News You Can Bruise for 2012 January 17

K'chua! Such a useful word. This week, Curic does her part to Keep Austin Weird. Here's the (tiny) Twitter archive from last week.

Some exciting news from the world of commerce: the Constellation Games paperback drops April 17. If you're waiting for the paperback, do yourself a favor and pre-order at the $20 level. Once it's released, the paperback will cost $20 on its own, but if you pre-order, you'll also get a bunch of extras, including three short stories that all pass the Bechdel test.

The seventeenth of April is also the day we serialize chapter 21, "Her". I'm going to keep posting my commentaries once a week along with the serialization, even though a growing number of you will have read the whole book and know how it turns out. Then you'll know how I feel right now!

I'm also thinking of having a celebratory book launch dinner at Hill Country, a famous Austin-area barbecue joint that fortuitiously has a branch in New York City. Let me know if you're interested in attending.

...and we're back from commercial. Here's the commentary for chapter 8:

• Hopefully this chapter doesn't seem too special now, but when I first wrote it it was a revelation. It was a narrative with a plot! Curic was an active character and you could see her chemistry with Ariel as they physically interacted! My writing group indicated in no uncertain terms that this was the stuff they had been waiting for.

  I wrote a couple more chapters in the old, boring style but it wasn't long before I gave up and started the second draft, which tried to make the whole book more like this chapter. To this end I introduced innovations like the long IM conversations, and Jenny. Imagine reading up to this point, except Jenny has only been mentioned once and Curic has only had three lines of dialogue. That was the first draft.

• Because of its importance to the book's history, and also because it's such a great set piece, I kept coming back to this chapter. Near the end of the book, I recontextualize it by showing the visit to Earth from Curic's perspective. And Jenny's remark that the plastic fractal "looks like Skewer Sue's bracelet" fed, as I hinted a few weeks ago, into one of the book's most important scenes.

  Which almost didn't happen. At this point I'd decided that Jenny was a big comics nerd and wanted her to reference a kinda bland comic book character name. My first try was "Titania". Well, the joke was on me because Titania is an actual Marvel villain. Sumana says she showed up during Dan Slott's run on She-Hulk, so that's probably where I got it, but I don't remember her. Bland, but already taken. Titania was out. Then I came up with "Skewer Sue", which is not a top-tier name like "Wonder Woman", but is definitely not bland. Then I decided "why should I deliberately come up with bland names?" and went with Skewer Sue. Believe me when I say that if I'd been able to name that character Titania, the offhand reference would have stayed offhand forever.

  ...And I can't even tell you all the other things in this chapter that become important later. Because they're all huge spoilers. But in one case also because it's quite embarrassing to admit how long I took to realize that I could reuse something. I should have called this chapter "Guns on the Mantelpiece". (Actually, I should have called the second chapter "Guns on the Mantelpiece"; I never liked "Corner Pieces".)

• Jenny's nephew Eduardo does not really show up again, except in the Twitter feeds and one of the deleted scenes, but if you want to make your protagonists look good you should show them doing nice things for kids. Just a little tip I picked up in Sid Meier's screenwriting class.

  Eddie was originally the son of Jenny's brother, James, who never shows up at all. I don't remember why James became Jenny's sister, but when I changed it I de-named the character so as not to use up a "named character" slot in your head.

  Actually, rereading this, I notice I didn't give Eddie any lines. That was kind of sloppy. I'd retcon it by saying he's intensely shy around Curic, but Curic's account of the day contradicts this! Oh no.

• The star-draw was added in the third draft. There's another star-draw in chapter 20, but a lot of other stuff is happening in that scene, and Ariel wasn't actually there for it, so the exposition was very difficult. Putting a star-draw here takes some of the load off the chapter 20 scene, and--only later did I realize this was much more important--shows you a fluid overlay in action. Albeit a two-person fluid overlay because Jenny and Bai are slackers and Eddie's a little kid.
• The celebrity voices used for the different ET vocalizers are a tiny import from "Vanilla", in which (among other things) the protagonist was shaken down by an ET who sounded like Garrison Keillor. Now that I write that down, I realize that I've only got one joke about this, because there's a very similar incongruous-voice bit in chapter 21. Maybe I should have declined to import this particular thing from "Vanilla"... it feels like an artifact from a less mature stage of my style.
• The bit where Bai introduces Dana to Curic was added after I sold the book, at editorial request to get more Dana early in the story. You'll thank my editor later.
• And I don't know when all of this came together, but I love Curic's mix of anthropological curiosity, disinclination to tolerate bullshit, and bizarre opinions on what's bullshit. Her reactions to Dana, to "Eddie wants to be an astronaut", and to the revelation that "fuck" is a swear word... she's got all the best lines. And she does the game reviews! This is the chapter where Curic came alive for me. Metaphorically.

Stay tuned for the inevitable letdown next Tuesday, when Curic will say, "I did not pee in your sink."

Image credits: (CC) Larry D. Moore and Wikimedia Commons users Solkoll and SeppVei.

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