#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 R4 Update: Scaling Chapter 14, and a Dream of Jennifer's War

My next task: Chapter 14! It has a new name, "City in Flight", replacing the Revision 2 title ("When the Cat's Away", now the title of 14.4) and the R4 working title "Plots and Plans" (now 14.6). After finishing Chapter 13 and Interlude 9, then scheduling the posts, I took a day off to rest my brain. That's because Chapter 14 R4 will have the most complex structure of any chapter in Book 1. I'm combining an anime-inspired mid-season "clip show", a flashback episode (with the flashbacks embedded in the "clips"), and straight exposition. One major character will appear a chapter earlier than she did in the Second Revision. And though Irina Lanskaya is one of the earliest Team Spanner core characters I created (as early as 1993), she's far more important than she was in earlier revisions, for now she's a major figure in Jennifer's backstory...

Yesterday morning I dreamed an entire story. Shortly after the Conservative Revolution of 2012 that overthrew American democracy, America goes to war. On the southern European front in the war against the Caliphate, we focus on a band of child soldiers, all female, all 12 to 15 years old, all naked starving and cold yet heavily armed. They belong to "Alice Company", made up of juvenile delinquents and the daughters of imprisoned and executed dissidents. In a manor or mansion, they wait in ambush for their Russian counterparts, led by a 14-year-old girl known only as "Blondie" (who is really Jennifer). They kill a few, but brutal Corporate mercenaries force the enemies to join forces. The Russian girl soldiers' commander is a redhead the same age, later revealed as Irina. They are soon joined by a band of very young kunoichi from Japan led by a 13-year-old called "Nana", which means simply "seven" in Japanese. To seal their alliance, the three young commanders become sworn lovers. Then the Caliphate sends waves upon waves of jihadi hordes, and the girl soldiers spring into action. But then comes the soul-crushing gut-punch revelation of the horrific and disgusting real reason the military commands conscripted and sent those girls in the first place...

This is what you get when you cross a brutal war movie with, say, Lyrical Nanoha, or play something like Strike Witches or Sound of the Sky like All Quiet on the Western Front directed by John Woo. I vividly dreamed it all yesterday morning, and I wrote it all down. It could make a NaNoWriMo novel in itself, but I think it would work better as a graphic novel (the most grimdark and depressing yuri manga ever?). And it proves more significant to Jennifer's backstory in Spanner itself than the "Blake Island incident" (her, alone, against 52 hitmen and serial killers out to get her) referenced throughout the story. Irina first appears in Chapter 14 R4. It triggers Jennifer's memories, which she will relate to Leila in the crucial main scene that ends 16.2. And we will discover over the next several chapters just how her Kriegserlebnis (her word: war experience) impacted her entire worldview, and just how politically radical it made her. The thread's name: "The Return of Alice Company".

Like the new thread of the nameless beauties, this dream-spawned backstory is a major new addition to the Fourth Revision. Unlike the Second Revision original, this new Spanner is starting to look extremely interesting indeed...

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: Chapter 4, Second Pass: The Novelization Part (With Bonus Chapter 5 Preview)

I know what I'm editing now. Second phase: adapting those parts of Chapter 4's Script Frenzy script version that I haven't adapted yet, plus completing scenes I didn't script but which remain unfinished. Here's the rundown:

1. Incomplete: the opening coffee shop scene before the shooting; the first two paragraphs are still in concept and not yet written.
2. Incomplete: the strategy conference for the Bangor High student tutors and their parents. The original outline and the Script Frenzy version are set at Mudlark House; for the revision, I'm moving it to the house of the Tachibana family from Chapters 1 and 5.
3. New: the scene where the future Team Bremelo scout Dictel Park and run into a Klown gang called the Baddd Boyzz near the old Dictel Corporation headquarters. The gang leader, Little Badd, and his chief enforcer, Big Baddd, will be a recurring menace throughout the School Arc.
4. New: what in the original outline was a funeral is now a gathering at Drusilla Becket's cult headquarters to determine who takes over Biotron Corporation now that its founding chairman Dr. Lars Thorwald is dead.
5. New: the scene at the Shelley family house to discuss how to extricate Leila from her arranged marriage to Oliver Thorwald, which remains enforceable by law despite the elder Thorwald's murder.

The hard part is, surprisingly enough, those first two paragraphs. The easy part is converting the new scenes from script to prose (and HTML). After that, I'll update the novelization to include changes made in the script version. The third phase, then, will be cutting the chapter down to size.

Meanwhile, here's a new scene for Chapter 5 that I thought up while walking the downtown streets right after posting yesterday's entry. This little scene says volumes about both episode villain Mark Bernkastel (the serial killer Shira saves Mimi from in Chapter 4, and the first homeroom teacher in the School Arc) and major villain Dick Becket, king of the Corporates and supreme guru of "Sado-Monetarism". Seems his sadism goes beyond even economics...

The scenario: just before Bernkastel sets out for Dictel Park to hunt our heroines, he calls the United Corporations chairman while he is having sex with the Shira clone he's having his kitchen staff fix for dinner that night (some Corporates like to eat clones of themselves as a delicacy, but their leader prefers to clone his female enemies and have sex with them before he eats them). The clone makes the expected sexual noises throughout the scene.

Bernkastel: Chairman! Shira Thomas is Spanner!
Becket: (irritably) What did I tell you about interrupting me, Bernkastel?
Bernkastel: But Chairman, this is urgent!
Becket: I'm busy, Bernkastel. Wait until I'm finished.
Bernkastel: What in Jesus America's name—
Becket: Are you a cocksman, Bernkastel?
Bernkastel: (surprised) What?
Becket: If you were a cocksman, Bernkastel, you wouldn't be going around killing women instead of conquering them. If you were a cocksman, you would have conquered Shira Thomas long ago. Am I clear?
Bernkastel: But—
Becket: You are as useless as ever, Bernkastel. Goodbye. [hangs up phone]

I've noticed how the Beckets can intimidate even the scariest villains: Drusilla and a theocrat in Chapter 1, Richard here, Henry pretty much anytime. And I haven't even gotten to Colonel Tom. As for making deals while having sex with the clone you're going to eat: that's an act of supervillainy in itself, and one of the most cyberpunk things my villains have done yet. It's absolute decadence only aristocrats are capable of getting away with. So into Chapter 5 it goes, along with the followup scene in which the cooked clone is being served, after Bernkastel is blown up by a mon his ex-wife sent to his phone.

The followup. Chairman Becket's serving this well cooked Shira clone to none other than the real ruler of the American Empire, the President of President Goldman Sachs & Company, a ruthless corporate raider who looks like a simulant and plays dress-up in a cop uniform even though he doesn't have Police Guild membership:

President: I thought I ordered you to serve me the real Shira Thomas!
Becket: I was hoping this would inspire you toward revenge.
President: Bull pucky! I won't be satisfied until the real Shira Thomas is right here on this table, specially prepared personally for me!
Becket: You try catching her, then.
President: My men are already working on it. Speaking of which, how's my old friend Mark?
Becket: He is already dead.

Now to get back to drawing my callipygian heroine — the stubborn original, that is...

Spanner R4 PREVIEW: 7.5 The Birthday Party NaNoEdMo REMIX

To understand just how much Spanner has been changing between the Third and Fourth Revisions during NaNoEdMo, compare Part 7.5 R3 with the new revised version below. A lot of it hasn’t changed. It’s the new additions that change everything, especially the brand new ending. (Except for Shira’s insistence on ditching her clothes; girl’s been acting up on me lately. That’s what happens when your characters escape your control...)

But first, a bonus extra scene, newly added to Chapter 7 R4, called “Mass Marriage at Xbox Field” (“Xbox Field” being the 2014 name of Qwest/CenturyLink Field in Seattle), inspired by the opening of Don DeLillo’s Mao II but quickly diverging from it:

7 september 2014.
xbox field. The faith-mad zombies of the cult of America rush onto the pitch to line up in perfect formation, two by two, male and female, to join in perfectly eugenic matrimony. Sun Myung Moon, late Shepherd of Korea, industrialized marriage into mass spectacle; Shepherd Moon, the hater of Communism, communized it in a way that Stalin and Mao would approve and the Kims adopted. The Eugenics Institute rationalized the aristocratic tradition of arranged marriage to advance Galton’s science into the age of space conquest. With absolute faith that they are bringing into being the New Man, crusaders united to defend the grail of Corporatism against the passing of the great race and the all-destroying entropy of individual passion, one thousand Corporate aristocrats in battle formation advance across the sign of the X to be united in eugenically correct union by the savior of the American Union.

Her name is Princess Drusilla Anne Becket Thomas Thorndyke von Wegener Pernell of Dictel, Incorporated, and she reigns over them as Supreme Shepherd of the Church of America in the American State of Cascadia. Upon the stage, before the altar, she stands before and above them as a living goddess: gleaming golden prophetic robes encrusted with glittering gems, beautiful harsh face artfully painted into an Egyptian objet de culte, golden locks architecturally braided atop her head and crowned with the spiked iron crown of Columbia, the Nation, eternal bride of Jesus America. Drusilla Becket, superstar: flanked by her top-hatted, leather-trenchcoated Patriot Metal acolytes Byron Scofield and Jeremiah Light, she appears before them as the Ideal made manifest, blinding all present who see her without the rose spectacles of faith.

[unfinished Mudlark House scene omitted]

In perfect unison, one thousand Corporates reach out to the sacred Flag in the legionary salute. Drusilla leads them in the Pledge of Allegiance, the Great Invocation of the American Religion.

In the stands, some are so overwhelmed by this tsunami of holiness that they lose all sense of self and cry out their ecstasy in the Unknown Tongue. Glossolalia spreads throughout the crowd like a fast-acting virus until they, the Intendeds on the field, the band and crew on stage, and even the legions of the faithful watching on television are on the ground, rolling, convulsing, glossolating the Invocation before it ends, masses of souls raped by the Holy Spirit, until only Drusilla, the channeller of gods, is left standing, her painted lips stretched into a smile of triumph.

And yes, the revised “The Birthday Party” now refers back to “Mass Marriage at Xbox Field.” So let’s now get back to our feature presentation:

Preparing for NaNoWriMo 2011

It's that time of year again. After preoccupying myself with editing Spanner Book 1, I'm ready to get back out into the world. I've already returned to most of my social networks, and I've created my profile on the new NaNoWriMo site and started posting to the forum.

And what am I writing this year? Spanner Book 3, of course.

But at the same time, I'll be working on Books 1 and 2 as well. I'm still not done editing Book 1; the Third Revision hasn't gotten past Chapter 10 yet, and there's still work to be done even on those first 10 chapters. I begin posting Book 2 on alternating weekdays starting November 1, starting with Interlude 12 and going on to Chapter 24.

I have my NaNo plan. The next challenge is to go back through several of my Project Notebooks going back at least to 1999 and extracting from them the scenarios I'll be putting into Book 3 (and the ones I haven't yet used in Book 2 as well). Once I put those in, I'll add the new scenes necessary to connect them. This time I'm shooting for 100,000 words instead of the usual 60,000+, since it's a big book, I have the outline already prepared since 2000, and so many scenes have already been plotted.

I'll be upping the frequency of posts here, and on my other blogs as well. You can keep track of my progress here and on Twitter. Stay tuned...

America as a Fanatic Cult: Inside Spanner Book 2

The article: Nihilism Comes To America (CounterOrder)

The trope: EagleLand. It comes in two flavors, positive and negative. The positive one is the official doctrine of a cult, known variously as the Civil Religion and Americanism. The negative one, for those unseduced by the religion's siren song and who therefore remain objective, is the reality.

Face it: the United States of America is not and has never been a democracy, and was never intended to be one. An offshoot of the British Empire, it is an elitist representative republic founded by slaveholding aristocrats whose desire to rise within the English nobility was blocked by the established nobles themselves. This aristocratic republic was designed by and for aristocrats who wanted to build an empire, and did so. The empire it was intended from the beginning to replace was, of course, the British.

The problem: the Imperial Paradox — external expansion leads, directly and invariably, to internal decline.

The solution: save the American Empire by overthrowing the liberal oligarchic republic with a conservative dictatorship based on the cult of the nation. In other words, the Empire overthrows the Republic. In the Spanner backstory, this is called the Conservative Revolution. Its stronghold is the white-dominated rural "flyover country" sentimentalized as the Ideal by the national cult. Its predominantly urban opponents simply call it "the coup".

The cult does not just claim that the United States Federal Government is the Second Coming of Christ. It deifies a national narcissism that has its individual counterpart in the narcissism celebrated by the cult of celebrity as relentlessly marketed by the "fashion-industrial complex" (FIC). Spanner Book 2's "Pretty City Arc" focuses on the FIC and what it stands for.

The name of Book 2 is "Rage of the Prophets". This is what happens when the two factions of the all-powerful Conservative Revolutionary Party start feuding over which elite "is" America: the Empire's Corporate owners, or the priesthood of the Church of America, the national cult? The article linked above will help you understand the underlying issues. So will this article, in which Chris Hedges explains that the narcissistic American cult of "Rugged Individualism" is incompatible with not just freedom but America's survival itself. The Empire is destroying the nation.

This is part of the background of Spanner Book 2. I'm finishing the first draft for JulNoWriMo '11, and I'll post the first installment on October 23. Watch for it!

Spanner Preview: Slice

Here’s a scenario I’ve taken from my early-’00s Project Notebooks for Spanner Book 2 as a NaNoWriMo preview, featuring main character Shira Thomas and her gorgeous Irish girlfriend Leila Shelley, with mention of Shira’s Buddhist cousin Karen Kubota and Team Spanner’s “tagalong kid/token loli” Aira Izumi. I added the surf rock soundtrack just today in a fit of sudden inspiration. I hope you like it!

Spanner Book 2 NaNoWriMo Preview: “Slice”

“KIRU YUUUUUUU!”

As Dick Dale wails on surf guitar on the stereo in the background, the giant yakuza Slice charges Shira with katana held high to slice her in half, screaming “KIRU YUUUUUUU!” Shira stands in his way, like the matador waits for the bull. The sword comes down, Shira slips away, the sword lodges in a wooden cabinet. Shira slips out the rec room door into the kitchen and slams it shut. Slice wrests his blade out of the wood and speeds toward the kitchen door, heedless of anything standing in his way.

“KIRU YUUUUUUU!!!”

Slice smashes through the door and trips over Shira’s outstretched leg, falling hard onto his face and rock-hard belly, katana stretched out before him. When he looks in front of him, he sees a pair of beautiful bare legs in blue tennis shoes. Leila stands above him in her blue sailor-girl school uniform.

The huge hitman bounces to his feet and raises his sword over Leila. “KIRU YUUUUUU!” She does not move; her violet eyes bore deep into his. He brings the sword down as hard as he can.

Leila catches the sword in a naked blade capture.

She holds the blade motionless between her hands and continues to stare hard into his eyes. He struggles to free his katana from her hands, but she does not budge and neither does the sword. With ever greater force he tries to force the sword out of her hands.

She breaks the blade off at the hilt and runs him through with it.

Slice looks down in shock at the katana blade sticking out of his gut, and then at the beauty who broke it. “K’sohhhhh...” he moans. He falls over onto his back, dead.

Leila rushes over to Shira and kisses her deeply on the lips. “Are you all right, love?”

Shira sighs. “There goes our big bounty...”

“I”d rather lose a lot of money than risk losing you, love. Let's go.” Leila kisses her gently.

Shira looks down at the dead yakuza. “Let’s just hope Ai-chan’s safe.” She sets her Droid Mega to send a GPS signal to Karen as Leila leads her by the hand toward the front door. Soon they will resume their search for Aira in hopes of finding her alive.

Go to the Spanner Page for the rest of the story so far!

Copyright © 2010 Dennis Jernberg. Some rights reserved.

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.

Bad Company Preview #2: Chapter 1

Last entry, I posted the opening scene of Bad Company as a preview. I hope I opened it with a bang. Now here's the first part of Chapter 1, introducing one of the two main characters: Charlie Thomas (a woman), a troubled pop singer who can no longer sing. The other main character is her sister Desiree, who runs away from their tyrannical mother, cult guru and fascist stage mother Drusilla Becket. Now what does all this have to do with Dictel Corporation? Drusilla herself is the direct connection at first, as she's the youngest of the nine Becket siblings who own the company. She has no role in the actual running of the company — it's the three oldest brothers who actually run the company, and especially the eldest, Colonel Tom Becket — but as a channeller and cult guru, she is the spiritual leader of the clan.

So here's the opening to Chapter 1 of Bad Company, still unfinished in the second draft. (Bad Company excerpt © Dennis Jernberg)

Bad Company Preview #1: Prologue

I haven't posted lately because I've suffered a bad case of writer's block for the past 11 days. It's finally broken now, so I'm able to write again, and post on forums and my blogs.

Now down to business. To give something of the flavor of Bad Company, I've decided to post excerpts of the prologue and first chapter. First, here's the novel's opening, in the version from the currently unfinished second draft. If there's a vague resemblance to, say, the 1999 Seattle anti-WTO riots, there's a reason for that which I'll explain later. (Bad Company excerpt © 2008 Dennis Jernberg)