Looks like Xtreme Collab was too extreme  for real life. Michael and I went off to cool our jets after a classic collaborative contretemps, and got too distracted with other projects to return to the collaboration. Here's what we did instead:

We finished our longest-running collaboration, "Zeppelin City," (years in the making) and read it at Readercon to appreciative howls. Then we sold it to Patrick Nielsen Hayden at Tor.com, who will be putting it up sometime in the next few months, along with (I think) a podcast of our Readercon reading.

Michael also launched Hope in the Mist, his short, remarkable biographical book on Hope Mirrlees, the author of Lud-in-the-Mist, and he interviewed Hope Mirrlees at Readercon (quite a feat, since Mirrlees died in 1978). 

Michael has entered the endgame on his next novel, and is happily writing away in a world where nobody names the characters but himself. I know that, if it were me, I could give myself a pretty hard time without any assistance, but I suspect Michael channels his energies more efficiently.

In addition, since you last heard from us, Michael has scaled Mt. McKinley in a tuxedo, captured alive the great white shark that was terrorizing Philadelphia, and swum the English Channel backwards. Myself, I've cleaned up the house and hosted a fun finale party for Clarion West.

So, I ask you: Which of us has done more for humanity? And which has made the most definite progress toward literary immortality? Yeah, I thought so.

Michael, I spent most of the last week wondering why I was having such a hard time with material the week before. I don't think it was, as you put it, a difference in vision.

I do think there is usually quite a gap between my vision of a story and yours and the fun of collaboration for me is in collaging a coherent story from these two ragged and rarely articulated visions. There's a sort of Darwinian plot development at work, and the hardiest device wins.

The hard part of plot generation, for me, is seeing all that naked plot sticking out of the story, like so many fractured bones. All the stuff that interests and inspires me -- voice and character and point-of-view (and colorful details of setting as filtered through the previous three) -- was missing. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between the chaos of birth and the carnage of disaster.

I was blaming a disconnect in the collaboration, but I think the real nature of the problem was my reluctance to stare down a plot outline.

I have outlined stories and even novel ideas in the past, but I have tended to lose interest in them -- they just always seem so boring. All the stuff that makes reading and writing fun -- the little surprises and felicities and messages from my subconscious -- were not there (yet).

Not to say that that stuff was all there for you, but perhaps you are made of sterner stuff than I. But now I think there is enough detail that I can get back into it.

Of course you will change everything around while proclaiming loudly that you're only doing what I want, and I will change everything around with the assurance to you that I am just doing some tidying. But that's collaboration as usual.

Eileen

. 

Chapter 4
The People of the Air

Creatures like giant bugs with mammoth hemispherical eyes gather up the netting, with the children inside, and carry it through the hole in the wall and through a similar hole that leads into a large barrel-shaped wooden vehicle, the source of the humming. The hole in the vehicle closes, and the vehicle, still humming, rises into the air.

The children are lying all over one another, some of them crying, and they are all tangled up in the netting. The giant bugs pull the netting off the children, not too roughly, and separate them in to groups. “This is bad,” thinks Sokia. “Are we slave labor, or are we food?”

She assumes a fighting stance, which means she quickly scales the wall until she is higher than the bugs. The bugs simply throw a net over her again, and pull her down. The net keeps her from landing lightly on her feet, and she gets a bit bruised. The bugs haul her off to a small room, which she recognizes as having all the signs of being an interrogation room. She is left there alone to stew, while the bugs sort out the children.

Finally, the bugs return. They remove their exterior clothing and become human beings. Now they want to talk with Sokia.

[Over to Michael]

There are minor changes, but it seems useful to post the whole thing IN THE RIGHT ORDER.

Chapter One:
Rooftop Revels

The night Sokia Valupak became a woman, she was almost shot by an arrogant
groundhog . . .

In the opening scene Sokia jimmies open a skylight and climbs down a rope
into the library of a rich groundhog. She grabs a handful of silver coins from
a jar marked "Roof Rats" on an ornate desk. She spots the crystal
sphere across the room and she goes over to touch it. She's simply
"counting coup" -- she was taught never to take items of extravagant
value. (They'll shorten you for sure, says her dad.) As she's about to climb
back up to the roof, a young man steps out of the shadows. He's wearing a dark
leather greatcoat. (So that his class and standing are not telegraphed.) He's
holding a pistol. He's roughly her age, a few years older.

He tells her that if she'd tries to take the crystal, he'll shoot her. She
tells him that she wouldn’t think of stealing a crystal, and if she is not
welcome, she will leave, and he can't stop her. He lowers the gun, smiles
briefly, and says, "I wouldn't think of it."

Sokia flies across the rooftops, leaping over alleys, rattling down fire
escapes (we show glimpses of the city below which has not cars, but electric
trolleys), and so to the cathedral which is the highest place in the city. She
scales it, noticing everywhere the glittering eyes of gargoyles watching her.
It fleetingly occurs to her that she's seen more gargoyles this night than
usual. But then she reaches the very top, where her parents are waiting.

In a brief ceremony which also serves as exposition explaining their
fourteen-and-adult mores (basically: arrival of menarche for girls, ejaculation
for boys, but of course this will be dealt with sensitively), her parents
declare her an adult. They also promise that they will always be prepared to
give her any support she needs, aside from food and shelter. Also that the
entire rooftop nation is sworn to protect her and she them, but that does not
always work out. Her entire extended family is there, save one.

Sokia is a little disappointed that her older brother Loki isn’t present.
(As a toddler, she named herself Sokia in worshipful imitation of him.) We get
the impression that he often doesn't show up.

But at the end of the chapter, after she's left the cathedral, she finds him
waiting for her outside her parents’ squat, where she’s gone to pick up her few
possessions. (Her kind own and need almost nothing) He’s whimsically hanging
upside-down by his heels from the eaves of a slightly higher building next to
theirs. He tells Sokia she had a close call, but that he was watching from
above when she had the encounter in the library, and was pretty sure he could
have torn off the groundhog's arm with his grappling gun, if he'd tried to shoot
her.

The reason he missed out on her menarche ceremony was that he was doing a
little investigation. (Loki has a groundhog girlfriend, which helps.) The young
man in the brocade vest is Charles Lii, the scion of one of the city’s leading
mercantile families. A merchant prince, if you will.

Sokia is offended he’s done all this – particularly watching over her as she
counted coup – but he points out to her that it happened when she was still a
child. As an adult she's on her own. Unless she asks for help, of course.

[Charles is a prospective romantic interest for later in the novel.]

The eventful night ends. It's false dawn, and time for Sokia to put the seal
on her adulthood by finding a new squat. She had scouted all sorts of neat
places previously – an old treehouse hidden way up a huge fir tree, an
abandoned attic of the Postal Museum, even a coupola decorating the city hall,
but all were previously claimed. She ends up in a rather smelly abandoned
dovecote on the roof of a factory. It's dark, but of course the City is never
completely dark, what with electrification and all. She quietly makes a space,
and hopes she isn't inhaling too much guano. She is just dropping off to sleep
when she realizes she is not alone.

End of chapter.

Chapter Two: Sokia
Wakes Up

Sokia is scared stiff, but also exhausted. Tells herself that this is not
necessarily a dangerous person. In major flight or flight quandry.

An old woman's voice speaks up: Don't distress yourself, chicken. Get some
sleep. We'll discuss your rent over breakfast.

Sokia goes to sleep. Early in the day, she dreams she hears the throb of
great engines filling the city. Sokia awakens, realizes it's the Empire of the
Air, going about their mysterious purposes.

Later, in the full light, she sees that the resident of the dovecote is in
fact an elderly woman, but one with an air of mystery about her. Sometimes when
Sokia looks at her, she seems almost young -- a trick of the light, perhaps.

The Pigeon Lady does not seem to be one of the people of the rooftops, but
she doesn't seem to be a groundhog, either. She gives Sokia a makeshift
breakfast -- a stale bit of bread and some strong coffee, which she makes on a
tiny spirit-stove.

Sokia's rent is to be that she supply more nourishing fare than that for the
woman's evening meal. Sokia accepts this.

But daylight is not the time to procure food. Sokia has more pressing needs,
and must take off immediately on her task. We get a lot of roof-top skittering
here, and a sense of how hard it is to clamber about on roofs without getting
caught.

Sokia escapes and find food for herself and the PL. She sleeps more securely
that night, and things seem to be going well the next day. She helps clear a
bit of the bird droppings, and learns more about the PL.

The next night, she gets a message from her brother that the flicks are
after her. Nobody knows why, but they're definitely describing her. And not
long after, the door of her dovecote is kicked down. It's young Charles with a
brace of police. He's angry, even desperate, and he wants to know where
"it" is.

The crystal egg has been stolen -- obviously (to Sokia) by the Empire of the
Air. Sokia is logically believed to be their scout. She is taken off to prison.

The Pigeon Lady is nowhere in sight. Sokia realizes she has been betrayed.
Her assumption is that it's the PL.

End of chapter.

Chapter
Three: Prison!

In prison, Sokia is first harshly interrogated. She, of course, knows
nothing of any use to her captors. She is able to learn that the crystal has
been stolen, but not much else. Charles stays for the interrogation and when
the police official (if he is given a name, he will reappear in the novel;
otherwise not; your call, Eileen) prepares to use force, Charles stops him.
From this we learn that he’s not a bad sort underneath. Also, since his orders
are peremptory, that he’s used to being obeyed.

Sokia is thrown in a holding tank with a large number of groundhog children.
Either her captors recognize adulthood at a significantly older age, or else
they are trying to humiliate her. There is barely enough room for the children
to stand, let alone lie down to rest. The toilet is a hole in the cement floor
that is stoppered with a large bottle to keep the rats from coming out the
hole. Smart, thinks Sokia.

Sokia, of course, although she has never seen anything like this, is made of
stern stuff, and toughs it out. Some of the other children don't do quite so
well. Others are mean: Sokia defends a rather frail child from bullies.

This child – Arturo – will later turn out to be the Pigeon Lady’s grandchild
which will somehow or other serve later on.

In the morning, the children are given a trough of slop. Older, more
powerful children take most of it, and give the remainder to the other
children. It almost seems like a child mafia. The jailers are two women and a
man, in shifts. The first jailer, a man, leads the children to a room where
they are set to work assembling some
kind of clockwork. (Actually bomb mechanisms, although the children have
not been told this. There is no explosive involved at this stage.) Sokia
realizes that she is larger and in better physical shape than most of the other
children, and she would have little problem doing the work and getting a good
share of food for herself. When the children are fed again, after six hours'
work, she takes a bunch of food before the mafia kids can get to it, and gives
it to some of the weaker children. She takes enough herself, realizing that
muscle beats brains in this situation. (There will of course be repercussions
from this.)

As her workday wears on, Sokia notices that the jailers are not much better
off than the children: they eat the same food as the children, but take more of
it. They are poorly dressed and obviously cold. At the end of the day, she is
shoved into the cell, and the door closes behind her.

She is about to fall asleep when she hears a grinding noise, like stones
being crushed. With a sound like a tree full of cicadas, a huge circle of the
wall falls away, and a huge sheet of netting is thrown over some of the
children, including Sokia and the youngest ones, who are together in the cell.
A thrumming noise fills the cell.

End of Chapter 3

[As I suspected, I couldn't figure out how to reply here properly.  I'll give it another go now, just after Eileen's next post.] Michael 

Michael and I are taking a day to re-boot our collaboration. This is a soft reboot: no data has been lost, and we have not blue-screened. We are transferring execution to a new kernel.

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is
nothing to compare it to now.

No, wait, those aren't my words -- they're Jonathan Lethem's.

I have no idea what Eileen means by her overheated and one does not say intemperate
prose. I am the most humble and mild-mannered of men. I wear glasses and carry
an asthma inhaler. I hold down a low-prestige job as a reporter for a great
metropolitan newspaper. My quiet and unassuming manner is legendary. My
diffidence is greater than that of ten ordinary writers.

But I'll do my best.

The basic idea here is to plot out an entire book, in open, so that if Eileen
and I ever find ourselves with a month or so free time and nothing to do, we
can simply dash it off, publish it, and live lives of indolence forever after.

I propose that we use the Stone Soup method, starting with nothing but a pot
of boiling water heated by our incandescent genius. 

Starting from nothing, I'll throw three suggestions into the pot.

1. It should be a children's or YA novel, simply because those are usually
shorter.

2. We should make it either Steampunk or New Weird, because kids really like
being cutting edge.

3. The protagonist should be a girl. Because there STILL aren't enough girl
heroes in young people fiction.

Over to you, Eileen. What's her name?

Michael