Train Station Zero

One more bit of plot nailed down.

The wartime "Zero Stations" are far too perfect. The Auxiliary Units, with connections to the Home Guard and W.W.II with all the "camping in the subway station during the Blitz" stuff and even the idea of invasion are wonderful for stuff to talk about, archaeology to discover, and theme to integrate.

I'm still thinking of an older thing below it. Why? Because I want some trowel work, and the kind of archaeology involved in digging out a W.W.II building is a bit different. Haven't decided on that. One problem is, relatively speaking, the archaeological history is shallow.

What I mean is, about a meter of soil was deposited on the ancient walls of Londinium. The Tube stations are in geologic eras, far below any human landscape. Well, except for the amount that's been shifted around and that's a problem, too. The beginnings of the Underground were cut-and-cover and that means anything that was higher in the strata is well and scattered.

***

A different thing I'm puzzling on is how much to go beyond the probably and into the possible. I've more-or-less ruled out Penny's big Tomb Crawl from getting into live subway tunnels or the secret passage to Number 10 or anything. Stuff that is critical infrastructure is well known, well explored, and well guarded. Every dime-store terrorist has thought of it and every cop has heard of Guy Fawkes.

Which isn't to say I can't talk about it, even have her underground adventures relate to, pass near, detect evidence (the shaking of passing trains) of the other life that's down there.

But still doesn't tell me how big I dare go with what she does find. Or how to explain how it is still accessible.

Hit that like button...with a large hammer

I swear I didn't click on anything. Watched a couple random videos. And suddenly my YouTube feed pops up with Jdn Ptrsn, at least two other mansplainers, and vx dy himself.

(The suspects were disemvoweled to keep the One who "knows when you are sleeping, when you are bad and when you are good, and how much science fiction you buy each fiscal quarter" from deciding I need to be fast-tracked to have all my manosphere needs met.)

It is getting to be a bit like spam and the golden rule of never click, and absolutely never follow the "please unsubscribe" link. I have put any and all reviews of the latest Star Wars movies off my viewing list, for instance. Not that I was going to watch them anyway. The reviews...or the movies.

Ah, brings me back to the good old days of using iTunes as a theatre sound designer. Monday I'd need "YMCA," Thursday I'd need "Summer ist icumen in" and on the weekend I'd be checking out some independent band that I would have to be mixing Sunday. Next time I logged in iTunes would be frantically trying to find electric guitar covers of medieval folk tunes set to a disco beat because it was sure it had finally figured out which bland identical product it could sell endless slight variations of to me until I died.

***

I'm being depressed about writing again. I have three people reading the last book at the moment. One of them got as far as the author's bio (he skipped to the back). The other should be just about at the scene were Penny buys a bra and I'm wincing internally at the thought.

The "quick and dirty" was only relatively so. Took me a year, I cut some corners I should not have cut (no beta reader, no paid editor). I'm flailing around wondering if there is something easier to write than a story set in the real, modern world that cares about the details of history and culture and geography -- both in getting them right and in covering them in detail.

I have the idea traipsing through my head right now that the bulk of a near-future military SF novel would come out as fast as I could type. Once the world is built, it is all combat scenes and the drudgery of soldiering and of course shit-talking with buddies. Pity the idea I have for that is an off-kilter close-to-singularity world with strong horror elements, various trope elements, and at least one character who has spent four hundred years reading literature and it shows.

***

So I'm still nailing down plot elements for the London adventure. I have the majority of the set-piece scenes I want to do, but still figuring out the physical layout and the who knows what and who cares. The "Churchill bunker" as my notes still call it (it is probably post-war), is growing in importance and I won't be able to consider this outlined until I've figured it out properly.

And I have to change history. I knew that already. I want to make a thematic bit about a North Sea storm surge, and there wasn't one of note in the time period I'm probably using. (Most likely right now is November of 2018, which was noted for cold snap and some rains). I am also more likely than not to follow most other people and create a Tube station rather than try to re-work an existing one.

Although there is one possible candidate. In the real world, the Northern Line being built to Battersea power station and opening in 2020 or so decided against a route that would have required expanding Vauxhall. But I'm still sort of caught between multiple things I'd like to throw in, which may not be all compatible; a closed station, a new construction project, an archaeologically interesting site, a W.W.II air raid shelter, a hidden phone/switching/intelligence/i dunno bunker. And a lost river, but there are a bunch of those and nobody is going to complain if I move or even invent one.

I just found a huge new resource for underground London so I have reading material for months. That's also getting in the way. This would be a really good week to actually write.

See, writing is best done in long blocks of contiguous time. Enough to get into the flow, then enough to make it worth while. Plotting, on the other hand, is oddly suited towards the work week. I get an idea, it lead to another snag, and I think about the snag for a day or two until I have an idea how to work past it.

Sitting and staring at the outline is exhausting. So I'm wasting all this lovely time off by being where I am on this book. But, since I have no other book that is in a better place, what choice do I have?

I can do this

I think this is the first time I was able to read through the entire book without interruption.

I haven't changed my mind about the flaws. It is still too busy, too unfocused, and the protagonist doesn't really speak to me.

But I also see how I have learned and grown and how I can do better. The last few chapters are the action chapters and cut way back on the excess excursions. And after the solo adventure of so much of the first half, the banter between Biro and Markos as they join Penny in exploring Athens is just so nice.

The next book is free of the language stuff. Or rather, is a different kind of language stuff. But there's less of it anyhow. The next book is more focused on London and it's history. And it is -- and this is mostly to the good -- largely stuff that Penny doesn't know and when it is plot-important, the reader gets to learn it with her.

Really, the first book was a lot of groundwork. I recognize that. But the strength of the London book is going to be focus, a lot more interpersonal stuff, a fair bit more action, and that I think I've learned how to write better. Basically, it should be more of the stuff that was good in the last one.

So basically, the main thing I got from the last reading: a lot of "Oh, I know how I could have done this better."

***

It is funny. I've run into several people who were impressed I got a book printed. Printing? That took almost nothing to learn (well, I did have a head start in most of the essential skills) and not that much time to do, either. If I hadn't done my own cover it would be even less than that (and probably better results but anyhow).

The writing is the tough part. Hard to do and takes a long time, too.

Sure I do, and so's the Queen

I'm watching Time Team and getting distracted by dialects again. I can't help but notice the British don't correct each other. Or even pause, or seem to notice. But I've heard the same thing in podcast discussions between an international group of archaeologists or historians.

Sure, let's just pass over "Mycenae" versus "Mykenae." That's the c-k problem inherited from the long history of Latin within other Western cultures. I've run into people who make a point of not just pronouncing, but spelling "Akropolis" et al. And other more accurate transliterations, which can slow your reading a bit while you puzzle out the new form of a too-familiar name.

I'm talking more of distinctly different pronunciations of other words. Like mesolithic; in one programme I recently watched, there were conversations between a mezo-lithic and a miso-lithic.

In the one I'm watching now, I'm hearing tsu-nami (the wall of water), su-nami, and tu-nami.

Oh, yes. And this on top of dialectic distinctions that can be generally made between British english and American english; shed-ule/sked-ule, gla-ceer/glay-seer, geyser/geezer, etc.

London Calling

The numbers are not looking good on The Fox Knows Many Things. It is largely a numbers game; the Amazon ecosystem, for instance, functions a lot like a game of Civilization. You get more sales when you have more exposure, but you only get exposure with sales. Leading to many people gaming the system, but that's a whole other conversation.

I'd like to go to London and do some research. Not because the book would earn it out but because I want to travel anyhow. Aside from dropping in over the holidays to catch a Panto (the only local panto is closed this year and won't be back until next December), I'd want to go in April-March when the field schools open as do the tours to various underground places of interest.

And that's a little far ahead. I pushed the last book out without outside editor or beta readers or feedback, and without working up interest and pre-sales via whatever kind of social networking. I just needed to actually finish something for once. And now I find it isn't over. I need a second or third book before I can start really playing numbers games. There's options open right now like BookBub advertising and promotional pricing, but none of it makes sense with a backlist of One (1).

The London book is dense, though. Not the kind of details I need to research -- although some of them are potentially daunting, I have a better idea of how much I need to know before I can write and how much is actually going to fit in, and even with putting in Theatre and Shakespeare and Panto and HEMA and Roman re-enactors and combined sewers and the Churchill bunker and the Thames Barrier it isn't really so bad.

Worse is all the Britishisms, particularly the way some Brits like to talk. Lots of witticisms and references. Verbal one-upmanship. Ribbing. I might be able to take a few pages down to the pub and let the Geordies have a look.

No, where it is dense is in the interpersonal interactions. There's a lot more character stuff and social stuff here. It isn't a largely solo adventure. Graham continues to grow on me and this is going to be a prickly and sometimes difficult but rewarding friendship. And that's just the start of it.

***

Now that I've done a book, it all seems so much simpler. Or at least more straight-forward, even though it is a lot of work. So I'm digging up all sorts of schemes, even though it seems most sensible to do the London book before anything else...and maybe the Japan book following (Kyoto, post-war Japan, the Takarazuka Dance Troupe, weebos, a bit of Tokyo, San Francisco, the Internment).

Stil have a hankering to do a generic fantasy. One of the people at Quora came up with an interesting wrinkle that I'd like to integrate.

Then there's the lightweight version of the Bronze Age novel. The misfit crew of heroes up against the Sea People.

And the techno-werewolf book. Which is basically brooding gritty mil-SF.

And the all tropes all the time space opera. Which should really involve singing. And is currently trying to see if it can morph around the title The Tiki Stars.

Incidentally, another thing I'm turning up on Amazon with the right search filters (well, actually, what I did was log out then try to ignorantly find something like my own book. I kept at it until the algorithm finally showed the ad I'm paying for. At which point I found out I needed to edit the ad!)

Anyhow, another thing I've been turning up is a fair number of, well, call them Manly Men adventure stories. A serving of retro with a side order of Take That, and not a small whiff of Eu de Sad Puppy. And that's the thing. The Tiki Stars doesn't want to be PC. But I don't really know how I can make this work for me.

To thine own self be true

I'm not in love with my protagonist.

It's actually a little annoying. I mean, this is a character that was designed to be a bit Mary-Sue. Either the traditional definition, or the modified, "yanks the entire plot and universe into orbit about her own gravity."

Penny is going from naive tourist to Lara Croft in one easy lesson (or two, or a dozen...) So on the one side, she comes on stage with a ridiculous number of pre-existing skills. And on the other, she is walking into a universe that seems willing to bend over backwards to let her succeed.

Well, at least that was the first book. The London book is the "reality ensues" book.

Of course this is also the Everyman Hero from so many films. The guy (almost always a guy) whose claim to physical competence is "played some sports" and is just so "gosh darn that's terrible fellows hey maybe if we all worked together we could fix it" the person who walks into an existing situation and instantly becomes the most important person in it.

But none of that changes that I just don't have an emotional connection with my protagonist. Who is my narrator. Who is my first person narrator; the entire story is told in her voice.

The main thing I connect with her on is that she can get really geeky about history. The whole series is largely an excuse for me to get geeky about history. (And lecture about pseudo-history, but so far there hasn't been an opportunity). Other than that she's largely defined by a list of what I didn't want to do. I didn't want her to snark or make endless pop-culture references. I didn't want her to act like old people. I didn't want her body-conscious or shy. There's a list of things I've seen done too often and am tired of, and there's an equally tired list of things I would do if I wasn't trying to stop myself.

So, sure, I sympathized with her struggles. And I expect to sympathize more in the next one, as it will have lots of cold and damp and dirt and bad food and so on. And uncomfortable work situations. But it is just a physical sympathy. I'm not feeling her goals, her concerns.

I'm not rooting for her, not yet. And maybe it isn't her, maybe it is the situation. Either way, this is something I have to solve before I can finish outlining this thing.

Taking Stock

I'm thinking of trying out a new cover. A more "stock" genre cover, using stock pictures (all the advice says; unless you are a well-known author, don't get creative with your covers).

ShutterStock already turned up a hero pic, from a model that has enough of a series in that costume I could do a long run of books off it. I'm tempted to do it just for the fun and challenge. Of course dropping a hundred bucks on ShutterStock, on top of everything else I spent this month...

But then I didn't really write a "stock" book, either. Although searching through top sales in categories, there are some similar things. What I was aiming for was the generic "go to exotic places, have adventures." I did a little too much "go to" and a little too little "adventure," though.

***

So the London adventure is turning into a zig-zag plot. Not one big arc, but more like a bunch of reversals. Rather pulp-ish, now that I think of it. I also think of it as a Tribble plot, in that there are things building slowly in the background that suddenly become a foreground problem.

So I'm still on for detectorists, dai-london binbo seikatsu manual (err..Down and Out in London), Romans, coin collectors, Panto, a bit of tourism, Doggerland, urban spelunking, train spotters, archaeological methods, the life of a shovel bum, and of course Underground London.

Just read an introductory book on Panto. I'm a little early for page counting, but it feels to me that I won't be getting more than 10-20K out of it, without it turning into filler. Plus might not be the right season for it (the big Panto season is the winter holidays. Do you know The Hoff played a villain several seasons running? He apparently does a great Captain Hook.) Anyhow I might set it in April; "Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote..."

I'm still lacking for villain. I mean, to really connect him to the themes and the plots. And what I'm calling the God Game is still way in the background. Anything supernatural is still entirely deniable, and also doesn't tie in any way to apparent entities of the last book.

(To lay it out baldly...in the last book there's a strange-acting little girl on the Acropolis, someone gives Penny a Medusa amulet, the ship that rescued her was called Hermes, she had a moment of power, competence, and rage in the big fight that the text is careful to place closely to a mention of the aristeia, but the only difficult-to-negotiate moment is that the Art Squad detective tells Penny he heard and saw her give a rousing speech -- in flawless Greek.)

So I can't use whatever the Immortals might be up to as a way to fill plot holes. Whatever happens, happens for clearly human reasons. Penny is going to wonder if there is more going on than meets the eye, especially in regards to the Whisperer in Tunnels, but there isn't going to be anything inexplicable in this book.

What there is, is much to develop in the relationship between Penny and the character she plays. I knew there was going to be. But I thought I'd be further along. This book is still in the figuring-out-how-it-works for her, and I've still yet to come to grips with the problem of pseudo-archaeology. And the way an Indiana Jones ripoff character tacitly supports it.

Well, this may be the book where I reverse a previous statement. I think Tomb Raider (that is, the games and movies and books) exists in her world, and this is possibly the best book to admit to it and start coming to grips with that.

Stop, Youth!

I have the bones of a plot. Trouble with sharing it is, it is easy to list "they go here, they do that" but it doesn't capture the reasons that place and that activity are going into the plot. Theme and pacing and the hidden structure that makes a story out of an event are much harder to put on paper in this way.

This is why writers seem to go out of their way to collect silly-sounding terms, and keep waving them around. Thing is, when I say "I chose a three-act structure" that is not just descriptive of the form, it is also documentation of a process; that I am saying I considered and rejected "save the cat" and "heroes journey" and a number of other structural/analytical frameworks.

So I need this, as I am working through plans and notes. I can't write out the entire thing every time I want to ask myself "do I want to do A or would B work better"; I have to have short-hand methods of describing the parts I am trying to fit.

Well, this one is original with me. "Stop, Youth!" doesn't describe the whole plot. It describes a plot where there is a sharp turn, a specific sort of sharp turn.

It comes out of the second Lensman book. Kinnison has defeated Boskone, saved humanity, and is strolling into the sunset with the girl. Then Mentor of Arisia stops him dead with a telepathic warning. Turns out "Boskone" was just one face of the vastly larger and more deadly Eddore, and Kim has just burned every link, every clue he had towards finding the real enemy. A real enemy who, by the way, just saw them using the super-weapon that ended the last book, and can now reverse-engineer their own...

I had wanted to make an arc that points down for most of the book, but for various structural reasons instead I have an upturn. An interlude that lasts far too long to be called a Hope Spot.

***

So caveats given, here's the nascent outline:

Part I: Penny is at Field School in the London area but everything is going wrong. She's not gaining the contacts and professional experience she so desperately wants and she's going broke, too. So lots of down and out in London stuff, street views of living London, and of course stuff on the practicalities of Archaeology as a career and the actual process of an investigation.

Part II: someone she met on the previous adventure shows up and now there is an enemy that is a little more obvious and basically everything is a little less serious. So a romp through dead parrots and Roman re-enactors and the New Old Globe and even Pantomime. Culminating in a real fight with fake swords.

Part III: a rescue dig in the subways. A real chance for real experience and camaraderie...and then it goes bad in a flash with violence that can't be faced with a costume and a quip. And this is where I really have fun with underground London.

And, actually, they are all interwoven. She's still down and out through most of it, just she has increasingly better living arrangements available. The reality and the reality of violence is under the surface through the Dead Parrot stuff. And the rescue dig came in about half way through that sequence.

So, yeah. It is ALL getting in there. I'm still at about 60K worth of plot so there's more to play with here but having that long "comic interlude" and then the sudden "stop, youth" moment as the sharp turn into the pit lets me get the coins, Romans, metal detectors, wartime London, field school, theatre and all in there.

***

But there's another thing. Another thing that makes this slow going.

This plot is going to some dark places. There is violence, and a strong undercurrent of sexual violence. I'm uncomfortable with it, and uncomfortable thinking I'm going to be putting it in front of other people. So this is even worse than feeling my research is not good enough, my characters are not believable, my dialog is unrealistic, I'm culturally appropriating all over the place and I'm basically not a good writer.

Basically, I can only work for a few hours, then I have to put it aside until I can work up the courage and confidence to go back to it.

Would help a hell of a lot if I had more sales. I'm entirely within my personal predictions; lifetime sales of around a hundred, meaning 2-3 a month, meaning the first month can go by without a single book getting sold. At least my KPP page count is still there. The algorithm is opaque (apparently genre changes the "pages read" that the algo generates) but my best estimates still say there are more pages read then there are in the book. So that's a good sign.

***

Reading list time. I wanted to outline as much as possible before hitting research so the research pool was smaller. I really do have to do some general reading about what is under London, though. And browse through some materials on theatre, especially pantomime.

Dad Read

One of the things you do as you are writing -- and especially as you are editing -- is to try to read through the text as if you were coming at it fresh. Or coming at it with certain assumptions.

I read through about half of it assuming I was dad. He decided life was too short to get distracted by smart phones and social media and all that rot and I can't say he is wrong.

Heck, I'm not exactly up on all that myself, but I was trying to write from the experience of a younger person who is extremely comfortable in the digital world. It's built in to the concept. Penny is a YouTube personality and that is a key part of the plot.

Heck, one of her badass moments is when she says she's going to update her Facebook page (it makes sense in context). And, yes, I know Facebook is way, way old school. That's actually part of the setup for that moment.

So that's the first hurdle. Chapter One, Penny is making a video for her YouTube channel, courtesy of her Patreon supporters. In later scenes she uses the GPS and map app (yes, she talks of apps) to figure out where she is, does some Internet searches on her iPhone using her cellular data plan (complaining all along about how much it was going to end up costing), and even buys train tickets via the Deutsche Bahn site. Oh, and there are selfie sticks all over the Acropolis.

When the plot started rolling, she was in conversation with a would-be influencer whose channel started with unboxing videos (and mentions Fyre Festival in connection with him), and an Internet bad boy who basically rides on online notoriety (a familiar character to even those of us who don't spend a lot of time on Social Media). He also has a lot of sock puppets. And PewDiePie gets name-dropped.

He does in fact have some friends in the nastier corners of the Internet; the chans, Something Awful, even some MGTOWs. She describes a couple of web sites that haven't been blocked in her location in terms of their landing page, and on one of them discovers an (from the context, animated) GIF. She also comments on how damage to one's brand on the internet can be damaging in the real world, and that's not even counting direct financial damage like a DOS attack. Oddly enough, she never mentioned doxxing. Or Twitter. Although she does make a mention of Russian Hackers.

Way back in Chapter Three there was already a text conversation, with emoticons off her phone and an "eleventy!!!" from her. That same person later gets hold of video taken from a streaming HD camera. And that same person has been responsible for updating Penny's Facebook status as she is completely uninterested in that platform.

So that's the online and social media world. There's also a brief mention of Wikipedia, I think, but that's it for that. I had originally intended that a key photograph was already in the cloud and thus couldn't be destroyed with the phone, but it never came up.

I mentioned a number of posts back how I am tired of the stock hero character who keeps making snarky pop-culture references. I particularly wanted to assume this is an abnormal person who just doesn't get around to mentioning games that much. Because otherwise it would be coming up all the time, especially when I got into action sequences.

I couldn't stop myself completely, though. In Germany she mentions both Wicker Man and The Blues Brothers, specifically in the context of Illinois Nazis. And of course there are numerous references to Indiana Jones (the same kind of blindness is also at work in that, for some reason, nobody in her world seems to have heard of Lara Croft. Otherwise every single conversation she had, the moment she mentioned she was an archaeologist the other person would be making a comment on the size of her guns. Or lack.)

Oh, right. And a name-drop of Topkapi, and oblique references to Marathon Man, Rocky IV, From Russia with Love, Ghostbusters, Harry Potter, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the series) and Hogan's Heroes. And an unattributed quote from Labyrinth and a very subtle reference to The Pirates of the Caribbean as well as paraphrased quote from and oblique reference to The Shining. There's even a quote from 1984.

It probably goes with the territory that Zorba the Greek comes up by name, and 300, BBC's Troy, the 1970's Iphigenia and even Never on Sunday are referenced.

As for games, she describes a figure painted on the outside of a ride at Oktoberfest as looking like Master Chief, during the chase in Venice she makes a throwaway comment about Ezio Auditore, and after the lagoon water has done a number on her stomach she comments she normally has the constitution of The Wasteland Wanderer. She name-drops Doom, Ơblivion horse armor, and makes reference to a "fetch quest."

So there's not that many references Dad won't get. The problem is going to be more understanding the online social world, how someone can make a living being a personality, how the fortunes of a YouTube celebrity can change in a moment. Also, how data connects people to such an extent that looking up bus schedules or opening maps or even keeping track of phone numbers is hardly a thing.

Search results

More weird findings via the Amazon algorithms.

There are a fair number of books that base a thriller plot on something from history. The category lists over 1,500, but there's an unknown amount of crossover with actual Historical Fiction (which also crosses mysteriously with Alternate History and Historical Romance.)

There's some strange code words I've been seeing lately across various genres of adventure story. "Clean" is one. "Language" is another. Apparently it is important enough to some people to at least advertise their books as not crossing certain lines of decorum. Whether this matters to the readers, I do not know.

Another inevitable is the biblical. A substantial number of amateurs dabbling in history do so to dabble in, well, biblical history. The "tells" here are subtler, as you don't even have to go to Dan Brown flirting with the Big Bad Church to put any number of powerful names with Christian associations in your title.

It usually takes a reading of the synopsis, but I've found between title and cover image a mere paragraph into the blurb it becomes quite clear what you are in for. Generally proving the truth of Jesus. Apparently Siddhārtha Gautama doesn't get as many fans.

Well, the main metric I have now for mine is page reads via the Kindle Unlimited/Owners Limited Library programs. Either one person has been reading a couple of chapters every night and is up to the meeting in Padua, or eighty-five people looked at page one and stopped there. Or any point in between. The Kindle measure is of course taken from their own hidden algorithm and it is difficult to place it exactly in terms of page/word count. They also changed their rules recently, otherwise I'd be getting full cover price already (too many people had been gaming the system with novellas.)

Anyhow, there's good reason I'm working so hard on making it so the series contains more than one book.

Coverage

Just thought I'd collect in one place the process I went through in making a cover for an eBook.

The rest is below the fold because this is a long post.

Trowel Tales

My Marshalltown (trowel) arrived today. Serious archaeologists sharpen theirs.

The author's copies (printed at cost, no mark-up) arrive in two weeks or so.








The Solstice is the 21st and my workplace goes dark from the 20th and doesn't open again this year. That's a lot of time I could have used for something. Instead I took time away from work to upload the novel. And to be sick. There's that.

This morning while visiting Quora I came up with the Parts for the novel I'm outlining. These, like the scene names I used for the last, are entirely internal references and will never be seen client-side.

Fox and Hounds

Prologue
The Show in Which Everything Goes Wrong
Down and Out in Soho
Three Times is Enemy Action
Daleks in the Subway
Yamatai

Yeah, if I wasn't me I'd need a lot of explaining. I don't actually know which are going to end up as numbered parts and which will be internal. There's several emotional revolutions not documented in the part names. I dreamed them up while helping someone outline a YA zombie book and not all my attention was on it.

And, oh yes, everything is finally approved at Amazon. I'm even spending a buck or two on ad space.

Gobble gobble gobble

On the day I uploaded, I woke up to a bit about the Ohlone on the radio. And I knew I had another edit.

In Chapter Three, about 2/5 of the way in, there's this exchange:

"Mound builders?"
"Not intentionally."

I remembered exactly what I had written and where I'd written it and I went right there and changed it to "Not the ones you are thinking of."

That's the level at which I had to deal with the text. I remember everything. And I was dealing with commas and double-spaces.

I'm a wee bit worded out now. Put together the start of a new website and added the first how-to-article to it. Edited my blurb, and my bio. And worked on the London book.

PENNY IS IN ENGLAND, and although parts of it are very old, none of it is merry.  

She’s finding out being a real archaeologist is harder than she thought—particularly when old enemies and an old shame come back to haunt her. 

She’s kicked off the dig, her channel is shut down, and soon she’s penniless in the cold streets of London.  

Then things get interesting. Deep under the streets of the old city, dragged into an ancient mystery and fighting for her life, Penny must come to grips with what it truly means to be the hero she once played. 

This should help a bit in outlining; I'm starting with a clear sense of where the book is going to be. I am committed now that The Fox Knows Many Things is going to be followed by Fox and Hounds.

After that it is still a bit up in the air between Go and Tell That Fox and Sometimes a Fox.

(The fox in question in the latter quote is Napoleon. The fox of the former is Herod!)

And I've already written the first 800 words. It's a stand-alone prologue, that's how I can do it without having to complete the outline first. Only gotta do that again, a mere hundred times more....

The prologue's about Doggerland. Why do you ask?

Harry Potter and the Formatted POD

I picked up a Bloomsbury edition -- in London's Heathrow -- of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Not "Sorcerer's," you bloody parochial classics-deprived Yanks!

Sorry. Getting in some practice.

Turns out the POD (Print-On-Demand) publisher I'm using doesn't do pocketbooks. It's been rather a struggle to understand the terminology. Everyone wants to talk about "paperbacks" and "trade paperbacks" and even though they sound like they are talking about the basic, you know, paperback book, they are actually talking about the larger sizes typically used for non-fiction.

In any case, the smallest I can print is the size of that Harry Potter book that's right now sitting on my desk as reference. 5.06" by 7.81", that is.

The eBook is live. I've started on the Amazon Author page and my own WordPress writer page. PDF conversion is done -- painful; there's no way to transfer the minutia of settings in Scrivener so I had to flip back and forth between formats transferring everything manually.

Turns out the mechanics of trim and bleed are pretty simple. Amazon will calculate it for you from your uploaded PDF (333 pages, cream paper, black and white with matte-finish color cover) and generate a to-scale template. Since Gimp is fully WSYWIG, I know anything exported from there will have the correct dpi and all that (just have to remember to collapse all fonts).

And once everything is approved and live, and I have the various social media presence objects properly built, I'll hit the publicity engine with some promotional sales and advertising.

Wrong Lever, Kronk!

My head is splitting. Some of that is the head cold.

I did the small edits, then crawled through the entire manuscript looking for bad dialog punctuation and doubled spaces. Don't know how ProWritingAid missed those last ones.

Uploaded all of the files to KDP. All that is left now is to hit the button and the book will be made available at Amazon.

Print is going to take a little longer. I have to make camera-ready text and a correct-to-the-bleed paperback cover.

There's also advertising and promos to consider.

And second thoughts. Do I want to change that one word? How is the new blurb working? Should there be more front matter? Is the cover too dark?

So much, I just had to guess where it was going to be when it all came together. That's the fun part of projects; when that much time is invested, there are early forks in the road that it simply isn't plausible to go back to.

The Fox Knows Many Things

And this fox's brain is starting to hurt.

Or maybe that's the sinuses. The pot is mostly rendered. The dirty secret to 3d art is the endless round of render, tweak, render again. As the final render series is over 4K pixels, those are long renders. Built the Mauser ammo and dipped into the appropriately named Bullet physics engine to drop a pile of them on the ground. Poser11 continues to not play nicely with the spherical world map function; first IBL/HDRI light map didn't work properly, and now the reflections look like shit. Something has changed. I've been doing reflection maps since Poser9 at least.

At least I've learned; to render in lighting layers so I can fix them in the final comp, and to let small stuff go if I am confident I can fix it with a paint brush a lot faster than I can fix it in the 3D scene. (No examples will be forthcoming. I have some stuff at a...different...graphic sharing site under a different name.)

I mocked up the cover with all the words and other graphics (well, waiting on the final renders), read up on fonts, wrote the blurb, put my data into Kindle Direct Publishing, and started an author's web site.

There's a lot of work in packaging a book. On the book itself, I need to do a couple small edit passes, including one looking just at closing quotation marks to make sure my various softwares didn't monkey up the capitalization on dialogue attributions. ("I'm not angry!" she shouted, but, "I'm out of here." He left the room.) And make sure I've set all the flags correctly so scene and chapter breaks come where they belong.

The blurb needs to be edited and there are some other bits and pieces that need to get added to the full text that shows up on the Kindle page. And I have to take another pass with Rocket at categories and keywords -- especially since I am going KDP Select and I have some additional keywords I can plug in.

The final assembly of the cover, of course. And then once the eBook is completed, go through the formatting and cover art stage again to get the paperback version into the shop.

And there's the usual mess of bio, picture...advertising, publicity, links...

Oh, yeah. And I really want to have another book in the store as soon as possible. I really should have started this with something other than Athena Fox. Because I know better now what I need to plan and outline a novel, and the Athena Fox series is constrained to stay in more-or-less the real world and be as accurate as I can afford about it. I could knock out two volumes of The Tiki Stars in less time than it would take to complete the London research for Fox and Hounds. And that's not even counting taking a research trip of my own out there.

Especially attractive if I could come up with the five hundred quid to "volunteer" at an archaeological dig whilst I was there...

What deaf banjo player gives Max Planck quartz?

I guess I've decided this is the cheap book. That is; not worth hiring editor or cover artist.

Well, not that cheap. But I'm hoping this is amortization. Get the tools, learn the stuff about cover design and so forth now, and then the next book it won't be a problem.

As long as I make December. And my new stretch goal is to have prints delivered by Jan 1. No pressure!

So.

I knew this way back, when I was still aiming for trad publishing, and sending off loads of short stories to the magazines. The best way to make money as a writer is to make money off writers.

This got really clear when I listened through a podcast on cover design. Which turned out to be basically an advertisement for the podcaster's course series, meaning the entire thing was pushing courses like the one that they were sort of but not really previewing here by interviewing a guy about his course and book, which does actually have some advice but is just as much an advertisement for his book-cover creation business.

Okay. It felt more Inception than it was. Still, I did feel several shells deep in the effort to actually get at useful information.

Once again, I've discovered the problem of being a fast learner. I quickly move to the "gifted amateur" stage but it is hard to find the resources to move up from there. Top-level searches and resources with wide circulation are inevitably aimed towards the first-time learner. At least for some things, past the transition hump are the serious resources. Which are usually serious money and time -- this is a good reflection of how "jack of all trades, master of none" works out with real subjects.

Come to think, Penny has the same problem. I should put this in the next book.

So there are a zillion tutorials on how to, kludge something up in PhotoShop. Rather fewer on useful techniques and pointers once you've gotten past "how to turn it on and what a layer is."

Anyhow, right now I'm trying to learn a little about fonts. Hours of podcasts, tens of pages, and one full book purchased and read and I have enough actual solid useful advice to fill maybe two typewritten pages. Double-spaced.

 Actually, assuming the more decorative design fonts actually work and don't distract too much from the total design, the main thing I got out of searching a bunch of fonts sorted by keywords was a desire to write the stories/settings that went with some of those fonts. Like, ooh, I want to do a story involving Celtic Britain so I can use that font in the title!

And the calyx is in renders. More adventures there. I am tempted to open Poser9, despite the broken Flash (Aaaah!) problem. Because I just can not get IBL -- HDRI lighting -- to work properly in Poser11. And apparently it doesn't work at all in the Superfly render engine, or so forums tell me.

Of course I'd already seen the problem coming. Red-figure Attic ware means large parts of the body of the pot are black. Especially the sides, if I am framing the central image. And I'm doing it against a black background.

I reversed the artwork, though, and I didn't really care for the black-figure look. Not for any connotations; just because so much red pottery just didn't look right in the composition.

So a couple of tweaks to go, then I'll render three to five layers. Since the light shaft is so hard to control, both the top light and the associated atmospheric effect (the "god ray") will be rendered on a black image. That light will be removed from the main color render. I might do the rim light as a separate layer as well. For that matter, it might be safer and easier to do a reflection layer separate (I mashed together some free pictures to make a semi-spherical "tholos interior."

And haven't decided if the bullets are going to be in this. I don't want to diffuse the focus but I also want something that says "action" -- a pot doesn't. And then back again to render a trowel for the back cover. (8×57mm IS rounds, since the appropriate rifle is an FN Model 24).

And, yeah. Back when I thought of using a pot instead of the Parthenon against mysterious brooding clouds, or a stock photo in a leather jacket running away from something out of frame, I was using artifact-based titles. I was amused by the idea of continuing to have the contemporary character and appropriate scenes showing up in ancient art; as the stamped image on a Roman coin for the story that was going to be called The Aurelius Dupondius, for instance.

Incidentally, for those that have forgotten, this is the image that is being referenced, both in the art and in the actual story:

Probably better than a paste-up of stock photos. We'll see. Here's the kind of covers you tend to see if you pop "thriller" and "history" into the Kindle search engine: some good. Some...not so good.

Blowing the dust off

I finally started to get some figure-drawing memories back. Took it long enough.

Four passes for this one. So far. Still not sure how exactly I'm going to ink it to make black-figure (or perhaps red-figure if it ends up looking better) Attic pottery.

Broke out my old pencil set and did action lines in red, drew roughs and guides in blue. Then anatomy (you usually draw nude then add clothes). Then outfits and features. Then a fourth pass to go slightly Attic with the linework. In particular, a typical eye form.

I'm being slightly annoyed now because the basis of both Attic styles (and even the later polychrome ware) is a silhouette figure on solid background, with details picked out on top.

In black-figure, the artwork is added with slip; this is a slurry made of finer-grind clay than the larger grained and more porous clay of the body of the pot. The pot is fired in three stages; in the second phase, the entire pot is already black with oxide formation and the finer-grained slip vitrifies, sealing in the color. The last re-oxidation stage brings the base clay back to reds and oranges.

Details were incised into the slip (presumably before firing) allowing the red base to show through. The later red-figure added details in the same slip as the background. In both, and especially in the later polychrome, specially formulated glazes added white, red, and yellow to the mix.

Thing is, I did line work. Typical of line art, the figures are outlined and the outlines carry through, becoming internal details. I'm not really sure how to best prepare it for filling in the solid color areas in Gimp.

The problem I'm having in the black v. red is that the black-figure is closer to the right period (I'm not duplicating the actual pot of the story in any way...it was painted in the Orientalizing period, barely out of the Late Geometric and prior to the full development of black-figure ware). Black-figure is harder to read, though. Also, traditionally (but not always) women would be picked out with that white overglaze I mentioned but whereas people of the period would understand this as short hand for the women having a slightly paler, less-sunlight skin tone, for us it looks like a white girl facing off against a black guy. Not what I want on the cover.

Red-figure also usually has that same symbolism but I feel better about omitting it there. Red-figure is also a lot more identifiable to the general public as "Greek Pot." The only real drawback is I'm intending a black backdrop so I need to be able to separate pot from background. Well, that and I really do like the look of the red background -- it has a lot of nice texture -- and less of that shows through if it is used for the artwork and not the ground.

And I might change the pot. The Calyx Krater has that wide mouth that casts a big shadow. The Column Krater looks to my eye a little late period. There's also the Volute Krater, with the really fancy handles. But at that point, why not use an Amphorae?

Why so Cyrus

Or should that have been "Osiris?"

Anyhow, that's the title of a new working folder. I'm taking the Bronze Age thing back to its roots and prepared to do LESS research on a LESS serious book that goes back to the Five Man Band concept and brings back magic and gods. So a lot less obsession about pottery forms in Cypress imports in 1182 BCE and more of, well, an Italian Hercules movie. So that's off the back burner. Not the story I was working on, exactly. But something faster and easier to write based on the work I've already done.

And I'm largely settled on London for the sequel to the novel that's going to be on Kindle before December is out. Assuming I can finish the cover. This is the down and out in London, everything going wrong, increasing misery taking an even sharper and literal downward turn in the last third -- into the various tunnels and crypts and mysteries and dangers under London. Some of which are not exactly of the real world. Because this was going to go into directions of pseudo-history eventually.

I'm early enough in plotting yet so not sure whether it is Fox and Hounds or Sometimes a Fox. Although the latter being, well, Napoleon, perhaps that's a better one to set in Paris? (I hear you saying; why Paris? There's more to France than Paris. Well, there certainly is. But there's more to the world than France, too. Why Paris is, specifically, because I've been there.)

I still have a file called Badgers which means nothing at all but that's where my military SF urban fantasy love triangle goes. I'm just not feeling that one at the moment. Maybe if I buckle down on the horror elements, or at least the classic horror tropes, I'll get an interest back.

And lastly, I'm seeing if I can combine the Space Opera idea with the Tiki Stars idea. I still have some basic problems. But they are both potentially un-reconstructed stuff that could possibly be deconstructed a little if that works better. And it would be hell of fun. And half the research would be hanging out in Tiki bars drinking mixed drinks so there's that...

Bye, Sierra

I had to upgrade in order to use DropBox. Well, that was worth it. Allowed me to coordinate Scrivener files between machines.

Unfortunately it also broke Carrara and Poser. So pretty much all my 3d aps. And all the ones I was going to use to build and render the calyx.

Carrara is deadware. The missing menu problem isn't fixed as of the last release, and there will be no other releases (I would say updates and bug fixes...but it never had those).

Poser might or might not work. Apparently I do have to at least put in the latest patch. Of course Smith Micro sold it off and instantly stopped supporting, and the company that bought it has no interest in supporting older versions so...no patch is available.

It is apparently a problem with Flash. Which everyone knew was a stupid idea for just displaying thumbnails. And no work-around natch. And Mac got rid of Flash because it is a giant gaping security hole.

So I wonder what other software it broke?  Well...Inkscape is still dead....

UV nodes on a Grecian Urn

The calyx model is done. I think. Now I just have to paint up the textures. Artwork, bump map, spec map. And render, of course.

Cheetah3D is growing on me. The best thing, right now, is that no operation caused it to crash or cause the object to become un-editable. And that's way ahead of Carrara on it's best day. The lathe operation puts out a clean UVmap and the built-in tools did a decent job of mapping the handles, too.

I agree with the manual. The bezier spline controls are not good. Better to make a spline in an illustration program and import it. My first take at handles was with a spline sweep, but I didn't like the resulting profile.

So I did a box model, dropped it on a symmetry tool, and then dropped that on a subdiv smoothing tool. All worked just as I'd hoped, with just a little learning curve involved. I think the software could end up being fast, once I put some custom hotkeys into it (apparently you can).

>>>

Meanwhile an instrument I had in my wishlist went on open-box sale:

Yes; transverse flute, otherwise known as Western Concert Flute in C. Closed-hole, C foot, not the longer B foot. And, yes, it is pink. 

I fired up my camera because this is the last chance I am likely to have to attempt to play an unfamiliar family of instrument without any prior study. Yeah; that question has been floating around. My opinion is you can get a sound out of most plucked strings and hammered instruments, including percussion and keyboards. Single reed, a little harder. Double reed and brass, harder yet. Bowed strings, extremely difficult; yes, you can get noises, but not anything resembling the characteristic sound of the instrument.

That's the thing about the piano. Sure, a random child or small animal can't play a Chopin Etude, but when the press down a key, it sounds like, well, a piano. 

Turns out the transverse flute was tough for me. Apparently some people get the embouchure right away. Some don't. Apparently the book method is you detach the head joint and just play that for a week. Then you play the first octave until you are good with it. Then you move on to the second octave.

Five days and I'm playing scales but the second octave is not secure. A very breathy tone I'm not happy with. But as far as adding flute sounds to a composition -- yeah, I've got enough. I may work on it for a few more days but then it is back to the trumpet. Which, for all I may have said about it in the past, is oddly pleasing to play.

What is it about 3D?

Maybe it is because working on a 3-dimensional form is largely incompatible with the interface of flat display, keyboard, and mouse? Like doing orchestral synthesis; even with keyboard, breath controller, and CC knobs you just can't put the same nuances in you can with an orchestral instrument in your own hands?

It seems that every 3d application I have worked with re-invents the wheel. Usually badly.

They are largely unintuitive and often have clunky workflow -- the kind of design where something you do once an hour has a hotkey sequence but something you have to do several times a minute requires selecting from a drop-down menu.

And they lack useful manuals.

It took three days of searching to find anything resembling a manual for Cheetah3D. It is a third-party, fan-written, but fortunately free manual. Still, every resource I've seen seems to jump over those early basic steps that become so rote everyone forgets they have to be explained to the beginner.

"Adjust UV's by applying the Scale tool to your Selection..." Okay, great, but how do I select UVs in the first place? The regular selection tools don't seem to do anything. That's the sort of thing that gets skipped over.

Two things annoy me very much from both a workflow and a "why are we doing this" angle; first is that selection and manipulation are separate. So if you want to operate on more than one polygon, you click the Select tool from the menu bar, possibly go into Area or another Select Mode (which does NOT toggle, but only acts for the duration of one selection), then go back and click the Manipulate tool also in the menu bar, go back and pick up your selection (don't accidentally click outside!) and then you can move it.

Oh, except you didn't "Make editable" so nothing happens. That's the other thing. Like Fusion's weird way of splitting editable objects into different types, I don't understand the underlying philosophy behind "make editable" and what it functionally does.

There is one fix which should be easy to make and I hope will happen soon; grey out menu items that don't apply to the kind of object you are working with. As it is now, all the menus open up; even contextual menu pops up with every operation that could be done on any object. Carrara, for all that I have and would say (It is dead ware -- Don't buy it), gathered the applicable tools to the contextual menus.

Actually, I lied a little above. Although it too has unintuitive aspects to it, and lacks any and all useful documentation, Fusion360 is hyper-fast and efficient at navigation and basic operations. The hotkey camera and selection controls and the multi-purpose contextual handles meant I could model pretty much as fast as I could think.

I had a lifetime subscription at a locked-in rate that was quite affordable. So of course they broke the contract, jacked the price, offered me another "lifetime" subscription at about ten times as much, and from what I can tell from their official pages, broke that contract for the people who were foolish enough to sign for it and is now at something approaching what I pay for rent.

Carrara, meanwhile, no longer works under the last four or five upgrades to the MacOS and there is no support and no plans to ever make it work properly. Although they will still sell you an "upgrade" to 8.5 (yes -- throughout its history, Carrara almost never released patches. Instead they'd sell you the point upgrade for full price, promising that it would include the bug fixes for the last version. Which it never did.)

So, yeah, I'm pretty much waiting for Cheetah to get over the early teething problems, to get popular and powerful, at which point they will stab the user base in the back, sell out to Autocad, and jack the price out of range of the ordinary user. But for now, I think I can get it to do what I want.

At least it is easier to navigate than Blender.

Singing Vampire Tiki in London

From everything the books say, there is probably a lot more editing that should be done.

But I'm tired of it. I'm going to go with Papa Heinlein on this (his old school advice was, "You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.")

Heinlein's rule isn't the absolute it seems at first glance, though. A nice essay I read recently talks about this as a process problem. There is a school of writing that says "get the draft out at all costs"; this school reaches an apex with NaNoWriMo, in which you are expected to write a lousy, too-short draft you will clean up later.

Me, I do a lot of editing on the way. When I'm re-reading a chapter to figure out if they mentioned the dingus and what the fellow's first name was, I also notice where I doubled a word or forgot to close a parenthesis. It seems to work; the grammar checker found very few errors of that type to alert me on.

I also do deeper structural edits. Now, they sound like the sort of thing that should have been caught in the outline and "fixed" then. But things grow organically. So while writing the climax I might think of a cool setting to use, and then I'll go back and plant references in earlier chapters and move some stuff around so the climax can happen there. And while I'm there, it is basically a second or third or fourth pass through the dialog and descriptions that are in that chapter.

Which means I tend to write a fairly clean draft, overall. So when I read the "standard advice" about doing four drafts until it gets good, I have to reflect that, again, is a descriptor of process, not a proscription of universal needs. I don't have to sit down saying, "I am doing a re-write" to be basically accomplishing a re-write.

(Which is sort of the argument I have against the pantser v. outliner battles; neither are the purists they claim to be. They just categorize what they do as falling into a specific pattern. "I wasn't outlining, I was just writing some rough drafts of possible scenes.")

Anyhow, I have it with a beta reader. It may go on from there, even to a native German speaker (who is sure to be horrified at the way "Herr Satz" mangles both languages.) And I'm not intending to do much past react to any complaints those readers might have.

>>>

Which sends me on a tiny language rant, a take-that on the kind of phrasebook speak where there is always a single word-for-word translation. I think this is a place invented languages often fall down on.

The closest you can get to a universal "Hi!" in Italian is "Ciao." It can be used at most times of day, and for that matter, for goodbye. But it is somewhat too casual for a good speaker to use with people he doesn't know well.

In my story, the first "Hello" is "Bueno Sera" (It is evening, and he hasn't been introduced to her.) Later, she greets him with "Buongiorno" and he returns with "Salve." (He's being "oddly formal" at that moment.) She also says "Ciao" to a friend.

And that's just Standard Italian; for this book I made no mention that almost every Italian is bilingual, speaking both that and one of the regional dialects so disparate they can be mutually incomprehensible.

I did mention in the book that they speak a regional German in Bavaria, but the only example I gave of Bayern was counting as "Oans, zwoa..." instead of the usual “Eins, zwei, drei.."

>>>

So I downloaded Cheetah3D and am getting into making the proper art for the cover. I'm rusty on 3d and on drawing and I'm feeling wiped out by that intensive editing work so I don't expect progress fast. This is really a better time to be dreaming a little. Say, coming up with what to write the next time I'm in a writing place, so I don't have to sit around waiting for the ideas to form.

As of the inevitable re-reading I had to do in checking edits in context and making sure no pages had dropped out in the process, I find myself not unhappy. It isn't exactly what I set out to write. The action does eventually end up just over the top although there is a slow boil in getting there. There isn't a lot of digging but there is an archaeological sensibility that makes it not quite and not just history-based. It is fun how many things from myth and history end up getting referred back to and given connections. And I achieved the "deep dive" into Athens, and it feels sort of right; she had to take a detour for half the book but, at last, I get to really sit down and hang out in Athens.

Can I do this again but do it better? By "better" I mean more focused, with less of a "If this is Tuesday this must be Belgium" approach and more of a single culture being the focus. And less of the oh-so-fun but somewhat extraneous details. And more sustained action. But, more importantly than that, a proper internal/external conflict, with Penny really wrestling with her inner demons (this book the conflict was pretty much, "Hey, wanna be a hero? Why not?") And with a strong antagonist who interacts nicely and who is properly visible to the reader (this one, the antagonists are largely masked, although the big round of edits put them a lot more on stage).

But things changed for me over that last push. New ideas showed up when things were bubbling, and some of the older ideas seem less attractive.

So here's the current line-up:

The transhumanist vampire-werewolf milSF love triangle is not interesting me quite as much at the moment. Maybe it will grow on me.

I'm having strong ideas towards Space Opera. I've talked before of doing a Used Furniture story. And there's the idea of an actual opera, or rather a group of performers...Downside is that I am already far too drawn towards cliche and kitsch and the intersection where make-believe hits reality, and there are too many excuses here. Well, in space opera, really. Like Epic Fantasy, it runs on Fable.

Sort of similar in the used furniture and big Space Opera tropes is a concept I'm calling The Tiki Stars. I'm talking retro-culture at full blast, Rat Pack in space, Moon Zero Two. Thing is this kinda wants to go in a Men's Adventure direction already and then there's the Tiki problem (as someone put it, imagine you are a good Catholic and you get served a beer in a glass shaped like the Virgin Mary.) It would be fun to write but, ugh, I'd probably have to pick a Sad Puppy nom de plume or would be Oh John Ringo No.

Although I've said I'd like to take a break, Fox and Hounds does seem a likely project to tackle next. Yes; I made the commit and all the Athena Fox titles will have fox-things. Starting with The Fox Knows Many Things. My beta reader already tells me she likes it.

82.3

Primary edit is done, and as of last word count, came up just slightly to 82 thousand words. I am tempted to edit out 1/4 of the references and words and described stuff. Might pull it down around 70K. But I feel is better to learn from this and do different next time.

Funny. I've heard it said many times research is like an iceberg. You need to know more than what you put on the page. Well, sure, but what I found this time is I have to read so much before I grasp the overall shape, especially of a location I want to set a scene, I've learned far too many details. To get enough of a sense of the ferry to write the basic movements and other key events, I ended up having so many details in my mind that even when I left most of it off the page I still ended up talking way too much about carpets.

Anyhow. Now I've got ProWritingAid fired up and I'm doing line edit. And I've got a bit of a rant stored up.

Not about the software, or that particular process. Sure, it is flagging me for passive voice to hell and gone, because it is designed to edit business presentations and I'm writing archaeology. "Ancient stones were stacked in low rambling walls" is better than, "We stacked the stones," sorry!

Yeah, sure, I changed a couple. "They forged it..." was stronger in the particular circumstance than "It was forged...," for instance.

This is also work I can't take to the cafe, because I need the full laptop with internet connection. The software uses an online brain. And I need to have a web browser to check on things like the use of the ellipses in written dialog (the sort of thing that, as useful as Strunck & White is, it doesn't cover.)

>>>

No, my rant is on something about editing.

Here it is. You go anywhere where advice is given to writers, they all say "Pay a human editor." I basically agree with this. Hell, even in my specific circumstances I'm pretty sure they are right. A human editor is worth that much to your career (for this book, it doesn't make financial sense, but if for some reason it does get eyeballs then I am tainting my readership if the editing is obviously lacking.)

But here's the thing. These same advice-givers point out that an editor will catch "all those mistakes" in tense, point of view, plot holes, character names changing midway through the manuscript, misspelled words and common substitutions.

And this is where I part company. No, seriously. You are going to write a NOVEL, from 60 to 120 thousand words, and you don't understand verb tenses? You don't understand POV? You haven't figured out that when a red squiggle appears under a word in the software you are using, it means you may want to look at the spelling?

You know, really? I don't believe it. Not at entry level. Up at the leader level, a book goes through a professional line editor who sends back a marked proof and the writer then spends months going through every passive voice or cliche or dangling participle that editor has flagged to decide whether the needs of the story are great enough to break the rule of grammar here.

These are structural insights software can't make, though. At best, software can flag everything that fails a small number of rules doggedly applied. I mean, I've got a line that contains "...kind of weird..." and the software I'm using thinks it should be "a kind" or "the kind." Grammatically correct, just not idiomatic. When I wrote that something had happened in the eighteenth century, it insisted it should be hyphenated, because of course I had to have mean AN "eighteenth-century" NOUN.

This is the kind of thing a well-paid human does. And the entire industry is having more and more trouble coming up with those people. It is getting to the point where editing is unaffordable. Daily newspapers gave up the battle a while ago, at least my eye tells me every time I run into another front page typo.

Which means a book that is earning in the tens of thousands. Has to be. For both the publisher and the writer to be able to afford the services and the time to have those details discussions about whether that specific error is one up with which they shall not put.

At the Kindle level? People are getting lifetime sales in the low hundreds. It doesn't make financial sense to do that kind of editing.

And, also, honestly? The people who are pushing a book out on Kindle and who don't understand how POV works...well, they've got bigger problems. The whole system has a basic flaw, really. The old gatekeeper scheme had problems but it did mean writers were kept in the trenches until they'd figured out the difference between First Person and Third Person and how to change viewpoint characters smoothly.

(If I might direct your attention -- I read the first two books out of a ten book series, and as of a sample chapter of book six or so the author was still head-hopping. But at least by book six he'd figured out what point of view was.)

The Rocket's Shadow

Yeah, so some of the numerics are useful but that tool is so completely oriented towards trying to be top dog of the Amazon heap by gaming the keywords. How about displaying the middle of the road, bulk sales instead of concentrating on trying to outsell Stephen King and James Patterson?

That and it didn't really help me figure out categories, which was my first question. But I looked at a whole bunch of titles and I have a little more sense of what is being written (and selling).

And, oh boy, feeling newly inadequate. Also intrigued. As in, I picked up over a dozen sample chapters from novels that just seemed so interesting. That's our new data world, right there. I have tens of hours of YouTube videos saved to History that looked interesting enough to bookmark but I didn't have time to watch yet...

And oh yeah. Finished the Car Ferry chapter. After almost two weeks of reviewing the flow of the novel I finally figured out what I could do there and, more importantly, what I couldn't. Sigh. Once again a wonderful setting for some crazy action and it didn't fit the flow of the story.

I also reviewed the chapter at the National Museum and I'm not going to change it. I guess. I had the idea of taking a longer time to talk about the history of the Greek people and break it up and make it a little less dry by wandering around the exhibits at the museum. Yeah, and snogging with Markos. But in the end it is about flow of the story and there's enough words there already.

Two of the things I had to do in the Car Ferry revision was explain one of the bad guys a little more. So the main edit from this point is to pick up on that; make sure I'm giving the right part of the revelations in the moment just before the bomb goes off and when he's got his rifle out on Scorpion Island. Yeah, it gets a little less visiting museums and a little more action movie towards the end there.

Those two weeks were not just wool gathering. I re-read, reviewed, and did a lot of little edits. So there's less left. I think I can move on to doing a grammar pass this weekend and by Monday ready to work on the cover.

I'm also re-thinking hiring a professional cover person. The other thing I've been doing with my keyword searching is looking at covers. And, yeah, I'm still on the fence. Enceladus Calyx is so left field that -- assuming it is category and keyword placed so as to be obviously a suspense book with history/archaeology elements -- the weirdness of the title might grab some eyeballs. There are way too many same-looking titles out there already.

Still, I can't help coming back to The Fox Knows Many Things. The main arguments I had against it, I'm pretty much over. Well, that's next week.

The next one, I'm doing in eight months. Just have to plan a plan to constrain the variables a little. After all...the hard lifting is done now.

Rocket's Red Glare

Wrote one scene in the troublesome chapter. Two or three more to go. My questions keep expanding, though. They expanded right up into the "what is this novel about anyway" zone.

So I stopped and picked up a copy of PublisherRocket to see if it could give me a sense of Kindle categories and keywords and where my book seems to fit.

Well. Is good to know that what I think of as "Regional Mysteries" are still going strong. And actually a lot of more adventure/thriller oriented ones. That is, this is like the Tony Hillerman books, or (to a certain extent) the Spencer books; places where a specific environment/region is a major character. Florida Keys, for instance, in the books I saw in my category browsing.

I know from my own searches there are a bunch of archaeology-themed thriller things. Sometimes teams, more often series around a named character. Which is where I was intending to stage. I wrote this book as more an origin story than a stand-alone.

After poking around a little in Rocket I'm starting to see some numbers for archaeology adventures as well as travel adventure fiction (somewhat less common but also less defined). There seem, oddly, fewer Lara Croft clones than I had remembered from my own browsing. But that's probably good. The closest analog is probably the Amelia Peabody mysteries, which are a bit cozy, and also historical, but have a strong interest in archaeology and history.

Rocket is designed for gaming the system, especially gaming the search and display algorithms at Amazon. The strategy it suggest and is optimized for is not to find what is popular, but to discover what keyword or category searches seem underserved. It basically compares the number of people looking for increasingly specific things versus how many copies end up getting sold.

Well, I feel a little more educated now. I don't quite feel like I got my money's worth out of the software. I also feel I've spent long enough trying to re-write this chapter and -- after spending most of this rare productive evening re-reading all the surrounding chapters -- it may be better to skim over it or basically leave it out entirely.

Becalmed

Still haven't finished the boat scene and it is really starting to get to me. I want this novel edited and on to beta readers, polish edit, and cover.

Partly I'm dead in the water because I'm personally under the weather. Again. I'm shivering with fatigue right now and my concentration is barely up to the level of a blog post. And too many of my hours need to go towards catching up at work.

And I'm being too conscious of plot holes. This is a scene where I might be able to explain how my convenient antagonist is able to be so convenient. The timing is really tricky, though.

That, and every time I think about how he works and what clues I need to drop for my protag to pick up, I am tempted to rewrite the other scenes in which he acts. Done so already; this is one of the big structural elements this edit is about, after all. I've already done a bit to move the first antag, the "dragon" character, to a better visibility where his goals actually sort of make sense to the reader. And I'll have no problems moving around the few tiny plants for the final boss. But this guy...he's an ongoing problem.

Not helped by the fact that he has no lines, he never gets named, and in the majority of the scenes in which he appears my protagonist either doesn't see him or doesn't realize she's looking at him.

>>>

Yeah, and the boat scene has a couple of other issues. One that is bugging me more and more is I conceived it -- heck, I thought of putting it in the book at all -- because I was going to base it on the boat I took from Piraeus to Iraklion. Well, it is really hard to figure out just what kind of boat actually leaves from Venezia (most tourists doing the Italy-to-Greece route go out of Ancona and most also stop off at Igoumenitsa before going on to Patras.)

The actual line is only interested in selling tickets, and the little bits of data they can provide are strictly for upcoming trips. Since I'm setting this story in the shoulder season, I had to work fast and pick up the reservation data. The only videos I've found seem to be from mid-season, as well.

But with all that said, the chance is great that these are bigger, fancier, newer ships than the one I was on, and more of a tourist crowd (there were a lot of working class riders on the one I was on).

So change it or not? I don't know.

>>>

And, yeah, the emotional arcs and the necessary character evolution through this sequence is also still a little weird. I think I know what I need to know but it is still proving hard to fit it all in.

Did I mention I still find this character hard to work with? She's so energetic, and relentlessly upbeat. The first was a consequence of having someone in their early 20's who knew a ton of history and also had an acting background and did video. The second just sort of happened; started from being all excited about being in a historical place (the Acropolis) and then the plot required she do a fast rebound from her first "accident" and basically this is a person who rarely mopes, moans, beats herself up over her mistakes, or fears what is ahead.

I had a much easier time writing for Samantha Nishimura, also First-Person, although I took her in different ways than the game she had appeared in. She had great mood swings, up and down -- and swore constantly through it.

I think, now that I've been working with it through the length of a novel, that one of the tools Third Person gives you is the ability to draw the camera back a little ways when you need to give the reader more of a cool assessment. Third Person gives you that ability to control how close the narrative understanding is to the character understanding, and it can change from moment to moment.

First Person, on the other hand, is always in the moment. Everything gets filtered through their eyes. The only equivalent tool with First Person is you can let them draw back a little with an emotional distance, more visibly telling the story to the reader and less experiencing the story as it happens.

Appropriate

So I'm troubled about the subject of the next book in the series. I'm worried about appropriation.

Actually, there's a bigger problem I have with that particular setting. This is a series that cares about language, that talks about language. In the one I'm editing now there's business about the difference between "Standard German" and Bayern, the dialect of Bavaria. And there's a plot point about a guy who speaks a sort of mock High German but whose actual linguistic roots are from the North.

Well, the next book is London. And the problem with the UK? They speak English.

So I was able to do language games in the current book because it mostly came across in small snippets, or in, "They said something in German," or as slightly mangled syntax within English, "And do not the phone in the back pocket."

Having a book set largely in London means that there is multiple dialog in the actual dialect being spoken. Just doing RP (aka "BBC English") is bad enough. I've heard enough of it, and I can look up a lot of the word choices; boot versus trunk sorts of things. But I don't think I can do extensive dialog that is convincing and accurate.

Well, no-one can. The Brits are famous about picking faults in other people's attempts to do, well, anything right; English accents, English dialects, English life, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (sorry -- Looking Glass reference.)

The idea after that is worse, though. See, part of the game here is writing from what I know, and that includes using places I know when possible. Of course I only spent two days in Athens (although longer in Greece) and my trip through lower Germany was a decade ago. Still, it seemed an archaeological plot I could work with; do something with the Dorian Invasion theory wrapped around an antiquities smuggling plot and I'd have excuses to set scenes in Athens and parts of Germany I'd actually been to (Frankfurt, Bad Münster, and Munich although I only saw the train station there.) Of course I ended up with a whole sequence in and around Venice but oh well.

So I've also been in London, Paris, Tokyo, and Berlin. Also Bangkok (briefly), Kyoto (over a week), Salzburg (a day), and a bit of the states, too.

So Japan is an obvious one. I've read pretty extensively on modern Japanese culture (well, post-war). But why does that feel so much more like appropriation?

Maybe because it isn't considered as bad to make fun of Germans? But I have Italian and especially Greek culture right up there. I mean, at the climax I've got a piece of Greek cultural heritage being rescued by an American. It's pretty appropriating, and that's before we get to suggestions that she might have been chosen by Athena for this role. (Which is one of several good reasons why I downplayed that angle as much as possible).

I read a lot. I especially read at forums where native Greeks react in their own words to what other people think of their world and their people. And I was careful to create a variety of Greeks, so there is never one person saying, "Let me tell you about my people." Instead there are six people arguing, and half of them don't give a hoot for the opinions of the outsider.

And, well, it certainly gets done. Out of all the things I think I've learned, it is that Greeks are very, very familiar with people appropriating their culture. I think I have one character pointing out it's been going on since the Romans (don't know if that line survived the edit, though).

It just feels worse to be doing Japan. Maybe because there is a longer history of such cringe-worthy appropriation. And of course the nature of this series is deep dive. Although I could breeze through Italy with just surface impressions, I had to go into the lived experience of being Athenian, from politics to racism to economics to history to language.

Japan would be the same. Even as I'm contemplating having a companion for that adventure who is a total weaboo, it isn't going to sit at a surface level. And maybe that's where it starts to get acceptable in my mind. Two things, really; one is that I will be visibly making the effort to get below the shiny surface of anime and yakuza, samurai and salarimen. The other is -- if I can communicate it -- that the Japanese are very conscious of role-play and surfaces. That the surface ephemera is to them also artificial, though not necessarily as alien.

I also really want to get into post-war Japan, and the Takarazuka, and other stuff that's, well, old-people stuff. Sigh. I had that happen already. My protagonist is in her early twenties and is not shy and nerdy. The first book, though, was about her getting her travel legs, becoming the "globe trotting" part of the adventurer archetype she is growing into, and travel at that level is weighted towards being an old person's game.

I guess that's another reason the current scene had me blocked for so long. She's at the bar on a car ferry and although my feeling is a number of the passengers are guest workers or the families thereof, (aka people visiting across the distances modern economies have forced on so many families), the people up in the bar with spending money and leisure time are going to be experienced travelers. Meaning mostly retirees. That's what I've seen across my own travel. Yes, there are backpackers and Instagrammers and all that, but generally people travel for pleasure after they've become financial stable.

Once again, my young woman is having to hang out with old people and do old people stuff. Or is that a culturally appropriating thought, too?

Wool gathering

I knew this was the big chapter as far as editing time went. And I shouldn't have been surprised that the reasons I thought it would take a while were not the reasons it did take a while.

This is a stand-alone sequence, a set-piece location. The course of my MC's flight has been the dig in Germany, train and Munich, train and Padua, Venice. And now the car ferry which concludes the side quest.

So, yeah. It is a big boat so a nice complicated set with places to hang out, hide, climb, fight, whatever. It is based on somewhere I spent about twelve hours on. And there's an under-text of The Odyssey and even though he never strayed into the Adriatic (he was all over Sicily, landed in Italy at least once, and might have made it as far as Spain) it is still a great excuse to do some stuff.

So I figured I'd be plotting all sorts of shenanigans. And I did work out some and started to write.

Well, it didn't work.

Fortunately I have a tool in my kit, a tool I'm calling "increasing the size of the boxes." I just kept asking the question above the question, the question that contained the question, until I figured out the character arcs and story arcs and emotional arcs were going in the wrong directions. What I kept trying to do on the boat was wrong for the character and the story.

The thing that really bugged me was going through the weekend -- a time when I can usually sit down at the keyboard and slam a few thousand words of text -- doing nothing but gnawing away at the problem.

So now I know. It isn't perfect. Writing is always a balance of compromises. At one point in the various attempted drafts I had some background about one of my antagonists. Well, it doesn't work here but now I know I need it so I'll need to offload it onto some other scene.

And I've added one more character. Terry, who owns a 32' cabin cruiser and is a very friendly drunk.

To go with (deep breath): Biro, Océane and Phillip, "Spooky," Andreas, Ariadne, Giulio, Signor Nardella, Howard, Dame Dupond, Jim, Vash, Drea, Graham, Doctor Newman, "Herr Satz," Robert, Gerta, Kaylah and her buds, Barker, "Polpetto," Markos, Eric, "Socrates," Demetrius, Georgios, Goku, "Outis," and Diana. In the list of named characters, that is.