News You Can Bruise for 2012 April 24 (entry 0)

(4) Tue Apr 24 2012 09:38 Constellation Games Author Commentary #22, "Nerfed": This chapter is bad news for Ariel but good news for me, because yesterday I got my box of author copies. That means those of you who ordered paperbacks should be getting them soon. This EXCLUSIVE SIDE COVER REVEAL shows the playtime synergies possible for those who shelled out for the Adamantium package with its USB key.

In a couple weeks I may do a special spoiler post so that those who've read the whole book can ask me questions about stuff that hasn't been serialized yet, rather than waiting until the appropriate chapter comes up in the serialization.

There's a solitary tweet in last week's microblog archive. Let's move on to the commentary:

I came into this chapter treating it like a chess problem. I had all the pieces on the board and the question was how Ariel would outsmart the BEA again, the way he did with Dana. I sat down and puzzled over this and had a long conversation with Beth trying to figure out how to get Ariel out of this scrape.

And after about forty-five minutes of being totally stumped I asked myself the obvious question: Why am I trying to get Ariel out of this?

At this point I knew how the book would end (it turns out I only knew how Part Two would end). I didn't have the plot planned out between now and then, but at some point I needed to break Ariel. This is the perfect time to start. He's stressed out from Sayable Spice work, shaken from his encounter with Her and the revelation of Curic's ambivalence. Let's just go for it.

So I destroyed Ariel's house. He tries all the clever gambits I thought of for him, and they don't work, and he loses. And that was the single best thing that ever happened to the book. From this point on the characters are developed enough that I can do whatever horrible things I want to them. They'll either figure something out and come out on top, or they'll lose, and either way it'll be interesting reading.

A lot of this week's commentary is me telling stories that are at best tangentially related to the chapter. But if that's good enough for big-name DVD commentaries, it's good enough for me:

• This was a little clearer in the third draft, but hopefully it's still clear. Something's going to happen around October 13 that makes Ariel willing to tell the truth about his house. The backdated post is a little flash-forward to the end of part two. So live in suspense! Or read the paperback, whatever.
• I got tons of pushback about Fowler's pie line in chapter 19, but apparently "That fucking snitch crate!" is A-OK.
• The Legend of the Bystander review got stuck in the beginning of this chapter because that's the last possible place it can go—after September 2 there's no more Brain Embryo. Because I placed that scene without thinking about it on a plot level, I didn't notice until just now that it creates a bizarre incongruity. Ariel keeps going back to Curic in the house-losing conversation ("You need to talk to Curic about this," "Maybe Curic can stop this."), even though he's just learned that Curic is crazy.

  I'm gonna file this under "accidental awesomeness" rather than "correctly regarded as goofs", because I think it fits in very well with what we see of the Ariel/Curic relationship. But it was totally unintentional.

  

• The missile defense joke is super inaccurate (much like missile defense itself—heyo!), but I left it in 'cause it's a funny failure mode. Inaccuracies: 1) An object with negative mass would probably look like nothing at all. 2) If that glitch did happen, the investigation would take months and a low-level State Department bureaucrat would never hear about it. 3) The port + its casing + the telepresence robot probably has a positive net mass anyway.

  The most likely in-story explanation is that Krakowski found out about Ariel's trip through old-fashioned HUMINT and is now trying to dazzle him with technobabble (a favor Ariel will return later). After all, the Constellation's not very good at keeping secrets. But I'm good at taking... Creative License.

• There's not really an "Austin Building Inspection Division" per se. Krakowski is clearly referring to the Building Inspection Division of the city's Planning and Development Review Department.
• The Greenland Treaty has been mentioned before, but now it's a done deal. Although it's mentioned several more times throughout the book, I deliberately left the details vague, because 1) who cares, and 2) if I set down the details I can't change them later to fit a future story. But non-canonically, Greenland has gained independence from Denmark and is now effectively a client state of the Hierarchy Interface overlay.
• When I took this chapter to writing group there was one person who really loved Fowler's line about using a black hole as a lathe. Yes, it's a good line. Very evocative, if I do say so myself. But this person was stuck on it. They said I should expand on that line in flashback, and spun a fantastical scene describing the port's construction, like the beginning of the Lord of the Rings movie where you see the Rings of Power being made.

  One of the rules of my writing group is that the person whose story it is doesn't talk until everyone else has given their critique. So I said nothing. But I thought: what the hell?! I can't put that in a comedy novel! It would read like Spinal Tap playing "Stonehenge"!

  I have no other complaints about this persons' critiques (they're not with the group anymore), and I've certainly delivered my share of idiosyncratic critiques. But that moment has stayed with me, perhaps because it's the kind of random obsession I expect from my characters.

• Ariel's defense of his parents' toilet-training techniques was inspired by one of my earliest memories. When my mom was training my sister Susanna, she bought bags and bags of cheap grocery-store candy to use as bribes, because Susanna was being difficult. This did not sit well with me, as my access to candy had always been severely constrained, despite my willingness to get on board with the pee-in-the-toilet program.

  In particular I remember coveting a bag of circus peanuts. Circus peanuts! I had never even heard of such a thing. Like a peanut and a candy at the same time! Oh, how I longed for those circus peanuts. But they were for Susanna.

  I told this story to Susanna last year when I went to visit for Christmas, and she had absolutely no memory of it. I don't remember my own toilet training, so it's quite possible my mom went the bribery route with Susanna because I'd been so horrible. Or that I'd had circus peanuts and forgotten about them.

  Anyway, if you subscribe to that archaic psychology theory that explains everything about a person in terms of their toilet training experience, you've now got a bonanza to work with.

• And closing out this week's commentary with another personal story explaining something that doesn't need to be explained. Dana's plan to disguise herself as a flyer for a chiptune concert is a super-obscure reference to a surprise birthday party I planned for Sumana in 2008. I came up with an imaginary chiptune concert as a way to get out of the house without making her want to come with. I don't even think that qualifies as a "reference", but that's why Dana says "chiptune concert" and not something else.
• Puzzle Korner: next week, Krakowski's going to ask Ariel about something Her said in chapter 21. Do you know what that might be?

Pretty chunky commentary this week, hope you enjoyed it. Be sure to tune in next week for chapter 23, when Jenny will say, "I don't masturbate to it."

Image credits: yours truly, the city of Austin, NASA/Ames, Wikimedia Commons user Hoshie.

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Comments:

Posted by danima at Tue Apr 24 2012 13:23

Another accidental awesomeness to the Legend of the Bystander review is how the gameplay is recapitulated moments later in real life.

K'chua!

Posted by Will at Tue Apr 24 2012 19:17

And here I was, about to praise Dana's plan in isolation without knowing the (even better) backstory!

Posted by Leonard at Tue Apr 24 2012 19:58

danima: That's interesting, maybe I did intend that and forgot about it. Maybe not; it's been a while. But "Legend of the Bystander", like "Sayable Spice", was a title I came up with long before I had any idea what the game was about or what it said about the people who made it.

Posted by danima at Tue May 01 2012 17:16

(Well, I read it initially as purposeful awesomeness, so full points to the author.)