News You Can Bruise for 2012 January 3

(1) Tue Jan 03 2012 08:49 CG Author Commentary #5: "The Stars My Screensaver": Yeah, you know it's getting serious now. The microblog archive is up, I'm feeling good and it's time for some commentary:

• The chapter title is one of my favorites, and I'm proud of so many lines in this chapter. I especially like "The aliens are not a dessert," the Paperwork Reduction Act line I used as last week's teaser, and Curic's unintentional poem about the nebula. I didn't realize until after I'd sold the book that the odd line breaks I used for Curic (meant to convey the rhythm of her native language) turn everything she says on IM into free verse.
• Ariel's older brother Raphael has been mentioned several times before, but I forgot to talk about him. Because there's not much to say. He never shows up in the novel except in stories Ariel tells about when they were kids. But I needed to establish Raph's existence so it's not a big surprise when Ariel pulls out those stories.

  In my mind, Raph is now an economist for the IMF or something. His parents are very proud, Ariel less so.

• The Bureau of Extraterrestrial Affairs first showed up in "Vanilla". It was presented as less sinister and more farcical, mainly because the protagonist of "Vanilla" is in a good position to manipulate the BEA, and Ariel is not.
• Want to know something hilarious? In the first version of this chapter (second draft), BEA agents Krakowski and Fowler didn't even have names. In his blog, Ariel called them Good Cop and Bad Cop, after their roles in this initial conversation. My writing group raised an enormous stink about this, and eventually Ariel made up ridiculous fake cop-show aliases: Krakowski and Tonsil. But as the second draft progressed and the BEA agents became essential to the plot, I found it harder and harder to have a character named "Tonsil" deliver important lines.

  Also, I'd never given them personalities. You couldn't tell who was talking. It was awful. Writing group conversation: "Why do you even have two of them?" "Well, they're Men in Black, there's always two of them..."

  After completing the second draft I considered a number of ways of distinguishing the characters, including making Krakowski a woman. That didn't happen, not least because it would turn Krakowski/Fowler into Scully/Mulder. But out of that thought process and the Good Cop/Bad Cop thing came the distinction I went with. (Highlight to reveal spoiler:) Fowler is everything Ariel hates: a reactionary thug getting by on his charm and connections. Krakowski is basically the same person as Ariel: an outsider, a xenophile, smart and driven. But Krakowski and Fowler have the exact same job.

• I'm pretty sure 9/11 didn't happen in this universe (and at this point you might be able to guess why not), but there's a Department of Homeland Security anyway. Go figure.
• One of my favorite feelings when writing is the realization that you can reuse a detail that earlier was merely incidental. "Limited Nuclear Exchange" is just a random game reference in this chapter, but much later in the book I needed to write a tense conversation between Ariel and Jenny, so I set the conversation during an LNE session and fleshed out the game: a board game, a cross between Twilight Struggle and Twilight Imperium that takes half an hour just to set up and generally ends abruptly with both players losing.

  That's a small example, but in a couple chapters there's another offhand reference that greatly shaped one of the most important scenes in the book. Watch for it! Specifically, watch for me pointing it out.

• At the end of this chapter you see exactly the thing Krakowski is afraid of at the beginning: a race to the bottom. Once one country opens up to the Constellation, the united front crumbles. How long until the USA acquiesces to the alien anarchists' demands in exchange for access? Not long at all, considering I need to keep the plot moving.

And there's the commentary. Stay glued to the proverbial set for chapter 7, when Ariel will say, "Well, her hardware's Chinese..."

Image credits: Gisela Giardino, The United States Department of State, and the East German postal service.

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