Pi-Ramses Lost

Since last September. That's how long it took me to cobble up an outline. Well, honestly, at least half that time was just doing general research.

It took me the last several months to work almost crabwise to an acceptance that all the stuff that had grown out of what was originally background detail for one of five characters was incompatible with the story of a group of adventurers on a whirlwind tour of the Bronze Age Aegean. But I wasn't willing to let go of all the stuff I'd been doing with my Cretan Weaver, or with the Egyptian Scribe, and I was blocked as I tried to figure out any way to cut between one and the other without destroying their story arcs.

Over the past week I read an article or two on fictional dystopias and watched most of Peter Capaldi's last season (the one with Bill Potts). And reading almost simultaneously an academic exploration of the origins of the Jason and the Argonauts story/myth and a light but well-done "Hornblower in Space" set of stories (no, not Honor Harrington. Alexis Carrew.) Oh, yes, and playing Fallout 4. And somehow all of these jumbled together to jolt me onto a fresh track. To wit; make the meeting between Setna and Kes earlier. Bring him to Crete while her story is still in progress, and make him part of it.

And it started spinning from there. When he shows up it is a shift in goals (which I'd intended already). Bring him in for Act III and it is a classic three-act structure. The first act is internally about her fitting in, finding her place (and geeking out about weaving, and later language). And externally about Knossos at peace, the height of the Mycenae koine, a good place that the later events will threaten.

And the second act brings in the threats. Crete is a good place to explore the Mycenae, and the history back to the Minoans, and look at some of the stressors that may have led to the Collapse. Among them being peasant flight and possible revolt. And Setna enters, but not as rescuer or even as coda to Kes' adventures on Crete. He brings the larger perspective, including historical and an elite's understanding of realpolitik, and this is when Kes really comes into her own, taking up at last the burden of the Birds of Stone. And, yeah, externally this is also about the transition from Mycenaean Age to Greek Dark Ages, from the bureaucrats of the Linear B tablets to the warlords of Homer.

And where does it climax and where do I end? Not sure yet. It very much ends with more story to be told because I very much want to continue in two or three other books. (Although I'm pretty sure, based on what the outline has done to the timing of external events, that by the end of the book significant parts of the population are moving inland to start up new towns in the protected fastnesses of the mountains.)

But all in all, I could do worse than end with a, "Here lies Hector, tamer of horses."