The Archaeologist Who Came In From the Cold

This has been an interesting and seemingly useful journey through genre structures. I have pretty much decided I am going to pivot, but it will be a soft pivot; walking back on a few things, changing the emphasis in a few places. Mostly having to do with character, as the ones having to do with story are going to take...more work like this.

I had been thinking that the London book didn't quite work as a mystery, but then I scanned the set-up scenes in the Japan book (there's a specific "refusal of the call" in that one) and I realized I'd missed a genre variation.

I was thinking Murder, She Wrote; where there is a body drop in the opening and the thing unfolds as a fairly straight-forward task of figuring out who did it. There's a different model, however.

It starts with a simple phone call. In London, this is Graham, who after a bit of a go-around explains someone might be stealing Roman coins from the dig Penny is working. It expands, with mysterious warnings, a shooting at the cemetery, more and more people of interest are added to the list and it is starting to look like a much deeper nest of conspiracies and secrets.

And in a way Penny was right. Although she finally confronts only one man, he was working with Penny's own boss and there was a tiny cover-up. But this wasn't nearly as big as the cover-up, and the secret, of Wentworth's Zero Room -- and that is where that final confrontation with Guy occurs.

I could apply this structure to the Japan book, with some stretching. It doesn't work at all for the Paris book but this itself is useful; it says that I may have been blending genres all along. Paris was designed as a treasure hunt, with the usual beats of that story template. And Japan is really...a caper.

The beats of the Japan book, in many places, I took quite consciously from the movie You Only Live Twice. Bond goes to a sumo match, Penny goes to the kabuki. She meets her Tiger Tanaka a little later, and up until that point had little idea what she had been sent to Japan for; just that it seemed to be a job and there might be more to it than it looked. Deacon/Blofeld is introduced fairly early. She and the local authority (in this case, a member of the Imperial Household Agency) plan their infiltration of his compound. She is discovered...and the ninja cavalry come rappelling down through the skylight.

I don't exactly make it a secret, either. She all but names the movie in the "scars" scene at the Park Hyatt Tokyo (yes...the Lost in Translation hotel).

And whether it is a chase, a mystery, a caper, or whatever, I need some kind of structure for the New Mexico book. I can see it working as another Rockford style mystery (the type goes back a lot earlier than him...I'd call Marlowe the archetype). She starts to look into the body found during the archaeological dig (in her shovel pit...and it isn't entirely coincidence), and it looks very much like conspiracy and indeed turns out to be one. Just not the first one she suspected. Or the second.

The advice about plotting a mystery is exactly like the advice about plotting a thriller. There are few totally cerebral cases, not in today's genre fiction. I still have what I already knew; Penny needs some skin in the game.

I'm working on this now. There are hooks already there in the setup. It was her dig. Worse, the people running the dig might blame her, meaning her career is in jeopardy. More so, I've got a sub-plot that brings Lon into the picture, and this can be thrown into Penny's basket with a false accusation against her (and leaving a very, very small conspiracy for her to uncover on the way to the big one).

I might have to kill off Lon early, though. Because that's when things turn around and Penny goes all-out.

***

Oh, and what was that about character pivot? What I've picked up is that the plot unfolds the same and believability remains the same whether your hero is an everyman or an adventurer. And neither impinges on what I call the "Christmas Jones" skills -- unless those skills are specific to the investigating or to the rough-and-tumble; trained forensics specialist, sharpshooter, martial artist, etc. 

I'm going to back off her confidence. And the apparent competence. I like the physical exuberance but heading towards making her competent in parkour and climbing buildings and rough-and-tumble and maybe some very basic martial arts was not the direction to go. The grim round of workouts and training is boring me too. It was a thing for the Japan novel, because that was part of the joke. But she's not an athlete, she's a genki girl.

I want to keep that physical exuberance and the way she throws herself into things, but making her either good at it or, even, conscious of how good she is wasn't working for me. The chase scenes in the Paris book left me a little cold. But I could see this coming in the Japan book; The yakuza chase and fight worked for me. The climbing wall less so, and the fight with Kaori...no.

A couple things I am keeping. She is still scared when she gets in a dangerous situation, but she doesn't freeze up. She also has just enough perspective (Amelia's job in the Paris book was to finally hammer this point home to her) that when she does pull off something badass, she can admit it. And enjoy it.

And as for all those hard-won skills from the previous books, like picking locks and riding snowmobiles? Not quite back to ground zero. Almost as good as "I've never done this!" is "I think I remember where the gas pedal is!" So it plays out like she is picking it up quick or really lucky (the standard everyman excuse) but she does have her "junior woodchuck" hand-wave of "Yeah, I rode one once in Japan..."

Which remark she will make. So I'm not counting on the reader remembering, and I'm not showing her carrying around a knapsack full of skills. I'm just using a slightly different justification. (Basically, it's the "I used to bullseye womp rats" justification).

As for structure? I do want to keep the pressure up, even if it isn't tension or a ticking clock. Just that she will alway have something to lose by not continuing. But I also like her better when she has a positive reason to approach something. In Japan she actually cried before agreeing to investigate Deacon. But then, she was carrying a lot of extra baggage at that moment. World's fastest recovery from PTSD (just add buddhist shrine, mountain priest...and yakuza.)

The motor-mouth stuff I can tone down and her focus improve, now that I think of it. She's earned a little maturity.

And I want clearer plots. Perhaps I should say I want external plots.

I've been leaning on conflicts that are internal, or even more often, thematic, and relying on those to carry the story arc. I've been borrowing resonance from them when the external conflict seems to fall short of proper tension and resolution. Penny's trip into the tunnels would have meant a lot less without Linnet's journey in 1941. I am risking this again in the New Mexico book if the ideas of peoples and migrations and human history don't actually have anything to do with either the mystery she is solving or how she approaches it or the solution.

Well, sort of. I call it a "Prachetism" when there's something that through most of the novel seemed like a thematic motif, but it becomes oddly important (through some sort of magical theory-of-contagion thing) to the resolution.

I like doing that. But I should first see that my external plot is strong enough to stand on its own.

There ain't no second chance against the thing with forty eyes

The prototypical Indiana Jones story sits comfortably towards the Thriller end of the Action-Adventure form. Raiders is almost top-to-bottom a hunt for and a chase after the biblical McGuffin. The tension is there from the beginning.

I should note I'm using "Thriller" here as a term for a certain story structure. As a genre, it ranges from intimate and claustrophobic portraits of psychological disintegration to explosive non-stop action. So leave aside the implications of creeping horror, gothic decay, festering family secrets and bad endings. Or terse conversations in techno-babble as submarines clash under the Arctic ice, for that matter.

Anyhow.

You can construct that same kind of Raiders plot around a stash of gold, or anything else worth killing over. But the size of the stakes are in inverse proportion to how close you adhere to reality; the really world-shattering stakes are easier when the thing has magical properties.

Clarke's Third Law-compliant, or not.

Not to say it can't be done. A surprising choice in the "third" Tomb Raider movie (the one based on the 2013 reboot) is that the world-threatening thing in Queen Himiko's tomb is the still-viable pathogen in her corpse.

Another one that doesn't -- quite -- reach for magic is Greg Benford's Artifact, with the globe-level threat something the physicist-author describes as "quarks on the human scale." However, even though this is found on an archaeological dig in the tomb of King Theseus and gave rise to the Minotaur myth, the puzzle-solving part is done in a high-energy physics laboratory.

Which leads to a basic observation; it is better to think of these not as archaeological adventures, but as the adventures of an archaeologist. We're back in Dick Francis territory. And where it may be reasonable for a jockey to get involved in a murder mystery happening at the horse races, having the final chase just happen to be on horseback puts us on the slippery slope towards Gymkata.

But I need to make a distinction between "Archaeologist" (a real-world job description) and "Archaeologist-Adventurer"; a character archetype that appears in certain works.

An archaeologist is a Dick Francis character. It is Christmas Jones or Gordon Freeman; it is an everyman hero who has that branch of anthropology in their CV. 

However, the skillset of an Adventure Archaeologist are those of an Adventurer. Flying planes and fisticuffs; all the stuff that will be the actual bulk of the story, and the stuff that for all practical purposes is what really progresses the plot. Both Everyman and Adventurer go through the same events but the flavor is different.

And that might be as useful a distinction as that between Mystery and Thriller. I'm going to call these the Adventure and the Thriller poles. The Adventure protagonist is trained for the job and plunges in, with some degree of confidence. The Thriller protagonist is pushed by the plot. They may squeak through, they may rise to the occasion. They usually take a few lumps and they may even fail.

Both have their moments of power fantasy. The Adventurer is a fantasy of being powerful (and usually fighting threats that are scaled appropriately). The Everyman is a fantasy that you, too, might do as well in the situations those protagonists face. It is considered a character easier for the audience to inhabit.

And that's why it felt so off for Penny to be collecting those skills for herself. It is always a little awkward, trying to level up the hero a bit, or even let them glow up, like Chuck finally becoming a trained spy able to hold his own with Sarah and Adam.

I got myself into a weird corner where I wanted to go more real but couldn't justify Penny surviving. 

Not with the situations she would be "realistically" running into. Doing a mostly off-screen Training Montage and making her now able to hold her own in a fist fight felt...wrong. 

I compromised by throwing her in the driver's seat of as many hot vehicles as I could come up with, plus giving her a handful of ninja throwing stars, lock picks, anything I could let her train up on. In short, justifying every one of these skills and showing the work she put in, so she never looked like some kind of Mary-Rey-Palpatine-Sue. 

But the emotional truth of a Thriller plot is that the hero survives regardless of their level of skill. Often the thriller will lampshade this. In the sequel to Preston and Child's Relic, the protagonist gets told to step aside for a much more competent squad of Navy SEALS. Who promptly get killed, leaving him alone to save the day anyhow. In Die Hard II, the professionals who take over the airport terrorism problem are, actually, part of that same problem -- and now McClane has to fight them, too.

Same principle as what TVTropes calls "Conservation of Ninjitsu." Or, as the unusually astute castle guards note in Guards! Guards! the fact that there's many of you and one of him means it might be a good idea for you to think twice. (They were wrong in this instance, but right in general principle. The Discworld runs on narrativium.)

So there's a reason I kept trying to push her emotions, thinking I was putting tension back in. Why I worked to back her down from where her climbing skills progressed to where she could be properly terrified climbing Notre-Dame de Paris, not traipsing along the parapet like she was Simon Nogueira.

The central conceit of the series is that Penny is an Everyman who keeps being thrown into situations that belong to an Adventurer. It it just a better story, I think, if she continues to muddle through. It was a mistake trying to train her up.

It also feels better to me, more in line with what appears to be the strengths of the concept, when Penny saves herself with a skill but it isn't the skill that you'd expect. Shooting back at the bad guys, not so good. Using a bronze-age sling to good effect, though... (She didn't do that one; Graham did. But point made.)

It should also be clear that "real" and "fiction" don't track in any way to the difference between the Joe Schlub and the ex Green Beret. Both are character archetypes that diverge from reality. 

That strong emphasis I was building in of "things don't work that way" (archaeology, history, but also fisticuffs) is there for the plot and for the joke. The world is conveniently real when it is inconvenient for the hero (and vice-versa). At most, you can say some things are more fictional than others. A famed globe-trotting adventurer who speaks seven languages is supposed to be recognized in-universe as a ludicrous fiction. A cold, scared, self-described "ex-dancer" who takes out a fully-grown yakuza in a fist fight is just...really lucky.

***

So what else does Thriller do that should work, and possibly has worked, for this series?

I've touched before on the aspect of control. The thriller is largely the villain (or events) in the driver's seat. The Action end of the pool has the hero making active choices; picking the fight, pushing after the villain.

I played with this in the Athens book. In Penny's mind, she is running scared and she only escapes several attempts on her life through sheer luck. But in the mind of Outis, she is the dogged pursuer, batting aside every attempt he makes to stop her and getting closer with every day. 

Mystery takes it one step further, where, aside from the bad guy escaping, the Detective is firmly in control through the whole thing.

You could also say that the Action hero wins and the Thriller protagonist survives. They scrape by, taking damage and sometimes even failing in the end. 

But this is old territory. What else does Thriller do?

Says one list; a clear thread, high stakes, twists (and also dynamic characters, memorable locations, and action).

I began this whole discussion with how Penny seems to have too little skin in the game (which isn't exactly what they are talking about with a clear thread, but I think it connects). I also mourn how many of the plots are slow starters, and how so many end up feeling unclear. The Mystery improves on that as well as there is a mystery that needs to be solved. It may open up the stakes into a larger mystery (often does) but there's something that is keeping the protagonist engaged from the start.

As several resources have pointed out, it has to matter. A rule sometimes broken; Holmes takes on cases for the intellectual challenge and would be depressed if he never found the solution. Travis, on the other hand, as much as he professes to be doing it to pay for his own peculiar retirement ("on the installation plan," he calls it) is almost always personally involved. Sometimes dangerously so.

The detective falls for the dame far too often. But even Sam Spade had a partner to avenge.

Perhaps, given the confusion between more action-based works where the heroes have to break into a heavily-guarded facility or stop a madman with a bomb, and the on-the-run style, where the hero has to not get caught and/or killed, it is best to think of there being a clear vector. Which way it points is unimportant.

Possibly the most dangerous thing to do is remove it. I did that in the Athens book; after the bombing, Penny thinks she is off the case. I repeated this almost exactly in the London book, and I actually gave a false ending in the Paris book where the treasure hunt appears to be over. (Not only that, she turned away from the treasure hunt a full third of the book before that.)

That vector doesn't need a face. It does make for a stronger thriller if there is an actual villain. The writer's resources don't talk pro or con on that, but they do have much to say about how soon you need your villain to show up.

Stakes comes with the territory of it being personal. I'm plotting the New Mexico book right now and I had Penny choosing to try to find out more about the body because, well, she'd personally dug it up. But her only skin in that game is the dig was shut down because of it and her former employers are not happy with her. It doesn't become truly personal for her until someone she knows is killed.

The London book squeaked by, I think, because of an alchemical connection* formed between Linnet (the diary-writer) and present-day Penny. She needs to find the end of Linnet's story because it in a way has become her story.

*(Borrowing the phrase from a review of Turandot.)

As I said above, this urgency, and this clear direction, can be there regardless of the outward form. They can both be there in a Romance (and the stakes as well, says he writing this draft on Valentine's Day).

I do find it interesting that deep and complex characters are getting mentioned as part of Thrillers. I suspect they are talking more about the psychological thrillers, because you don't need a complicated back story and deep hang-ups to flee from a crop-duster. Mystery and the kind of thriller where twelve people are trapped in a lonely mansion and start dropping one by one are ones where figuring out motives and navigating the tangled landscape of potential allies or betrayers can take up a big chunk of the story.

I find it troubling that location is also singled out. Perhaps Thriller isn't the safe-haven from the dreaded info-dump that I thought it was.

You call this archaeology?

 So I have determined that the forms of "Mystery" and "Thriller" can be analyzed to see what elements work for the series I am currently writing. And that the series appears to fall somewhere between the two. Assume, then, that I chose to emphasize the Mystery. What are the strengths and weaknesses of that form?

You certainly can't say that a mystery is incompatible with action or tension. There is a mystery element in the most action-filled adventure. Usually. On the flip side, even the cerebral Holmes sometimes needed to ask if Watson had brought along his trusty service revolver.

Thing of it is, when James Bond finds a clue, it really isn't a main line of the story. His tales proceed from the logic of action. Clues are just the mechanism of plot to get him from one action set-piece to another. He wins because he survives getting shot or blown up, not because he deduces it was the Duchess in the dark with her dirk.

(As illustration, do you know how hard it was to find a picture of James Bond looking for a clue?)

Basically, mystery and Action (our current stand-in for the somewhat different idea of the Thriller) are different streams. They don't really intersect. The action may or may not connect to the solution, but the process of solving the mystery is that process of sorting the clues into order. Not how the clues were obtained.

A lot like that disjunct between how the story in a game advances (through choices made in dialogue) versus how the larger part of the game is played (combat, exploration, crafting).

The main intersect in the thriller is that there is usually an external tension, with or without ticking clock. In a murder mystery, the murderer might get away. In a thriller, the murderer will kill again if not stopped. Action is implicit in the premise, basically, because the stakes are always mortal.

I would point out that the thriller goes hand-in-hand with violence, because you need the stakes, and the stakes need to be personalized in some way in order to engage the reader's empathy, and good story-telling rarely lets the hero slide through without taking a few hits so you've basically walked yourself into the hard steel-lined door of having your hero getting get hurt at some point. Which means the action -- the violence -- is happening up-close and personal.

But that seems trivial. Better to, for the moment, think of violence as a sort of slider that can be run up and down regardless of where a story sits on the mystery v. thriller arc.

Concentrate on action. On the idea of the action driving the plot. Well, what else is an archaeologist-adventurer? It is practically the name on the tin. They have adventures. Now, they might go around punching people, or they might be climbing rocks, but they are doing physical adventure. Meaning there's an element of physical danger.

Which points the big arrow at the end goal being physical. That is, that the end goal should be stopping the zombie uprising, not finding the mummy of Pharaoh Senebkay. Again, the difference between not letting the bad guy escape, and not letting the bad guy kill again.

Okay, not saying the Tomb Raider franchise always got that one right. In the first of the reboot trilogy, she saves...herself. Okay, she's trying to save her fellow crew members as well. She's only partially successful. In the second game, she stops a zombie army from destroying a village. That's decent. In the third, she stops a guy from getting superpowers he can use to give his people a better life. Um...yay us?

***

Archaeologist-Adventurer seems pretty incompatible with Mystery, though. It is funny, because the process of archaeology is a lot more like the process of mystery. But -- and this is true for Adventure as well -- real archaeology is pretty much orthogonal to what drives the plot. It might be an excuse to get into a plot, and I've treasured the moments where I've managed to have Penny use archaeology as part of her solution, but really it is more of a character trait. Black hair, likes dance, archaeologist.

It reminds me far too much of all those cozy mysteries (Dick Francis may have started it in modern fiction) of the amateur detective who, for the purposes of the story, is a detective. For the purposes of character, though, they have a thing. They know horses, they collect orchids. It rarely intersects the plot and when it does, it can seem...forced.

So it seems worth asking if the methods of archaeology and the questions of archaeology are compatible with the process and the result wanted in a mystery. Obviously, you'd hardly call it a mystery if your protagonist scrapes dirt with a trowel for twenty-three chapters, and by chapter twenty-four is willing to write in their site record that this is probably an Athebascan burial mound from about 800 CE.

In the stories I've written so far, Penny rarely digs anything up herself. She is more like an academic researcher, going through existing collections to draw conclusions from the material there. And she does, even of most of the book is taking place outside the lab (aka out in the real world having conversations and, yes, sometimes getting chased by yakuza).

And the questions I have her dealing with as the core and most important questions are anthropological. Which in the States archaeology falls under as a sub-discipline. Sure, Penny may recognize a name, or a jacket, or some other traditional Mystery clue, but she knows the importance of it because she has put it in an anthropological context. 

(The Paris book is interesting here; she has four big contextual realizations. But only two of them come out of the anthropological context the story has been focused on; what the last poem refers to, and why there might be a secret in a cemetery in Montmartre. The other two are a much shallower sociological context and, strangely, are the ones she almost loses her life over.)

But in the end, she could be an anthropologist or a historian or, for that matter, a travel writer or a novelist or a social worker and still bring the same skillset to bear in piecing together all the little cultural traits with the hints she's gotten and realizing who Ichiro is really working for and who he is protecting, or that Linnet's "Captain" had a stash of guns hidden under the Nine Elms station.

But not a beekeeper. That wouldn't have helped.

(To get a bit more technical, in Indiana Jones or similar situations, the heroes use the clue to tell them where to dig the hole. The actual digging is putting a shovel to what the ancient inscription said or where the light beam from the intricate mechanism fell on the first day of the year. In actual field work, digging the hole is the thing and the clues come out of not even what is dug up but the context that can only be discovered by that careful and technical excavation.)

Which brings me back around to the intersect the stories were partly written to address; between fictional archaeology and the real thing. Real archaeology may be a "find some fish for Aquaman to talk to" in a mystery, but it falls even more outside the thriller. It matters to the actual engines of the story (that is, climbing skyscrapers and punching bad guys) the way it matters that Denise Richard's character is a nuclear physicist.

Is, however, an archaeologist-adventurer incompatible with mystery? Can Lara Croft do the Miss Marple? It does seem a waste of what that character brings to the table. If Nero Wolfe was a circus strong-man, you'd think his cases would have a little less talking and a little more Santos Superman about them.

(And, yes, there is a whole sub-genre of Luchadores being cops, priests, superheroes...)

Since there really isn't an established genre of "Tomb Raider solves crimes in her spare time" it doesn't really feel like an avenue worth pursuing.

***

Put that aside as inconclusive. What am I writing a story for, irrespective of what my protagonist might call herself? As I said in the last entry, I seem to have moved towards Regional Mystery. Mystery split fairly early on into the detached cerebral puzzle -- locked rooms and the like -- the more action-oriented and hard-boiled stuff (and see above for where that sits on the "mystery v." axis) and lastly, mysteries that use the mystery as frame for character and social commentary. Led perhaps by the "knight in tarnished armor" himself. A phrase used by both Robert Parker and John D. McDonald, with the former specifically crafted to explore ideas of the previous work.

And although Sam Spade had SF and Spenser explores him some Boston, it is Travis McGee who shows focus on the place where the stories are happening. (Not to say Chandler didn't do so as well for an equally sun-drenched LA).

Mark the next era with Tony Hillerman, where the setting is a character in itself, and perhaps more importantly, readers are coming to the books for the setting as much as for the story. The mystery de jour is almost an excuse to hang out in Four Corners with the diné. 

Is this sort of celebration of place compatible with the thriller? Writers from E.R.B. to Alistair MacClean were giving a strong sense of place within a plot that was pure action-adventure. The thing I think this misses is that in Hillerman we are, again, anthropological. We get deep into culture and language and religion. We get into a place at the bones of economy and history. It isn't "Here's Prague, isn't it spooky with all the old buildings and the fog."

There's an almost science-fiction element to it, because of course it is a scientific interest. Maybe there's a reason the stock detective character is a wryly cynical observer, standing just slightly outside (rather than fully outside, an intellect vast and cool and unsympathetic).

And I think that sort of perspective, and that attention to detail, is firmly on the Mystery side. If for no other reason than that there are only so many words to go around and every word that's being used to describe the history of the Eiffel Tower is a word that can't be in a crazy parkour scramble to get away from some street thugs.

And yes, I have two chase sequences in the Paris book that are largely for the incongruity of doing the tourist-view of Notre-Dame de Paris in the middle of a foot chase, or the same in Gallerie Vivienne.

Which I guess answers one question. Tony Hillerman is facing the same thing, which is how to tie all of that setting back to plot. He is using that same sense of context to understand the clues, a context that can only be grasped by the reader through leading them through the same landscapes and showing them the same cultural ways. John Begay wouldn't have left his truck and walked because you don't leave the truck, not here in this desert landscape.

I was so conscious of doing this in the Paris book, that it is embedded in Huxley's book and clues as well. Meta-textually, she is going through the same experience with his fictional book, as we are with the book that contains it.

This is a ride I want to craft. Is it the ride the reader wants to take? Can I do it better? What parts of what I've been doing are making me unhappy, and what parts of it are making my readers unhappy?

I can't help coming back to the idea that this is too much license for me to indulge, and this is why I've got readers (well, family -- nobody else seems to want to comment) about getting lost in Japanese history or Bazalgette's sewer system. That I'd be more focused if I had more pressure on my protagonist, giving them only enough space between blows to glimpse the front of the Pantheon, but not enough time to mention Baron Haussmann.

Obviously a mystery can pass as lightly as a thriller over all of these too-tasty details. I mentioned reading an urban fantasy set in Paris (written by a German now living in New Zealand) and even though the character has a day job at the Pantheon I can't even say for sure if there are stairs. Much less any other detail of the physical building.

On the other hand, her protagonist also meets and has commentary on a dozen different famous people who are buried there. Complete with a hundred-year-strong, page-long argument about philosophy (something so far outside my area of interest I couldn't name you the characters involved even with having just read the book).

In any case, I lack any good metric of what "too much stuff" means. So finding an approach that isn't using that "stuff" as an underlying plot (or at least closely plot-adjacent) mechanism might be something I need to do.

What if I advance the mystery on a different set of clues? What if the clues are things like a clock broken at exactly 10:43 or a left-handed shooter; things that aren't dependent on the story being set in Anchorage, Alaska? Where I can absolutely chose to show or not to show language or food or religion because they are only there for color?

I don't like it. There's nothing fun about using Mystery elements that have been there since a certain Belgian first groomed his mustaches. And since nothing ties them to the setting, might as well set the mystery in a white room. And on the flip side, since none of it matters, there's no reason to care where the mystery is set, either. And, really, this doesn't even work for thrillers. As much as there are so many stock settings, the docks, the late-night warehouse, the crowded precinct station, the seedy boxing ring, the thriller lives for the set-pieces that are absolutely regional. Tied to some specific element of some specific place.

But is this contextual? I would argue that it is. Bond's famous Thames boat chase looks cool, but it gets resonance through recognizing the London landmarks in it. In a book, you at least have to name-drop if you are going to get that thrill. 

I felt there was more to it, though. The exercise I did in the Paris book was that two locations in particular are tied to some of the mythology that surrounds them; she tails the treasure-hunter gang through the Paris Opera House while ruminating on The Phantom of the Opera and what that story has meant to people including one future historian (herself). And of course The Hunchback of Notre-Dame for Notre-Dame de Paris. 

To the point where there are in-jokes; Penny hisses under her breath "So it is to be war, then, war between us both" (a paraphrase from the musical) in the former, and comments Captain Phoebus won't catch her if she falls from the latter (a detail which only appears in the Disney movie).

So already we can see the slippery slope. Assuming "too much information" is the problem I think it is. The problem might actually be one of lack of urgency, lack of tension, lack of a clear goal and a clear victory...and for all of that, I need to look at the series as a thriller.

Next essay.

Pivot Time

Actually, I already pivoted. I just didn't realize it until now. The pivot happened between the first book and all of the rest.

I thought it was changes in my writing, or perhaps the change in the character arc, but really what is going on is that the first book in the series is a different kind of book.

The Athens book is a thriller. And it isn't even that she is being chased (although she certainly is) but that she is fleeing. She's a neophyte tourist without any personal confidence, on her own in a strange place. She doesn't understand enough to properly grasp her situation or come up with better ideas -- she just runs. That's the strong structure, and those are things that aren't true for any other book in the series.

In the thriller model, the heroes are on the back foot for most of the book. They are reacting; it is the villain who drives the plot. Very close to the end of the book, the heroes are pushed into a final desperate confrontation -- often involving some long-shot gamble of a plan -- and the villain is finally forced to react to what the hero is doing.

I pretty much hit all the classic beats. This is thriller-adventure in an exotic location. And, yeah, there are places I lost the thread, there are places I went too slow or described too much, but the combination of thriller format and the inexperience of Penny acted to control the amount of "stuff." It is all unfamiliar to Penny and that unfamiliarity is the point. So the idiot lectures were -- mostly! -- toned down.

The later books are mysteries. Cozy mysteries, even. So that's already a more contemplative approach. And the very nature of a mystery, as opposed to an action-adventure, is that the protagonist is the driver. Penny is, despite some of the situations she ends up in, never quite pushed by the plot as she was in the first book.

Even in the Japan book, which brought back the action and the pressure, Penny made a choice to go up against the cult, to train, to go into their compound. The same happens in the London book; she isn't driven by outside forces, fleeing or struggling, she makes the choice  to go into the tunnels.

And the flavor of the choice wasn't good. In both cases, Penny doesn't leap at the adventure, she doesn't make a heroic declaration. She approaches what she knows is going to be a difficult task with resignation. That's never a good place for a story to be. Hell, I should have learned this back in acting class (I remember in particular a monologue I did and the teacher's suggestion of a very different way to approach it).

(The lesson was; don't play this monologue as despair. Play this as rage against the gods. Giant cow optional.)

But back to the essential idea of a mystery. These aren't just mysteries, or even cozy mysteries. These are regional mysteries. She's gone from being an outsider to whom Athens, and the other locations on her wild flight through Europe, are strange unfamiliar and frightening places, to staying in a place and learning enough to start fitting in.

Worse, the solution to the mystery often lies in a gestalt of her understanding of the place and people. This is most clear in the Japan book, where she figures our who sent the yakuza after her by understanding the Lost Generation and the effect of the collapse of the bubble economy on the Japanese psyche!

Which sets things up for info dumps. So very, very many info dumps.

So it wasn't the density, or the approach, it is the nature of the story itself that led to this kind of density.

I even had a map of a different way to handle it. Through the Japan book in particular, she is shown learning the things she later will use. There are three specific scenes demonstrating, dramatizing, the idea of the public to private spaces, though wood floors to tatami mat.

But she also has her magical language skill in picking up local idiom. Sure, in the Japan book she is shown learning (or, rather, being shown) "Chotto, matte." By the Paris book, she can instinctively come up with an "Eh nien quoi?" to maintain her cover, and that was absolutely not used at any point in the book before then.

I talked in my notes about being fair to the reader. About not having her suddenly drop some plot-important bit of historical knowledge that only she had, but to have the reader have the same information and grasp the same clues. That is, to treat it as a mystery, where it is considered unfair to the reader to have the murderer someone who wasn't even in the story until the reveal.

***

There are other differences. A mystery can indeed have adventure, and confrontations, and heroic actions. Sometimes a man does come through the door with a gun in his hand. But the essential format is one of a contemplative approach. While there might be a final action-filled confrontation, most of getting to that goal is the gathering of clues (and understanding), and few of those require heroics to gather. The hero earns the plot coupons to pay for a good ending not by fighting for them, but by being smart.

I understood what was happening in several of the books of the series. There are places where I knew there was no causal connection between the action and the gaining of the clue or other advancement of the plot. So I worked to forge an emotional connection; that she somehow earned the plot-important thing because she'd succeeded at some actually-not-important thing.

The clearest case is the radio in the London book. She turns on the radio after a lot of work. Later, the Whisperer in Darkness talks to her. It looks like connection because it is in temporal sequence and shares elements; cries for help, communication, etc. But he doesn't call on the radio. Nobody answers the radio. And it is hinted strongly in the text that she left it on "receive" and didn't, actually, even send a signal out!

So I was forcing action in, and it often felt disconnected. The Battersea jaunt felt out-of-place in the London book because even though more about Guy is revealed (she finds the shooter of the Highgate Cemetery incident) those discoveries are incidentals that just sort of happens during the urban exploration adventure. They could have happened just as well on solid ground.

***

There's usually a villain in a thriller. In a mystery, most often the point is figuring who did it. So the protagonist doesn't know, and the reader doesn't know, and the final confrontation is more often a "I know you are wondering why I gathered you all here today," not a sword fight on top of a burning dirigible.

In a thriller, even if the identity is unknown, there's an active presence pushing the hero, pushing at the story, shaping their choices. You could even say that in a mystery, the hero chases the villain. In a thriller, the villain chases the hero.

The Athens book is really the only one where she got to confront the bad guy and the Big Bad behind him, make a proper challenge, have a little fight (with someone else, but okay), and win. In the London book -- where, I now realize, things began to go wrong -- Guy comes almost out of nowhere. The mystery is about where the Roman coins came from. It was never really about who was fencing them across South London. It means that Guy feels disconnected from the plot; he isn't a resolution, he is more like another obstacle on Penny's epic sewer crawl.

Deacon at least is a strong and visible character through most of the Japan book. That book just whiffs the end as he turns into Hannibal; a charismatic guy, who is very possibly a bad guy, and who has some really nice moments with her earlier. But then who escapes at the end and didn't really have much to do with the resolution.

(Not helped that her resolution to the Japan book is to...do nothing.)

And as part of this package of villain, clear goal, and final confrontation, the hero gets to make their own declaration. It might be a simple statement, it might be a badass boast.

Penny is full of them in the Athens book. Even at her nadir of confidence, afraid and alone, she tells Newman that she will get the Athena Sherd back to Athens. She stands up to Satz in her first heroic confrontation when he tries to stop her at the airport. And she does The Line on the cigarette boat in mid-Adriatic; "My name is Athena Fox. I am an archaeologist."

(It's what her character said in her show.)

She gets a proper "I'm going to stop you" speech on the island and...she does. But the rest of the series?

She does tell the treasure hunters in Paris something along the line of "Try that again and I'll stop you." She does The Line in the climax in Kyoto, complete with hero pose, and she talks like a tough guy to get through the junior yakuza before that. But the closest she comes to the bad-ass boast is when she tells Ichiro -- very near the end of the book -- "I'll protect the Prince. I'll recover Kusanagi. I'll stop Deacon cold, if I have to. And then I'll come back to you."

***

Now, sure, a lot of these story elements are cheesy. But I set out to do cheesy. I set out to do Indiana Jones, but in a Romancing the Stone way; to have an ordinary person who thought they were living in a sensible universe thrust into full-on Hollywood action sequences. Stunts and all. And cheesy or not, that stuff can make for a good read.

(Yes, I did just watch The Stunt Man. As well as a couple episodes of Spenser for Hire, which has the same uneasy balance between a primarily mystery format, and random gunfights breaking out at intervals. And for that matter, a bunch of classic Doctor Who, which alternates a cerebral puzzle with chases down corridors. Like Chandler said, sometimes a Dalek comes busting through the door with a ray gun.)

And I knew I wanted these things when I was in the later books, and I was fighting hard against the material to get them in, and I was uncomfortable at how badly they often fit.

So I understand, now a lot more of why things went in certain directions and what forces were causing things like slow talky scenes, directionless plots without urgency, and a lack of strong resolution. Not to mention the terrible, terrible info-dumping. So much info-dumping.

Just on the urgency; I set a Ticking Clock in the Japan book. I started the clock too late; there should have been a deadline looming much, much earlier in the story. But it failed as a ticking clock because there was no bomb under the table. The framework was still mystery, and the mystery was not even what kind of bomb, but whether there was a bomb at all. That rather defuses any urgency of there being a deadline.

Now, thriller and mystery aren't hard definitions and there is blend between them. The question I have to deal with next, though, is whether the strengths of the mystery are things I want to keep in the stories. 

I rather do like her doing a deep dive into a culture, and solving a mystery with intellect. I am just more and more conscious of fighting the other things I wanted -- and that I feel where the later books are much better books, I miss the fun of the first book.

Up up down down left right

For no good reason at all, I fired up Stable Diffusion, loaded in several different models and a few LoRA, and experimented to see what would happen if there was no prompt at all.

Some of the LoRA were so overtrained they popped up the elements you'd be using for. Say a "classic Chevy" LoRA would produce classic Chevys even without a prompt. Styles also came through even without prompts, like a LoRA I use that does the kind of pulp cover art appropriate for all your Retro Rockets.

And then there was this.

I did several runs and got several other weird sportsball sort of displays. Until the penny dropped; there's this one model I experiment with that was strangely trained, and requires a cryptic Konami Code of a thing in the prompt box before the "real" prompt. "score_4, score_6, source_pony..." And I hadn't deleted those lines before testing a model that didn't parse them.

Anyhow, the results were amusing. A lot of the checkpoint models, when left without direction, return a close-up of a textured surface. The handle of a dishwasher. A warehouse roll-up door. That sort of thing. But especially with the LoRA, it only takes one prompt word -- not even one of the recommended keywords -- to get the thing spitting out the kind of thing it is designed for. There's a weird thing I've noticed, where even if the LoRA is incompatible with the checkpoint model some of the raw data in it is still filtering in.

Oh, and here's a less amusing look into the soul of a new machine. In normal usage you have several prompt terms that all get thrown into a bucket, parsed and interpreted, and some hybrid thing created out of them that you could almost think of as a hash table for what is supposed to be a finely-ground abstraction of the original training data.

When you use a single term on an overtrained LoRA, it spits out what looks a lot like a thing that it shouldn't even have. It isn't, of course, an actual copy of an original image. Even if you can read the artist's signature on it. But there are few enough of them, and you aren't calling on enough other elements that are present in the model itself to mask them, either.

If you are running a "mammals" LoRA that only has six bats in the original training data, after a few runs you tend to really notice the bat with the wings up, the bat with the blue background, and the grainy night picture of a bat. Even if they don't look exactly like the originals, you get the feeling that with a little work you could probably identify those originals.

AI, however, is here. The backlash is also here and in some corners getting vicious; many young artists are being accused of using AI with the same specious logic and "it looks like" of Moon Landing deniers finding prop markings and lighting instruments in the Apollo Surface Record.

In a different corner, there are still hopefuls trying to make a buck writing novels with AI. They founder on the shoals of the fact that the marketplace is unforgiving for even good novels; there's no easy riches to be had in the writing game. They hardly need to crash into the towering cliffs of Amazon's aggressive adjustment of the algorithm (and the rules) to protect their brand.

And in forums, AI has just become another part of the noise of spammers, astroturf farmers and all the people who just want to have an argument about their hang-up of the moment. The enshittification that makes it harder and harder to actually find information, answers, or help was already ongoing. AI output just takes another new set of skills to recognize for what it is. The biggest challenge is that the productivity of chatbots is so much higher than that of even the political talking point sweatshops in Russia, China, and elsewhere, it exceeds whatever small ability there might have been for forum operators to moderate or filter the stuff.

It means, like search engines, like most of the Google monolith, like all the things that were supposed to be making things easier (review sites like Yelp, say) have become pitifully useless, drowning in the inevitable SEO-ification of anything that might earn a nickel anywhere.

And we can't blame AI. It is just the tool of the moment.

Kiss Me Deadly

A thing I tell a lot of new writers is that when a problem seems unsolvable, try to think out of the box. You have to recognize you are in a box first. You also have to figure out where the sides of the box are. That's why stating the problem as unambiguously as possible is such a good trick; it makes the constraints you are unconsciously applying more obvious.

This wasn't quite what happened with my nuclear MacGuffin. It was more like I wandered across the unstated boundary without even realizing it.

It's right there in the name. Hitchcock made the name deliberate to underline that it doesn't actually matter what the MacGuffin is. And I had already decided that the punch line to Penny's brush with nuclear secrecy is to accept that in the end, she never does find out what the secret was.

(Something I also had her do in the Paris book. I hope it isn't going to become a trend.)

The thing it took me a week to see is that not only don't I have to show what is in the box, the plot works if there was nothing in the box to begin with!

So this is how I construct it now:

MacDonald had the MacGuffin. John Freeman thought he might have taken it literally to the grave with him. When word got out about the Russian SLAM project, Freeman went back to White Sands. When Penny does her illegal midnight stratigraphy, she finds that MacDonald's grave has been dug twice (not counting the archaeological excavation, or the mess the Coroner's Office made of the site. This is a dig that will take all her skills as an archaeologist).

When the coroner got a good look at MacDonald's bones is when the NEST team was triggered. (NAGPRA was already on site, in the form of the Indian rights activist, because they were already on call. So they'd show for human remains even if Penny hadn't recognized what turned out to be a Tewa burial ritual.)

(I haven't decided whether it is a plutonium alloy Macdonald was machining -- that stuff is pretty tightly controlled -- but he was working early Los Alamos style where some of the workers weren't even informed about the hazards of the materials they were handling, and as a result his body was contaminated.)

The NEST team might not have been entirely serious. They were also on site at White Sands, and they took theexcuse for a training exercise. Hence the straight-from-the-movies fallout in full team strength, white vans and hazmat suits. In any case, their talk of a possible Source helped cement the existence of a MacGuffin in certain people's minds.

Lon Davis published a picture of MacDonald's body that he shouldn't have been able to get. That caused a search of his trailer by "parties unknown" (because I'm trying to avoid some spoilers here in my blog!) and led to the "Lon Gunman" (as he calls himself online) being taken out by a lone gunman. Which looks suspiciously like the kind of Black Ops hit Lon wrote about in his work as a conspiracy theorist.

He's not really an aliens guy but Penny goes to Roswell to find him because why would I pass up a chance to do Roswell?

And now there are at least two people looking for the MacGuffin/The Source and Penny breaks the law again to search Lon's trailer, and so does his killer, leading to another must-have scene that was in my list as she fights back with Lon's SOF Magazine collection of ninja throwing stars and the like. 

Then the long desert chase. Which is my "trying to do Sir Pterry" resolution of a ongoing thematic thread about early human migration, persistence hunting, and...things. More sidebar stories, just like the last book, but these are in Third Person Omniscient. Lucy, Egtved Girl, a Spanish settler on the Jornado del Muerto, etc. The archaeological excavation, after all, is around footprints of putative pre-Clovis humans. Or rather pre-pre-Clovis humans, pre Beringia even.

And I also might put my notes in the front this time, indicating that I'm using archaeological knowledge as of 2019. Time, and better strontium analysis, marches on.

In any case, this chase fetches up at Trinity site. Which is why I was trying to put together a vacation to New Mexico on the one open day of 2024.

So. The ball got rolling because this is how nuclear secrecy, scientific secrets, works. When people know a thing is possible then they start noticing all the clues that are out there in the open literature. MacDonald's radiation injuries by themselves weren't enough (they are unfortunately common), but between the location of the grave and Lon's efforts and Penny's efforts in stirring the pot enough people are turning over rocks that the engineering breakthroughs of a secret project from the Star Wars days (Reagan, not a galaxy far, far away) risks being uncovered by Unfriendly Powers.

(And I haven't even mentioned the military intelligence guy, a very smart captain who made sure to have a good working relationship with the E4 Mafia).

Secrecy and paranoia got Lon killed. The phantom Source just accelerated things...but more than that, it fulfills the Doylist function of getting people running around being tailed by menacing pickup trucks (everything is menacing when you are driving a Smart Fortwo as Penny will be), sneaking around military reservations, and getting shot at. The plot works even if the box is empty.

This was one of those snowball days where that understanding of how the MacGuffin worked led me to understand a lot more about MacDonald, and also about John Freeman. Retired physicist and itinerant musician, with his buddy "silent partner" Al, he dropped in to the Alamogordo blues and rockabilly scene and sat in for the bass player for the existing "Ray Cats," who is having back problems and needs to sit out most of their sets. Which also gives Penny someone to talk to when the band isn't playing too loudly.

(Since they owe more than a little to The Unreal Band, they frequently are.)

So what is, as of the moment, still on the table, or probably on the table?

The Solutrean Hypothesis and the Mound Builder Conspiracy, plus Indigenous Archaeology and Tewa mythology. Which is a through-line up to the current-day neuvomexicanos, Los Alamos, and to why MacDonald was buried on military land. So it is actually plot-important.

There's a very cool mural on what is called in some circles Nuclear Colonialism that I would like to move to Alamagordo so Penny can see it.

UFOs are probably off the table. I can't miss Roswell, but all the really fun stuff is in Nevada anyhow. Same goes for Fallout/Nuclear Armageddon. I do want to touch on the idea of the Anthropocene and even the pessimistic last couple of variables in the Drake Equation, but I can't indulge in any Mad Max LARPing on this one. Goodsprings is in Nevada, too, for your Fallout New Vegas fix.

And same for westerns and ghost towns and...I just came up with another story, didn't I? Especially if I can work the Lost City of Cecil B. DeMille into it. Though what Roy Rogers, the Wasteland Wanderer, and Cleopatra VII Philopator have to do with each other...

And Kerr-McGee? I would like some Industrial in my military-industrial complex, but this red herring is looking pretty smelly at this point. It is quite clear MacDonald got exposed while working on a weapons-related program, not due to the poor management of uranium mining and refinement in the area. 

I would really like to get a visit to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, though. This hooking back to that Fermi problem et al. And it isn't like MacDonald has a CV I have to stick to (not even his name is set in concrete, much less buried in a stable containment facility).

That stuff will have to wait for the chapter plan. But at this point I've narrowed focus enough to where I can do directed research towards the elements I'm fairly sure will feature in the story.

Gormenghast

I found another panto on YouTube with good picture quality, good production quality, and even though it is a 2020 production this one is traditional.

 A proper Boy, a good Dame, and they even have a Panto Horse. But then comes this moment:

The villain enters Stage Right. The Good Fairy enters Stage Left. They explain the story to come and they do so in rhyming verse and all of a sudden we're back 400 years or more, seeing something strange and unfamiliar, something straight out of the Mystery Plays. A glimpse into ritual and deep history.

And then it's back to jokes about social distancing and pop songs and pies to the face. Craig Fergusson once described panto as Mama Mia performed by the Three Stooges for the audience of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. I'm not sure you could do better. I did a whole chapter on it in the London book but even then my protagonist ended up calling it indescribable.

That idea I had over brunch continued to grow. It isn't just Penny thinking about family and finally explaining a little to the reader. This is going to be Gally's first real appearance (she was previously in a brief phone call from Japan). And she's going to do something that opens up the question again of whether there might be a reason Penny's been having all these adventures.

Like I said, series isn't selling. My confidence isn't growing, either. But I am getting closer and closer to resuming writing anyhow.