According to my calculations, each chapter in my outline should average 4.7 thousand words if I want to hit a target of 80K. They are going to vary quite a bit, though. Especially as my outline is more of a story beats than it is an absolute plan of chapter and scene breaks. Nice how the numbers work out, though. 4K was typical of the chapters in my last fanfic. So not only do I know what that looks like, I also know what fits in (One or two set-piece scenes, plus some Meanwhile Back in Ithaca.)
So, yeah. Best guess now is from the moment she arrives on the Acropolis to the moment she falls off will be somewhat over 3K. I do want to decompress, but decompressing in a place where all I can do is history factoids and pretty scenery is not the best. Save the page count for some longer conversations and other interactions.
(The way the plotting is working out, scenes like this are a first take, and almost every single bit of background information given ends up being expanded, explained, or repudiated later. Means unless I'm careful later scenes are going to become way too wordy).
Still too early to tell how it is going otherwise. I've been talking to Penny for a while in my head but this is the first time I've tried to write a full paragraph in her voice. I thought the prologue was going to be more over-the-top and also have move ludicrously bad history in it. Sure, she discovers Cycladic figurines in a tholos tomb as well as a Phaistos Disc she identifies as being written in Minoan before reading it, but that's...I think it is a wee bit subtle. It's even archaeologically defensible; there was a cross-over of burial practices and neolithic artworks, besides pretty much making it to that time anyhow, were collected by later ages.
And, yeah, it was tempting to do more about the language but it is too early, both for Penny and for the novel, to get into geeky depths about Linear A and Minoan Hieroglyphs and all that.
The rest of my time has been spent learning about cigarette smuggling out of Montenegro, the Roman presence in Germany, antiquities laws in multiple nations, and a host of other questions that keep coming up. And will keep coming up.
Whether I intend "no research" or go all-out, though, there remains an issue. I think the way research works best is when you read a whole bunch first. What you get out of that is a feel for the landscape. Unfortunately, perhaps, you also get a bunch of obscure stuff that turns out to be really annoying to track down again later.
Just two hundred words ago in the current draft, I remembered that I'd heard the term "Periclesian Parthenon" a couple of times. And I can't track it down. I can't even confirm the spelling. There was a Greek term for the desecration of the Hermes that I only heard from one place. Fortunately I could go back to him and get him to spell it. But I also heard an archaeologist on a program filmed in Greece use what appears to be the Greek equivalent of "tombarolli." That is, tomb robber. But I haven't been able to track it down (the original source was not captioned.)
Annoying process, that. The search engines are only giving me two options. One is to assume I meant some more common term and correct my spelling to that. The other is to take what I know is the wrong spelling, accept only those exact letters, and of course come up dry.
Back a decade ago my joke was if you tried to search for a famous european, especially a scientist, you'd be flooded with hits for some Anime girl that had been given that name. Now the problem is when you know damn well there are other acropoli than the Acropolis, the boolean logic permitted in the search engines is insufficient to keep it from trying to navigate you back to Athens. (Actually, that one's a bad example. But you get the idea). There's really no way of typing in, "Zeus, but not the one you're thinking of." Or "Valence, but not curtains or electrons."
Well, maybe my classics-prof buddy at the pub will know the Pericles one, too.
Oh, yeah. And I found a generator that will translate text into bad German accent. It doesn't add gratuitous German, but that's okay. I took a year of the stuff and some of it stayed.
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