Research

Planning what will probably be the final Germany sequence in The Enceladus Calyx. This evening my research mostly consisted of watching YouTube videos about Oktoberfest while drinking Hofbräu.

Not, unfortunately, Löwenbräu -- or as at least one entity at Wiesn says, “Leewwwwvenbraaiiii!"

(Seriously, you have to hear this thing. It's fifteen feet tall, in the front of the Löwenbräu festzelt and sounds off at intervals.)

I've edited up to that point. Haven't done the big dialog pass I'm meaning to, but did tweak a bunch of lines so Penny's voice is more distinct, and is especially different from Athena Fox's. This story presents the same problem my Stargate/Tomb Raider fanfiction presented, which is a lot of places where someone needs to go into lecture mode. At least in this case, it is usually driven by their personality or the specific circumstances, not by the need of the author to info-dump. In any case it is hard to keep voices distinct during these.

(I mean, she's running into guides and opinionated history nerds and so forth and similar, and she's asking questions. So, sure, someone is going to go off on a ten-minute sidetrack about Roman coins.)

I reworked the scenes with "Herr Satz" and added him into earlier scenes to give him more presence in the story. I've also got Penny thinking about him more. I added more agency to most of her decisions, including her intention to confront Vash at Oktoberfest.

I am so glad I invented him. He entered the book as a walk-on character for one specific scene. The other thing in this particular round of edits is to move him to the front of the scenes he is in. I'm still regretting having the white power stuff show up at all. I think I've made it less of a wide brush and reduced the chance of turning into (or looking like it is turning into) polemic, and that is largely by re-casting the scenes so it is a known and specific character who speaks for them.

The Oktoberfest chapter is when I finally close a character and plot arc. And, yes, my desires for Rhine-Castles aside, it is the right place to close Part II and move on to Italy. Although there is a nice Egyptian museum in Munich that would be cool as a sort of getting back to history...

I just re-read the whole Germany sequence (sans final chapter) and it is really working for me. I’m feeling better about this story than I ever have before. Punching up the emotion, the emotional connections, the agency, and the characters did it.

Of course, I still have to figure out how the fetch quest that she undertook to get into Oktoberfest is actually going to work out. I’m not saying this last chapter will be easy. But I have confidence.

("...I have confidence in sunshine/ I have confidence in rain/ ..." Which was added to the film version of The Sound of Music, and brought back in to several stage productions following. That show is set in Austria but close enough...they're all Bavarians in Munich.)