Jumping Jack Splash

So, writing a novel set during the late Bronze Age was turning into years of research. So, I took a step back to do something that didn't have "any" (well, "much,") research. So, now, I'm having some real problems with that concept.

Italy is one. I'm sending my protagonist to Athens and to a small town in Germany because I've been there or near enough. But geography is not my friend, and as the plot evolved it looks to be sending her to Italy as well.

And, yeah, it is disheartening how easy it is to fake a certain kind of shallow flavor. Way back when, I wrote a short story about a game of Assassin at UC Berkeley that goes...strange. In the first draft I went for a 1980's techno-thriller flavor. It didn't work for me, and in the next draft I went film noir. And in a surprising number of places I could literally cross out "black catsuit" and write in "battered fedora" and not have to change another word.

(The old role-playing game Champions institutionalized something like this in the "power effects" mechanism. Say your character could leap tall buildings in a single bound. It didn't matter if they did it with spring-loaded boots or by turning into water and splashing. It was just...color. The referee couldn't say; "It is below freezing on this day and SplashMan can't use his water-based powers" because if that were true, SplashMan's player would have gained character points creating that disadvantage.)

In any case I find this shallow and cheap and these days pretty much shows the reader you can use Google. The good stuff, the stuff I think adds value, is when I've got insight or deep understanding or the personal experience to give a boots-on-the-ground impression. And -- as the bronze age novel was proving -- it is really hard to get to this kind of stuff without a lot of work.

And then there's something else that's bothering me now. It first hit me when I was reading about the rather complicated situation of people in the UK who use metal detectors, but before that I'd been thinking about the Solutrean Hypothesis and how you can't engage with the problem comprehensively without talking about the modern-day experience of Native Americans.

What his me is the problem of cultural appropriation. Which is sad and amusing because that's an underlying theme in the very book I'm working on. I guess I'm reversing myself again; I'm uncomfortable putting stuff in about living people, existing organizations, etc., etc., unless I can be really sure of my facts. 

And for that, even having been there or done that, I'm not entirely comfortable. Maybe my experience in Athens was personal and atypical and I mistook a lot of what I was seeing. Heck; this blog started with me assuming my technical theatre experience was both typical and comprehensive enough to justify my pontificating about it.

And after all of that...do I even remember enough? I remember going through some rigamarole with automated ticket sales/trip planner machines in Germany. But do they still have those? Heck, I'm not sure I remember how the Ath.ena transit pass worked; where you bought it, what it covered...and I was just buying and using one last month!