Mind Bomb: A Spanner Side Story

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

Picking Up the Pace Now

I've finished all the business that's been distracting me this week (though it didn't stop me from writing and posting this first of the Spanner Side Stories). Foremost was upgrading my Internet connection from dialup (which was excruciatingly slow). Now I'm ready to get back to business at last. It's the middle of the month, and I don't want to force myself back into Panic Mode yet one more time.

What am I planning on doing this time? Writing Black Science, of course, plus a few more Spanner Side Stories. I'm also getting back to my music for 50 Songs in 90 Days (though my electric guitar problems still pose an obstacle). (And, fellow 5090ers, I'm now ready to start listening to your songs too.) And one more thing: I now intend to keep my blogs up to date. In this one, I plan to keep everybody posted on my fiction and art projects.

I've had a fairly busy month so far. Now I intend to make the second half more properly productive.

And now I throw myself back into the fray...

Destroying Angel: A Spanner Side Story

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

JulNoWriMo Day 3: A Little Setback

I wrote no words on day 2 of JulNoWriMo. Why? Because I spent too much time on the JulNo and 50/90 forums! All these Internet forums tend to distract me, especially since I'm stuck with a slow dialup connection. But I have a remedy for my problem: write myself a note!

I went online ostensibly to get some information that would help me write Black Science. That information is on Wikipedia and other sites. I didn't go there, nor did I search for any other sites related to what I wanted to write. Instead, I posted to forums and wrestled with Facebook and Twitter. And I uploaded my second photo to Flickr for the Project 365 thing (take and post a new photo a day for a year), as I relate here.

For day 3, I intend to start writing again. But I need to write myself a checklist so I can get all my research done. Then I can write. I can post to forums and wrestle with Facebook later.

And I'll have previews of the new draft of Black Science right here on this blog. Wait for it!

JulNoWriMo Day 2: Starting Again From A Standstill

I haven't written anything in my novels for two months. So it's taking me a little while to get back into the swing of things. Once again, words are trying to evade me; once again I have to chase and capture them so I can type them in Word. I may have to force the inspiration to come if necessary. Finishing Black Science won't be a cinch. This JulNoWriMo won't be easy at first.

Some of my fellow writers have a similar problem: the words don't come at the proper pace immediately. Some are slow writers anyway. The words pour out of other writers; sometimes it seems they can't even stop. I'm the kind of writer who needs to build up my pace. That's why, during any given WriMo, I do most of my writing in the second half of the month. And anyway, I've barely even started. Day 2 is early.

Current word count: 337, all in Black Science.

In site-related news: I ran out of room for tags for my blog entries. I was going to eliminate all the character tags, but that may be more trouble than I need. However, I had all these tags for individual WriMos. I condensed almost all of them into the single tag "WriMo". So you probably can't search for individual WriMos (e.g., NaNo, JulNo) anymore, but at least I have room for new tags now.

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

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

So what are my plans for JulNo '09?

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

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

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

Of course, I'll write songs.

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

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

Black Science: Preparing for JulNoWriMo

Instead of returning to Bad Company, I started a new short story (which is turning novel) instead. I'll post the first few chapters soon, and I'll inform you here (and elsewhere) when I do. Though I'm now delaying BadCoFiMo, I still plan on doing the complete rewrite of Black Science for JulNoWriMo. I'm already assembling reams of old handwritten story notes, writing new ones, and collecting a small library of books and websites as research material.

A short synopsis of Black Science, or a rough treatment for the eventual plot: After the disastrous events of Bad Company (in short: Barack Obama gets elected, and giant military corporation Dictel invades America in a futile attempt to restore Operation Permanent Republican Administration), the government psychologist Willa Richter-Thomas is confronted with a choice to either join the super soldier project at Dictel Research or get railroaded for espionage. She chooses to fight. The big question: Why does the new Democratic government want to bring back the evil corporation that tried to destroy them in 2008? The answer, in one word: Afghanistan. President Obama is escalating the Afghan war into yet another Vietnam. And the Pentagon sees Dictel as the key to victory.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bad Company: BadCoFiMo Starts Late...

After losing Script Frenzy, I took a break from the whole WriMo thing. I took May off. As it turns out, I took almost the first half of June off too. That means my "Bad Company Finishing Month" is starting late — when the month is already half over. But at least I've actually started BadCoFiMo...

I changed my BadCoFiMo plan when I started trying to insert those JanNo/FebNo scenes from their standalone files into the main manuscript. Each day during JanNoWriMo, I wrote scenes from various parts of the novel and saved them in separate files to make sure I could count the words more easily and not mess up the main file. However, some difficulties ensued when I tried to put the scenes in their proper places in the novel. So I realized that I need a new strategy:

1. Separate the chapters of the novel from the main file and put each chapter into a separate file, named in the order I find them in the main file.
2. Separate each of the JanNo and FebNo files into the separate scenes, one file per scene.
3. Organize (and, if necessary, reorganize) the files so that all the scenes are in their proper order.
4. Take out the index cards I've already used and write ideas for the missing scenes on new blank ones.
5. Map all the storylines and character arcs so that I have a better idea of those I've already written and how to write the unfinished and unwritten ones.
6. Write all the remaining unwritten scenes and put them in their proper files (new ones if necessary) in the proper order.
7. Organize the scenes and chapters again if necessary.
8. Finally, put the whole thing back together, restoring the main file with all the original and new scenes in their new order.

This should make everything a lot easier for me to write and edit, even if it's more unwieldy on my hard drive and in Word.

I still plan to finish the first complete draft this month. I've simply gotten a late start on it, as I've gotten distracted by news and opinion websites, which can get addictive...