News You Can Bruise for 2012 June 12

(9) Tue Jun 12 2012 09:32 Constellation Games Author Commentary #29: He Sees The Map And He Throws The Dart: PLOT TWIST. Please tell me you didn't see that coming. Well, tell me the truth, but I hope you were just about to figure it out when it happened. It helps that most of Ariel's really odd behavior (the unpublished blog posts, "eyes on the prize") ended up in this chapter, so you didn't have a week to think about it.

The day I brought chapter 28 to writing group, just as we were leaving, Andrew stopped and said "Oooooooh." Ideally that realization will now happen right in the middle of chapter 29.

I've mentioned before that this plot twist was originally going to be the end of the book (along with a little bit extra which became the seed of the actual ending). I'm pretty sure y'all would have screamed bloody murder if that had happened, so it's a good thing that as I wrote part two I thought of more and more stuff to happen after the "end".

The PDF of part two should be released soon. Here's the Twitter archive. In news of "dammit", the Twitter feeds stopped working last Wednesday, possibly because of this UTF-8-licious tweet, and I didn't notice. Especially furiating since last week featured many classic bits, like Tetsuo discovering The Game and Ariel mocking thrift store T-shirts. So I do recommend you read the in-world timeline for chapter 28.

In news of "non-dammit", I'll be appearing this Sunday on the Cambridge (UK) radio show The Science of Fiction, talking about "Games in Fiction and Fiction in Games", and about Constellation Games in particular. Even if you don't live in Cambridge you can stream it "live" (we're actually recording on Wednesday) over the net, or download the program[me] afterwards.

This is a story all about how Ariel's life got flipped, turned upside down. And I'd like to take a minute—just sit right there—

then to the elements
Be free, and fare thou well!

• The second-draft title for this chapter was "Uploadable Content" but I didn't really want a goofy game reference closing out part two. The title actually came from a source I haven't mentioned once in this commentary, a source that inspired "Vanilla" and thus the entire Constellation universe.

  Back around 2002 I wrote a song about a human who acts as a gigolo for ETs, a plot I reused for "Vanilla". The song ended like this:

  His engine's missing an essential part
  He sees the map and he throws the dart
  He's got to close his eyes, even though it's dark
  He sees the map and he throws the dart
  He's heading out and he's looking sharp
  He sees the map and he throws the dart
  She's looking down with a broken heart
  He sees the map and he throws the dart

  A lesser problem I fixed in the third draft of CG is that a lot of minor characters who should have names, didn't. Naming a character lets you use the name instead of descriptions or pronouns, but it creates additional mental load on the reader. Knowing where to draw the line is kind of a black art, but I'm pretty sure the founder of the Mars mission overlay needs a name. In a short story I'd have combined that character with Colonel Mason, but this is a novel, we have space to stretch our legs, and I didn't want a human to be planning that.

  In the second draft it was an unnamed Ausländer who invited Tammy to join the Mars overlay, but around this time I noticed that "He sees the map and he throws the dart", the line from the old song, is a perfect Gaijin name. That line is also a good characterization of Ariel at the end of part two. So we got a name for that character, and a better title for this chapter, and a hat-tip to this song only a couple people have ever heard.

• Side note: maps seem to be unusually important to the Gaijin. We don't see a lot of the species, but we get HSTMAHTTD!, the smart paper OS is called The Big Map That's Easy To Understand, What-The-Fuck Creek was played on a map, and a game to be reviewed in chapter 32 features magical maps. I don't know what to make of this, but it's a real trend.
• [TK IN THIS DRAFT THE MARS MISSION WAS LAUNCHED AROUND SEPTEMBER 10. IT NEEDS TO BE MOVED BACK A MONTH--I THOUGHT THIS PART OF THE NOVEL WOULD TAKE MORE CALENDAR TIME. FORTUNATELY, THE DATE OF TETSUO'S FIRST LECTURE ALSO NEEDS TO BE MOVED BACK A MONTH, SO THEY CAN BE FIXED SIMULTANEOUSLY.]"

  I spent way more time that I would have liked fixing stuff like this.

• "He seduced her with a ten-point checklist" is one of my favorite lines. (Extratextual spoiler: Colonel Mason did not seduce Tammy at all.)

  

• After writing Dana's accusation that Ariel made up his relationship with Tammy, there was a couple hours where I wondered what if she's right?. Wow! This was the second draft, so there weren't any "real life" sections per se. And the scene where Tetsuo and Daisy interact with Tammy didn't exist yet, so Ariel had no corroboration. What if he is lying about Tammy?

  Oh, man, that would be so cool. Unfortunately, that kind of reveal would derail the whole story. Tammy would suddenly become a non-character and her arc would serve no dramatic purpose. Plus, there's already plenty of Ariel lying, and this is a really dumb thing for him to lie about. So I gave his story some corroboration in the third draft. But it was fun to consider the possibility that he'd pulled one over on me.

• Speaking of Tammy's arc: this is a tiny spoiler for next week, but eh. Ariel thought Tammy was his Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but she's the protagonist of a totally different story that intersected Ariel's at one point. Ariel assumed Tammy wouldn't undergo character development when she was offscreen, but she did. He is not going to handle this well.
• The Dana/Bai/Ariel argument was intended to be the capstone of Dana's plot arc. But you may have noticed that this scene, like this chapter I originally thought would end the book, is more cliffhanger than resolution. I really have a hard time seeing this. I tend to think that if I've created a lot of tension I've done my job. This scene was the one I mentioned back in 2010, as causing the "where is this subplot going?" incident.

  So... there's more Dana stuff in the novel. Stuff I can't imagine not having. But I wouldn't say her plot arc gets resolved until the end of "Dana no Chousen."

  

• The Constellation Library is another thing that went into Constellation Games mainly because it was so important to "Vanilla", the story you'll probably never see. Given that I invented the Her superorganism for CG, I probably could have done something like the Library scene without introducing another ancient, world-weary collective intelligence. But, I'm ultimately glad I kept it, because in "The Time Somn Died" you get to see the working relationship between Her and the Library. Truly, they are the original Odd Couple.

  Since the Library scene is just a transcript, you don't get a description of the librarian, but I'll tell you (and you'll see in "Somn") that the Constellation Library is sort of like the Borg collective: a heavily-striped RAID array of brains, running in the bodies of people who died in ways that precluded them uploading (or who just didn't want to upload). The librarian Bai talks to is effectively a zombie.

  The "user interface" of the Constellation Library was inspired by how in David Brin's Uplift series everyone's such a jerk about letting humans use the Galactic Library. Here the library itself is a huge jerk.

• It's probably clear from the text, but just in case: Sky Goddess the Myriad Fingers is the jurist's name for the Her superorganism.
• The Library's primary documents are the sort of thing that I can write and know it's good, but I can never look at again. I don't think I've changed them at all since the second draft. I could check, but that would mean looking at them.

Thus ends part two, "Software". The stage is set for "Artwork", the action-packed miniseries that will end the serialization. It all starts next week, when Ariel will say, "It's fucking romantic, okay?" Will it be okay? Is it actually romantic? AllMost will be revealed! Tune in next week.

Photo credits: Voyager 2, Wikimedia Commons user SeppVei, NASA, Dorothy Harris, Flickr user zdw.

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