Sesshu and the Fish

There's this story about a master sumi-e painter. I can't remember where I read it or who the figure was. Basically, he agrees to do a painting of a fish for a local merchant to hang in his store. Two years pass, with the merchant becoming increasingly agitated. Finally he demands his fish or the return of his money. The painter wordlessly takes down a sheet of fresh washi, mixes the ink, then one stroke, two, three, and there's a koi so lifelike it seems to leap from the page.

"That took you ten seconds," the merchant complains. "Why did I have to wait two years?"
"That's how long it took me to learn how to do it in ten seconds," the artist replies.

A lot of my projects are like that. A lot of projects are like that, period. For all I talk about iteration and the freedom to fail and so on, what sometimes feels like half the time spent on a project is time I spend planning. No, more than planning; pre-planning, parameterizing -- trying to figure out what the actual project goals are and how I'm going to approach it.

As a contrast, my Sutton Hoo lyre took two afternoons to put together. It seemed an adequate parameterization to build "something fast and cheap out of available materials," and it seemed likely to serve useful goals. (It did.)




I'm in that horrible lingering pre-planning stage on most of the things I really want to do at the moment. And that's bad, because it is heavy lifting to try to hold an entire proposed project in the palm of your hand, then jump upwards to examine the box it is in. And maybe the box that box is in.

It is the kind of concentrated thinking I can only do for an hour or two before I burn out. The time that is really bad is when I don't have anything exciting enough that's in the "mindless sanding" phase that I can work on after I burn out. And I'm still back-braining the thing, so I don't even have the concentration left to do general research. Heck, I have trouble even getting a good practice session in on my collection of instruments.

(If for no other reason than the back-brain project will bubble over on the back burner, forcing me to drop everything else and jot down a few more notes and sketches).




The "Crete" novel is feeling too daunting again. Every page is going to have something I have to research, or verify, or borrow, or create. And so much of the research I've done so far has just made things more complicated. If my weaver was at Pylos she might be at the palace, but she's at Knossos, which had a different system. So I have to depict both the ruined palace of Knossos and the village (very probably Tylissos) where she is staying the rest of the year. And yeah she comes from a Peak Sanctuary and will return and it is just too tempting not to try to show an actual ceremony. And that's just the opening chapters!

So I've broken out Scrivener to try again to see if there's something I could write that's simpler, faster, cheaper. Something to get some writing done while I'm still slogging at trying to plan out the Big, Serious Novel.

I picked up a bunch of Kindle books to take traveling -- mostly non-fiction of course -- but that led me down new routes and new explorations and I'm still finding new caches of stuff that's...well let's just say it isn't quite Barbara Hambly. And I'm not just talking historical accuracy or depth of research. Fiction is more than that. Fiction is not a Wikipedia article. You've got to be able to handle description and POV and dialog and pacing and all that. And, seriously, I'm seeing a lot of writers that need help there.

But again if that were all there was, some of the fanfic I've been reading would have millions of views and all the reviews they'd ever want at fanfic.net. There's obviously other things, possibly intangible things, that makes a book a good read.

All of this is a bit beside the point, though. As much as I try to chart around the basic issues I have with historical fiction, they are still there. I've spent all my useful thinking hours this weekend hammering at the latest germ of an idea and I still don't know if it is workable.

The idea of the Adventure Archaeologist (as TVTropes calls it) is potent and rich in possibilities and has been generating stories since at least the Victorian Age (arguably, from as far back as New Kingdom Egypt, if you take the Tale of Setna as an example). It also is inherently problematic, from both a realism point of view and the implicit insult to working academics and to cultures past and present.

Of course, one can argue that two out of three thrillers similarly insult law enforcement and entire foreign nations (depending on the details). Too often the hero is an everyman who wouldn't even be in that position if the entire infrastructure of society hadn't utterly failed him, and who proceeds to succeed in a way that throws into further question the competence of everyone else around him.

Amateur detective stories and lost world stories are both unlikely, and Adventure Archaeologist stories are generally both; the one person who does what the academic mainstream can't seem to do, and in the process discovers something global satellite coverage should have revealed decades ago.

But that's an old, old rant.

I have the bones of something that doesn't violate my sensibilities and would be fun to write. Not to give away too much at the moment but I do love fish-out-of-water situations, out-of-context problems, and orthogonal solutions.

Or at least I did have an idea until the Greek Gods showed up. They would be so much fun and add so much story potential that now that I've thought of them I'm loathe to leave them out. But they break at least one of the conceits I started with...and I have yet to figure out how they work.

There is this exhibit at the Lawrence Hall of Science, simulating using a cyclotron to infer details of atomic structure. It's a sort of pinball machine with a blank disk hiding the central target. You have to observe how the balls are deflected to try to figure out the shape of the hidden object. Well, that's basically where I am right now; shooting different approaches at the core idea and trying to get a better idea of its basic shape.

And every now and then taking another big step back to ask; is this still something that is cheap, fast, and fun?