23.4 where Radica gets shot down and only Liz can rescue her, and the one planned for 23.6 in which Willa applies violin torture (sound-cannon amplified this time) to the one who deserves it most, her ex-husband the Party Chairman, still in his superhero uniform.

I haven't started this yet, but another plan I have is to relentlessly brand everything to an annoying degree in order to represent the total marketization of society, with Corporatism playing exactly the same role in the American Empire that Islamism does in its symbiotic enemy the Caliphate (which itself is "Jihad vs. McWorld" gone berserk). And I've reverted the name of the giant corporation that own China to Chinese Communist Party (Holdings) Limited.

The muse is happy to get back to work now that I no longer have to work on a schedule. Back and forth is just fine with her. And so the nonlinear edit continues.

#amediting Spanner R5: Aw, To Heck With the Week's Break, I'll Edit Chapter 1

And so the one week's break I planned to take was broken, and I did not take it, so now I'm editing Spanner Chapter 1 instead. This time I'm taking my time, since I no longer have a regular posting schedule to worry about and the muse threw at me some great ideas I dare not ignore.

First of all, there's Elle, the background character I fell in love with while editing Chapters 22 and 23 for Revision 4. I realized she's a much better fit than Karen for Chapter 1, so now she's replacing Karen altogether. Where Karen's handle in the flashback sequence was "Genki Girl" (which I settled on while in one of my "closet raver" phases when spinning out scenarios for the Project Notebooks between 1998 and 2001), Elle "takes a handle only a Rocker could understand: Whatsername." You probably already know where it comes from, but I'm setting up a running joke. She now has a full name: Eleanor Kayla Shears: Eleanor after her great-grandmother Eleanor (Nelly) Richter (who for some reason never even made it into Book 1), Shears as in Billy (yes, the guy who was Paul when Paul was dead is her great-grandfather, and he appears in Interlude 8).

Second, I changed the character of Jim Sparks the rogue cop to make him a villain in the first two chapters so I could give him a stronger character arc. Among the Team Spanner heroes, I replaced him with a gung-ho anarchist hoverboarder who races under the handle "Blackflag" and dates the precocious Elle. I'll spoil his fate: just as Neal Stephenson killed off the Cyberpunk Hero in the first chapter of The Diamond Age, this guy's the Shounen Hero I kill off at the end of Spanner Chapter 1. Elle will cry for him (in Chapter 2 and later), but Shira will regain sole possession of the protagonist role. Sparks is my Cyberpunk Hero (named after Akira's Kaneda, even), but he never becomes the protagonist and in fact is pretty much a pinball in Shira's game.

Third, I'm finding a whole lot of places to put references to later themes and plot threads that didn't even exist in my mind at the time. For example, Elle's decision to take the handle Whatsername foreshadows the women with no name at all who first appear in Chapter 12 and whom Leila joins in Chapter 13. For that matter, Elle herself may decide to go nameless eventually, but in Book 2. I also found more places to fit mentions of Kira, and so on.

In the "kill your darlings" department, I decided to remove Jennifer's rant about Ayn Rand and serial-killer fandom from the airplane scene. Sure, it sets up her later stint with the Slasher Hunters, but it stands out a bit too much from that scene. Instead, I had Jennifer and Elle react more emotionally when Shira informed them about her battle with Oliver, possessor of the Travelling Shovel of Death from whom she stole Leila's power crystal. I'll fit that now orphaned snippet of dialogue somewhere into Chapter 2, 3, or 4, since it's still important.

I even found both dialogue and narrative passages to condense. I thought I'd gotten them all by the last of who knows how many Chapter 1 edits in February and March of last year, but no. Turns out Chapter 1 wasn't as perfect as I thought. But doesn't it always turn out that way?

And so the final edit begins...

On Spanner Book 1: Thoughts on the Fourth Revision, Plans for the Fifth

I began the Herculean labor that was the Fourth Revision of Spanner Book 1 back in February 2012, jumping the gun on NaNoEdMo that year. It's now April 2013, almost a full month after this year's EdMo ended, and it still seems hard for me to believe I just finished. It proved to be the toughest part of the job, much more difficult than merely writing it. It got even tougher once I got past Chapter 10, where the third draft ended; in places, the fourth draft became a whole lot different from the second, especially when I got toward the end (which was admittedly quite weak in the second draft).

Well, it's done now, and it's much closer to what I want despite all the crazy new ideas my delirious and overworked muse threw in (pretty girls without names, anyone?). Where previous versions were the equivalent of alpha software, this is the beta. The Fifth Revision will be the equivalent of bugfixes.

Before I finally unleash the ebook edition, there's a few more changes I want to make in one final one-pass edit. First, there's the central love arc, which revolves around Shira and Leila but isn't limited to just them. Still, I need to strengthen it so you can feel the full sublime and destructive force of their love from the moment each first appears separately in Chapter 1 until the final poetic stanza, for it's the story's driving force, the irresistible force flinging itself at the immovable object that is the Conservative Revolution. Second, I'll need to strengthen the forces of resistance: Jennifer (a relatively minor opponent, and only in the relationship line), who tries in vain to keep Shira with her and away from Leila and then throws herself into relationships with two other girls only to return to Shira in the end and make the core couple a threesome; Governor Brinkman, her grandfather and clan patriarch, who insists on marrying her off in order to form a political alliance between clans that eventually fails; Oliver, the one she's being married off to, who finds his "Intended" in the arms of another woman, who proves too dangerous an opponent; and the entire school establishment at Bangor High, to whom their love is as dangerous a political threat as the Student Union.

Beyond the relationship arc, there's the School Arc of Chapters 5-21. In Chapter 4, when the Teachers Guild dissidents and Student Union organizers first meet, I need to set up the two sides of the conflict more strongly. We need to get a sense of the kind of threat Peter T. Ross is even before he first shows up in Chapter 6. I have him described as a hedge fund manager who raises horses for the rich on the side. However, financiers have a heroic and magical aura in this series, one I'm playing up for Ross in particular in Chapter 25 (in Book 2), and they find the source of their heroism in Ayn Rand (though Rand herself would have scorned them as unproductive parasites leeching off actually productive companies, a lower form of business type than even her politically connected but still productive villain Orren Boyle). His appearances in the office behind the principal's at Bangor High in Chapters 6 and 21 are the epiphanies of a god descending to earth. Another major player who needs played up more is Henry Becket, particularly after Chapter 15 when his superhero team take over the Party.

There's a few other characters I want to give a more prominent role. Chief among them is Elle, who didn't fully emerge as a character until Chapter 22, after which I fell in love with her. I realized she makes a better player in Chapter 1's Spanner Incident than Karen does. As for Karen, I need to make her more prominent in the Student Union plot thread so as to justify her near-martyrdom in Chapter 19 and the ensuing Team Challenge in Chapter 20.

There's some other things I need to change. Some of the characters need to talk more British, including the Canadian, Australian, and Irish characters; and the Rockers should use a lot more British street language than they currently do. Some of the narration should be less journalistic and more poetic, or vice versa. There's still a bit of filler. And there's the formatting and stylesheet experiments I "pulled my punches" on in Chapter 23 R4 that I'm going to "supercharge" in R5, in not just Chapter 23 but 15 and 22 as well.

This edit will take nowhere near as long as Revision 4 did. After all, I was still throwing in all kinds of new stuff, up to and including the kitchen sink (or, more perversely, the bathroom one). I'm done with the big edit. The rest is just fixing and fine-tuning. And just like last February, I'm impatient to start.

Spanner R4 Update: A Short Break to Catch My Breath (and Upgrade my CSS Hacking Skills)

NaNoEdMo is over, and with it the most intense editing experience of my life. I had my celebration; now I deserve a few days' break. And so I'm posting Interlude 13 tomorrow and starting Chapter 22 on Monday.

Meanwhile, I checked out a couple library books on Cascading Style Sheets, one on CSS3, thinking I could learn a few things that might be relevant to the HTML5-based EPUB3 ebook format while I was waiting for my brother to drop off a new bookcase. The Spanner book 1 ebook is in the trusty old standard EPUB 2 based on XHTML, but I'm doing book 2 in EPUB3. I also had in mind some serious CSS hacks for Chapters 22 and 23, especially when the superheroes start mind-bombing the rebellious civilians, Echelon gets its first speaking lines, and the Rockers bring out the sound cannons. I found myself neglecting Interlude 13 for a day while I worked out, by trial and error, a series of new CSS hacks for the ebook version of Chapters 1, 20, and 21. I made several changes to the ebook stylesheet, threw out the styles that didn't work, and kept the ones that did. Mostly this had to do with styling sections set off by the <div> tag and the <p> and <span> tags within <div>s. I haven't yet experimented with the font and text-box properties I'll be playing around with in Chapters 22 and 23.

So I'm slowing down the schedule again so I can take more time to work with styles in those final two style-heavy chapters. Back to the three-a-week schedule. Interlude 13 posts tomorrow; Chapter 22 begins on Monday.

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.

What's In Store for Spanner in 2013

Looks like I took an unintentional break from editing Spanner Chapter 14 over the extended New Year's weekend. Anyway, now it's the year before the story actually begins, and I'm still editing Book 1. So what are my plans for the series this year?

1. I'm going to finish the final edit of Book 1, of course. I'm just over halfway to the end. Unlike with Revision 3, I want to get all the way to the end.
2. Complete the first draft of Book 2, then do a full edit before I start posting installments.
3. Plot Book 3 and begin writing a first draft — sure, there's scenes written, but right now they're just fragments.
4. Complete the Book 1 ebook and get it ready to sell through the online bookstores. This means not just the expensive parts such as buying what I need to keep full creative control, but also the covers and possibly inside illustrations.
5. Get my drawing skills back to the level at which I can finally do the long-delayed task of designing my characters.

For the remainder of Book 1 Revision 4, there's many new elements I've decided to throw in that were completely absent from R2. Here's how I plan to do it:

1. Expand the "anonymity is freedom" theme to include people with one-word or even one-letter or -character names, plus the most important names of all: the numbers the Imperial American government gives pretty much everybody on the planet it claims to rule forever by divine right.
2. Take Book 3 characters Shane Chantry (from the mid-1990s Project Notebooks), Oz Bean (the black rodeo cowboy from Texas), and Radica Maxx (Shira's jealous archrival in hoverboard racing, always sick and tired of being number 2) and insert them in the later stages of Book 1. I've already done this to Shane in 13.5 and 14.1. Oz will make his first appearance in 15.2. Radica... where should I put her? I'll figure it out sometime soon.
3. Expand on certain neglected characters from previous chapters, including those new to R4: Daisy Kwon, Irina Lanskaya, Zac Finney, Hope Reston, the librarians and other dissident teachers, etc. The third-act "homestretch" (Chapters 16-23) should give me plenty of room to do so as I prepare to clear out certain Book 1 characters to make way for the Book 2 supporting cast.
4. Escalate both the "cyberpunk" and "Orwellian" aspects of the story.
5. Weaponize "the power of rock": on the government side, the Patriot Metal superstars and their battle copters; on the other, the Rockers with their instruments (lead guitars, electric violins, circuit-broken Casio SK-1s, Roland 808 bass cannons, etc.) connected to sound cannons. Combine this with "the power of love" weaponized by Shira and Leila starting Chapter 15, and CPMC may die from "rule of cool" alone — but the point of Chapters 16-23 is that "rule of cool" is not enough without the masses taking action on their own behalf.

And so this is my plan for Spanner in the year before the story begins. As I myself am impatient as to how the story's going to turn out, I get the feeling I'll be following this plan to its completion, unlike previous years. And it starts tonight, as I've started editing the second half of Chapter 14. 14.4 will post on Friday because my muse refused to work during the extended New Year's weekend. But she's back on duty now and attacking the story again as we speak. It continues...

Spanner R4 Update: Taking the Week Off to Plot Phase 2

Phase one of the Spanner Book 1 final edit is over (mostly): all 10 chapters that got a Third Revision are now upgraded to the Fourth. Now, to avoid burnout and serious continuity errors, I'm taking this next week off. The first thing I did was avoid the story altogether this weekend, except to take a few notes. Here's the rest of my agenda for the week:

1. Reread all 10 of the chapters I've finished so far. I will use this as an excuse to convert to ePUB-compatible XHTML those chapters I haven't yet converted.
2. Correct any continuity errors I see during my reading. This includes reinserting forgotten characters that got lost in certain scenes where they should have been important (e.g. Ayla in Chapters 9 and 10). If I see any opportunities to insert foreshadowing for later events, I'll take them.
3. Plot Chapters 11 through 15. Work out an outline. I'll be working from that. I need to make sure all the plot elements follow from what has gone before (i.e. in Chapters 1-10); this may mean editing previous chapters yet again to make sure all plot threads lead up to the events of Chapter 15.
4. Draw up a quick outline of Chapters 16 through 23, continuing the threads from the previous chapters. This may also require edits on the first 10 chapters.

Once all that's done, I'll start work on Chapter 11, and resume posting new Revision 4 installments on October 1. In the meantime, I need time to catch up with the story so I don't lose it (i.e. allow careless continuity errors to sneak in).

Chapter 11 R4 starts October 1. But right now the real work begins...

Spanner R4 Update: The Tough Edits, and an Old Influence Unearthed

First, the influence I'd forgotten. Its name is Sukeban Deka, and Erica Friedman of Yuricon brought it up in a recent blog post that links to her new article on this classic manga, "Hooliganism, High School Crime, and Giant Snakes", in which she declares it "one of the most awesomely outrageous series ever made."

Back in the early 1990s (1993?), during my anime club days, I watched the OVA series. If fortysomething me had seen it back then (or read the original Shinji Wada manga), I would have howled, raised the devil-horns salute, and cried out, "rock 'n' roll!" But twentysomething me was a virgin of sorts, and I saw it just as I had barely begun developing the early Spanner concept with just the five heroines, two mentor figures, and four villains of the "Class of '92". There's a group of characters who can be considered the "Class of Sukeban Deka": the Fleer sisters (the first three, oldest to youngest: Charmian with the long blond princess-curly hair, Christian with the short brown hair with pink highlights, and the less villainous black-haired Julian), their mother whom I would later make part of the villainous Becket clan, and the characters I would much later name Mimi Scott and Polly Parker. A late addition to this "class" is the Fleer sisters' father, Alan Fleer, whom I would make not just an admiral but the son of a fascist Argentine general. The twist on my part is which of the "Class of '92" heroines would get the loaded yo-yo: not Debbie Longmuir (who became another Becket!), she of the impossible aim, but rebel protagonist Shira Thomas herself. And since unlike Sukeban Deka title character Saki Asamiya, a sukeban (roughly "gangster bitch") drafted by the Japanese government and made a deka (cop), Shira is manipulating an American government that hates her skin color and conscience. For this reason, her loaded yo-yo is not government-issue like Saki's, but a Go-Yo, in homage to a now-forgotten American comic called Go-Man.

Back when Sukeban Deka was published, 1978-82 in the shoujo manga anthology Hana to Yume, anything still went in manga, while American comics and television were subject to strict censorship codes. Today Saki would not be allowed to drink and smoke in the censorious new Japanese climate, while on American TV (at least on cable) you get such things as True Blood, Breaking Bad, Diary of a Call Girl, and The Borgias, and American comics can get as outrageous as anything from Europe (case in point: Sin City). A Sukeban Deka could not be published in Japan today, but it sure as hell could make it onto American TV. Japan and America, it seems, have switched places in this one respect. In its original concept and final execution, Chaos Angel Spanner is very much a homage to an age of freedom in Japanese comics and animation that is now lost, and Sukeban Deka is one of its earliest pivotal influences. Saki Asamiya may be gone forever (she dies at the end), but Shira Thomas has only just begun.

Now for the tough edits: it took me over a month to finish the Fourth Revision versions of Chapters 4 and 5. Maybe I shouldn't have been so surprised that editing them turned out to be so difficult; after all, it took me about four months to edit Chapter 1. But Chapter 1 is special; its purpose is to sell the novel. Absolute awesomeness was absolutely required. Maybe the problem is that the final edits of Chapters 2 and 3 had gone so smoothly and fast. One scene in particular, "Meeting at Mudlark House" in 4.4 (it's the second big scene), I rewrote over and over and over till I got it right. The first two scenes of 4.6 (before the flashback) also gave me a lot of difficulty. To wrestle these three scenes into shape, I came up with a new trick to help me. It's a three-step process:

1. take the scene I want to edit in the ebook's HTML file,
2. go to the corresponding part of the TV-episode script, and
3. start a new text file as a workspace in which I can combine the two versions.

While editing 5.2 and 5.3, I forgot this method and did a new one:

1. tear the long scenes into pieces,
2. write a new outline around the pieces, and
3. rewrite and rearrange until everything feels right at last.

I ended up creating new transitional scenes, particularly in 5.3, whose major scene I had already divided in half and set in different high-school sports venues.

For the climactic sequence of Chapter 5 I used a different technique entirely:

1. break up the sequence into its constituent scenes,
2. put them in the correct order using the cinematic intercutting technique I first used in Chapter 1, and
3. flesh them out.
   
4. 
   

It's been very much a learning experience. It's almost as if I've had to unlearn and relearn everything repeatedly, or at least learn to do everything a new way every time I do it. I think I may have left Chapter 5 a little rough in dialogue and style in comparison to the obsessive sheen of Chapter 1, even if the plot is now far more cohesive than it ever was before. But at least I know a little bit more about what I'm doing, and I'm going to take that knowledge into my next edit, in which I sink my teeth into that bloated mess that is the current edit of Chapter 6...