Owl be back

Oh, goody.

I have an outline, I have the basic research, I can start creating chapter and scene.

So what's up first?


Scene 1. I have to describe the Acropolis. And I don't mean an info-dump from Wikipedia. I mean show my protagonist, acting in character, giving an improvised lecture that is cogent and amusing but also contains both errors and omissions. And to write it in such a way so it is obvious the errors are not the author's, and that the omissions are there and are going to be important. And of course it is the first scene for the protagonist of the story which means I have to reveal two different people simultaneously; the character being filmed, and the actor behind the mask.

Scene 4. This is a reception at a trendy gallery where everyone has hidden layers and every conversation takes place on multiple levels -- culminating in a scene where my protagonist pulls a Danny Kaye and the Italian art dealer plays along for his own reasons, slipping in Verdi quotes in his replies -- that turn out later to be rather meaningful.

Oh, yeah, and the Prologue. It shows bits of an episode of the show my protagonist created back in college, where she plays a female Indiana Jones on the track of....Atlantis. Yeah; after all that time trying to come up with a historical fantasy that wasn't about Atlantis, my modern-day story of Athenian antiquities smuggling requires I figure out an Atlantis plot.




There's a little more here. I'm having a huge crisis of confidence now, about writing in the voice of a contemporary young person (well, younger than me). In one way I'm okay with that because my audience is probably closer to my age and the style of this thing means I can hang a lampshade on it and describe the High School of my era, and theirs, and get a nod and a smile and a tacit understanding that the world has moved past us. 

But that connects with the bigger problem I've been wrestling with. That I just don't know enough, that I'll never be comfortable that I know enough. What was the actual trade in the early Iron Age between Greece and Northern Europe? How do trains work in Italy? What are the options for live streaming or nearly-live journalism? 

How do people actually work? What is romance? What is the meaning of life? I really don't think I understand humanity well enough to write about "us." I feel like I just evolved off the spectrum within the past decade, and there's no way this lifetime is long enough to catch up.

So, yeah. It isn't going to be a fun weekend.