Annotated 49-6
FB: Xan has squiggle vision.
I’ll get into the plot side of this sequence more tomorrow.
You can see me tinkering with transitions a bit here, from Sundar’s “safely” back to Shanna’s “how are we defining ‘safely?'”, which could comment amusingly on Sundar’s line as well as more directly on Carol’s. There’s a hint of that on the next page, too. I’ve played with that sort of verbal (and sometimes visual) jump more extensively in Traveler, and I’ve gone on enough here about 1980s-era Alan Moore, who used the device often enough that it became a tic. If Flo and I had (1) not been writing this chapter together, (2) had enough lead time to talk through style points like this, or (3) not had like eighty million plot points to juggle in this big wrap-up, then I might have pushed to make these winking transitions a standard for the rest of this chapter. Since we hadn’t used them much before, it could be read as a sign that the barriers between the two worlds were breaking down, especially if we’d included more mid-page jumps between them.
Would that have been better for the story? Not sure. Sometimes gimmicks like that lessen the power of the worlds you create by making your fingerprints too visible on the page: the magic(k) dies if the reader spends too much time looking at the puppet strings. But after readers had gotten this far, their immersion probably could’ve withstood it. I would’ve liked to give it a shot.
Doing Traveler has gotten some of the Alan Moore influence out of my system, to the point where I probably won’t imitate him as much in the future. But I could still see using his devices in a pointed, moderate context like this one.
I do like this transition, it does convey the idea that the worlds are getting closer together, as well as making the action feel more fast-paced. Would have been cool to keep it up, but also sounds like a lot of work.
Switching more often, in general, would have helped at least me to keep track of where each thread of the story is at a given point.
Doing it mid-page regularly would only seem to make sense to me if there was some sort of clear link/parallelism going on between the different storylines. I.e: either the threads develop in the same way, independently, or what happens in one thread influences the other in some manner that might be relevant.
What I find hard to understand: Why does Shanna think it’d be bad for HR if the Five got out before he was done in Arkerra? If she believes he’s just playing in godmode, and that it was possible to just disconnect the Five, then … I think I in her place would be simply confused because then nothing would make sense. Why keep the Five jacked in when you don’t have to, and need to hire killers in order to cover what you’re doing? And why would HR require them to be jacked in while he enjoys his own game?
Yeah, sure, the Five might get angry if they unjacked them now (assuming that was possible…), but that can’t be the reason they’ve kept them in there.
In short: I struggle to think what Shanna’s view is of what is happening here that allows her to speak the words she says with any certainty.
Carol, on the other hand, seems to have a good and rational explanation for everything (on this page), and is getting really good at ignoring the fact that she sent a killer after Shanna. Makes complete sense.
About the Shanna thing, if 5 missing people suddenly showed up and turned out to have secretly kept against their will in some man’s (company) basement it would probably not look very good for that man. It especially wouldn’t look good with how many people have died for him to keep them in there
Yes, of course — but if the only reason not to disconnect them now was because they and their families might get angry — then why keep them in there so long, in the first place? In that case, they could have just jacked them out after a few hours, sent them home and get amazing PR. But they didn’t, and so there must be a much weightier reason why they’re still connected.
It’s not like they forgot to end the play session, covered that up with crimes, so ending it now would look awkward.
I think I would have liked it too. Not that I didn’t like the way it is!