Athena Phone Home

Things have changed since I visited Germany. No, not Bad Münster am Stein; the Medieval Market festival and the jousting show are still there. Even the Austrian meistersinger we met is still there (at least as of a year or two ago.) No, what has changed is the way we approach it.

I sort of miss being able to puzzle out things. Testing my language skills understanding signs and explanations, my navigational skills, my anthropology and history skills. Now, we're not quite to the level of data overlays but my character can at any moment whip out her smart phone and figure out where she is, what you call it, who sells train tickets (or, for the latter, purchase them right from the phone).

The only thing that hampers this process is the wealth of information online and the poorly organized nature of it, a problem conflated by the priorities of those who post it. I went looking through videos of what the town looks like, and found a significant number about random trains that happened to pass through: rail fans are everywhere, it appears.

(Never did find any good images of the area around the bahnhof itself, but I figured out a much better way of handling the scene -- that doesn't require that data.)

Well, Verne would probably be similarly pleased and mildly disappointed that there are regular flights to practically everywhere. You don't have to hire a caravan of camels and drivers yourself.

I never bothered with a paper map in Athens, except for those that indicated there was a museum or archaeological site that didn't appear at any useful zoom level on Google Maps. It wasn't a perfect system; I had to go to the ferry office to have them print a paper ticket for what I had purchased online (unlike the airport, they don't have a handy machine to give you that hard copy; and both are unlike Deutsch Bahn, where you can just flash the conductor with the image on your smart phone.) But I'm also not one of the techno-cognoscenti; I have no interest in ever hiring an über and even AirBnB makes me wary, and those sorts of things give even more mobility.

There's also...it is interesting for me to know what I'm looking at, whether a historical building or just the name of a food item. You can get a bunch of this stuff via the phone, if you are willing to spend your vacation looking like you are hunting Pokemon. But at the same time interacting with people is even more fun than trying to read signs in another language. Given the choice between finding out what a graduation tower is, and having a conversation with a nice couple who have no idea what the thing is because they're from Lübeck, I'll take the Lübeckers and their amusing anecdote about marzipan. I can always look up how mineral spring spas work later.

I guess the long and short of it is that research is still hard. It is easier to look up what train goes where, but not terribly important to put in the book. And it is almost as hard as it ever was to find those boots-on-the-ground details; those things the reader can't find themselves in a few minutes with Google Maps.



And while we're on the phone; this is how I decided to handle text in my current story:

There was a Greek coffee served sweet and thick and a house salad that had everything — down to some kind of brown-bread crouton — but no lettuce. After that and with two different pastries in front of me I could at last face the stack of messages.
Where have you been? Drea wanted to know. Are you okay? the next read. And many, many more of the same. Please respond, it’s almost midnight! said the last, sent twenty minutes ago.
I’m at breakfast, I sent. Did you forget the time difference?
Oh thank god. When I saw you fall I was so scared. Are you sure you’re okay?
You saw what now? I forked up another bite of ravani, syrup dripping off of it. I’d better get a lot more hiking in today. I stopped suddenly, grabbed at the phone. Biro sent you video?  No wonder he’d had that guilty look all the way back to the hotel.

So tags and punctuation handled just like dialog, only omitting the quotation marks and using italics to set the quotes out instead. And notice also the word "texted" never appears, nor any other mention of the mechanics of phones. It isn't needed, any more than "he said" is needed after every line -- much less an explanation of how syllables are formed by the mouth and tongue.




You know if I book now I could fly into Frankfurt in time for Oktoberfest and it would be under four hundred bucks? Yeah...I'll save that sort of expense for the next book. I'm still wanting to travel again, though.

It's too dangerous to go alone

Word count is at about 24K. The scenes are getting longer, the pace more relaxed because all that critical scene-setting and character-establishing and plot-starting stuff is out of the way. They are also writing more quickly, due to basically the same thing. So it feels like I'm going to hit my target word count.

I've done the Inciting Incident, a Refusal of the Call, the cross Into the Underworld, a first Crisis...but I'm not actually following any template. I've given up on warping things into too close a reading of the three-act structure, even though it sort of is one. And following Campbell too closely is a mistake. On a smaller scale I love the idea of Try-Fail cycles and Scene-Sequel construction but I'm not quite getting those either. Best I can say structurally is there are arcs, with plenty of rising action, climax or turn, falling resolution, integrated into an overall arc.

This is the point at which iterative outlining is finally working. There were several places in the earlier chapters where I had to backtrack more than I wanted; to go back and tinker with the outline itself. Now I have a basic structure and I've done enough of the general research that I don't have to go back to ask, "What is this novel really about?" all the time.

I'm finding it much easier to monkey with scenes now. So much so I'm doing fine with doing a rough draft of a scene, leaving it in place as I see what the scene after it will require, then coming back to change it around. Perhaps it helps that this particular first-person voice is not terribly eloquent. Penny thinks fast and jumps around and I'm finding it very easy to drop new lines in or re-purpose old ones.

The heavy work is done. The major research issue I'm having now is the fact that I'm trying to push ahead whilst I have a couple of scenes I've skipped over. So I have a bunch of windows and links and notes and images saved for the material in those scenes.

Oh, and somehow I totally lost a cute discussion on a German-Language forum that gave specific examples of the things you are likely to hear if you cross the street against the lights. I may have to ask my German-speaking friend. Would rather not, as she makes a living doing translations (from turn of the century German to modern German but still).



Oh, and whoops...I was misreading Google Maps. Although Maps thinks it is a 35 minute walk from the train station to the airport, the Frankfurt Bahnhof is a mere pedestrian bridge from the terminals (it is a little more complicated -- it's a big airport -- but there is an automated train between the terminals and basically you never have to go outside, much less have to walk around the streets of Frankfurt. So I need some other way to waylay my protagonist.

And, yes, I would totally love it if whatever they did gave her a chance to do something badass. Because she's been largely reactive so far. Her most heroic moment was talking to a guy she didn't like. Which was actually an act of physical bravery...but being brave and good are not quite the same things as being cool and awesome, and I also want some of the latter.

Time Machine

I just leafed through some old blog posts. A long-time blog is like a diary. A looking glass into a different time. A different time in which you were a different you; like the man said, you can never step twice into the same river (unless you are very fast).

November of 2014 I lost a position of nearly ten years, ending an association of over twenty years with a theatre I still miss. It still hurts. I will never forgive them (especially as I wasn't the only person who was abused, insulted, lied to, and eventually cheated.)

Followed by a year of craziness that was both very tough and in a strange way invigorating. Like boot camp (which I've also been through -- don't know if I've openly admitted that in the blog but yes I spent three years in the Army. Also went through Jump School, which is a whole story to itself.) I worked some very interesting shows, I worked some crazy long hours, and I barely kept my financial head above water.

And then found the second only job I've ever found by answering an ad (most of my jobs for most of my life, they called me. Well, actually, these guys called me, too. I sent in a resume and after I'd all but forgotten it they gave me an offer for a different position.)

It's been different. It's been exciting. And sometimes boring, and exhausting, but rarely frustrating. I get more trust and more support than I had in most of my time in theatre. And a hell of a lot more money (well, maybe not quite that much more, but getting full benefits sure makes a difference).

Through all this time...through the life of this blog...I've been doing three things. On shorter time scales I may seem to have given up one or two, but the reality is all three continue. Only the proportion changes.

Writing, building, music.

And theatre. But theatre was never a side activity. It was what I made a living at. Now I do it the way someone who isn't a mover will still help a friend move. I do a little theatre for people I made promises to. November 2014 was when it ended. That was the last time I could say theatre was my career.

1POV OTS

Revisited a podcast and it agreed in many places with what I'm thinking about First Person.

The mirror bit, for instance. You can argue you don't want to use it because it has become cliche. That's fine. But that's not really the problem with it. The problem is that most of us don't do that. I mean if I look in a mirror, my internal monolog is, "Yeah, I can get away with another day before I have to shave." Not, "Oh, look, I have brown hair and eyes."

We don't usually look at ourselves externally like this, whether or not a mirror is involved. But here's the caveats; "usually," and within certain values of "we." To the former, there are times when you either chose to look at yourself analytically or comparatively; "I look more like my father every day." There are also times, for some of us, when a mirror or a recording catches us by surprise; "Do I really sound like that?"

And to the latter..."we" is not inclusive. Some people are constantly worrying about the specifics of what they look like. Trying out different looks; "I really liked how the perm framed my face." Being critical, "My complexion is too light to carry off that eyeliner." And, yes, "She's prettier than I am."

Ain't it fun being human sometimes.

So, yeah, if you really need to drop her red hair into the narrative, have her pick out a green sweater. Or have her make a snide internal comment about whether redheads really do have more fun. The convenient mirror is as obvious as the convenient Watson.

Related to this, the question of what people were wearing came up again. My rule is simple; some characters notice. Some don't. And the noticing is contextual; they may notice what people are wearing at a restaurant and assure themselves that sandals and shorts are going to pass. They may notice what the pretty girl is wearing. They may notice uniforms and by long habit check for rank tags. The mistake isn't describing. The mistake is never describing. The mistake is doing an identical police blotter on every character that is introduced.

(And, yeah...everything connects to everything, sooner or later. My current POV character is totally aware that after sneaking around in the woods her clothes are all dirty. I'd point the camera away so I don't have to bog down the story with the logistics of doing laundry. The narrative voice, however, doesn't want to play along.)

Clothing isn't special. This goes for clothing, architecture, weather, everything. I think it is actually part of the fun in writing in First Person. And, yeah, this is true in Third Person as well. Third Person Limited, that is. Third Person Omniscient has a completely different set of issues.





And that brings us to First Person Over-The-Shoulder. First Person is usually written in past tense. I've heard from one author who actually uses italics for internally verbalized thoughts just so he can tag them like dialog and make them shade closer to the immediate.

Back in earlier decades First Person was often placed in a framing story; the Time Traveler would sit down with friends and then, after the brandy and cigars had been brought out, launch into his narrative. These days the urge is towards bringing the narrative as close as possible to present without actually using present tense.

This means avoiding anything along the line of, "Had I but known..." The illusion is difficult enough to maintain.

(Heck, I have enough of a problem with past-past events. That is, when someone narrating in past tense needs to talk about something that had happened previously. "He came to the wall. Last week, the wall had looked forty feet tall and sheer as glass. Now, he looked at it with new eyes...")



Another fascinating thing about First Person is that you can do an "as you know Bob" in it. Here's the thing; you can indeed and most of us do go over a review of what we actually know on occaision. Because in our own heads there's only us, not some other person who has heard it already and doesn't want to hear it again. A maid-and-butler can be made to work if you turn it into a character moment, or find some other creative frame like a pre-flight checklist. Within First Person, you don't have to be that clever.

I think, perhaps, one of the reasons it works is because we don't think in words. We verbalize when we need to, but if a character says to themselves, "I quickly reviewed what I knew..." it isn't the same as laboriously putting it into a simplified explanation that is convenient for the reader as well. Which is what you have to do if the maid and butler are doing it in dialog. I mean, sure, it ends up the same words, but there's that convenient fiction of First Person that you are getting a sort of shorthand of their thoughts, not a set of words they are dictating around their cigar and brandy snifter.

(I am still on the fence with internal dialog. In our own minds, we think and take notice of our surroundings and plan our next step without usually putting it into words. It is only when we are composing a letter or thinking through something carefully and precisely that we internally verbalize it. Thing is, every single bit of the experience, both what the character sees and what they think about it, is already presented as a narrative. I know there should be a difference. But it feels artificial to try to apply it.)

(It may depend on the kind of narrative voice, including the rhythm and sound of it. Maybe for some characters, "There was a tramway leading to the peak. Funiculi, Funicula, I thought," works, and for others, "There was a tramway leading to the peak. Funiculi, Funicula," is better.)



But was First Person really the best way to tell my current story? I came to it in this case mostly because the character is going to spend a lot of time by herself, or at least without a confidante to bounce things off of. And, sure, you can get the same information across; "It reminded me of what Diogenes had said to Alexander," is easily replaced with "It reminded her of what Diogenes had said to Alexander..." If you think you can't do a rich internal life without using First Person, you haven't read any Joyce.

I think what makes First Person -- its greatest flaw as well as its strength -- is attitude. "The cocky bastard came in swinging and I wiped the leer off his stupid face with a left hook," just isn't a sentence that transplants well to Third Person. Not saying it can't be done. Just that it is so easy to do with the appropriate POV.

I had toyed with Third Person. And even with switching viewpoints. I did actually try the latter; to have Penny narrate in First Person but to describe some of the things she did in character as Athena Fox in Third Person. It didn't work for me.

A problem within the problem is that at various places Penny "becomes the mask." When she is completely immersed in the character of Athena Fox, it doesn't just change her spoken dialog...it is reflected in the internal narrative. She is calmer and more confident. And this begins bleeding through to those times she isn't in character.

And, yeah. That's going to be tough to pull off.

The Concession

Yeah, so that thing about how you can make one big concession at the start of an SF story? It sort of works for pseudo-history based stories too.

I just read a book that did it and it seemed to work. Then made it not work. And both choices are informative.

Right at the start of the story, it is presented that the Sphinx is older than the Pyramids. Okay, fine. For the purposes of this story, we are in a world where this is true. And where the secret library buried under the Sphinx is a thing, too.

There's no pressing need to argue that the whole library thing is clearly a fabrication as it didn't start being talked up until the Christian era. Because this is the beginning; this is the place where you can say, "For the purposes of this story, light has mass. For the purposes of this story, India doesn't exist. For the purpose of this story, Elves." Whatever.

Okay...I do still have a small problem with it. I think that to really be fair to actual science you need to do as they did a scene fairly close in to the start of The Core. Which is to have someone point out just how absolutely stupid the idea is. And then go and do it anyhow because that's the story. "Elves? Are you insane? There's no way...oh, look. There they are."

You don't need to defend it, not really. The audience is totally willing to accept this as a premise so they can get on with the story. You don't have to give them some convincing story about how Michelson-Morely should really be interpreted or how Google Maps lies or how pointed ears can easily be hidden by hats. Sure, you can, but that is for entirely different reasons than convincing the reader.

One is because it is useful in-story; say, you want to do a big scene at the Explorer's Club where your hero explains how he is going to launch himself in a giant cannon and therefore launches into similarly ballistic arguments. One character convincing another. One character demonstrating their character (the physicist demonstrating how they are smarter than anyone since Einstein).

The other is because its fun. It is a nod and a wink to the audience, a spoof explanation given because it is funny. It is a chance to trot out your research. And I have to remind you again; because this is while the Contract With the Reader is still in the process of being signed and ratified, this farcical "explanation" is done in full view, the merest sop of a top hat and a cheap sparkly wand while the writer does it. The reader knows they are being spoofed and they are enjoying the ride.

So here's where the book I read made a big mistake. It made arguments later in. After the author already had the audience on his side, he created situations where someone could bring up the erosion theory, or...since the Sphinx was part of a parcel of Ancient Alien stuff...the Bagdad Battery, the lack-of-soot argument...all the horribly familiar and long-debunked trash of the Von Danieken brigade.

The only reader this isn't going to annoy is the reader who is gullible enough to either fall for or (more likely) already fallen for the pseudo-history in question. The average reader is going to be increasingly annoyed.

Not saying you couldn't make this kind of delayed argument work in the right context, but basically this is where you've moved from making one clear concession for the purposes of the story to trying to argue for a clearly counterfactual when there's a perfectly good story you could get back to telling.

So...if this is how it works, does it make it harder to write an adventure archaeologist story? Perhaps. What seems to me is that the process remains familiar. If on page three you introduce the anti-gravity paint, the only things you are allowed to do from then on are either science as we know it, or extrapolations that follow logically from that first concession.

Follow logically. Science as we know it. If you've set up the 25,000 year old Sphinx in the first chapter, if you later want to talk about Battle of Kadesh you can indeed explore the implications of an ancient Sphinx. But you can't also unveil that the Hittites are, for completely unrelated reasons, riding against the Egyptian chariots on their trained velociraptors.

Depending on the type of book, of course. It all does have to do with the contract with the reader. If you've introduced a traditional mystery, you can't have Miss Marple give up on ever making sense of the clues and in the last act, gun everyone down with a war surplus Thompson. World-building a fantasy world means you can't suddenly have dragons appear in the third act -- not unless you've been planting the proper portents all along. Magic users can't develop new powers on demand.

It all comes from the original premise you've asked the reader to accept. So if you want to add Atlantis and Crystal Skulls and Pakal's Spaceship to your Sphinx story, the opening premise has to be not that this one thing is different, but that lots and lots of things are going to be different.

But I still think that premise needs to have structure. Saying, in a Science Fiction story; "A lot of the physics you know is plain wrong" gives the writer too much license. It is hard to concentrate on the dangers faced by the heroes if you aren't sure if inertia works in this universe, or even oxygen. You kind of need some ground rules in order to be emotionally involved. And for anything that is a scientific technological or historical puzzle, to be intellectually involved.

"Lots of history is wrong" is a poor premise because it doesn't constrain the possible. At any moment Elvis and Bigfoot could pop out to take down the bad guys. "Some history is wrong because this thing here" is a better premise. There is a race of immortals. A long-lived conspiracy. A crash-landed spacecraft. A really, really weird Pope. Or some other schema that regulates what sorts of para-historical things are liable to pop up in the manuscript; "Welcome to the monster hunter club," "Your mission is to go to critical battles across time and make sure they come out the right way," "This book of your grandfather's explains all the things he discovered."

Density Control

Seriously, I do not remember writing being this hard.

Could be I've gotten better, so I'm more aware of what can be done and what needs to be done. Or could be I only think so but I'm climbing into that navel of worrying about things that only make sense within my own over-elaborated Weltanschauung. Or it could be eating all that lead paint has finally caught up with me.

Today has been mostly surgical repair. Had to move a scene, and there was a lot of stitching to try to get it into the new spot. There will be more of that to come; my chapters are currently unbalanced, with two stand-alone scenes at the end of the first Athens sequence that are too short for their own chapters but don't flow enough into each other to be joined into one.

And the numbers still don't add up. Listened to a podcast that gave a too-mechanical breakdown around a three-act structure in which the first "plot point" (essentially, first climax and change of course) happens at exactly 25% (or about 20K in for a 80K target length) and the first act break at 29.6K. Also read an amusing but pointless novel that had no real organizational structure, wandering around aimlessly and arriving mostly nowhere. But then, the elevator pitch could easily be "Bertie Wooster meets Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull" so you are pretty much getting what you came for.

I'm still over-working stuff. I know this, and I'm putting up with it for the moment because I'm still trying to feel my way towards basic things like the character voice, the pacing, the level of detail, etc.

It used to be easier to plot, too. I think. I do wonder if my previous plots were more about stringing action sequences together. But then I look at the first full-length fanfiction I ever did, which was a Sailor Moon AU.

Basically, the lead character never gets her powers and the side characters each go on what are essentially solo arcs. Point being, over each 3-5 chapter arc I was carefully plotting how that character's own particular approach to things could only take them so far. Each arc was also based around a different one of Beryl's four Generals (each in increasing power).

So the climax of each arc was a personal nadir, a failing of the method they'd used so far, then -- usually through a second parallel plot -- Usagi would do something that showed she was still the heart of the team (even if no-one recognized it), the lead of the arc would regain her determination, Kitty Magic would take place, and you know the drill.

(Back when I could sort of draw. Or was more willing to believe I could and try anyhow. By the later chapters Rei had dropped the Miko outfit for a snazzy costume and Spirit Bow, Makoto had a nice leather jacket from her Yakuza friends to go with the demon-killing laser gun, and Ami was in a wheelchair. She got better.)

I wrote a post a while back about how much I like a good pile-on climax. Pretty sure I never posted it. In any case, the example that always comes to my mind is Star Trek TOS, "Journey to Babel." The
Enterprise is saddled with a cargo of bickering diplomats, including Spock's estranged father. Dad falls ill and only a transfusion from Spock will save him. A strange ship is tailing them. Kirk is stabbed by a spy. It all comes together in the third act when the mystery ship attacks and Kirk has to stagger out of sickbay and bluff Spock into thinking he is fine so he will save his father. So the ship is shaking, power failing in sickbay in the middle of the critical operation, the shields are failing and Kirk is bleeding all over the command chair...

Another visual example is Doctor Who, "The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit." The Doctor and Rose come to a world suspended by unknown technology just above a black hole. I simply can not put succinctly how well this episode presents a series of points of no return, from the loss of the Tardis to the Doctor's decision to unbuckle from the winch line and fall into the pit. At the climax, in a brilliant series of cross-cuts, the gravity generator fails, the ship is pulled towards the black hole, the planet is disintegrating, the Oud are dying, the oxygen runs out in their suits...

But that's a bit outside the point. I don't need a plot where everything falls together in one huge climax that wraps up all the plot threads at once. I don't even need plot that effortlessly ties the internal and the external, the plot and the theme, the character arc and the mystery and the physical movement all in one. I just need....plot.

Makes me want to do a fantasy. Thing is, I'd find a way of complicating it. The idea I had this morning was to go into the hoary old magic = technology, flip it (technology is treated as magic) but do it within the confines of a non-modern social structure.

See, that's what happens in most stories; when magic is treated as technology it turns into cell phones and personal cars and at least some of the shattering changes to social order and world view accompany them -- even if the writer didn't seem to intend it to be so. That's my big problem with steampunk; there are almost no writers who take the opportunity to present an actual Victorian Age being hyper-accelerated into the vast social changes that occurred in our world by what is essentially a conflation of Industrial Revolution and Information Age.

Instead they present the modern world with top hats. No, worse; that peculiar wish-fulfillment modern world in which social mobility and personal autonomy and opportunities for adventure are available to everyone; something that in the real world is only marginally closer than it was in an older age.

So use every one of the strictures that keeps magic remote from the lives of most people in, well, some traditional fantasy, and apply that to technology. So there is none of the benefit of mass production, economies of scale, etc. Peasants still live and die short lives of grueling work, and wars are still won by who can afford to put the most men on the field.

And I've spent far too long thinking about this. I need to go back to the story at hand, and write it until I know what I actually have in my hand. I need to get through the Germany chapters.

I need to write faster, not better.

Ultimate Thule

I was feeling under the weather and was unable to write into the next chapter. Which turned out to be a good thing; over those sick days I refined what it was I was going to do with the chapter. The "Bayerische Heidentum-Gesellschaft" (for that is their working name) has evolved considerably in my mind and I think works better for the story than what I might have put in on Monday.

There are hundreds of societies, clubs, and other organizations that have one foot in some flavor of German neo-paganism. Each has its own unique relationship to not just that subject but other things that are often but not always fellow-travelers, from euro-skepticism to nationalist to...

And even names are not a sure guide, but there are a few pointers. The term völkisch is anathema in these days of dog whistles, as it is too closely associated with National Socialist-type racialism. Pity, because it has that "false friend" look to it, like the Spanish word "embarazada." No, it doesn't mean folklore. It is a nearly untranslatable term describing a sort of nationalistic racial essentialism.

Even more mysteriously, "Wodenism" is generally considered to fall in line with anti-semitism, anti-muslim, and yes very much into flying the banners and doing that stupid salute. "Odinism" is less tied to these notions, and there are other variations that go even further towards a gentle New Age type dancing-in-the-woods-with-drums thing. It gets even more confusing when you cast your nets outside of strictly German organizations.

"Paganism" is disliked by many neo-pagans (they dislike neo-pagan even more, with very few choosing to use it to describe themselves.) Instead of a term originating with the Romans they prefer one that actually originates in Greek, although it passed through quite a few twists and was in the hands of Christians before "Hellene" turned into "Heathen."

I would have liked to put more of a dog whistle in but my discretely named "Bavarian Heathenism Society" (if I am conjugating this all correctly, they aren't Heathenist nor are they studying Heathenism in an academic sense) is a social club with an interest in the more mythic aspects of German history and identity. Their application of any of the philosophies they study are more in the way of drinking parties in the woods and an emphasis on traditional masculine virtues in their own lives. They are politically conservative, anti-immigration and have severe doubts about the European Union, but some of their best friends are Jews. And they can manage enough money to support an excavation trying to track physical evidence of the movement of Aryan peoples through the Palatinate and, eventually, into Greece and Rome.

This I think is strongest for the directions I want to go in the Germany chapters. It also means that I can re-use a character I've already introduced to be the big mouthpiece for Professor Sharp's crazy views.

Much, much better than calling them the "Thule Society," as I might have on Monday. That one does not fly. Not at all. (Not unless you are an English-Language website dedicated to worshipping the Chaplin Impersonator himself as a sort of god.)

(Which is doubly hilarious if you know any of the actual history, but anyhow...)

Romani ite domun

I really didn't want to get into the Romans. I think, actually, it isn't that I dislike Roman history -- no indeed, there's so much fun stuff there. Nor that I'm afraid of it per se -- although there is terrifyingly too much of it. No, it is that there are a lot of people out there who are really, really crazy about the Romans, and no matter how carefully you try to do your research one of them is going to pop up and say "Actually, the Hairy Nose Legion wasn't posted to Argylia until the reformations of Claudius the Indigestible, and their Campaign Knot was actually called a Bidireta Unuctava and was worn on the right shoulder of odd-numbered Dodecaturians..."

Anyhow I'm trying to get through the big scene in Germany now so I can get the actual plot started. But there's so much to deal with; the actual location, the history of that location, the archaeology of it...and figuring out what the Romans were actually up to in a specific part of Germany is not one of those things you can do a simple Google search for. Much less doing comparisons with Iron Age activity. Figuring out what kind of a dig this is...plus I really don't know my archaeology that well and I really want to do a little geeking out about soil horizons and baseline datum and whatever.

Oh, and the theories that caused this dig to happen. I spent the morning at the cafe working and by the time my laptop battery died I'd worked out that basically a classics scholar with some, let us say, non-mainstream views did a lot of close reading of Tacitus et al and decided he would find something interesting near this one town. He may or may not have dug, but if he did was 1960's style and not good. Decades later his protégé comes out there with fancy MGR equipment he isn't experienced enough to get good data out of, convinces himself and his backers he's got something, and after a few months of frustration salts the pit.

Which has left open the question of who funded this. Which opens up a whole new rabbit hole of ever-shifting organizations on several different (and, one would think, opposing) fringes.

Which, since I'm also in the middle of trying to build more plot and more action into the thing, opens up all sorts of questions about whether these various anti-social societies are going to play a larger part in the story.

Which is another whole issue. I'm not taking anything off the table yet...but does seem a wee bit too far to have terrorists planting a bomb on the Acropolis. But, heck, I have enough trouble believing in, say, my protagonist fleeing from German cops. So maybe there's a happy medium. Because having the high point of the action being a fake gun and an inconclusive slap-fight between two amateurs...

Only barbarians drink their wine neat

How do I get into these situations?

I'm trying hard to ramp up my exercise schedule (which currently consists of walking to work as many days as I can fit in) to get my endurance back up to some reasonable level. And making changes to my diet as I do. And I'm trying to ramp up my work hours because I've almost but not quite paid off my Greece vacation (and plus I really want to keep this job). And I'm pushing the writing, to an almost nanowrimo pace.

So of course we're bringing out a new product at work and we're trying to build a whole new assembly line for it and, yeah, there's a lot of stuff happening that's taking time and energy and attention. So, yeah, is a little crazy.

Pity because I'd love to take a mini sabbatical right now. I am so close to getting the draft of the novel to the first big moment, the place where I will learn if the idea is working or not.

Today I crunched my way through the flight-to-Germany chapter. The conversation wrote itself...and I kept having to go back and edit most of it out. 90% of what Graham is eager to talk about isn't actually required this early in the story. If I let him have his way it would be a huge lecture and look far too much like the naked info-dump it is. So I write ten lines of dialog. Throw out eight of them. Try again.

Yeah...it is always the rule. Writing 1,000 words is easy. Writing 100 is hard. 

I'm still struggling to decompress but I still haven't found how to do that. My latest thought is I need more words that are generic. Lines of dialog that don't do much, for instance. Or description that is colors and sounds and smells and so forth but doesn't include any names or technical terms; sort of less "The sunlight brought out the deep bas-relief of the entablature" and more "The stones gleamed white against the blue sky, almost as bright as the puffy clouds."

So, yeah. At my current pace I'll be lucky to hit that key scene before Sunday. And it is very, very irritating not to have more time available to work on it.

Raider of the Lost Arc

"All that data mining, and he goes and causes a cave-in." -- Freefall


In the writing world one sometimes hears about "Outliners" versus "Pantsers." Most writers are a combination of both. For me, although I am by inclination an Outliner -- my notes files is close to novel length by itself, and that's before you add maps and charts -- when pen hits paper is when I discover all the questions I really should have asked earlier.

Like yesterday's realization. I dreamed up a bit to properly close the character arc of the undercover Art Squad guy, but realized I had no place to write that down so I could find it again. So I started a page just for character and other arcs and the moment I did that, I realized I didn't have nearly enough to understand the evolution of several other key characters.

Take the guy with the stupid accent. I know how that arc resolves but how did he come to be chasing Penny across Europe in the first place? If you look at his arc as it stands, the only thing he should be trying to do is hand her a check.



And, yes, I'm still struggling with the characterization of the lead. There's a certain default when it comes to genre heroines in first person. Sarcastic, shy in crowds, wears jeans, lives alone, studies krav-maga...you can easily make a list of common attributes. I keep finding myself falling into that comfortable default that is, I think, less that of a male writer trying to first-person as female (as female authors write to the same template) than it is a writer trying to be put on the skin of a hero with physical skills and a quip ready on the tongue (instead of ocurring, at is does to most of us, after the door has closed.)

(There's a somewhat less common but still familiar template for third-person heroines in adventure fiction. It starts with great hair, moves down to crop top, and usually involves a large measure of what TVTropes calls "waif-fu." Also, oddly enough, gender of the writer is immaterial.)



Right at the moment I'm working on another crazy conversation. See, I created this French couple for a walk-on bit, but then I needed them for something else, and now they've grabbed an entire chapter for themselves. And their first stop was to go eat. So now I'm trying to deal with Greek food (unfamiliar to my protagonist and, dammit, largely unfamiliar to me -- traveling on a budget and having other things on my mind, okay?) Through the lens of a pair of French tourists. So way foodie.

The only thing that is worse is if Graham has to talk about coin collecting. That's a rabbit hole I just don't want to fall into.

I also have windows open for the Athenian Agora, for the Straka and Monastiraki districts (shopping, mostly), and for the flight to Frankfurt from airline schedules to pictures of the Check-In area to flight tracker data. Fortunately I can screen-capture a bunch of this stuff, and you can actually paste images directly from a viewer into the Scrivener window so all that research is lumped into the saved document.



And, yeah, I'm thinking again about the basic concepts. This isn't the novel I set out to write. I'm not entirely sure it is a novel I want to write. In any case I did some scribbling last night and I'm narrowing down what an Adventure Archaeologist story is.

On the physical side, it is a Jungle Adventure. Hear me out. Unlike a thriller the physical environment is not so much fast cars and big cities and high-tech machines. It tends to be natural surroundings, wild, remote areas (and the tech tends to be stone and remarkably durable wood and rope). There's usually a "man vs nature" thing going on. Wild animals, too.

On the, erm, "intellectual" side there's always a puzzle. The hero usually has to remember some trivia about ancient times, often has to translate something, but may only have to pattern-match. (The main place this breaks from real archaeology and history is the answer the hero gets is confirmed correct when they discover the lost city or pull the big lever. Instead of writing it up and submitting in a journal and hoping tomorrow's dig doesn't prove you wrong because science is always probationary).

There's also more often than not a mythology layer. Some part of the ancient experience which relates to the puzzle is in the form of a story, and there will be mythic resonances if not story parallels if not outright transubstantiations that occur (if I could use that as a descriptive term).

So right now the story has neither. It is a tourist trip through Greece, Germany and Italy (well, parts of each) and a fairly thin story of antiquities looting that is really more of a simple mystery than anything else. Yes, she does chase down some history through a more-or-less archaeological lens, but that is more to understand the motivations of some of the people involved in the smuggling and in the end doesn't really matter.

Contrast this to a word-picture I drew up when I first started the planning file:

We weren't on top of the airplane. The pilot was dead, the engine was smoking, a man was attacking me with a 16th-century broadsword that I was barely parrying with the remains of a parachute I didn't know how to use anyhow, but we weren't on top of the plane. That would just be silly.

I think I could arrive there within another book or two. I'm not sure I should. But this doesn't really help with figuring out what the book I'm actually writing needs and, more importantly, how to accomplish it.

So all I can really do is preserve my notes for the Monastiraki and Plaka scenes so I can come back to them, get back on that plane, and arrive at the actual PLOT as quickly as I can. And hope that it looks better from there than it does from here.

Goat

Ran into a guy at the pub who used to fly Airbus320's from ATH to FRA. It was a short conversation, though, and I didn't learn anything I hadn't already grasped from Flight Tracker.

Unfortunately I have to suspend that flight for a bit. I really needed some breathing room in the Athens sequence and there was some thematic business I wanted to work in.

Figuring out the logistics, though, finally took tracking down all the important locations (figuring out where the actual tickets gates to the Acropolis are was a task for memory and a good hour in Google Street View) and painting them on to a screen shot with Gimp.

On the other hand, names have gotten easier for the writer. There are very amusing generators for everything from time-culture appropriate character names to names of classes at Hogwarts. I've never found anything I could use as generated but they can make a good start.

Baby name pickers and "what does my name mean" sites are plentiful these days. Sometimes their research is a little shoddy; I was at one that claimed "Penelope" was a three-syllable name and had no interesting stories attached. Homer doesn't count?

But if this site is right, the French girl that I cast as a walk-on to handle a bit of business on the Acropolis and proceeded to talk her way into an entire chapter for herself and her friend, suffered the same fate as my sister's kid; "Oh, this is a wonderful unique name that no-one else is using!" Eight years later, the teacher reading roll; "Justin? Justin? Justin? Justin..." (My sister's kid is a girl...well, a teen and going to school in New York right now, but you get the idea).

For my last bit of research for this added chapter I'm going into that JSTOR membership I pay for (and the Academic.edu membership I don't) and find what I can on the active archaeological excavations at the Athenian Agora.

And, yes, in this revised scheme my protagonist actually gets to Plaka to do some shopping. She'll have just about enough time to find a new scarf...then it is off to the Hesse, and possibly to scale a Rhein castle (if I can figure out a reason for her to do so).

##

Also abandoned my "Viking" sketch when I realized the title theme to Game of Thrones is plausible on the Shetland Gue (and associated; anglo-saxon lyre, penny whistle, bodhran.) It is a nasty stretch finger, though, and I also discovered that playing with a drone is really, really sensitive to exact intonation. If I hit the notes just precisely right they sing. Even the ones that aren't in a strong harmonic relationship.

But then, that's unfretted instruments for you. The piano forced upon us an era of equal temperament; it is a system of necessary compromises because you can't, mathematically, achieve all the possible intervals cleanly. So the fifth and the third are in tune, the second and fourth are just slightly off pitch and don't sound good. This is why Western music is dominated by the fifth and the major (and minor) triad. But a fretless or equally flexible wind instrument can change; you can play A at 440 at one moment and then, when supporting a different harmonic relationship, shade it to 439.75

Sorry, I bollixed that all up. The standard tuning for electronic instruments is Equal Temperament, which simply divides each octave into twelve identical intervals. The advantage to this is that if you tuned so, say, Cmaj was in tune with itself, then switched to another key (which happens frequently within many compositions), many of the chords would be even more off. Basically, the compromise is that no key sounds WORSE than any other.

String quartets, a capella singing, and so forth can Just temper to the actual key they are in at the moment. So the remarks above.

And, yes, what drives the "ring" in intervalic relationships is the underlying harmonic series. Any simple resonator (a string or bar considered by itself) has implicit in its sound the entire harmonic series stretching up from the fundamental (c.f. Fourier transforms). In reality, the first few are the strong ones; that's octave, fifth, seventh, etc. (Twice the frequency of the fundamental, 3x, 4x...)

Still doesn't change the original problem. At what would be the scroll of the Gue, I have to be accurate to within a quarter of the size of my pinkie. Towards the bridge, it gets...worse.