{"id":1071,"date":"2015-01-01T06:16:51","date_gmt":"2015-01-01T14:16:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/?p=1071"},"modified":"2015-05-06T06:19:56","modified_gmt":"2015-05-06T14:19:56","slug":"im-pretty-much-making-this-up-as-i-go-along","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/2015\/01\/01\/im-pretty-much-making-this-up-as-i-go-along\/","title":{"rendered":"I\u2019m Pretty Much Making This Up As I Go Along"},"content":{"rendered":"

Postaday for January 1st:<\/strong> New Skin<\/a><\/p>\n

If you could spend the next year as someone radically different from the current \u201cyou\u201d \u2014 a member of a different species, someone from a different gender or generation, etc. \u2014 who would you choose to be?<\/em><\/p>\n

If I could spend time as anyone else, it would be as Lancaster, the evil robot assassin hell-bent on killing every secret agent in the world.<\/p>\n

Why is killing all these agents? What\u2019s his end-game? What happens if he succeeds? And why does he choose to kill them in such elaborate and increasingly ridiculous ways? Is killing agents really his main goal, or is there some greater purpose to his scheme?<\/p>\n

I need to know, because I invented him, and I have no idea what he\u2019s doing. He\u2019s the main antagonist in my terrible spy novel, A Football Makes a Lousy Briefcase. Note: terrible is a subgenre of the spy novel genre. This is supposed to be terrible. I have whole sections called Deus Ex Machina. It\u2019s a play on words, see, since Lancaster is a machine and all.<\/p>\n

Lancaster is an AI based on a program that was built to test agents in the field. But things got out of control. I don\u2019t want to reveal too much, even though I\u2019ll probably never actually finish the novel\u2026 and even if I did I wouldn\u2019t bother editing it\u2026 and if I somehow edited it I certainly wouldn\u2019t get it published\u2026 and if I accidentally published it I just don\u2019t see anyone buying it, much less reading it (not unlike the novel I published A Night Without Sunshine and my collection of short stories Still Life With Zombie).<\/p>\n

But nevermind all that. The point is, I need to get inside Lancaster\u2019s metal head and figure out what\u2019s going on. It\u2019s the principal of the thing. I\u2019m struggling with the main plot line of the novel as it is, and if I can just figure out where this is going, maybe I can figure out a way to stop him.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s great about Lancaster is I could spend a whole year being him, and not really mess anything up, since he clones himself regularly so that he can personally conduct \u201cexams\u201d on agents in order to kill them. I don\u2019t have to \u201cbe Lancaster\u201d to be Lancaster.<\/p>\n

And a year should be just the right amount of time. Lancaster once posed as coffee machine at a cheap motel in Reno just to get access to an ATF agent who had stolen a thumb drive from a CISEN operative. (I actually haven\u2019t written that chapter yet, but, gosh, it\u2019s a good idea and I\u2019m totally going to use it.)<\/p>\n

CISEN, by the way, is the acronym for Mexico\u2019s intelligence agency. I just found that on Wikipedia, since I\u2019m pretty much making this up as I go along.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Postaday for January 1st: New Skin If you could spend the next year as someone radically different from the current \u201cyou\u201d \u2014 a member of a different species, someone from a different gender or generation, etc. \u2014 who would you choose to be? If I could spend time as anyone else, it would be as … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “I\u2019m Pretty Much Making This Up As I Go Along”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8,61],"tags":[76,62],"class_list":["post-1071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogging","category-postaday","tag-lancaster","tag-novel-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p24y52-hh","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1071"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1071\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1072,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1071\/revisions\/1072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}