Bitte nicht den Horror-Clown

...an actual newsmagazine cover on the eve of a certain inauguration.

I knew I was going to have to do some overview and work-up before writing the last chapters. And I'm deep into it now. Wishing I had made different choices. Wondering what different choices are open. Worrying about some of the things (many of the things) that are in there now.

I've been doing a bit of research for local color stuff. I'd like my protagonist to hang out with some contemporary Greeks, some young people, check out music and art and foods outside of the tourist favorites and the Classical Era.

First another research fail. There was at some point an internet cafe right by the National Museum of Archaeology. That is just so handy for plotting purposes I'm going to use it, despite the name coming up blank on every other search and the one picture I was able to find showing what look suspiciously like early 2000's computers.

But that's also the thing. Story is largely about when things go wrong. If this was just "Penny has a good time in Athens" then I could just look up hotels and museum hours and restaurant menus and take everything I found at face value. This is adventure, which pretty much exactly means that things go off the rails into places and events that are less common. What actually happens if you jump into a canal in Venice? Have a medical problem at Oktoberfest? Get shot at in Athens? These are a lot harder to look up.

Anyhow. Local color.

I knew that there were abandoned buildings and squatters right in the heart of Athens; I'd seen them, I'd asked around (just a little). So, yeah. There are. I haven't been able to find out if there is an Athenian equivalent to the kind of spaces like the Oakland Ghost Ship. I suspect there are but it is those differences that matter. It turns out there are some larger abandoned spaces; much of the 2006 Olympics, and connected to that, the old International Airport. Which are still in partial use, largely at a community level, and are really not being maintained so, yeah.

So sure that would be fun. Do some fun/spooky/crazy stuff from the basement Electronica scene to guerrilla street artists to the fascinating largely immigrant squatter community which in some cases is almost semi-official to, well, actual urban spelunking in abandoned underground spaces.

But there's three things that make me shy from it. One is that it doesn't seem plot related. Thematic, sure. But as tempting as criminal hideouts or whatever might be, you attract a lot less attention moving trafficked antiquities out of a rental warehouse near the docks just like every other commercial business.

The next is that it is a little Every-Hero. Yes, there are people who can instantly make friends and be permitted into secretive and sensitive cultural areas because they are just that nice. And, yes, my protagonist is designed to have some of that; she's conventionally attractive, personable, a skilled actor, and careful not to step on toes. But I see this done just so damn much, the clean-cut American Everyman who instantly makes friends of hostile tribesmen or scared refugees or whatever and no.

Last, I opened on the Acropolis with a protagonist named Athena. I cut a contract with the reader then and there that said that Ancient Greece is going to figure in the narrative. So as much as I do want to show there is more to Greece, and the young people are more likely to quote Tupac than Ovid, I don't want pivotal plot events to take place within settings and frames that clash thematically with that premise.

Ah, well. I do definitely want to do some street food. Not that easy to find around here but it does seem like smart research to eat a bit before I write certain scenes. Pity my protagonist can't continue to enjoy ouzo; she's under doctor's orders until the end of this particular story.

Still, between the deadly forest fire that struck South of Athens only a few months ago, the Medicane "Zorbas" which strikes Athens that weekend, and the public referendum that preceded the Prespa Agreement (where Greece compromised that FYROM could use the name "Macedonia" as long as they added the qualifier "North") which is also this same weekend, the people she sits down to chat with are going to have a lot on their minds that they can talk about.

I don't have to do a Tomb Raider crawl through dangerous underground spaces in order to make my page count. It would just be, you know, so much fun.

(More's the pity; the Yellow Vests stuff is just starting to happen and isn't at the kind of mass where it would be remarked on in Greece. Golden Dawn got so thoroughly knocked down when they shot a popular rap artist they are hardly in the picture by this date. So much as I'd love to have some big public events, the reality is that there's always a small protest in Syntagma Square but the specific names are going to be obscure and insignificant.)