News You Can Bruise for 2012 April 3 (entry 0)

(6) Tue Apr 03 2012 09:07 Constellation Games Author Commentary #19, "Implementation Details": We're more than halfway through the book! Traditionally, it's around this time that an author starts to have doubts about having signed on for this huge project. It's happened on all three of my books and it's happening again with this commentary. I have a great time writing this stuff every week, and I hope you're enjoying it, but it does take a lot of time. Time which might be better spent working on my second novel, "A Fire Upon the Derp".

Uh, anyway, last week's Twitter archive. Don't forget about the game design contest, which ends next week. This week we meet Dana Light 2.0, and the totally different human person who's not Dana, Svetlana Sveta.

• Speaking of stupid meme-puns, alternate title for this chapter: "The Pie Is A Fake".
• CG is getting LibraryThing reviews from people who got advance copies (average rating: 3.88 stars!), and one reviewer mentioned that "[t]he story, told in a combination of first-person narration, blog posts, e-mails, and text messages, gets complicated."

  I do not comment on reviews because I've seen what happens when authors comment on reviews, but I want to use that quote as lead-in to say that I think this chapter is where it really starts getting complicated. As of this week, the narrative has split into two different universes: one in which Bai's girlfriend is a Constellation AI modeled after a human AI modeled after a video game heroine, and one in which he's dumped the AI for a Russian mail-order bride. The narrator is now lying to you.

• In the second draft, "Svetlana Sveta" did not exist. Ariel talked freely about "Dana" doing this and that, unprotected even by friends lock. This was incredibly dumb, and in the third draft, Dana 2.0 tells Ariel this is dumb and to knock it off before he gets everyone into trouble.

  I couldn't just "real life" everything, because Dana shows up in some of the game reviews, and I didn't want to "real life" everything because one of the things I wanted to strengthen in the third draft was Ariel stressing out about lying to everyone. So I started here: I moved all the details of the Dana pickup into a "real life" section, and created two contradictory summaries for Ariel's blog, one of which introduces Dana's alternate identity.

  

• I've mentioned before that almost every character in the book has two names or identities. I didn't plan this, but it worked out that way and I like it, so I'm beating that drum.

  But what about the BEA agents? Recall from the chapter 5 commentary that in the second draft, Ariel referred to the BEA agents with ridiculous cop-show aliases. You never learned their real names. Perfect symbolism! But then Cheryl pointed out in writing group that if "Krakowski" is just an alias Ariel uses in his blog, I can't use the "Crack-housey" joke in this chapter. So I made "Krakowski" his real name. And that one stupid joke is why Krakowski and Fowler have only one identity each. That's what happens when you don't plan out your symbolism ahead of time.

• Svet is Russian for "light", so in a fit of pique Ariel has named this fake person "Lighty McLight".

  There's a reference later on to Svetlana being extremely tall. In the third draft Ariel "established" this in this chapter along with her silly name. I cut that detail in the final draft, but but decided to keep the later reference, because why not.

• For the record, the ridiculous Fowler line I mentioned last week, which everyone wanted me to cut, was "Don't tempt this planet with your pie!"
• I almost missed this while rereading: Ariel drops into the present tense in the "real life" section. "I couldn't [tell Farang apart]. I still can't." It's not a big deal, but it reminds that Ariel is the author of the "real life" sections as much as he is the blog posts.
• In "real video game" news: Bai makes an Altered Beast reference, but since it's not mentioned by name I don't count it. Sonic & Cipher is a fake Sonic the Hedgehog game, but of course Sonic is real. I mean he's a real-world fictional character. Sorry, kids!

  In various earlier drafts, the game Ariel imagined playing in the refugee camp was Cipher & Sonic (because in this universe Sonic was a minor character in Sega's Cipher the Whatever series) and Blizzard & Chaos (because Sonic didn't exist in this universe and instead we had Blizzard Lizard, who can still be seen in chapter 13). The work I put into these things; you have no idea.

• The Dana pickup scene was the only one that had Bai and Bruce in the same room, and the only one that really suffered when I got rid of Bruce. You may remember me mentioning a joke about Bruce's Simple Affect Metadata Exchange tattoo, which I moved to Twitter. (setup, punchline) That's fine, but I did have to cut a couple sub-jokes from this chapter once Dana (not Curic) told Bruce what the tattoo said. The best one:

  "This is why you don't get random tats!" said Bai. "Didn't Omicron Beta Digamma show you the informational video?"

  "Big talk from a guy with Chinese characters tattooed on his wrist," said Bruce.

  "Yeah!" said Bai, flashing his wrist. "It's my mother's name! You know how I know? 'Cause I can read! fucking! Chinese, Bruce!"

• I only named the fraternity because I thought it would be funny to use an obsolete Greek letter in its name. ΟΒϜ is probably also the frat Ariel got kicked out of (as recounted in chapter 2). Later on we'll see that Ariel met Bai right when he started college, so I imagine they became friends when they were both in ΟΒϜ.
• The scene with the Massmonger 31, like last week's Brilhantes review, is mostly to give you some fun gaming stuff in a plot-heavy chapter. After the novel got taken over by computers like the Brain Embryo and the False Daylight, I wanted to have just one scene where Ariel tries to use a computer that's completely incompatible with his physiology. The plot wouldn't allow for a lot of them, but I did get this one.

  The experience of writing this novel has given me some sympathy for stories where the aliens are not much different from humans. It's not that hard to come up with this stuff; it is hard to use it in a story that human readers can identify with.

That's the week! Stay tuned for next week's special tabletop gaming episode, when Ariel will say, "I think we should just nuke each other once and get it out of our systems."

Image credits: Wikimedia user Ecelan, Joshua Kaufman, Flickr user ePi.Longo.

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Comments:

Posted by nemryn at Tue Apr 03 2012 13:48

Are you sure you uploaded the chapter? It's not showing up for me on the CM&G site.

Posted by Leonard at Tue Apr 03 2012 15:30

You're right. Kate says it hasn't been archived, but that it will be by about 6 PM EST.

Posted by Zack at Fri Apr 06 2012 23:53

It now occurs to me to wonder whether the Constellation could put together a biomimetic humanoid chassis for Dana if she wanted one.

Posted by Zack at Fri Apr 06 2012 23:54

("now" as in "just now", that is)

Posted by Zack at Fri Apr 06 2012 23:57

Oh, other random nitpicky detail: I presume the smart paper's memory is distributed and many-times redundant, so, is there a second copy of Dana in the chunk that the BEA cut off as import duty?

Posted by Leonard at Sat Apr 07 2012 19:24

They could make a robot, but not something that looked like a human. And when you take Dana's character as a whole I think it's pretty clear she wouldn't want a chassis.

Re: a second copy. That's a good question, one I've played around with and one I don't have an answer to. I generally think Dana wiped the cutoff chunk as it was being cut. But a second copy in the BEA's hands would make a crucial plot detail more plausible.