News You Can Bruise for 2011 December 21

I'm experimenting with posting these commentaries on Wednesday to give you time to read the chapter. I don't think a lot of people read these commentaries right now, but feel free to complain if you want it sooner. It's easier for me to put the commentary up on Tuesday along with the Twitter archive, but I think this might be a little better for you.

So! This is where the engine of the novel starts running. We've introduced the human characters and their dynamic, they have a gateway to the Constellation in the form of Curic, and in this chapter we meet the main plot drivers for Part One: the Brain Embryo computer, and the Constellation Database of Electronic Games of a Certain Complexity (hereafter CDBOEGOACC).

Now's a good time to talk a bit about the three bonus stories, because one of them takes place right after this chapter. "Found Objects" is a story about Jenny Gallegos and what she does with the reentry foam that the Brain Embryo was packed in. "Dana no Chousen" features Dana Light, a character who's been mentioned (as Bai's girlfriend) but not introduced. I'm currently working on "The Time Somn Died", which features a character you haven't met yet.

If you subscribe at the Bronze level you'll get one story, probably "Dana". Subscribe at Gold or above and you'll get all three. There's a fourth story, "A Princess of Mars", which I won't have time to finish. But I might do it as a promo later, or write it to be sold separately.

How these happened: after finishing the second draft I realized that although I'd created a lot of interesting female characters, the POV is so tight around Ariel that a) the only one who'd gotten the time she deserved was Curic; b) my novel didn't pass the Bechdel test. I fixed b) with some cheap tricks which I'll point out when the time comes, but a) left me unsatisfied, so when it came time to plan bonus material, I decided to write stories about and from the POV of the women in the story.

Like I said, I'm not done with the stories, but I think this strategy works really well. Each bonus story presents a part of the world that wasn't shown in the novel, while recontextualizing what was shown.

And now, random notes on chapter 4:

• As you can see here, Rachel Chalmers is the one who came up with "Knockdown Dragout" as the name of the antistrip poker game.
• I hope you enjoyed guest stars L. and Zhenya, because they won't show up again now that Ariel has quit his job. A couple things about them, and about Ariel's now-former employer:
  • Zhenya is the @Engineer_Evgeny Ariel has been talking to on Twitter. I think Evgeny is a great name. I was so excited that I had finally named a character Evgeny, even a minor character. Then I brought the Evgeny chapter to writing group and a member who'd spent a lot of time in the former Soviet bloc said "If your name is Evgeny, everyone calls you Zhenya." It's the same as Eugene/Gene, I guess.
  • L. dismissively refers to his henchmen as "caipiras", which, according to my former co-worker Guilherme Salgado, means "hicks". It's the same root as "caipirinha", which by semi-coincidence also shows up in the novel.
  • Salgado also told me that Brazilian software companies commonly have English names. The Brazilian game company is never named in-story, because explaining that would take more time than it's worth, but FYI its name is Tin Soldier Games.
  • I wrote a scene where Ariel tells his manager that he's quitting, but I cut it for two reasons. 1) L. is a perfectly acceptable stand-in for the manager, so I don't need the extra character. 2) In the third draft I added a similar but much more interesting scene to the next chapter.
• In the book as sold, I had a character named Bruce who was... kinda dumb and not that interesting. I got rid of him and gave all his scenes to Bai or Jenny, which improved those scenes greatly. But one scene I couldn't farm out was a funny bit involving a tattoo Bruce took from a Constellation design without knowing what it said. I gave the tattoo to an offscreen character (Martin) and moved the bit to the Twitter feed. The joke may not work in real time because the payoff isn't until next week, but I can write it off on my creative taxes as a social media experiment.
• The Scorpion is an actual Russian clone of the ZX Spectrum. IIRC all the human computers in the novel are real or realistic projections of existing brands (DS Twin, Xbox Forever, PS4). I would have loved to make up totally new hardware and brands like in "Mallory", but it would leave you confused.
• The biggest alt-history elements in the story have to do with space: the abandoned moon base Glavanya and the end of the Shuttle program post-Columbia. I use these as background throughout the story, but I could have done without them, and people in writing group suggested I scrap them. Certainly the book would be tighter if I'd scrapped them, but for me the abandoned base and the long-grounded orbiters give the story an air of melancholy and longing, especially when contrasted with the Constellation's capabilities.

  In the first chapter I considered mentioning a resurrected Glavanya crew in Ariel's fantasy, but it seemed disrespectful to put made-up people alongside the real people who've died doing space exploration. So whatever happened to that last Glavanya crew, they did make it back to Earth. And if you've been following the Twitter feed, you've seen that they got to go back to Glavanya.

Tune in next Tuesday for Chapter 5, when Curic will say "I am going to do research on human zombies to prove you wrong."

[Photo credits: BuenosAiresPhotographer.com and NASA.]

<- Last week | Next week ->