Jim's Tried It

Oh, yeah, the fun part of discovery writing. When you have to stop a couple of times every sentence to finally nail down a name or location.

Most of this is stuff I glanced through previously, but it is still drilling back into the research and finding what actually works within the current state of the text.

Two Italians, one Greek, and a Sengalese to name. Which means looking at Italian forms of address (says one source, "the Italians love titles and will use them whenever they can"). Immigration patterns (if you want to pick a statistically average immigrant to Greece from 10-20 years back, they are going to be Albanian. Just so you know.) And by the way Greek surnames are gendered. Sort of. So, women sometimes take the name of their husband (says Wikipedia, "... (or) use it socially") but may just keep the name of their father. Which was at some point feminized but then became actually the genitive of the surname...but that's too simple, let's make the surname the Katharevousa form!

And of course this character it is a Belgian surname so who the heck knows what happens there. Then looking up opera companies in Athens (there is one, boringly called the National Opera of Athens) and the makeup of their board, the proper name of the "Sons of Herakles" who were famously promised to return and are sometimes conflated with those protean Dorians, (Professor Sharp's book is now officially titled The Return of the Heracleida), what Ermou Street looks like, and what to call a fedora if you don't want to say fedora. Or even if you do; it is not a terribly well defined hat name.

And yes they do make them both "camel" color and of actual camel hair and the latter is not, in my eyes, attractive.

My cast are still playing probability cloud, with whether they are at the reception in Athens, not seen until the dig in Germany, or not seen at all like proper criminal masterminds remaining undetermined until a critical paragraph is reached.

The one time I actually started writing at pace I made it half way through a nice little conversation with Dottore Guillo Manuzio before I realized I needed to set up their meeting later and in a very different way. (Or is that Il Dottore? Hardly matters...I don't think I'm using a title for him, not in Italian anyway.)

Thing is, this party scene is where they are going to be discussing the Dorian theory and there's also a comic bit with snippets of musical terms and Verdi operas. And some scene-setting description when poor Penny finally gets a chance to look around.

Oh, yeah. Currently on the list...her surname is no longer working for me. So now I'm staring at poetry meters because there is a bit I want to set up about "Penelope" being a good combination for the surname and "Penny" clashing with it.