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.