Material Estimates

Sudden big project dumped at me at work. Great timing, what with the holidays onrushing. Plus I'm in the middle of a big writing push. Doesn't help that they need it by middle of next week and they haven't even delivered all the drawings yet.

All in all, I've been staring at the partial plans for two days now trying to figure out how I'm going to machine the damned things. As happens so often it comes down to work-holding, and I have yet to come up with a really elegant way to hold a thin rectangle so I can turn it down to a disk (the last similar thing, I held it against the chuck face with the pressure of a live center, and that's a wee bit scary.)

And I'm in the same place in writing. I worked up a chapter plan and my gut instinct says I'm coming way short on the word count; between 30-40K total. I do mean to decompress, but there's a point where it becomes padding. And that's not the worst of it.  In the current plan, all the places where I can really pad (up to forty percent of the final text) are before the adventure-as-such kicks in. I think it is a lot of fun with both Penelope being a tourist, and discovering the ramifications of playing her YouTube character Athena Fox in a live situation, but she hasn't even seen the McGuffin yet.

Among the stranger ideas I've had is to do the original web video series as a B plot. On the plus side, that means I can explore the character of Athena Fox as Penny originally created her, and I can also show Penny doing the work; the research, and the physical stunts, that she can later call upon. On the negative side, I've seen this sort of thing done before and done badly. 

On the third hand, though; these could be an excuse to really, really do a no-research story. These would be globe-trotting artifact looting ancient technology babbling adventures. But of course part of the fun (besides setting up ironic echoes for the real-life events later) is being creatively wrong.

Just as Penelope's first scene is her giving a lecture on the Acropolis on the Acropolis, a lecture full of The Greek Miracle and other dead white men stuff and missing so much of the larger context (plus getting a few basic facts wrong), the fun of the Athena Fox adventures would be her blithely reading an inscription in Linear A or conflating King Minos with King Midas.

Which would...probably take a little research to come up with some good ones. I'm cursed.