I feel that this act as it is does not convince me and cannot convince the listener.

The above is a quote from Puccini himself, as he struggled with the impossible last act of Turandot. The problem he faced is that the most sympathetic, most Puccini-like heroine in the opera is murdered late in the story, and he faced the impossible task of bringing the audience around to accepting the climactic love duet would be sung by and to her killer, the "Cold Princess" herself.

Some reviewers believe he pulled out some of his Puccini magic, wrapping meaning and melody around to create a strange synthesis between the kind gentle slave-girl Liú, who gave her life for love, and the princess Turandot who has been up to this moment executing would-be suitors right and left. But any such legerdemain took place after Puccini's sudden and untimely death; he left this his last opera uncompleted.

#

Here's all the opera quotes in Part I of my current draft. (In Part III someone will give partial translations in English, and also utter the words, "Nessun dorma.")


...“La tua pronuncia è unica…” he started. Then he beamed, operatically. “La donna è mobile,” he said instead. “Muta d'accento!”

“Tu pure, o Principessa,” Giulio said, sounding like he was flirting with me. “Nella tua fredda stanza, guardi le stelle.”

For a moment his expression was serious. “Vissi d’arte,” he told me softly.


Rigoletto and Tosca are in the Public Domain and are quite safe. And, as is the nature of opera arias, the public name is the same as the first line of "Vissi d'arte," "La donna é mobile," and "Nessun dorma."

The most-quoted part of "Nessun dorma" is the second stanza, containing "il nome mio nessun saprà!" Which I will not quote in the novel, nor will I use any of the popular English translations. My in-universe excuse is that Penny has found the only street singer in Venice who doesn't know much English. At the moment I'm considering having him conflate with a later verse and say something like, "No-one but you shall know my name."

I actually look forward to taking flack for an "incorrect" translation. That means that a fellow opera buff will have read the thing. Well, doesn't take that much of a buff; it's probably the most famous opera aria in the world. All three are way, way up there; they are the kind of excerpts people would recognize, from art dealers to gondoliers to, well, many of my readers.

It is there because it advances the plot and supports the theme, because playing with language and the embedded meaning in artworks are both part of the process of problem and solution, the conflict if you will. And because it falls within the class of material which can achieve "pleased recognition."

This is true across all sorts of fiction. It isn't just a trivia game the reader is playing for points. Say you are doing a story set in the 40's and you mention "In the Mood" is playing on the radio. Most readers who have chosen to read a story set in the 40's will recognize the name and remember the song. They will run the gamut, of course, from just starting to learn about the period and struggling to remember key details, to being extremely familiar with the period and wishing the author had made a less obvious choice. But for all there will be that moment of recognition, of knowing the reader and writer are on the same page, sharing and communicating a similar understanding of the material.

You would expect a globe-trotting story to expect you to have heard of Venice and know it has canals and gondoliers. And that you are going to see people saying "hello" in German. And set in Athens, someone is going to bring up the Persian War, Greek gods, Homer, and Ouzo. And you expect to learn a few things you didn't know before, but also be presented with things you are happy to recognize.

And I'd venture there will be quite a few people waiting for Penny to finally share in their knowledge. In the scene above, she immediately recognizes something is up, but it isn't until Venice that the shoe finishes dropping.

Sing a Song

It is annoying.

Songs are copyright, of course. The music, the sheet music, the lyrics, most recordings. As are many things. ASCAP, however, is very protective. Basically, you can't quote a single line of a song in a work of fiction. Nor is it easy to get the legal rights if you chose to go that path (just figuring out who to contact is a chore).

Means you end up with scenes that are the narrative equivalent of those weird cigarette brands you used to see in movies. But instead of having something that looks familiar but isn't the same, instead you have these weird gaps in the text where the characters (and narrator) are suddenly forced to talk around it.

"Like Shakespeare said, 'A rose by any other name.'"
"Or like John Lennon. The Beatle's song 'Imagine.' You know, 'something something something.'"

I have people quoting from Tacitus. Quoting from operas that are older than 1929. But then I get to certain scenes where I have five hundred Oktoberfest guests clapping and singing and all I can write is, "They sung that song by John Denver."

There are two other places where a song comes up the same way a quote from Shakespeare would come up or a plot line in a movie would come up in conversation. In one case my historian character is about to board a plane to Istanbul and -- just like everyone I hang out with -- immediately quotes from the song. Except of course she can't. She can only describe that she thought of the song or sung part of the song but I have to leave the actual words unsaid. There's another bit where an impromptu rendition of a Disney song crops up from an unlikely source. And if there's one rule to live by in copyright, it's don't mess with the mouse.

It reads very weird when you are in the middle of a fully-quoted conversation, is what I am saying. And it isn't because those words have a special poetry that, alone, can express my meaning. All I want to reference is the presence and meaning of the song in this particular decade, in the same way I'd give the color of an automobile or the author of a book or the ingredients of a pizza.

(It is especially odd since the title of the song occurs in the chorus. So if you write, "She sang 'Country Roads'" you are fine, but if you write, "She sang, 'Country Roads...'" you are in copyright violation?)

And, drat, it is worse. I've got a couple of scenes dependent on snippets of the librettos from three operas being quoted. It has to be the actual words, in the original Italian, for them to work. And it turns out that although Puccini is indeed in public domain, "Nessun Dorma" -- is not. (It was completed after his death and bears a copyright renewal date in the 50's).

Yes, there is Fair Use. But it is notoriously murky. There is no bright line. No seven second rule or anything like that. It is determined by a judge evaluating the balance of four conditions (commentary, transformative use, damage, and extent).

It still annoys me that the Orangeman can play a recording of Pavarotti singing the thing, but I can't risk quoting as little as a single line in my novel.

Yes Rly

The experiment was worth it. Another evening of tinkering with Kindle export options and I got a half-way decent looking text. Which I looked at both on the Previewer software and on Kindle for Mac (I can't, however, preview on my phone without going through a lot more hoops. Fortunately AnkleZombie's Preview software will simulate phone display.)

So it scans pretty well. A lot of the stuff I was agonizing about, like too many sentences beginning with "I," too many extraneous details, too much detail overall...well, they basically work.

The character stuff -- specifically, the interaction with her pursuer through the bulk of the book -- works as poorly as I thought, though. Good thing that's the major item on the work list.

I'm finding actually the stuff I'm marking for deletion now is mostly explanation. The context seems to be explaining well enough without the narrator having to spell it out.

But I still need to go back through all of the Germany chapters before I can move forward.

Owl Really

So I figured out how to do custom scene separators in Scrivener. Actually, I figured out more than that. As of the more recent Mac OS the 32-bit kindlegen no longer works right from within Scrivener. Amplezonk is pushing their new .mobi formatter, the Kindle Create system, and last I heard only have links to the 32-bit -- but they are also offering Kindle Previewer 3. Which, surprise surprise, contains kindlegen 64-bit inside. Because after all you can modify texts slightly from within Previewer, so of course they just stuck a copy of their own editor in the resources and leveraged that.

If you control-click to look through "Package Contents" on the ap, you'll find the executable. Make a copy somewhere useful (like the Applications folder) and point Scrivener to it, and you can output a Kindle reader-compatible eBook straight from Scrivener. 

As part of this process I ended up changing the way I organize again. Although you can easily uncheck or otherwise identify work files within the "Manuscript" folder as non-compiling, it is slightly smoother and cleaner just to keep all that stuff outside. Since the nature of a text file (and even if it is a "folder," as in has text files in hierarchy under it) is unrelated to the format and contents, it is easy enough to write in scenes and later collect or promote to chapters et al.

Inline graphics are easy. The thing about Scrivener is you can automate all the centering, spacing, enumeration, and etc. of titles. Generate a TOC on the fly as well. Which is great for eBooks because just putting "Chapter One" in a bigger font would mean sometimes it would wrap funny on the end-user's machine. Doing it in code means it scales properly with viewer size and font size.

It will of course pop the standard "#" or the also-common "* * *" between scenes automatically as well. Or you can point to an image stored in the Scrivener project, in typical markup: ($img:owls.png;h=50). Seanan McGuire is one of the writers I've seen doing that recently.

So...printed out a photograph of an Owl of Athena discovered during the Parthenon restoration (I bought a ceramic copy of that one while I was at the museum, too). Taped that on to the light-box I got a long time ago for just such things. After finally finding a brush pen that wasn't all dried out, mocked up a black-and-white treatment. Edited in GIMP, added an alpha channel and exported as a transparent PNG (so it will work with off-white paper).

And why? Well, the new outline is starting to take shape. But one of the things I'm trying to solve is how it reads; how it flows, how much time is spend between things and during things, how much it seems to jump around, etc. For that it would be cool to be able to see the text in something resembling the final format.

This isn't just for ease of viewing. I actually pad scenes or added lead-in material to compensate for what I was feel are problems in chunk size and transition. So this is going to help me know what actually has to be in the text.

And at the moment the cuts and changes are fairly small. The changes really start to hit at a place I was unsurprised to have them hit; at the point where the real adventure starts. Most of what I'm doing is punching up certain characters, giving them more visibility and a more specific role, and most of that is going forward.

Except as a result of these notes I really, really want one more Germany scene now; some excuse to scale the walls of a castle in the process of doing something heroic. Saving a kitten, I don't know.

But back to writing. As nice as it was to spend an evening learning about how to set up chapters and scenes in Scrivener, and some of the more advanced export/compile settings, and of course do a little graphic arts, it is way too early to play with my probably-a-bad-idea cover.

(Greek pot on one of those dramatic gradient-and-fog backgrounds. Photo-real black-figure ware, but created in 3d with the figures in modern dress).

* * *

A slight edit: although it is possible to use a transparent image in Blogger (it requires replacing some of the stock CSS) it is not currently supported on Kindle. After struggling with it for a bit I went through my Kindle library, turned on the sepia page color option, and opened every book I owned that had extra graphics for chapter titles and similar. Not a single one passed the white square test.

Zombies of the Heliopause

Back a few months ago I made a throwaway joke about a "near future military werwolf vampire urban fantasy romance."

So I started plotting one. I've been having so many issues trying to repair the plot for the current novel, I wanted to see if I could actually write a clean plot if I started properly. So every now and then I take a break from the one and jot a few notes into a growing file.

Plus I had some spare parts lying around from an abandoned short story that was a tongue-in-cheek transhumanist take on classic horror tropes.

Given that I've also been watching a lot of videos about writing, including of course Terrible Writing Advice, it seemed obvious to go full Meyer and make it a vampire werewolf love triangle (In Space). So yeah...it's a tranhumanist Twilight meets a bleak and gritty Starship Troopers. (Or Halo meets Abbot and Costello meet Dracula and the Wolfman. Only without Bud and Lou. Take your pick.)

Well, the best comp title I've got for The Enceladus Calyx is "An archaeological Romancing the Stone -- without the romance." Which really underlines the weakness I'm struggling with now; that there are no strong central character relationships, positive or antagonistic.

So why not build a novel around a young idealistic pilot, a gene-spliced super-soldier who fears his animalistic instincts, and a cryogenic rescue turned immortal cyborg infiltrator, in a doomed romance amid a whole bunch of ground-side action in the setting of an apocalyptic Total War?

I'm not saying that's seriously the next novel, but it sure is fun to work on when I need a break.

pining for the fjords

I had to stop writing just short of the Munich chapter.

The novel's not dead. I could finish it from the present outline and it wouldn't be that bad.

But it should be better. So I'm trying a new outline. And that's driving me back towards the basic questions. Shoe-horning thematic material into what I already had didn't seem to be working. I need to take it apart to much smaller pieces in order to rebuild.

Take that very Munich chapter. I was having fun with my protagonist buying a ticket to "München" and after figuring that part out, still says, "Well, at least it isn't October yet." Oktoberfest of course is mostly in September. The next bit I wanted was she sees someone she didn't expect to see again, everything clicks as she figures out who actually threw her in a well in a previous chapter, and reacts by leaping across a table to tackle him. Then there's an amusing battle-of-competing stories which is less a fight with an opponent and more a harsh lesson on the basic techniques of social engineering.

So, yeah. As outlined, she gets some answers to the central mystery, and she gains some new skills, and it closes the arc of one of the characters. It has an actual antagonist and there is conflict with him. But...

This was intended to be, and I still feel should be, an adventurer-archaeologist story at heart. And there is a lot of variation within that concept but a common core plot module is to go to an exotic place and, despite opposition, solve a puzzle that advances the final goal. (Typical goal being "get the artifact." Whether the artifact is the goal of the bad guys or a way to stop the bad guys or a key to something else with the bad guys getting in the way, there is almost inevitably an artifact center stage).

So. As per the current outline she didn't chose to go to Munich. She doesn't go there hunting answers to specific questions. She doesn't struggle against opposition to solve a puzzle, well, not very clearly. This would be acceptable in a full work as there are times when what the protagonist achieves is to befriend the right person or stumble on a discovery or otherwise advance through the story in other than doing a specific archaeological puzzle. The problem is, the Munich scene as outlined is entirely typical.

I have other issues, of course. Even if I do nothing to the thematic plotting and the creation of concrete antagonists, there are structural problems. The first-act development takes too long, with the plot starting after a lot of extraneous material has been presented. The big crux either happens too early or too late. The story is meant to be primarily Athenian, but switches tracks far too early to spend time in two other nations; settings that largely do not advance a central coherent theme.

I've been complaining about being constrained by geography and time. Places and events are where they are, even if it is inconvenient to the plot. But the current set of problems comes from the current plot structure. I don't have to go to Venice at all, and I don't need to do a big episode on the Adriatic; I could, for instance, fly out from Munich (or even from Frankfurt) and move the ferry scene to the Aegean.

This is the problem of having outlined the mechanicals. The outline essentially said "it should take this many thousand words to get from incident A to incident B, pad out the journey with other incidents as needed."

The first sign of trouble was when the word counts weren't lining up. The second sign of trouble is that I can easily put in enough incident to hit the outline, but that same outline never had specific goals and obstacles that were integrated emotionally and thematically by using specific characters to embody them.

Sure, you don't have to plot this way. Hemingway got a hell of a story out of a man, a boat, and a fish. (So did Melville...well, there were more people on the boat and that's one big fish but anyhow). It is just the strongest plot.

And what's so frustrating is the pieces are there. I have characters who could take larger roles. I have themes which could be made clearer and more concise. And I have settings that are exotic and could be used as proper steps on the quest and arenas for conflict and puzzle-solving. If you squint really hard, that's even how Munich is currently being used. But it isn't focused enough to work.

So I'm stopped while I try to re-plot. If I can find the through-lines then I can do a heck of a lot with juggling and re-purposing scenes. And I will have stronger material to expand the existing scenes and build new ones; at the end of the day my word count won't be so terribly impacted. IF I can solve this...I might still have draft done before the end of the year.

Scrivenings

Based on the actual draft starting somewhere in early April, I'm averaging 10K words a month. At that rate I actually would have the first draft done before the end of the year.

That's NaNoWriMo pacing.

Is even slightly better than that. I've hashed out a lot of deep plot and character issues over these early chapters, and I have hope and a not-unjustified expectation of getting faster. Also I'm doing a lot of editing as I go -- very much against NaNoWriMo tradition -- and it will take mostly clean-up passes to get it into final shape.



But today's essay is about Scrivener IOS.

I've written several scenes from scratch, and done some editing, with nothing but iPhone and -- the almost indispensable -- iClever keyboard. It works...well enough. All of my complaints are basically due to limitations of the iPhone, especially, the limited screen real estate.

Oh, and to my current working methods, which leverage parts of Scrivener which do not emulate well in the IOS version.

So. Basic typing is good. One immediate and wonderful enhancement over using the built-in notes function is pinch-zoom. Basic hotkey functions work. And you are within the Scrivener file structure, meaning instead of typing into one long document, you are typing into something of controllable length which is nested (and can be nested indefinitely) into a hierarchy of chapters and scenes and projects. You can also flip back and forth between certain related documents with a single key press.

I wouldn't want to work without the external keyboard, however. Too much screen real estate is lost otherwise.



But as for the more powerful edit functions: well, first, selection is a pain on IOS. So selecting a block of text to paste it elsewhere is better left for the main computer. Split screen doesn't seem to be functioning, either, and that hurts in two ways; one is being able to cut and paste between documents so as to, for instance, save a previous draft to the cut file. The other is being able to leave a window open with the research data.

The iPhone version also lacks corkboard view. And, because of how IOS handles files (and memory issues) it can't do Scrivening mode. This is the ability to seamlessly string together separate documents into a single continuous read. If I was splitting files at the scene level this would be more painful. As it is, though, it is easy enough to tab through consecutive files. Oh, and there also doesn't appear to be the ability to move files around in the hierarchy, not on IOS. So to have this ability to arrange and re-arrange you need to duck back to the main computer again.

Fortunately synchronization is easy and smooth.

A last edit function I miss on the IOS version is hotkey text color. Let me get to that in context of my current work flow, though. First I set up a file structure with named folders for research, draft, and general planning -- the later has theme, outline, elevator pitch, and side discussions I want to keep intact instead of spread out among other folders.

Within the draft folder I have, currently, a five-book structure. Each "book" folder contains three sets of files; a set of drafts by chapter, notes pertaining specifically to each chapter, and catch files for deleted material. As I write the first draft of a chapter I plan the basic structure within that chapter's notes file, then flip between that and research files in the lower part of the split-screen with the draft on top.

When I go back for editing, I add the cuts file to the split. Usually, though, I start by reading through and using colored text to mark potential deletions (red), potential insertions (green) and line notes (blue). Then when I do the actual edit the deletions get saved in the cuts file (in case I change my mind later, or hope to move that cut material to a different scene), the line notes get cut entirely, and the insertions, when properly expanded and integrated, are converted to standard black text.

And obviously none of this process works on IOS.

I could probably come up with alternate ways of working. I used to jumble notes and cuts at the bottom of chapters during construction and editing, and delineate line notes with ///. This would work on IOS, but would get annoying when you can see such a smaller slice of text to begin with, and have more work to scroll to the end of a file.



So, yes. If planned around the functionality that is in the IOS version, I could write a novel entirely on the iPhone. But as it is, I'm happier to be able to do certain kinds of work there and leave the heavy lifting for a full computer.

Italic Persons

...and now I'm back to hating it.

The problem I'm having with the novel, I've decided, is I'm not connecting emotionally with the character. I don't know if this is a flawed character, a plot that doesn't support her properly, or just over-familiarity on my part.

But I'm going to venture it might be voice and narrative problems. Because it has those anyhow and they need to be fixed.

I actually gave sincere thought to re-writing it all in third person. The discussion of the pros and cons and comparisons of the two is fascinating and writerly but I don't have time this morning to go into it (Brandon Sanderson has a two-hour lecture on the subject, and there's still much more to say.)

In the end, what has convinced me is a thought. Or rather, a bunch of thoughts.

This is a character who has a very verbal inner life. If her typical thought was "I have to get out of here!" it could easily be recast in non-verbal mode; "The water was rising. She had to get out of there."

Her thoughts tend to be more like, "...crossing my Rubicon. Or was that Hellespont?" And that needs to be directly quoted. There are two primary ways of indicating what most books call "direct thoughts," aka verbalized thoughts; as italics, and with dialog tags.

Italics are out; fortunately I'm not using them for foreign language excerpts but I am using them for text dialog. And dialog tags? Having endless "...she thought"s littering up the text wasn't going to fly.

Oh, and besides, going first person allows you to slip in and out of direct thoughts, putting the color of the voice in all of the narrative, "...the water was rising and I'd burned my boats. Damn you, Cortez! I had to get out of here."



So, yeah. On a surface level, there is a lot of passive construction....that is, "there" formations. That is to say; passive construction is all over the current draft! There...sigh...are also too many attribution tags. And "I" formations. You get closer and more emotionally connected when the narrative flows without the intrusive "I."

Related to this; this is a very thinky character. She is consciously observing the world and drawing conclusions. That means I am using -- over-using, probably -- constructions like "I saw," "I heard."

And maybe along the same trail as these corrections is the ways I can handle the problem of seeing the swan's legs.

See, this is an adventure. At the center of the adventure is a cool character; cool name, cool job, does cool things. Slowly, and often to her surprise, my protagonist is becoming this person. But that means she's on the inside, seeing the effort.

A swan is like a ballet dancer; moving gracefully, effortlessly, a light smile (well, not on the swan). Under the water, the swan is paddling away frantically. Just as inside, the ballet dancer is sweating and hurting and bleeding into her toe shoes.

So when Athena Fox smiles a dangerous smile, then launches herself into a death-defying leap, it looks different from the inside. Inside she's frantically bluffing and ever-so-conscious of faking it and terrified of the consequences...there's never the freedom of flight, the moment of grace.

So I'm going to hit the Notes section of my Scrivener document and see if I can't chart a path that allows the reader, and yes, Penny herself, to experience those moments when the theme song kicks in and Athena Fox proceeds to do what she does best.

And maybe that will finally let me like this story again.



(I have to say...I've got a really strong longing for the Bronze Age now, for Setna and Kes and the dour Mycenaean mercenary, for weaving and goat herding and the rocky slopes of Crete, for the relative simplicity of palace politics in the capitol of Egypt's New Kingdom.)

Country Roads

I'm back to being interested in the novel. My protagonist finally got to do something active, not reactive.

It was a tough scene to plot. The outline only said, "She does something clever here." Which is, amusingly, how my protagonist sees it as well. This is the first big moment when she consciously puts the fictional adventure-archaeologist character she created for a YouTube series into the driver's seat, in hopes that Athena Fox has an idea for "something clever here."

It wasn't that clever, but I guess it gets the scene written.



So, I was getting a little bored. But then I got into research for the next big set-piece and I found one of those crazy things that makes it worthwhile. Oktoberfest in Munich. Those giant tents. Playing music and there are of course a few songs that people feel obligated to sing along to. (There are other songs which arise spontaneously, of course).

And, yes, it is one of the standard songs; I found several clips on YouTube showing ten thousand drunken Germans (and foreign guests) singing...Country Roads (John Denver).



I have to say I'm all in a dither again about cultural appropriation and stereotyping and speaking for others and all that rot.

I hope I am going to be able to pull together a nuanced portrayal of Germans, Italians, and Greeks, but even if I do, there is the problem that theirs is not my story to tell.

I don't know if it is even possible to do a travel story without in some way invoking some exoticism. But I think it is worse when you are writing fiction. As a traveller, I can say I found the people I encountered were "this and that." But as a writer, I am often in the position of creating a character who then says, "My people are this and that." And I think there's a difference.

My first scene on the ground there are neo-Nazi's. Who are mostly Americans and other foreigners. But still, although it takes a long time for it to become clear, the locals in that scene are still of a more generic racialism (volkish, actually, but that's hard to explain succinctly.)

The next big scene is happy drunken Bavarians in a beer hall. Well, again, a lot of the people at Oktoberfest come from elsewhere. Oh, and there's a major character who, for not-terribly-sensible reasons, is going around disguising his perfectly good lowlands accent with a music hall Prussian officer accent, complete with archaic word choices, gratuitous German, and quotes from movie bad guys.

I am really not sure these are good choices.

The fake-accent guy turns out to be a real pain to write dialog for, too. Or is that a real puzzle? Even the orthography is a trap. See, there's so much about language acquisition and code-switching in this book, I'm choosing not to italicize. Not only that, but any unfamiliar words are never spelled phonetically; instead I give the correct spelling for that language. (The exceptions being when someone tries to repeat it; my protagonist's first attempts at kalimera and epharisto, for instance, or her attempt to repeat from memory part of an opera aria she heard.)

(Another wrinkle to the latter; my starting point is me trying to quote the aria from memory. Just as in a later scene I'll do some Shakespeare from memory, with the intention of discovering natural errors that I can then use.)

That turns out to be an interesting problem. This crazy accent fellow might say "Was ist?" and of course I'll spell it the correct German way. But then he might say "Was it?" and that could be spelled phonetically to simulate the accent; as "Vas it?" So from word to word you are sort of guessing which pronunciation to give it, depending on whether it is an actual German word, or an English word with a German accent....or the wrong German word, or a word given the wrong accent because he's putting it on and isn't entirely comfortable in it....

Fortunately, he isn't committed to his act. And I don't have to do every word phonetically to get across the accent. So I can for several lines without anything more tricky than German syntax go.

(No, I only did that once. And very mildly.)

Well, my Austrian in the Tyrolean is on stage now to explain that München is also known as Munich and Oktoberfest is actually in September. Among other things. But there's a dirndl and eine Maß (well, at least one) waiting for my protagonist. And she'll get to sing "Country Roads."

Not lacking in instrumentality

 

Finished a case for the lyre. This was a technology trial; I didn't spend a lot of time trying to make it look nice.

The next cover is going to be the opening theme from Game of Thrones. It also won't be very good. That's one of the reasons I'm doing it.









I'm it doing around the older instruments in my collection; the "Sutton Hoo" lyre, the Shetland Gue, bohdran standing in for early frame drum.

It won't be wonderful because it is too hard to play the gue in tune (and because of the drone string I can't fix it in software). And the very period "block-and-strum" technique is also both harmonically limited and, well, noisy.

But its good for me to work on something that isn't worth spending a lot of time on. Call it another test piece.



One of these days I should get a better picture of the gue. But I keep meaning to re-do the finish on it, and no sense in shooting it before then, right?






So I've pretty much got the kit to do a certain sort of early acoustic music. Mostly where I'm lacking is the skills on the instruments I have. Penny whistle at speed and with all the flourishes. Making full use of the acoustic guitar with combined strumming and finger-picking. Better bodhran and darbuka. Folk fiddle technique.

But more importantly, I'm lacking the theory to do the kind of harmonization and voice leading and, for that matter, the skill in sight-reading the increasingly complex parts I'm writing. The next piece after this is probably "Far Horizons" from the Skyrim soundtrack. A similar project is the "Citadel" track from Mass Effect 1. I have arrangements in my head. Translating them to parts is at the very edge of my current theory skills. (Actually playing the parts may be beyond all of my skills).

So, really, I have much bigger problems than trying to add to the ensemble. That's the problem in thinking like a composer. I hear sounds in my head that don't come from the instruments in my collection. For "Far Horizons" I'm hearing flute, for instance.

And that's just what I need; to get into the esoterics of the Boehm fingering system. There is an interesting hybrid option, though; a Low D tin whistle with interchangeable head to turn it into a simple-system or Irish flute. Which is to say; not quite as mechanically complex as a concert flute.

Another thing that would come in handy is harp. Not pedal harp, here. Just a Celtic harp, lap harp, or even smaller. A nicer shawm and/or crumhorn. And of course more drums. Can never have enough drums.

Yeah, this picture doesn't include the gue. Or the penny whistles. Or the violin -- all of which are perfectly useable for vaguely medieval/folk-acoustic stuff.






I've been listening to a lot of trumpet lately, and the instrument is growing on me. It really isn't a solo instrument, though. What I mean is, yes, trumpet can solo, but that's against a bed of, well mostly brass. It is really rare to hear a trumpet part without hearing some trombone parts. Plus sax, maybe french horn, clarinet, flute, tuba, flugelhorn, etc.

So, yeah. Find other musicians. Tweak the sound to try to sound like trombone (actually sort of works). Or just use synthesis. Doesn't matter so much right at the moment because my trumpet playing is still poor. And it's the instrument I've been practicing with regularly, too.

(When I get back to the Hellboy cover, that's about what I'm going to have to do; use the trumpet and the Venova to try to mimic a full brass section.)

I have to say; the main upside to the Venova is it is rare and it looks unique. As a sort of mini, budget, soprano saxophone it sort of is to a proper sax what the Ukulele Bass is to a proper full-length bass guitar.

Which is to say, looked at from a purist point of view it is tonally compromised (also harder to play in pitch, play the full range, etc.) But looked at from an arranger point of view, you use the sound you have.

The same arguments, only even more so, can be made about the piccolo french horn. Both instruments also get added to the list of instruments I need a practice space for (the trumpet isn't great to practice on Yamaha Silent Mute, but at least I can).

I still want one, though.





I just did a re-listen of two of the "weird but cute" brass instruments on my wish list. The pBone mini -- which is an Eb alto trombone in plastic -- lacks the metallic edge of a real brass instrument. The piccolo french horn sounds a bit like a french horn but just as much as a trumpet. When you get down to it, the tonal colors provided by those two instruments can be better achieved on a trumpet with performance tricks and some audio manipulation.

Athens wasn't built in a day

8 months since I started The Enceladus Calyx.  The first blog post that indicates I had a working premise was Nov 6, 2018, although there are posts going back before my trip to Athens that contain germs of the idea.

The outline was completed Jan 1; only two months. Felt longer. It took until April to tweak the draft until I was writing the current "semi-clean" draft.



And although I was feeling it was much longer ago; the Bronze Age novel that sent me to Greece to research got its start in September of 2017. Which means I took a break fifteen months later to do the "quickie" novel I'm currently on.



This has not been a fun week but I still ended up with a stronger plot.  I have multiple and conflicting emotional through-lines but I have a sort of scheme now that organizes them a little better. It is creating more tough things to do, though. I've got a character coming back that I didn't intend to see again, and a whole scene that is sort of a harsh mentoring in social engineering. And then there's a chase after a pickpocket in Venice.

At least in Munich, physical stunting doesn't attract the wrong attention. Ten thousand people in a tent full of testosterone and beer and there isn't any stupid thing they haven't tried. Stunting around on the vaporetti is going to get you put off the water bus, at least. If not get you in bad with the Carabinieri.

The new scheme does leave me uncomfortably having to talk about neo-nazis while in Germany. There's got to be a sort of Godwin's Law for Adventure Archaeologist stories. I've actually got her at one point blaming the hat.

And I'm really not sure what all is going to happen back in Athens. So I have a lot more spots in the future where I will have to slow down and do some research and planning. I don't think it is likely I'll have Draft In a Year. Sigh.

Oh, and research. I looked up airfare and hotels and even with doing tricks like flying into Frankfurt or Verona and taking a train either Munich or Venice is a wee bit more than I want to spend at the moment. The castle in the sky plan of copying my character's itinerary from Frankfurt am Main all the way down to Venice with a stop-over in Munich...yeah, that's close to two thousand bucks. I thought the point of this story was to write about what I already knew?

Counting Sherds

Writing is both an artistic and a technical effort. Today's work was mostly the latter.

My outline isn't detailed down to chapter and scene. Instead it captures the "beats," places where the plot moves. Thus the more text I have written, the better I can estimate how that outline is going to fill out.

And I've reached that point. I can now say my chapters are averaging 2.5K words, and I'm getting an average of 6 of them per "book"; first book is 6 chapters, second is 5 with 3 more projected, and the third is currently 5 projected. 32 chapters would bring me to 80K and with 5 books it would break nicely into three acts at 1/5, 2/5, and 2/5.

Problem is I have four books, with 27 chapters planned, and that projects to 65K.

So I have options. First is to accept the current outline. 65K is short for SF&F (they tend to want 80K) but acceptable outside.

I don't feel simply expanding is right. Still, I have decompression to do, and the later chapters will run a longer average, and there may be fun stuff I think of that I really want to put it.

Still, the option that is most attractive is to basically add a book. Instead of a straight climb from the final confrontation with the dragon, drop into a third low point. Combine this with how München is getting a bigger and bigger role in my planning, and I basically turn it into a stack plot. Each problem "solved" uncovers a bigger problem. And each is different in character in useful ways, each coming at the core questions of ownership of history and the meaning (and abuse) of the Indiana Jones archetype.

In a somewhat less mechanical aspect, I'm still having a heck of a lot of trouble coming up with stunts. Things that are dangerous, cool-looking, and in the real world would usually end with someone getting hurt. What's even tougher is figuring out how to stunt around, especially in a densely-populated place and around national landmarks, without all sorts of unwanted attention.

Hot Time in the Old Town

We're having a heat wave. Worst in my memory for this town because it just keeps going. It is just cool enough this morning I'm taking the excuse to go to work late so I can air out my place a little.



Finished back-filling on all the scenes I'd skipped over and I'm at a solid 26K now. Did a skim-read and it seems to hit the plot points at a decent pace.

I'm still concerned about the density of detail. (Actually, I have a lot of concerns, from title down to narrative voice, but anyhow). It is partially a problem of doing history. It is more a problem of doing a story about people who are passionate about history. I'd have the same problem if it were, say, cars.

History just makes it worse. You can name-drop "65 Mustang" and trust the average reader won't feel left out. Name-drop "Alcibiades" and it's a bit more of a question.

For both, though, if you chose to dig deeper it is a real question of where to stop. How much you have to explain. How many of the connections you can afford to explore. However, I think it is a little easier to make generic statements about what a 65 Mustang means. You can say "muscle car" and the idea comes across. "Vintage car" also works.

I suppose you can say "Peloponnesian War" and the idea of "some important war" gets across. But how do you say "Desecration of the Herms" and have any hope of communicating what that means without a lot more explanation to the reader?



In any case, one of the progressive edits I'm doing is taking out elements where I can, and expanding on others where it feels like it is too much of a naked name drop. Latest of those was replacing "...Helios chases Selene across the course of a day," with "...Helios in the Chariot of the Sun chases Selene the Goddess of the Moon across the course of a day." (It's an on-screen lecture about the Parthenon Friezes.)

I also trimmed most of the French-isms out of Océane's dialog, although I left, "And do not the phone in the back pocket," (as part of her advice to the neophyte tourist as to how to discourage pick-pockets).

Come to think of it, there's only one character in my roster who indulges in Gratuitous German (TVTropes link not provided). I don't count the frequent use of "hello" and "thank you" in whatever the local language because that is an important courtesy and I make a direct point in the novel of that being a good thing to learn. The one fellow who puts German words in when speaking in English to an English speaker is the same guy who is putting on an accent so patently false my protagonist starts calling him, "Herr Satz."



And, yeah, sure, it is partly having fun with language, but it is also reflective of the kind of code-switching that happens when you are navigating around multiple languages. In one conversation between two historians they may say "Temple of Hephaestus" at one moment, and "The Hephaestion" at another. When traveling in Germany I found myself saying "train station" at one moment and "bahnhof" at another. Even signs (especially in heavily touristed areas) both alternate and duplicate between languages. So it is an authentic part of the tourist experience to do this kind of code-switching.

Painless Upgrades

Finally dropped the bucks on Scrivener IOS. Right away was best money I've spent in a while. Typing into the Scrivener window was much more comfortable than typing into Notes, and better organized. With that and my folding bluetooth keyboard I could probably write a novel on the iPhone alone.

But the real power is being able to synchronize work files between machines. Of course that requires Dropbox, and Dropbox stopped supporting OS 10.9 or below. So finally took the risk of updating to High Sierra.

No, there aren't any whistles and bells I was interested in. I don't need Siri on my laptop, for instance. And I'm not sure I care for the new theme. But...so far all my core applications have worked or been an easy update, and I didn't lose any files, passwords, or even bookmarks.

(Just the usual run-around of turning back off all the, "Please share my identity with the world and while you are at it, put my critical files on the cloud so you can hold them hostage at some future date" stuff.)

(The only real annoyance is the pop-up window that happens when you open an ap for the first time; it says "This ap is not fully compatible with your mac" and the "tell me more" button takes you to an apple web page about how they will be dropping 32-bit compatibility in some eventual upgrade. The "okay" button seems to quit the ap -- or maybe the whole process is just so slow it only looks like it does.)




So did the acid test for Scrivener IOS today. Most things worked. I lost the macro I'd set up to color blocks of text, and selecting blocks of text is annoying on the iPhone anyhow. Also there is no Scrivenings mode (a mode that presents all the selected text as a single contiguous page -- helpful for scanning through a series of scenes nested into chapters). But navigation is smooth enough, typing is fine.

(An odd wrinkle is Scrivener IOS doesn't recognize the "command" key on the iClever keyboard. Instead I have to remember to use the "Windows" key for control-key sequences. But I already went through mental keyboard remapping when messing with programming inside a Raspberry Pi.)

I took it to the cafe and managed to create a new draft of the Agora scene. While I was drafting it discovered an opportunity to plant a couple of ideas; the idea of all Europe being a Euro-rail pass away once you've made the Big Leap across the Pond. And the idea of Penny having this vacation all planned out in her head, a dream she will have to tearfully give up during the events in Germany.

Didn't end up talking about that palimpsest. Although I think I snuck in mention of a well. So it all basically works for me and I can move on to filling the next hole in the current draft.

Oh, one last discovery. Don't synch files unless you have wifi. It takes far too long on cellular data.



Also switched to the 5C mouthpiece in the trumpet to continue my daily practice sessions, and retuned the gue to C - F. Both give me a clearer tone and make it more distinct when I'm locked into the right pitch and articulation.

Best advance? I took out the mute and was able to achieve the high c at pianissimo. That means I'm finally getting some strength in my embouchure. I'm still pressing too hard or something and my lips get a little numb. Is probably a mistake to keep working on the top end of the range. But I got that Disney songbook and the very first number on it goes to the top e on the staff within the first dozen bars...and finishes with the a' above the staff. (The last marked notes are a gliss from d to D).

(For a moment I thought it was the top c'. I'm still learning how to sight-read.)

I have this terrible idea of practicing up enough until I can record my Gue-and-Lyre cover of Game of Thrones before I get a hair cut. I don't have the beard to go Viking on it, though. I am not an actor. I'm barely able to make the music.

The Ken Burns Cinematic Universe

Unlike Disney, who gets to chose what is and isn't officially part of the Star Wars universe, documentaries are constrained to come as close as possible to the real world.

I had a whole scenelet planned out around the current archaeological excavations of the Stoa Poilike in the Athenian Agora. I've got a pdf from excavations in 2011, links to the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (who have been there since 1931) and drawings and pictures of ostrakon with the name of Alkibiades, electrum coins stamped with the head of a bull (possibly from the time of Theseus, or so says Plutarch), and a cute black-figure lekythoi painted with a scene depicting the apobates, an "unusual event in the Panathenaic Games" involving a fully-armed hoplite jumping out of, then back into, a moving chariot.

And best yet for my purposes, a section that forms a neat palimpsest as Byzantine trenching cut down far enough to expose the original foundations, with a nearby well (used and/or expanded as late as the 19th century) that does a similar job of going through multiple horizons.

I drafted the scene last night. It didn't work. I put in my notes to re-arrange so there's more banter, more character stuff, and the Diogenes story comes at the end.

This morning I started work by reviewing the geography of the setting. And, whoops.

Turns out the actual site isn't directly (or publicly) accessible from the agora. It is not just across Adrianou Street (named after the Emperor Hadrian, of course), but across the railway as well. Pity, because it is a very typical example of how modern Athens lives with the history under it. A Greek restaurant that wouldn't be moved juts out into the space on an island of dirt and stone, as you can see in the picture above.




But this may be to the good. This scene really isn't about the history; it is about having fun with the kind of friends you make when being a tourist.

When the maps showed me the geography of Frankfurt am Main didn't support the scene I was planning, I recast it for the Bad Münster a Stein banhof. And that led me to what seemed to be a better approach; instead of physical action, to play to the strengths of my protagonist; have her have to talk her way out of it.

But after three attempts and a deep dive into the character arcs and themes planning folders, I realized this undercut what I wanted to do with my antagonist. I could not afford to have him speak in this scene. So rewrote it once again and I'm basically back to physical action. But I did get a good character moment out of it. Maybe in re-writes I'll even be able to punch it up and make it really pivot.




So this weekend is all about filling in some gaps. There's one scene with big holes in it and three that I skipped over entirely to get into the "chase" section of the book.

There are advantages in writing draft and seeing how all the pieces work before laboring on the scenes in detail. Well, at least there are now. When I wrote my first novel I found it far too difficult to lift and move big sections or re-cast the entire thrust of a chapter.

Well, I also have better software now. So I'm about to put it to the acid test and take my phone to the cafe for brunch and writing. (I suffer from the opposite of agoraphobia. I need those crowds and those potentially uncomfortable social situations and those uncontrolled elements of the wide outside world, otherwise I crawl into my head...and I don't get any writing done.)

Girls do that

Don't know how many attempts it took to get a draft scene where my protagonist first meets the "dragon" of the story. There were many. Over the course of at least a week.

That's TVTropes talk again. The "dragon" archetype is a character who is the active antagonist for most of the story, but isn't the actual villain-in-chief.

Mine is sort of doing a dual role. His actual goal is to secure a potsherd, which as far as anyone else knows could probably be achieved with enough cash. He is approaching it, however, as if he is the bad guy in a cliché adventure; he's enjoying playing Belloq and thus dragging my protagonist reluctantly into playing Indiana Jones.

So it took over a week and a heck of a lot of attempts to finally get a draft of that scene. This is one of those places where plot and theme overtake incident.

I think my last big writing was mostly incident. There was a plot, but it wasn't terribly well integrated into a thematic whole. The old saw is, "'The King dies' is Incident. 'The King dies and the Queen dies of grief' is Story." Or "Plot," depending on where you are getting the quote from.

And, yes, today's title is taken from some ludicrous events within the Star Wars canon. Apparently Padme is not the only character to mysteriously die of "grief." YouTube commenter Jenny Nicholson, dryly, "Girls do that in this galaxy."

Anyhow, yeah. It gives me a little more sympathy for the crazy changes screenwriters make to what you would think was already perfectly useable source material. It is easy to criticize when a story has unrealistic elements -- things that wouldn't work like that in the real world, things that are far too convenient for the characters or for the plot, etc. But the physical setting and action is really visible iceberg stuff. To make a Story instead of a string of Incidents you've got all of these stuff of character development and conflicts and resolutions and statements of theme and emotional resonances and....

There are always external choices. The Hays Code dictated that the bad guys always lost in the end. Street and Smith had a house style for dialog. There's a wonderful bit in the musical The Drowsy Chaperone. There's a cute little scene that exists mostly to do a spit-take gag over and over. After it is concluded the Man in the Chair comes out to mop the stage. As he does so he comments that the only reason the bit was in the show was the set crew needed time to change the sets. He does this explanation, mind you, in front of the main rag....giving the set crew needed time to change the set.

And, yeah, it is incredibly difficult to make it all work. Much as we hate it, in the end the story is god and if you need to put seven bullets into a six-shooter to make the plot happen, then so be it.

So, yeah. There are a bunch of ways the scene could have been set up, or could have resolved. There are a bunch of ways in which how it actually unfolds isn't strictly realistic. But it is the scene I need to move the plot forward in the right directions.

"Mousie...! Mousie...!"

This is why I got into history.

In the chapter under construction my protagonist is fleeing from Bad Münster. To throw off pursuit she's abandoning the original plan of a midnight flight from Frankfurt to Athens via...Istanbul (long flight). So there's a short scene in possibly Mainz (which more-or-less was a major Roman city) or...Bingen.

Of "Hildegard von..." fame. And what else does Bingen have? Well, there's the Mäuseturm, the Mouse Tower; a watchtower in the middle of the Rhein. (Built by Romans, rebuilt by Franks, destroyed by French, rebuilt by Prussians...you know the drill). Attached to it is an almost Japanese tale of thematically appropriate revenge on the historical Hatto II, Archbishop of Mainz. Which tale is referenced in "The Children's Hour," the Poem by Longfellow!

(And, yes, I did visit Bingen. Can't remember much. There was a museum, I know.)

Bibliography

Just for fun, here are the books I've been reading for The Enceladus Calyx:

Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice
Renfrew and Bahn, Seventh Edition 2016

Fodor's Italy
2011 edition

Lonely Planet Crete (Travel Guide)
Lonely Planet, Alexis Averbuck, Kate Armstrong, Korina Miller, Richard Waters

Modern Greece: From the War of Independence to the Present
Thomas W. Gallant

The Odyssey
Homer, Emily Wilson

Why Homer Matters: A History
Adam Nicolson

The Medici Conspiracy: The Illicit Journey of Looted Antiquities-- From Italy's Tomb Raiders to the World's Greatest Museum
Peter Watson, Cecilia Todeschini

Stealing History: Tomb Raiders, Smugglers, and the Looting of the Ancient World
Roger Atwood

Antiquities: What Everyone Needs to Know®
Maxwell L. Anderson

Indiana Jones in History: From Pompeii to the Moon
Justin M. Jacobs, Bob McLain

Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age
Donna Zuckerberg

Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right
Elizabeth Sandifer, Jack Graham


The list of books I've considered, including reading the first few hundred words of, is longer. That list is mostly contemporary Greek history, some contemporary Greek writing, and histories of Germany during the Roman era. Plus I need to at least nod to the dozen or more books I'd previously read on Greek history prior to the Classic era, aka all the reading about the Mycenae and the Minoans I'd done.