(NB. I won't be setting a Twitter profile image for Tetsuo because the default image is a much better depiction of him than anything I could come up with.)
Speaking of Twitter feeds, here's
last week's. And before we get started, some extratextual comments:
I'm not sure when people who are getting bonus stories and USB keys
will be receiving them, so lemme just tell you this now. For our
mutual peace of mind, I ask that you hold off reading those stories
until you finish the novel. "Dana no Chousen" takes place after the
novel; "Found Objects" casually blows two of the Part Three reveals;
and "The Time Somn Died" is, in my opinion, actually incomprehensible
unless you've read the whole book and know a lot more about Ashley and
the Constellation than you do now.
You can read "Pey Shkoy Benefits Humans" anytime, even though it
"takes place" after the novel. It's got basic spoilers like "Tetsuo
still teaches at UT Austin", but guess what, I just spoiled you on
that.
Finally, an obligatory reminder: although has been an instance where the
week's chapter didn't show up in the web archive, the emails are
consistently sent out every week, and if you didn't get a chapter it's
almost certainly in your spam folder.
This process has been happening in the background throughout the
novel. You've only seen glimpses of it (the bits that Ariel
contributes), but it's very important, because that's how I've been
controlling the flow of the worldbuilding: flooding the zone with
misinformation and letting the truth precipitate out when I'm ready to
use it dramatically.
There must be CDBOEGOACC games about Ragtime and the Slow People.
But I can't tell you all this stuff at once. There'd be no space for a
story. My Creative License-ish solution is there's lots of
information about this stuff once you know where to look, but no human
consensus about what information is accurate. It's a mess of
half-assed opinions mixed up with misinformation and conspiracy
theory, with no way of judging the truth of the matter. (Bai will
complain about this next week.)
It was easy to control the flow of information early in the novel,
when I had the world's governments working on my behalf. In "Found
Objects" Jenny has a hard time getting some basic information, because
that story takes place during chapter 5. But with the Greenland Treaty
in effect, the half-life of secrets has declined dramatically, and the
worldbuilding is starting to flood the story.
But I still have control over one thing. Ariel is the
narrator. There are secrets he has to keep, details he considers
unimportant, and one thing he just doesn't want to tell
you. Eventually he'll figure out the central mystery of the book, and
he won't tell you that either. (Don't worry, I won't leave you
hanging.) With Tetsuo blabbing all the stuff the Constellation played
down in the first half of the book, Ariel's scheming and obstinacy and
fear of embarrassment are my secret weapons for maintaining a
relatively even pacing.
That was the big-think piece, now for the misc:
As you'll soon see in Tetsuo's Twitter feed, the "nothing will come
of it" understanding does not hold for Alien women.
In the second draft this was the first scene that really made use of Ariel's prior work for Reflex Games. Reflex becomes very important as early as next week, so I went back and backfilled it a bit, notably by adding the scene at the Reflex office in chapter 5.
Because I don't explain the mystery, my whole writing group said I
should cut Ragtime from the novel. Fools! The mystery is what's
important. But for some reason readers didn't see it that way.
So: after selling the book I wrote a new scene, the final Ariel/Tetsuo
scene. That scene will call back to this chapter's conversation under the night
sky, how Ariel freaked out about Ragtime and how Tetsuo reacted. If
I've done my job, that scene will change the way you look
at Tetsuo. Look for it!
The beefiest commentary yet? I'm not going back to check. Instead I'm looking forward, to next week, when Tetsuo will say, "What were you smoking? Perhaps it was crack!"
Image credits: Tim Patterson, Matt Lancashire, Mark, Doug Kline.
(6) Tue May 08 2012 09:07 Constellation Games Author Commentary #24, "Homebrew":
Tetsuo's back, and he brought exposition! This week we take a break
from beating up Ariel, and just startle him a lot while he's
high.
This week's Twitter feed is almost entirely devoted to Tetsuo's
first day on Earth. Today also marks the start of the Great Microblog
Bonus Content Migration. Prior to this point, Ariel's feed was where it
was at. But Ariel's now too busy to tweet a lot, and he'll stay busy
until the end of the book. Tetsuo's feed will be
picking up the slack, chronicling his adventures on Earth and showing
what the other characters are doing as the focus of the novel tightens
around Ariel. If you're following Ariel but not Tetsuo, this is the
week to get on the Tetsuo Train (patent pending).
Now
that the paperback is out, you can get it from your regular source for
paperbacks: Barnes
and Noble or Amazon,
or order it from a bookstore through Ingram, or is there any chance a
bookstore might proactively stock it based on the radioactively
glowing Publishers Weekly review? I wouldn't depend on it, but that would be nice. Note that the paperback is the only
thing you can get from your usual source—bonuses are only
available from the C&G
store, and the ebook edition won't be out until serialization
wraps up at the end of July.
Now on to real commentary. I wrote the contact event as a positive
catastrophe, a shocking world-changing event out of nowhere which is
absolutely wonderful. These days a catastrophe leaves a maelstrom of
frantic Internet communication in its wake, a stew of information and
guesses and wishful thinking and propaganda that slowly settle into an
agreed-upon set of facts and opinions and crackpot theories.
Thanks to A.K., registered medical marijuana patient, for
coming up with the brand name of Jenny's pot. The legalization of marijuana in this universe was established back in chapter 6. Completists will also want to check the microblog archive for chapter 8.
- Comments:
Posted by Emile Snyder at Tue May 08 2012 12:56
Even in the near future, I don't think a consumer phone-camera would be sensitive enough to make possible the constellation-recognizing app Ariel uses here. It's a cool idea, though. All it takes is a little...Uh, Google Sky (and presumably others?) already shows you what you're pointing your phone at, and will let you search for a particular constellation and give you a little on-display arrow showing you which way to move to see it. Doesn't do image recognition, just uses GPS + accelerometer + time to figure out what your phone is pointed at. But now you've made me want to try to write a version that does it via image processing onboard......if I write a sequel...Please? Pretty please?
Posted by Brendan at Tue May 08 2012 15:30
Yeah, I have a very nice app called SkyView on my phone that does exactly what Emile describes. We live in the near future.
Posted by Jeanne at Tue May 08 2012 16:02
The moment where Ariel is looking at the notebooks, looks at Jenny's comic panels, looks at the note from Jenny: that's a really really nice moment. I also really like the description of Tetsuo's laugh, which de-anthropomorphizes him very effectively at exactly the moment in the narrative when he needs to be kind of otherworldly and scary. Still so good.
Posted by Leonard at Tue May 08 2012 16:32
As you can tell I was imagining the camera acting as a CCD telescope, but yes, there's an easier way. An easier way I'd already encountered, applied to car navigation.If I may be mercenary, the existence of a sequel depends on me seeing some commercial success for this book. Otherwise I'm happy writing novels in different universes until one of them takes off.Oh, one thing I forgot to mention, about those comics: Kris Straub and I used to do that whenever we had class together. It wasn't one panel at a time; instead, we'd take turns riffing on some topic. I'm pretty sure we were super annoying to everyone else in the class.
Posted by nemryn at Wed May 09 2012 12:03
Given what we later learn about Ragtime, "We altered a planet with no history" becomes a little more ominous. Especially in conjunction with "We gave it Gliese777Ad", a bit.
Posted by Leonard at Wed May 09 2012 12:49
"A planet with no history" is a definite Ragtime reference.