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.