Block III

Blocked out Act III of the novel-with-a-name-in-flux.

Wow. There's a lot of threads I threw up in the air that I want to bring to conclusion. I don't think I'm going to have much trouble hitting my word count goals. The problem is more doing so in an interesting way.

Right now I'm in a chapter I've been anticipating since I first outlined the thing; my protagonist is at the great National Museum of Archaeology in Athens with research questions she wants to answer. On the plus side, she's there within a month of when I was there so I have available all the sorts of looks and feels you only get with difficulty by doing remote research. Also on the plus side, this is coming closer to actual archaeological puzzle-solving -- on of the legs of the tripod of an Adventure Archaeologist story.

On the negative, this is largely background research. Her questions are rather inchoate. And there's no ticking clock, no pursing bad guys, no snakes. So I've thrown in a professor with visiting friends who is saying things Penny would love to be able to overhear, and an Athenian art student who likes to hang out around the popular museums picking up tourist chicks, and an overly suspicious docent just so everyone can be tailing each other and surprising each other and otherwise be doing some low-key hijinks.

Basically it is stage business. I saw so many directors blocking out scenes, coming up with reasons to have a cross or two or a dozen to keep the stage picture from being too static.



The last big "research" chunks are a dinner get-together of a bunch of art students who will go randomly around various elements of the modern Greek experience; throwing their own varied reactions to North Macedon and Golden Dawn and Angela Merkel and Ovid and whatever else comes up in the natural course of a free-wheeling ouzo-lubricated conversation.

So I'm not going to research then write. I'm just going to set into it. Heck, these guys are students. And individuals. So they will have ideas that are incorrect and opinions that aren't mainstream. All I need is for them to be interesting, plausible, and at least somewhat appropriate.

And then there's when the police show up. Which I know little about and don't even have good ideas how to research. When this became an issue in two previous chapters I off-staged it; "After I had talked to the cops..."



And title. I had set out to write a quirky Adventure Archaeologist story that both poked fun at the concept and delivered on the promise. For various reasons, including that this is the origin story, it ended up having a lot to do with travel -- basic, practical travel advice, as well as a fair amount of eye candy description of several places.

The best of all possible titles would look like a serious genre thriller around a pseudo-archaeological premise; The Doomsday Codex or The Ariadne Clue or The Mask of Agamemnon or whatever. But do so in a slightly "off" way, a bit silly, a bit over the top, a bit too much on the nose, or including a pun in the title; anything that would inform the prospective reader that it isn't going to be a grim serious but extremely unrealistic thriller of lost technologies and guns akimbo.

(And it would also have a pattern that would lend itself to brand identity for a series).

Sub-title, blurb, cover all help, but you have to grab the eyeballs first. It also has to feel whole; it just isn't right to have a bodice-ripper cover and inside is a physics text. No matter how much you gave the game away with title and synopsis, it still just doesn't work artistically. Closest I can think of at the moment is the cover to Bimbos of the Death Sun which both is (like the title) satirical and the thing being satirized. And apparently the author hated it so...



A small thing. One of the reasons I picked a character who isn't that knowledgable is so I could have her learn key facts in front of the reader. So the reader is presented with them too and doesn't feel cheated when the hero suddenly pulls out "Ah, but there were no pineapples in Alexandria before 1087..." One of the purer examples I can think of at the moment is Doctor Who, particularly New Who, where the Doctor is constantly babbling and lots of colorful side things are going on but it turns out that one of them was a clue.

In "Time of the Angels" they are investigating a starship that crashed into an ancient monastery that is just crammed with statues. The Time Lord reflects that he knew these people before their civilization fell and vanished. He'd even worked with one of their architects; "Two heads are better than one," says the Doctor. And explains he meant the locals had two heads. More time passes. More statues everywhere. Way too many statues, crowded around almost menacingly. And one of the companions says, "I get the feeling we are missing something..."

The only examples I can think of off the bat in my own are language. When pretending to be French my protagonist says "Les carottes sont cuites," That phrase came up in a conversation she had way back at the Athenian Agora. Just before the Act II/III break, she finally commits to taking on the mantle of hero and thinks "Alea iacta est." That also showed up back in Athens. And, yes, I explain it again for the reader who missed it the first time.

I've been doing a number of call-backs and running gags but that's not really what I was talking about above. These are more verbal tics, or bookend bits.

I've been leading up to a revelation on "...with the dirt still on them." It is a phrase I picked up from one of the books I read on antiquities trafficking. The way I intend to work it is the undercover Carabinieri Art Squad guy talks about artifacts being sold in bulk right out of the ground. And later a sort-of innocent gallery owner expresses her disappointment at what is supposed to be a private collection; "I was surprised by how dirty..."

Unfortunately it is otherwise not quite happening. I mean, I've got her in the National right now, but I can't plant the reader in front of the objects and let them grasp the lessons. I still end up with either my protagonist or some handy bystander having to stand there and say, "the white glaze used in red-figure ware often implied..."