"Are you ready?" he texted.
Others are looking to the example of epistolary works like Dracula and setting out each message in an isolated and indented chunk of text, such as:
Are you ready?
But I hold with those like the current crop of YA writers, who are facing the task of depicting a digitally integrated world in which internal monolog and in-person conversations and text chats are all twisted together in a continuous skein. For them, are you ready? is the clear leader.
My "no research" novel is taking enough research it is actually making me feel better about the Bronze Age novel I didn't feel competent to tackle yet. The modern world is so filled with detail, every single thing you try to nail down becomes a rabbit hole. And once you've found them, it is an almost impossible task to communicate to the reader. If you put too much in they'll get confused, if you leave too much out they'll squawk. There is such a surfeit of detail, and everything that does get in needs to be explained. Somehow.
Of course, every single age there ever was, was a modern age. 1860's Kansas City had "gone about as fur as they can go." For me, nailing down whether they used the Murex dye in Mycenaean Crete is a heavy research task, but once I've nailed it down the environment is simple and straight-forward.
Or is it? For us, today, the Bronze Age must remain relatively simple. But people are complex. They always have been. For Kes, holding a purple-dyed thread in her hands, there must have been as many connections, as deep a rabbit hole, concerning that seemingly simple thing. The meaning it had within social systems, within economics. Its connections to the gods and other religious practices. What it reminds her of in the rich natural world around her -- connections that have already been explored for generation after generation of poets and myth-makers.
The advantage to the writer is that all this stuff, thank the gods, remains optional. I can put it in for color, and create context where it will reveal character or deepen theme, or I can leave it unsaid and the reader will not miss it.
Still, all in all, is is tempting to reflect on having to write a generic space opera, all comfortable used furniture and technology and science that I (think) I already know and all of that messy clutter that people drag into their thoughts and conversations is both made up and optional.
(Not that it would ever work. The big problem I have with the generic future setting is, no way people are going to lose that baggage of history. They presumably care less about the American War of Independence than we care about the Battle of Gqokli Hill, but the Information Age is one of those things that's really, really hard to take back. If they want to talk about the campaigns of Shaka Zulu they are going to be able to reference them. At length.)
So I just got 900 words out of my protagonist drinking a glass of ouzo (there was some food involved, as well). I'm still a little split on how many words I want to put in with her joining the other tourists and doing touristy things. That stuff is there for two reasons; to set up for later explorations of what it means to be a Modern Greek, both blessed and cursed with the heritage of the classical world. And to have plain simple (and even instructional!) fun being a tourist in a cool place.
On the larger of the pro sides, my outline said I'd be at 20K before I left Athens. On the con side, I'd really like to, before this weekend is over, write up to the point where she boards the plane to Frankfurt.
At least it is still going quickly. That 900 words was this morning's work. And I'm not entirely burned out for the day. And there's the biggest pro of them all in my current planning question. This is the origin story, and getting on that plane is the first really big step of my history buff and YouTube programmer turning into the Adventure Archaeologist she was born to be.
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