News You Can Bruise for 2012 January 10

Ariel's Twitter will be pretty quiet this week because the entire chapter takes place over the course of one day. Your only solace is farmers market quail sausage, and this COMMENTARY:

• In this chapter we meet Bai's girlfriend, Dana Light. Sort of. Dana is the bane of this minimal-spoiler commentary because it's a bit of a spoiler even to treat her as an important character instead of a bit of character development for Bai. But she is important--Bai was defined in terms of Dana, not the other way around, and I found Dana interesting enough to make her the star of the first bonus story, "Dana no Chousen."

  Chapter 10 will be a very Dana-heavy chapter. If I hadn't been writing a novel when I came up with the character, that chapter would have become a standalone short story. Of course, once I had the character, Dana quickly became important to the story (spoiler!!) and after selling the book I moved bits from Chapter 10 backwards into this chapter so as to introduce her earlier.

  More on Dana and Dana/Bai in a few weeks when I commentate chapter 10, but for now you might enjoy going back to chapters 3 and 4 and re-reading the earlier references to her.

• Bai is pretty ditzy when it comes to women, because that was the only way I could get him into this relationship without making him stupid or a Love Plus-style otaku. If I was a better writer I might have come up with a better solution, but I'm at the level I'm at. However, there are a couple moments later on when Bai is surprisingly perceptive about Ariel's love life.
• The other introduction in this chapter is Sayable Spice, probably the game most important to the plot. In the second draft, Ariel talked about Sayable Spice a whole lot, but it wasn't until chapter 14 that he mentioned that he was working on a remake. Now Jenny forces Ariel to commit and puts a stop to that nonsense right quick. Thanks, Jenny.
• When I got rid of Bruce, the character you'll never see, I gave most of his scenes to Bai. (Eg. it was originally Bruce playing Knockdown Dragout in chapter 4.) I'm pretty sure the scene in the backyard here is the only Bruce scene I gave to Jenny. Nobody cares!
• This is also the only chapter in which Bizarro Kate has a speaking part. In the second and third drafts, she hooked up with Bruce at this chapter's cookout, and later in the novel they were living together. Hers was a supporting role to begin with, and when I eliminated her major-character boyfriend, she got cut down to just a walk-on. But I really like the character, and I gave her a chance to shine (ie. be cranky) in "Found Objects", the Jenny story.
• I think Tennis For Two is the only real-life video game I mention in the novel. There was no other way to get the joke to work.
• The tattoo joke I had to cut from chapter 19 has landed on Twitter. Relive the saga: 1 2 3 4. I don't think I needed to actually present the translation. Oh well.
• Around this time I planned on changing Ariel's Twitter profile image to the duck from the Crispy Duck Games logo, but it didn't look good, so I think I'm/he's going to stick with the pissed-off pony.
• The only other thing I want to say about this chapter is you see a little bit more of how old ET video games just aren't as interesting to other people as they are to Ariel.

Stay tuned for chapter 8, a chapter I think is one of the best in the book, the chapter that got me to give up on the first draft and rewrite the entire book to be more like it. The only chapter in which Jenny will say, "Wait a minute, are you naked?"

Image credits: I got the first image from Flickr user marsmet462, not sure if they put in enough transformative elbow grease to put their own license on it. Second image comes from Sven-S. "☃" Porst .

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