Spanner R5 #amediting Update: Chapter 1 Is Done! (again... for now...)

Okay, I claimed that a few months ago. But after a few months' break, including FAWM and my first NaPoWriMo, I went back to the Chapter 1 HTML page and took another long look at it. I got a few new ideas in the intervening months and edited them in. I got some really cool ideas while editing (e.g. the fedora Willa stole from Henry Becket back in 1992 when they divorced) and threw them in. I found a couple continuity errors and corrected them. Then I made a few more tweaks. And now, for the second time, I can declare Chapter 1 done.

Except for that "for now" part. You see, I've finally started actually writing Book 0, Banned in Japan. I've plotted several scenes for the first two chapters and am working on an overall plot that will fit in the continuity of Book 1 Revision 5. Turns out Steve Jobs is not the first "posthumous man" Shira assassinates, and they're called "Ascended", and she takes out two more Ascended in the course of Book 0, and one of them was the killer guru responsible for the 1995 Tokyo subway nerve gas attacks bombings. And even he isn't the first Ascended she takes out, only the first she takes out in the series. Ostensibly Shira's there as an exchange student; however, she's really there on a contract, to kill a ghost.

Book 0 also introduces some characters who appear later in Book 1, possibly later. Previously existing characters who now debut here: baka-boy gangster Koji Mizoguchi, "world's worst kogal" Nenene Sasakawa, loli slavegirl Ayla Izumi (whom Shira rescues here), deranged detective Locke Holmes, the Tachibana sisters with mother Umi and cute male cousin Seika, and some of the major characters whom I couldn't leave out. Jennifer, both before and after the Blake Island incident, gets some side scenes and phone calls; Karen gets introduced as Shira's counterpoint (the teenage female Victor Laszlo); Henry Becket gets his first scene in the first chapter, in which as Secretary of National Security he browbeats the American ambassador to Japan and strongly hints that he does the same to the Secretary of State back home; Shira's dad Ric appears on tour with a Band with No Name side project (in Book 1 he makes his first appearance in Chapter 3); and others I'll likely fit in. An idea just popped into my head at just this moment: might Debbie be there too, trying to be something of a blond teenage female Golgo 13 only to find out her target is a ghost? And of course Leila, who plays such a central role in every subsequent book in the series as love interest and deuteragonist, should hover over the prequel as an "absent presence" at least mentioned every chapter and already clearly Shira's obsession.

Oh, and the chapters are numbered -13 to 0, with Interlude 0 ("Foregone Conclusions") coming before Chapter 0.

So as the plot of Book 0 develops, I'm bound to make a few more edits to Chapter 1. In fact, I just realized there's one edit I need to make now: the one about Shira having already killed three targets like Steve Jobs — that is, three Ascended. And so a-#amediting I go again...

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 R5 Update: Putting the Axe to Chapter 2 (with 2.2 now complete)

At last, I've begun editing Spanner Chapter 2! 2.2 turned out to be surprisingly easy to edit, so I finished it first, complete with new scenes. The next order of business is 2.1, which follows directly on the events of Chapter 1 and continues its threads, including scenes starring Leila (dating back as far as Revision 2) and Ariel (a new opening for the final version). Like I said, I finished 2.2 first because I found it easy, even to cut down the original scene ("Ghost Hunting" from Revision 1) so I could add the new ones — and "What Shira Knows", the interrogation scene I originally wrote for 2.3 and then moved to 2.1 for R4; and even that scene I made major changes to, echoing the similar scene in 16.1.

I'm editing 2.1 next because the scenes I keep in and the order I put them in will determine the order of scenes from 2.3 to the end of the chapter. These are the new scenes I'm adding:

1. "Ariel's Vision": Leila's aunt, the hot witch with the white-striped black hair, induces a vision that puts Chapter 1's Spanner Incident in its wider context, subtly foreshadows future events, introduces the theme of fate vs. freedom, and reveals the true reason why she's become archenemy to the Beckets and especially Drusilla — and that just happens to involve the Holy Grail.
2. "Message from the Evil One": the ghost of Osama bin Laden wimp-shames America. Only his smirking face will be visible.
3. "Introducing the Beckets": a little three-paragraph exposition that does exactly what the title says: introduce the ruling clan.
4. "Tender Enemies": the videophone call in which Willa taunts her ex-husband Henry Becket, which I mentioned last post.
5. "Get Ready for the Bad Endings": a scene removed from Chapter 1 (1.2 in R2, 1.4 in R3 and R4) to become the heroes' own retrospective on the Spanner Incident. It still introduces the "Bad Endings" described in detail in Interlude 10. To fit it in its final place, I'll have to cut it down pretty severely.
6. "Great Nike Is Not Pleased": the corporation that owns the monopoly on all sports and their arenas (Madison Square Garden during the Spanner Incident) reveals itself as the incarnation of its namesake goddess (the Greek goddess of victory) and tries to attack Shira in her own dreamspace only to discover that in dreamspace, Shira's power is equal to hers. The myth behind this scene, one of the series' two core myths (the Theomachy, or the War of the Gods, with the Olympian generation of gods now under siege from an upstart new generation: humanity itself), will be made explicit in 2.3, by none other than Ariel.
7. "The Call" and "The Arrival": Shira gets a call on the flight home from her mother's nemesis, Teachers Guild president Dr. Jenna Hunter, and accepts her offer to be a college-student tutor at Metropolitan Seattle's toughest school, Bangor High. Once in Seattle, she and her cousins (and niece and sister) meet Willa and Angela outside the airport terminal only to be interrupted by police agents Sparks and Kowalczyk, leading into "What Shira Knows". In fact, these two scenes are the original reason I decided to move "What Shira Knows" from 2.1 R4 into 2.2.

The appearances of Spanner and Rebel, which I originally built 2.1 around in R2, will remain, along with the villains' post-Incident follow-up meeting, which in their current (post-R4) state consist of three different scenes I need to combine into one. Other than that, just as I mentioned last post, 2.1 will be vastly different from even the R4 version.

Once I've straightened out 2.1, I'll bring back Ariel in 2.3 to give Shira a Tarot card reading (of the story itself, actually, and her role in it) and introduce the first of the nameless women (the beautiful tall barista who used to be an Olympic swimmer and claims to be a psychologist). 2.3, 2.4, and 2.5 should also be easier to edit once I've finalized the scene order of 2.1. The remaining big challenge then will be 2.6: instead of just following the Shira-Sparks sequence with the "Henry Becket and his psychic-seer mother" scene the way I did in R4, I'm going to cinematically intercut them into a single climactic sequence consisting of as many as five threads, one of them introducing major villain Byron Scofield.

The work has begun at last. And I'm beginning to believe I can finish this chapter before Christmas...

Post-NaNoWriMo Spanner R5 Update: The Many, Many Changes of Chapter 2

Now that NaNoWriMo 2013 is over and won, it's time to return to the really, really Herculean task: editing the final publication draft of Spanner. Now that I'm done with Chapter 1, it's time for me to move on to Chapter 2.

Chapter 2 has been more or less the same through three drafts. I didn't do more than add scenes and do continuity corrections to the Revision 4 version. Not so in the final version. It's already vastly different. Since in its current state it's nearly twice its proper size, I'll be throwing out scenes I thought would be permanent. A lot of the scenes are entirely new. Here's the changes I have planned so far:

• Willa Taunts Becket: in a videophone call. Ex-spouses Henry Becket and Willa Richter-Thomas have been bitter enemies since their one-month marriage in 1992. She has a special fondness for taunting the humorless old bully. Major themes invoked: fate/destiny and the death of capitalism. New.
• Women with No Name: three new scenes introducing three characters whose first R4 appearance was in Chapter 12 with one retconned into 10.1 just because I was short of my desired word count. Sure enough, they demanded I put their real debuts in Chapter 2. Over the next 2-3 chapters they'll explain (and not in a single chunk of exposition) just how they manage to have no names at all yet be some of the most vivid and individual characters in the whole series. And they have relevant new backstory too. And this is partly because of what I found happening to major character Leila in R4: the moment in Chapter 12 she went permanently nameless, she became a stronger character than she was when she had a name. In fact, she became her own person; because of this, after that moment, "the girl with the violet eyes" will never go by a name again — and for R5 she insists on taking away her sister's and twin brother's names too, because she loves them so much, especially because she doesn't want Brinkman to forcibly marry Fiona to the evil Oliver in her place. (Actually, one of the nameless women, the blond rockergirl, does that in the R5 plan for Chapter 7. But that's later...) New.
• Shira vs. Sparks: The final Shira/Sparks sequence "The Dangerous Type" (formerly the title of just 2.6, now the name of the entire chapter) is now a full-blown confrontation between two people on opposite sides of the Law, one trying to catch the other, who are highly attracted to each other. Sparks is still a villain until Shira lowers the WHAM! that destroys his world, as carefully reconstructed as his face. Even their flashbacks are now weapons. Shira makes his head spin just from the sheer number of names she's got, surrounding her like an obscuring cloud or nimbus (I swiped the metaphor from Henry James, incidentally, though he was describing rumors rather than aliases). Intercut with the "Becket's mother" sequence I added to the end of Chapter 2 for R4, it now makes for a strong conclusion complete with triple cliffhanger. Revised.
• Rebel Styles and the Dying Patriarchs: Now the child-succubus videogirl kills one of them at the end of every section except the last, which will be the new introduction to major villain Byron Scofield. To the mystically minded villains, Rebel's the "Babalon" to Spanner's "Choronzon", and they know Shira's somehow connected to both. Revised.
• Norma Jean Presley: the alleged daughter of Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley and the cult object of a schismatic Church of Elvis sect in Japan. I created this character while the two celebrities were a married couple for a short time back in the 1990s. Now I've brought her back, and she starts seriously haunting Shira here, this ghost of a celebrity who never was. Added.
• The Cults of Mammon and America: Wasn't America supposed to be the nation of the Enlightenment? Not according to the Corporate aristocrats and the Patriot warrior caste of the Conservative Revolution. They turned America into as fanatically religious a nation as the Caliphate itself. This, of course, will ultimately backfire. Theme now foregrounded in R5.

Several of the major scenes, some of which go back all the way to the first draft, will still remain more or less intact, intercut or not. In fact, the core and title scene of 2.2 ("Ghost Hunting") will probably stay the same as ever, with a few tweaks here and there. But the old scenes won't dominate the new chapter, or at least they won't make it in untransformed. The final continuity requires many changes, enough that Chapter 2 will come out a completely different beast.

And so the great work resumes...

NaNoWriMo 2013: In Which I Shoot for Consecutive Victory #8

It's that time of the year. NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow. Since I've been offline most of the last month or two, one would figure I haven't bothered to come up with a novel to win with. Not true! Unlike last year, I've got a very strong idea of what to do.

It's called Freefall. It starts and ends with the first-person villain protagonist falling to his death off a skyscraper. The all-important Dramatic Question: how did Eddie van O get himself thrown off the top of a skyscraper? The answer involves ex-wife Kelly with whom he has a passionate love-hate relationship, a would-be restorer of the tyranny destroyed at the end of Spanner Book 5 name of Martin Becket, various Spanner special guest stars, Eddie's long career as a hitman turned secret policeman turned hitman, and a city population that refuses to act like idiots just because villains Martin Becket and Eddie van O assume they are by definition.

Freefall is a far more straightforward thriller than I've attempted so far, though it's plenty convoluted. I was getting bored by all the moralistic conventional thrillers featuring government connected heroes who are cops or something similar and battling evil terrorists and serial killers and other stock supervillains on that order. Well, I decided to go noir on the ANSI Standard Thriller establishment and pit the serial killer against the terrorist. And they both lose because their Author has vowed to avoid David Brin's definition of the Idiot Plot. Roger Ebert coined the term to mean the all-too-common Hollywood plot that cannot progress unless the protagonists act like idiots. Brin's version is the one where all the bystanders act like idiots so the heroes can be heroic, also a standard Hollywood bad habit and one of the central conventions of the ANSI Standard Thriller, replicating the professional class's typically technocratic contempt for the working masses. And so we have our two stuck-up professionals, the professional killer and the professional mercenary, trying to bring back the good old days of Spanner's Conservative Revolution when the common people were required by law to be idiots, a requirement backed by brute force inflicted by professional thugs such as Eddie van O and Martin Becket. And the people have not forgotten. Specifically the people of Seattle, the city trashed by the Conservative Revolutionary terrorist Rev. Byron Scofield in Spanner Book 2, who takes over at the end of Chapter 23 (and Book 1) when Rev. Luke Everson of the infamous Fearsome Foursome and ultimately gets killed by — Eddie van O.

I'm taking a different approach to writing this time. Instead of using trusty old MS Word, I'm writing it in the heavy-duty text editor Vim in a wiki-derived text format called Markdown. Vim makes writing Markdown documents easy by allowing you to collapse and expand all the text contained under a heading. And to edit it I won't be using yWriter5; I'll stick with Vim and endure its considerable learning curve so I can tap its awesome power; and I suspect this will be the fastest edit job I've ever done.

Simultaneously, I'm doing the first preliminary work on an interactive fiction (text adventure) game called Dead City Radio, which is a prequel to Freefall containing many of the same characters and incorporating a "wide open sandbox" structure and multiple endings only one of which (called the "canon ending") leads into Freefall. And you can be sure I'll throw any ideas for Spanner I get this NaNo into their yWriter5 projects, the last three of which (for Books 3, 4, and 5) I'll have to create.

*takes deep breath* NaNo victory number eight, coming up! Here goes...

Spanner R5 Update: Chapter 1 Almost Perfect, Just One Brand New Scene to Go

I thought it would take just one pass. I found myself going back and forth through Chapter 1 making major changes to a lot of scenes and then making tweak after tweak after little tweak until now it's all but perfect. All the typos and continuity errors are fixed, all the foreshadowing and revealing character moments inserted, all the words made right. I even converted all the dream and vision sequences into embedded poems, simply because I got bored with just italicized and double-indented narrative prose that looks like I copypasted it out of a nonfiction book on dreams, and because I found I can write dreams and visions better when they're in formatted free verse.

All this means: I'm finally finished editing Chapter 1! The final edit on it's almost done! Except for one scene: the new opening.

This new opening is formatted like a movie or TV script. I call it the "Propaganda Reel". Filmed, it's the bombastic opening to a patriotic superhero cartoon, with America itself the ultimate superhero, far greater than even the series' (antagonist) superhero team the Liberators. It's full of Hollywood Blockbuster bombast and the utter lack of originality caused by studio-enforced rigid conformity to Blake Snyder's Save the Cat! beat sheet. I realized I could map Christopher Vogler's hero's journey beat sheet to the Snyder template so that the Reel spins out an entire hero's journey for main antagonist Henry Becket (costumed as the superhero American Crusader in the Reel) telling of his 9/11/01-12/21/12 rise as he would have us see it in just 7-800 words of script, with the series itself being in part the tragedy of his fall, his fatal flaws being self-righteousness (an ever present danger for superheroes) and paranoia (a flaw that reaches deep into his backstory). The Reel's soundtrack is a pounding and bombastic military-metal theme song inspired by such songs as the G.I. Joe cartoon theme "A Great American Hero" and "America, Fuck Yeah!" from Team America: World Police. The Reel's plot? The deeply fascistic "Annihilation Plot" of Fort Apache and the movie version of World War Z.

The whole Propaganda Reel serves as an ironic counterpart to Chaos Angel Spanner itself, whose main plot commences with the first scene, Shira's defiant trash-talking videoblog post (and the plasma disruptor her brand new unlicensed 3D printer is building up). What better to show just what Shira and her friends and allies are up against? And Becket's actual appearances in the story reveal that he just might not be the hero he thinks he is; he might even be what his ex-wife and nemesis Willa (Shira's Rocker psychologist aunt) calls him, a mad-scientist villain who thinks he's the only sane man left alive.

One more scene left. I'll take a break to give the muse a rest (unless of course she has no intention of resting), and then I'll attack. One more scene...

Spanner R5 Update: Chipping Away at Chapter 1, plus Those Women with No Name

One by one I've been chipping away at the remaining unedited scenes in Spanner Chapter 1. Most of them need only a few edits to put them in line with the final continuity, or bring out something more in a character, or just to fix up the language. I even changed the name of the new character in the flashback sequence (from Oscar Ribeiro a.k.a. Blackflag to the cooler-sounding Rico X). I still haven't taken on those difficult large scenes at the beginning and end, but I'm getting ever closer.

Also, I'm skipping back and forth among the chapters to edit here and there. Some scenes need just a little tweak to bring them fully into continuity. Others I'm putting into other chapters entirely, including nearly everything featuring Revision 4 newcomer Dr. Mina Tatsumi. I'm even inserting scenes I left out of previous versions, including one or two I intended to put in the incomplete Revision 1 but never got far enough to write.

One major revision surprised me. I came up with the thread about women with no name while I was in the middle of rewriting Chapter 12 for the Fourth Revision. Three major characters (love interest Leila, reporter Amanda, and Desiree's long-lost daughter Lucie) abandoned their names (in Chapters 12-13, 16, and 19 respectively) after that. Turns out my muse had bigger plans for R5. Now the nameless Asian woman who first appears in Chapter 12 of R4 makes her R5 debut in Chapter 2 as the new manager of the apartment building Shira lives in, the FEMEN scenes I threw into Chapters 22 and 23 now feature the master nudefighters who emerged out of the suppression of the topless-feminist group by Eastern European governments during the Conservative Revolution (and their first local recruit when they get to Seattle is none other than the now nameless Amanda), and the tall brown-haired woman I retconned into the Chapter 10 opening introduce the nameless women is the direct connection between them. The nameless-women thread has become a major thread in the series, precisely because Leila decided to erase her name — the original idea the whole thread grew from.

One thing I never really got around to in my haste to finish R4 was create full profiles for the nameless women. The "contextual list of descriptive tags" they replace their names with are in fact a significant subset of their character profiles, the part that conforms to rules now explained by the nameless Asian woman in Chapter 3. So, thesaurus in hand, I set out to compile the "name" lists for several characters: the aforementioned nameless woman (whose former name is now completely unknown, something she took great pains to ensure), her brown-haired and blond roommates, Shira (who never truly loses her name(s) but has a complex and fascinating profile), Leila, her twin brother Rob and younger sister Fiona, Lucie, and others. In fact, I'm going to do the same for major characters who keep their names throughout the entire series, precisely because I'll be developing their profiles to make them better characters.

One character I threw in late in Revision 4 I decided to throw back out of Revision 5: Shira's long-lost twin sister Kira, who's now back to the R3 plan in which I was going to save her for a major plot point of the Pretty City Arc in the middle of Book 2.

And so the editing continues. Now back to editing those two tough scenes in Chapter 1...

Spanner R4 Update: The Structure of Chapter 14

So here's what I'm doing in Spanner Chapter 14: I'm taking the original scenes from the Second Revision version that I haven't moved to earlier chapters, adding some new scenes, and embedding flashbacks in them, largely condensed from earlier chapters in Book 1 and the still unwritten Book 0. Some flashbacks will give some of the backstory behind "Anonymity Is Freedom", "The Return of Alice Company", "Lucie's Escape", and other threads new to Revision 4. This flashback episode is all about context building, and the chapter that needs all this new context most is Chapter 15.

It maps something like this:

main scene
   flashback
   flashback
      flashback
main scene

...and so on. That's just a sample of what I'm doing. Instead of giving the date of each flashback (too hard a task, really; that in itself could take a month or even a year), I'm going to introduce each flashback sequence with the label "flashback", or "scenario" (a term I took from my Project Notebooks) for hypothetical scenes used as if they were flashbacks.

As for the scenes themselves: I'll be condensing some of those still left from the far simpler Revision 2 version, then putting new flashbacks in them. I'll expand a few scenes. A few I've already transferred in from other chapters, such as the Project Notebook scene in which Leila hugs a lonely Asian girl — though I'm greatly expanding that so that the girl is now Daisy Kwon, and back in 2013 she was one of the ninja girls who fought alongside Alice Company against the invading horde led by Emir Yusuf Kony, and Jennifer was the company's platoon commander: a simple scene I recorded in the Notebooks is now far more complex and incorporates the new R4 thread. In a new scene, the cute monfighter boy Akane reveals to her that he knows her by her Korean-Japanese name (Hinagiku Kon) and hero-worships her; she scorns him because he hasn't faced evil head-on, and he replies, yes he has: Mark Bernkastel from Chapters 4 and 5 — his stepfather. And he'll be the one to give Shira or Jennifer the latest revision of the Demon-Summoning Program from Digital Devil Story, which has Lovecraftian connections that point right back to the archvillain Henry Becket and also brings into the story for the first time the real-life hacker subculture of Chaos Magick. I'm currently pursuing trains of thought like this; you don't have to understand any of it yet.

So, the structure will be pretty complex. If it resembles anything, it'll be the experimental Interludes, as if they were exploding into the main narrative. There will, of course, be some shocking revelations. I've been expecting to take a long time structuring it, but if some of those Interludes are any indication, I could very possibly whip it out in a frenzy of inspiration. Stay tuned...

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: Chapter 14, the Clip Episode with Extra WHAM!

Every fan of Babylon 5 and many other series is familiar with the Wham Episode, dedicated to the shocking plot twist. Now Spanner has more than enough WHAM! to satisfy any plot-twist addict, and I've spent extra time putting more WHAM! into the Fourth Revision, particularly Chapter 1, where the WHAM! (the Spanner Incident, to be exact) is what kicks off the plot in the first place.

Then there's the Japanese TV tradition of the Recap Episode, which sums up the story so far for those who came to the story late. (There's a specific reason for this that has to do with Japanese broadcasting which I won't get into right now.)

Problem: how do you plot a Recap Episode so that it becomes a Wham Episode? It sounds difficult, and it is — but it's been done before. Case in point: episode 33 of Revolutionary Girl Utena. The trick is to add a little something which will change the context of everything. Trickiest of all is doing it in such a way so that Chapter 14 will make, say, Chapters 2 and 3 look like Innocuously Important Episodes in comparison, and still be overshadowed by the major-league WHAM! of Chapter 15.

I'm going to keep roughly to the outline of the Third Revision. I'll remove some scenes, condense others, send others to earlier chapters, all to make room for the context-changing flashbacks to earlier chapters. I'll still keep certain of the new Fourth Revision scenes, but the main plot is there mostly to structure the flashbacks and add the extra context needed to prepare for Chapter 15.

The first flashback-oriented episode is Chapter 9, which tells Shira's and Leila's backstories in a way intended to drive them apart but only brings them closer together. In fact, I'm going to scatter a lot of flashbacks in Chapters 10-13, of both the backstory variety used in Chapter 5 and the context-changing kind I'm now using Chapter 14 for. By the time Chapter 15 begins, you'll realize that much of what you knew before turns out to have been wrong.

An extra character bonus comes in the assault on the gang meeting at Oliver's property. Turns out Leila was part of a couple with a bit of a "Bonnie and Clyde" reputation, and her boyfriend was Frank Becket, police chief Jack's gangster son and classmate Debbie's older brother. But now, though they still share some nihilistic-sounding premises, Leila has grown from a nihilist into a more optimistic existentialist, while Frank has remained a nihilist. This comes out during their katana duel:

Frank: What happened to you, Leila? Where's the heartless bitch I fell in love with? You've gone weak!
Leila: I grew up. Why won't you?

Of course one issue Frank has with Leila now is that she's fallen in love with a girl, a dark-skinned one at that, and he thinks it's gross. And Shira is no nihilist; philosophically, she's an "ethical slut" hedonist.

There's new character Dr. Mina Tatsumi's escape from the madhouse and army of Yakuza-girl clones, and there's the whole "Fujoshi Paradise" sequence that needs restructured, condensed, and ultimately turned into a thread which should start in Chapter 5. But first I need to completely restructure Chapter 14. The fine details come later.

Spanner R4 Update: Chapter 4 - The Meeting at Mudlark House, Take 1

Believe it or not, there's three versions of the pivotal meeting at Mudlark House in Spanner Chapter 4, and they're all unsatisfactory. One, they don't have enough of the characters; two, the plan's still too explicit like in a heist movie; three, there's not enough ominous foreshadowing. The versions are those from the Third Revision, the initial Fourth Revision outline, and the Script Frenzy script.

In addition to host Willa and her teenage relatives involved in organizing the Student Union that plays such a pivotal role in the School Arc between Chapters 5 and 21, Hope has brought several disgruntled teachers who, unlike her (and the three sexy librarians who serve as mentors to the Student Union activists), have not been purged from the Teachers Guild — yet. Problem: the Guild is using the Conservative Revolution as an excuse to transform itself from a workers' organization into a private employment services corporation which its management hope they can list on the stock exchange. Bigger problem: it's the Guild that owns the private Seattle Public Education Corporation that's already notorious for treating both teachers and students so contemptuously. Shira announces she'll be going "into the belly of the beast", meaning she plans to undermine SPEC from within.

I guess this scene will have to work like the ones in heist movies — in fact, the TV version in its final form should be in part a homage to heist movies, and to those war movies in which the heroic raiders work out their plan to, for example, bomb the bridge over the River Kwai or the Nazi gun emplacements at Navarone. But this being Chaos Angel Spanner rather than, say, Topkapi or Inglourious Basterds, anything can happen and every plan requires a Plan B. Shira's tagline is, after all, "expect the unexpected". Point and counterpoint: to properly set up the School Arc, I will need to contrast the flexibility of Shira and her crew (the future Team Spanner) with the pointed inflexibility of the management within the "revolutionary government" of SPEC. The meetings at Mudlark House and SPEC headquarters should reveal two completely opposite worldviews, the Populism and Corporatism that will clash head-on in Chapters 22 and 23, once the School Arc has come to its explosive conclusion.

There will be two more scenes related to the Mudlark House and SPEC meetings: the emergency meeting at Drusilla's cult complex to determine the succession to the chairmanship of Biotron after Shira's delivery to Dr. Thorwald blows up; and a Socialist Revolutionary terrorist action involving hostage taking and, well, a meeting to plan an even more audacious action, this time aimed at SPEC and its chairman, Peter Ross.

Ah, Peter Ross. I'm going to give him a character arc like the infamous "Papa Doc" Duvalier who started as a doctor and ended as a genocidal dictator. Ross started as a teacher whose politics were pretty liberal and who was a friend of the even more liberal Hope Reston. Now he's a militantly corrupt neoconservative Corporate, and Hope is his radical nemesis. But he personally blacklisted her, so her daughter Shira Thomas will have to serve as her point man. In Chapter 6, Ross reveals just how unamused he is.

Now back to crafting the Mudlark House scene. I want it to work, so I need to get it right.

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...

Script Frenzy 2012: In Which He Attempts to Script a Visual Novel

NaNoEdMo 2012 is now finished, though my fourth draft of Spanner isn't. But now Script Frenzy has begun. And lo, what did I decide but to abandon my original plan to adapt a new batch of Spanner chapters into TV episodes in order to flirt with a new obsession: the visual novel.

What is a visual novel? It's something like a videogame version of a "Choose Your Own Adventure" novel that's recently become huge in Japan. Actually, the form is older than you think, and it didn't even start on any computer system. It dates back to the 1985 laserdisc arcade game Thayer's Quest, whose creator had the "Choose Your Own Adventure" novels specifically in mind because, well, how else do you translate the experience of Ultima or the Atari 2600 Adventure on a laserdisc system? But though the storytelling has improved greatly in the ensuing decades (just compare Thayer's Quest and the rest of the Kingdom series to, say, When They Cry or Fate/stay night), the actual gameplay system has not. Visual novel elements have been incorporated into various adventure game genres (e.g. the "conversation" scenes in the Persona series). But considering how in writing Spanner I've been mutating the political thriller genre far beyond the ANSI Standard Thriller Format, I can see that this game genre that hasn't really changed since the days of laserdisc arcade games, I can't help but try to push its limits to the breaking point too. I'm already mulling possible minigames, say, puzzle games, hidden-object games, SCUMM-language point-and-click adventures...

But I won't be concerned with that this month, not really. During Script Frenzy, my primary concern is with the script. And with its translation into an open source game system called Ren'Py. The Ren'Py site explains:

Ren'Py is a free and cross platform engine for digital storytelling. It makes it easy to combine words, images, and sounds to create visual novels and life simulation games.

Visual novels are computer-based stories that are told through words, images, sounds, and music. Many visual novels also present the player with menu choices that allow the player to control how the story is told.

Ren'Py's script language makes it easy to write visual novels, and other writing-heavy games. It's easy to learn, and scales well to the largest projects. Even without customization, Ren'Py provides the features players have come to expect from their visual novels.

Life Simulation games, such as management and dating sims, are more interactive games that mix story with gameplay. Ren'Py's screen language allows one to create complex interfaces, while its support for the Python scripting language makes allows for complex game logic, if that's what your project requires.

Now, Ren'Py's scripting language doesn't look like the standard script formats used for movies, TV shows, comics, and stage plays. Furthermore, you can add Python scripts to your visual novel's main Ren'Py script (that's the "Py" part), many of which are available online but none of which I'll add to my Script Frenzy page count even if I write some myself.

And my first visual novel? It's called The Jennifer Theory. It has nothing to do with my NaNoWriMo 2006/Script Frenzy 2007 project that quickly mutated into another novel entirely, but is a graphic novel that I've been thinking about doing almost as long as Spanner itself, as a side story or (as it eventually turned out) a prequel. I'm reworking it as a visual novel. It's a thriller that wouldn't be much of a "ren'ai" (romance) game anyway (there would be only two romantic choices for Jennifer anyway, her mother [this is a Spanner Side Story] and her favorite cousin Shira, and no way would she dare choose between them). So I'm using thriller conventions to push the limits of a game genre.

So that's what I'm doing. Now to do it...

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.