On a Boat

And finally, I'm at the chapter that I knew needed to be re-plotted from scratch. Which I'm working on.

Turns out there was more Italian in the last Venice scenes. I added:

Polizia
Butto salvagente (a phrase I heard while watching videos of ambulances and rescues in the Venice canals).
And a complete "E, Polepetto. Basta, basta!"

This in addition to adding "Mi" to "Mi scusi," and Signori and Signore in the first Italy scene. By the time she hits Padua there is a complete exchange:

“Buongiorno!”
“Salve,”
“Come stai?”
“Sto bene, grazie. E Tu?”

But then, Venice is also the scene where Nessun Dorma is sung, as well as La Donna e' Mobile and Vissi d'Arte is mentioned. Two words are singled out, vincero (how the aria is written) and amore (how it is often sung.) And can't forget the Acqua Alta, Piazza San Marco, calle, rio, campo, piazalle, vaporetto, osteria, fondamente, ponte, and sottoportego.

While I was at it, I went back and took the direct quote of Nessun Dorma out. So no more getting sued by Giuseppe Verdi.

>>>

I'm having trouble finding a place I want to work with on a cover. What I need is for someone who knows format and fonts and is a pair of eyes that has done books before. They might tell me my idea for the cover is stupid, that's great, too.

Especially since I don't actually seem to have 3d software loaded on any of my machines right now, and the more I work with Gimp the more I miss Photoshop (Gimp has the functionality, but it is slower -- Photoshop is a more natural set of actions to get things done smoothly).

Here's the rough idea:

I played around with flames and riot police and Acropolis/Parthenon, and thought about doing a tholos/tomb background, but simpler works for me. Have to do a stacked render to get proper control of the volumetric light cone and the balance of the lighting effects. Done it before though.

>>>

The only other major re-write is the third scene at the National Museum of Archaeology, and that should go much faster. The 6th of next month marks one year since I had the concept I wanted to write. I hope and even have reason to expect to have the larger edits done by then.

Sunk Costs

The little Venice scene I meant to add was going swimmingly. Until I realized this is a perfect opportunity to show off something the average tourist doesn’t get; the inside of a Venetian home. An insight into the lives of the working Venetians.

Which would get into all sorts of interesting discussion about Venice in the modern world, beset with tourists they are unable to do anything about because Rome is beset with debt and won’t throttle the destructive flow. Nothing sums up all of this better than what happens if you try typing “Inside a Venetian home” into a search engine. You get a zillion Air BnB links, because the cost of living has gotten so high and the tourists so rapacious working Venetians are selling or getting their houses sold out from under them to make them available to the tourist trade.

But not only is it a bit much to research, it is also out of the arc. I do want my protagonist to realize there is context she is missing. I want her to get a glimpse behind the paper-mache walls of Euro Disneyland. But her first chance to actually step backstage needs to take place in Athens.

Argumente

I'm up to the half-way point in the fix-ups and I'm burning out on it.

I knew the big Oktoberfest scene would be a problem. Not the revised teufelsrad. A little chat that's a bit of a conversation from Dune, with each of the players having multiple layers behind their words.

Well, it is done. It is stronger than it was, and fits the new flow better. I did end up with a ridiculously fast-acting drug, though. It is a real-time conversation and I made the moment when the drug goes into the beer specific, so...

Now I'm looking at an argument between various Italians that is only fitfully translated. This one will have almost no Italian quoted, though. The only word that will appear in the narrative in native form is "Rom."

And then there's the revised Sheep scene. Actually, I think I can blow it off, even though there is some fun stuff in it. I shifted some stuff out of the Oktoberfest confrontation and now that realization needs to go there.

Would possibly concentrate better if I didn't have to wear headphones through the entire day. My new neighbor will NOT stop making distracting noises (mostly a baseball game. Or whatever sportsball is going on right now). Seriously, I get more work done at the cafe. Noise, interruptions, and all.

Bluebs

And I got mired in the dirndl scene. The editing intention was to turn as much empty narrative into fully-dramatized scenes, and this was a good scene to put in some dialog and interaction. It is also an overview of Oktoberfest traditions -- I'm still meaning to add some of the things she got told off-screen to being told on-screen.

What I didn't realize is if I do this, it turns into a scene about boobs. I mean, a dirndl is really all about the boobs. It is a carefully engineered boob-enhancer. And for writing an immersive female character, getting all voyeuristic about anatomy is pretty much at the bottom of the list of things to do. Sure, it's not going to "breasted boobily down the hall" but, sheesh.

I don't care if she's having fun and the whole interaction could give some nice character interaction. I mean, sure, she's gushed over her jacket, her boots, and have you seen a dirndl bluse? Cuuuute! The way to look at it, though, is you could do the same with a male character pissing into a urinal but that doesn't belong in most stories, either.

In short, it distracts from the main directions of the narrative.

I've got the shredded scene lying around in pieces right now, plus scraps that are supposed to get stitched in somewhere if they fit. It isn't a hard task to make it work. It certainly isn't challenging. It is just a bunch of annoying text drags and revisions to take the material I've got and put it into a new shape that...isn't all about the boobs.

So finally got through that one. Although I still ended up looking at catalogs of push-up bras. Sigh. But I managed to make it through the scene without anything feeling like it was going too far. Now the revised teufelsrad scene, on the other hand...

Durn. This bock is a 7.9% ? No wonder.

Not dead yet

At some point I want to do a post-mortem on the 1-year novel. But I'm still in editing so it is a bit early.

So far the biggest take-home is the methods basically worked but I need to problem-solve things in the Outline I didn't realize I needed to a the I wrote it. I'm not talking about a more detailed outline. The narrative style outline worked fairly well for this particular book. But I only outlined certain bones of the plot and left out other things that simply couldn't be retro-fitted in.

There is no strong antagonist who is present and visible through the story. There is no strong love interest, either. There are, worse than that, no reverses to the protagonist's personal relationships. She doesn't need to chose, betray, get betrayed, be surprised.

Well, mostly. I realized most of this early on and I worked to put as much as I could within the framework I had. So Vash and Herr Satz are at least somewhat interesting and get a bunch of interaction and both have an arc in their interaction with Penny that come to surprising conclusions.

>>>

Editing is going quite well. So far. I did a lot of editing as I went, but that meant, progressively, I hit the early chapters more times than I hit the later chapters. So there are bigger holes in the later chapters. This is the main structural edit, not the grammar or voice pass. This is the one where I make sure the plot and themes and character arcs are as visible and sensible as possible.

So far I've mostly taken stuff out, in fact. Tightening in on the through lines. So anyway I'm at the 30K mark now, doing an easy but time-consuming edit in which I rip apart the dirndl scene to dialogue it out and shift some material from a later scene here instead, where I can dramatize it, too.

The next hole to repair is worse. That's the conclusion of the Vash arc. I've simplified what he's doing, but I haven't figured out what her plan is. That is a problem with the outline that is essentially inescapable; it pretty much had to say "Penny does something clever here."

>>>

Ended up taking a couple of weeks away from the trumpet and that might have been a good thing because I came back with the clearest High C I've ever blown. Nice tone up there, finally. Now I'm working on taking the puff out of my cheeks. With my whiny new neighbor I've given up on practicing at home, even with the practice mute, so I'm bringing my sheet music to work instead.

I think I figured out why the high B and A are so vicious, too. First, you are blowing that high C partial to get up there, then valving down. Which means already you have to push a whole bunch of air, and when you valve it you are having to push it through even more tube and a lot more bends and squiggles. Plus of course the partials are getting far too close together (especially the "false" slot, which is right in the middle of those two notes).

>>>

It is hot as heck and this marks six weeks since I started the levo or about due for a really bad slump. Well, I'm slumping. But I still got a half-day in at work. And editing.

Ten Months

Draft is done.

81.6 thousand words. Almost dead on.

That's more by accident than not. The original plan said I'd spend about 60% of the page count in Athens and I hated that I had to spend so much time on a side quest. Then I realized I was going to fall short and added more incident to the detour. At that point I was sure I was going to end up with too little of Athens, especially as I had no real ideas other than "go to some museums."

Well, the riot sub-plot got me 4K, Markos when I added him into the museum scene gained me 2K, and I ended up with 30K after she returned from the detour to Germany. So that means just slightly over half the text takes place in around Athens, which was kind of the point of this plot; that I could write a bunch of stuff about a place I'd actually visited recently.

So now for edit.

The first edit is large-scale tweaks. There are scenes I didn't like and need to be reworked, bits that didn't work, and misplaced emphasis in several places.

Example of the latter; don't talk about Nazi's until at least Munich. I know. She's in an Indiana Jones hat being chased through a woods by crazy Germans and there's even been swastikas (on a pot sherd, actually) and she's from Burbank. How could she not think about Nazi's? But I'm going to walk around it and point the camera in other directions because I don't want it to be one of the first things I say about the German people.

That's the first big one.

It cascades down in that what she realizes on the DB to Munich will be different. This is when she makes the distinct connection to cross-national racists, but even then I want to keep that a bit on the back burner. I hate the Dorian theory and part of the reason I hate it is the racist underpinnings of so much hyperdiffusionist but it is an easy target that makes it look too much like a polemic.

Plus, here and in the big Vash confrontation at Oktoberfest, I really have to sort out just how far I'm going into the social media pressure cooker.

The drndl scene is probably shifting into dialog with the dresser lady becoming more of a speaking role and interesting character. Possibly she's going to take over some of the "I learned from Robert" facts she got off-stage, and on-stage them.

The final gimmick in the Vash confrontation either isn't clever enough or needs to be told better. So that's a scene that's going to need some re-thinking.

Outis is going to "appear" in the Oktoberfest scene and that's a whole little sub-scene I have to write. Yeah, and at some point I have to decide if I'm going to allow a running gag about him being named "nobody." I tried it a few times in the final chapters but it can get confusing quite quickly and probably wears out its welcome as well. (No, it isn't his name. I'd say at this point that outside of Vash not a single male bad guy actually gets his real name. Penny had to name them all.)

The first night in Verona should probably be unpacked and made into a proper scene, complete with her finding out which door out of "Signori" and "Signore" that she's supposed to use. Really, all of Verona could be expanded into fuller scenes. And I'm not entirely happy with the "Wherefore art thou" scene, either.

The end of the Venice Chase gets expanded into a proper scene with a bunch of Venetians arguing. And an annoying kid translating when he can be bothered.

The "Sheep" scene just before the ferry probably gets deleted. It isn't working for me as it is and I want to try a different way of handling that business. Or maybe I can reach into the "Sheep" scene and twist it to be more about pigs and sorceresses? Yeah, it is a scene doing two things; showing Penny abusing her power for good, and riffing on the Odyssey.

The ferry chapter gets completely reworked. The stomach flu becomes only a nuisance, she talks about the aristeai in the "reading the llliad" scene because it is too late to set it up in the conclusion of the fight with Enceladus on Spider Island, there's a bunch more running around and, like I said, the "Sheep" thing may happen there if I can figure it out. That's going to take a few days to plot out.

Back in Athens, the third scene at the National Museum of Archaeology, the "Why did you stop with the Romans?" scene with Markos, is rebuilt so we can do the lightning tour of Greek history with the visual aids provided by the museum. And I really have to work in the reconstructed costumes that are on special display right then.

The speech needs work. I knew it would need work. Writing an inspiring speech is not an easy task.

She needs to do something a lot more clever to deal with Outis at the climax. It isn't working right now. Also Diana isn't anywhere near as dangerous feeling as she should be.

And that's the big ones! After that is cleaning up dialog to give more distinct character voices. And run the whole damn thing through Grammarly. Or whatever the Grammar checker I finally decided to buy is.

Or maybe I'll take a short break first and work on the cover art.

That's a wrap

Climax is done, hero won. Very close to ten thousand words on the button. Now just have a wrap-up scene to write in which the Art Squad character fills in a few details.

I'm so close I might take a day off work to do it. But then, I pushed through till midnight to do this. Surviving on '80s movie themes. Probably tainted the writing a bit, but it was always supposed to get over-the-top anyhow. It is just a novel with a slow burn. Origin stories can be like that. Maybe I'll open the next one with a pre-titles sequence.

>>>

I'm reflecting a bit on catch phrases. The original conception was a relatively sensible person facing ridiculous situations, and I thought I'd be using some variation of, "You have got to be kidding me!" over and over.

Well, it only barely happened. After she made the choice to tackle a seven-foot tall Greek carrying a huge sledgehammer. I think she twice remarked something along the lines of, "When I grow up I'm going to stop doing this" and there were two key places where she announced that the universe was going out of its way to fuck with her. Mostly with it being way more genre-savvy than she'd like. Worst case being after she's yelled at the gods (she's getting a little slap-happy) a boat shows up...and it is named Hermes.

I had two other mannerisms I had planned to use. One was that she sometimes forgets the right name and reaches for a series of similar-sounding but increasingly implausible substitutions. I think I only kept two; way back in Chapter One, trying to remember the name Pericles she goes "...Peristyle…no, that’s not right…Periaktos? Perestroika? Peri-Banu?"

The other part of the joke is that they are all appropriate, just not what she is reaching for. Peristyle being an architectural term appropriate for the discussion she is having about the Parthenon, Periaktos being from the Greek Theatre (and she is after all a one-time Theatre Bum), and Peri-Banu is -- this is really obscure -- a crater on the moon Enceladus.

This finally has a payoff when, trying to remember the name Aegeus as she is struggling to stay afloat in the Adriatic, she goes through, "Aegis? No. Aegisthus, Aesculapius, Aegyptopithecus..?" before realizing she's been wearing an Aegis and it might actually be important.

The similar trick is that when flustered she yell out a word in every language except the one she actually needed. I'd intended she yell "Stop!" at the Giant Mook about to smash the pot and get the correct word in Italian, German, and of all things Japanese...but not Greek.

Yeah, I never used that.

But I added at least two quirks.

First is she ended up needing to swear a bit. I mean, yeah, she's running for her life and getting shot and and you'd probably get a little profane. And the usual suspects are there. But I tried out having her say "Gods" or similar, and it seemed to work. And pretty soon I had her saying "Hades" as well. At some point she was going to say, "Great Hera!" and then stop with a, "I'm never saying that again." Never got around to it. She's not quite genre-savvy in this book.

Very late in the story, she starts saying, "I can do this." After the second one, "If I live through this, I'm coming up with a better catch phrase." Yeah, I'm dissing on the source material.

Well, okay. If she does have a catch phrase, it is "My name is Athena Fox. I am an archaeologist." It's basically her "Let's get dangerous." When she says that, it's generally before doing something crazy. Like trying to bluff a sociopath who has a bolt-action rifle aimed at her chest. (It doesn't work).

Yeah, the next book is when things get real. Not that she had it easy on this one. The main thing that's going away is Protagonist Aura. The Roman book is the one where people will keep going, "So...?" Or asking where she graduated from.

>>>

And I guess I've decided the Romans are next. Romans, Brits, London. Violence. This is the one that really tests her ability to act like an archaeologist adventurer, and forces her to own up to and try to improve in some of the places she falls short.

I think it works better that way, and the following novel being the reversal. Japan, complete with a total weaboo as a guide, and a situation in which everyone totally takes the Athena Fox act at face value and expects her to be able to pull off all the stunts. Except maybe they aren't. There's going to be a lot of second-act revelations in this one.

And I really need some sleep. I need to turn off the '80s soundtrack, finish the beer, and deal with the final chapter tomorrow.

Death of Doctor Island

I probably will have the aristeia. Just have to handle it carefully. This is also the chapter where a character named Diana shows up and I know what's going on and I do want to hint a little but I don't want it to be obvious. So that's tough.

I thought I might have to stare at maps for a while. Turns out there are far too many good islands to chose from.

The private island of Patroklos -- which sounds enough like Patrocles to get The Illiad another boost. After all, I've already got a character who is saddled with the nickname Achilles. So it is off the southern tip of Attica, about 65 km from Athens. You get close to it by taking the winding, dangerous, 91; a road so insane it is popular with illegal racers, and perhaps as a result the government has decided not to repair or upgrade it but instead let it die and eventually replace it with something safer.

It is so close to the coast you could probably take a hang glider from the Temple of Poseidon (now it is Odyssey shout-outs) and get there.

The other island that jumped out when I started research is Skorpios. And if there is a better name for the private island of a villain...! It was of course owned by Onassis. He married Jackie O there (and the paparazi caught her sunning on the beach). Now a Russian owns it and is trying to build a hotel despite a certain lack of permissions. What else?

So, it is actually in the Ionian Sea; similar distance from Athens, crazier voyage; you could put out of the Port of Piraeus -- but nobody would let a neophyte ship-handler out in that craziness.

The main reason to stay far clear, though, is Diana is the remaining daughter of a rich Greek industrialist who had ties to the right-wing. So, no. Move that island as far away as possible because I'd rather not be accused of slandering that particular family.

So my island is roughly where Patroklos should be and -- at least until one of the Greek speakers at Quora gets back to me -- called Aráchnios.

Because if you can't have scorpions, then spiders will do! (No spiders will make an appearance in the novel.)

I think, sir, you know me at my best

Working very fast now. The Wayfarer saga is over. Now I'm in the middle of a fight with a Giant Mook because it wouldn't be an Indiana Jones pastiche without a giant mook.

Yeah, except that really isn't this character's thing. Her only previous fist fight was an inconclusive slap-fight. So the character evolution as I've been working with it says she shouldn't even be able to compete, much less win here.

Except. I've been hinting at gods, and this is a place where I thought about having the unseen behind-the-scenes manipulators bless her with a brief Aristeia. That's a concept she'd be familiar with from The Illiad (not that she read much of it -- she hated it.)

The way it is presented in the poem is as a sort of supernatural super-competence, a zen-like condition of being totally focused on destruction and being essentially unstoppable. During his Aristeia, Diomedes stabs Ares -- a god -- and drives him from the field.

I'm not saying I'm going to make it obvious. No golden light, no super strength. Just a surprising reversal and a strength she didn't know she had and a powerful urge to put a mallet through the poor guy's head. And then she rejects it.

So, I don't know. I'm not in favor of it at the moment. One of the few pluses on the ledger is that it transitions smoothly into the next scene. AND I just thought of a really cool thing she could do, if I set it up this way.

But I'm probably better finding a different way. Now that I've Actually Reached the Scene (TM), I can decide what the Outline couldn't. It doesn't work for me, not as well as her doing something damned clever like talk to the guy.

Wayfarer Fantasy

I'm within 5K of the page goal. I'm going to go over a bit. My instinct says 8-10K to wrap this up.

And this is the point at which it starts to get weird. My protag has put the costume back on and made the bad-ass boast and I'm currently writing the scene where she -- as a complete neophyte sailor -- is single-handing a sixteen-foot sailing dingy with jib sail out into the Aegean.

Was easier than I thought to pick a boat. The brand is Wayfarer and they are up to Mark V now but there are still Mark I's around. Good basic boat. Way more lines than I remember from my El Toro days (well, it is twice as long and twice the sails, too).

To keep from swamping the reader and, more importantly, to keep from swamping me I decided not to go all Aubrey-Maturin with it and had her instructed by someone who gave up on the language barrier and just calls everything "That thing."

Kind of like my boss. We've worked it to a high art over there; the entire shop is likely to say things like, "We need to move the things that were in the place we got the stuff from the other day."

Anyhow, from here on out to the end of the book she's basically getting away with the kind of hero shit that would put most of us in jail or at least on YouTube. With a brand new concussion. I may have forgotten what little I know about sailing but you do not single-hand a boat in the middle of open sea after a twenty-minute lesson that consisted mostly of silently pointing at things!

Yeah, once again, I'm in territory that I just had to explore by writing the actual text. Once again, no outline could have saved me.

Oh no George Lucas no

My protagonist mentioned reading something in the transcriptions of the Raiders of the Lost Ark story meeting between George, Spielberg, and Kasdan. (What? She studied media arts. Made student films. Of course she would.) So I found it and read some of it.

Do yourself a favor and don't.

Oh no John Ringo no.

Quorum, quora, quoramos...

"How long does it take?" is a popular question on Quora. So are similar questions about how many words you can or should write in a day. And the other side; how much planning do you "need" to do.

Nanowrimo is coming up next month. The battle lines of Outliner versus Panzer, or, as George R. R. calls them, Architects versus Gardners, are drawn up.

Because while everyone recognizes that Art is Art and in a perfect world it should take as long as it needs, in this imperfect world writers need to eat. By selling their writing, once. Well, that era is largely over. So instead writing time is for many not even a break-even proposition and every hour of writing is the loss of a potential billable hour.

Even reading falls into this dismal math. Even for me, the time it takes to read a novel works out to a potential hundred bucks in billable hours. Of course you do have to take a break some time, and reading is still to me a decent use of off time.

In short, we'd all like to know how to write faster and more efficiently. Not necessarily the same thing! But two very common and entwined questions.

>>>

This is why I bring up Nanowrimo. National Novel Writing Month is structured so that Outlining would appear to have the advantage. Appears. Any Panzer worth their pants can get 50,000 words deep into a novel before realizing they have no way to end it.

The lovely theory -- the one the serious Outliners cleave to -- is you get all the hesitations and the back-tracking and the research out of the way once. And then you just write. I think the strongest argument for Outlining as a time-saving strategy is not the simple math of having every hour in the chair be an hour making text. It is, instead, that the act of writing text is a flow, a zone, and the longer you can stay in that zone, the better.

I hit the zone a couple days ago and had passed 2,500 words...until I realized the direction I had taken the scene wasn't working for me.

And this is the great flaw in Outlining, at least as usually described. Heck, I tried to outline this one a lot more than I did. But I realized I could not visualize my protagonist, I could not see how she actually worked in a scene, without writing text.

And that's why I am thinking a better answer than picking a comfort point somewhere on the number line between Outliner and Panzer is to find a way to plan that is properly iterative.

>>>

Every prop I've built, every major project, has used an iterative development. Even the current novel was iterative, as far as it went. I think I probably could have iterated just the way I was going; outline until I needed to see if something worked in text, did some test text, came back and modified the outline.

The problem with the current novel is that the thing I needed to see in text keep happening. I needed to see how that character worked in the Ordinary World and Refusing the Call space. I needed to see how the character worked when she was ready to confront the Threshold Guardian. I needed to see how she worked when she landed in the Pit.

And the way the book is designed and paced, these points come pretty much one after another. There really wasn't sufficient reason to go back to the outline because the very next scene was going to be another question that could only be answered by writing it.

I'm hoping the next book has a different kind of problems.

>>>

Reality is, Panzers stop and plan, too. They just do it in different places. This is why Outliners laugh a them; "You could be writing the next scene, but no, you are stuck figuring out what is supposed to happen next!"

The retort the Panzers should give more often is that the Outliner's gain in efficiency is illusory. They spend months and months not writing a damn thing. At least the Panzers got to their first chapter already.

The thing is, as R. R. points out, the Gardener already knows what she planted. There probably are some Panzers who just started with a nameless character in a white room and let the page tell them what happened. Most of them have more of an idea than that!

>>>

And, yeah, all of this is coming because I'm 5-10 thousand words from the end and I'm still trying to find the best way to tell the Nadir. I wrote the "worst day of my life" scenes, and I wrote a "Let's Get Dangerous"** moment that I loved.

But it isn't right. And at the moment my biggest question is one I could have solved in Outline but wasn't ready to. And that is; "should I do this particular thing here or is it best explored in the next book of the series?"

Yeah. A series. I was not about to solve that question in Outline when I hadn't written Page One of the first book!

>>>

Target is still November 1. I got back from Athens on October 28, I had a finished outline on Jan 1 (see! I do outline!) and Nov 1 makes it ten months to draft. With the goal being to edit, cover art and upload by...Jan 1.



** "Let's Get Dangerous" was the catchphrase of Darkwing Duck. An interesting character, he was a self-made, self-promoted hero who would spend most of the episode fumbling and failing. And then in the last-act turn-around, pushed to the limit, he'd suddenly morph into the cool-as-hell hero he's been styling all along, and dispatch the bad guys with attitude and panache. When you heard he words "Let's Get Dangerous" you knew he was no longer Drake Mallard in an ill-fitting mask, but the Terror that Flaps in the Night -- Darkwing Duck!


And, yeah, I just solved it. That's really why I write these things; to sort my own thoughts, not to annoy my five subscribers with more TL:DR.

A day or two I posted about classical essay structure on Quora and that's still on my mind and, yeah, there are things you come back to. So the way the Indiana Jones archetype clashes with the real world of Archaeology is going to be explored more deeply in the next book. Whether it is the Japan book or the England book I don't know yet. That's another post.

But I can broach the subject in this book. Bring it up, put it aside. Plant it for later exploration. It is why I sent her to the New Acropolis Museum, after all. To think about Lord Elgin and put that together with the rapidly fading hero worship she had on for Schliemann and the various mentions I've made of Evans and Carter. 

But this won't be the turning point. She's going to recognize it is a problem, and may even be part of the problem she's having right now, but ultimately the escape from the pit is on different reasons.

Now I just have to figure out if it is stronger symbolism for her to don the hat again, or to show that she doesn't need the hat....

Final Crisis

There's easy, and there's hard. And then there's the stuff that looked easy and turned out to be hard.

I'm at the third act crisis on the novel. This is the point at which things look bleakest and the hero is at their most despairing. There's no way out. No way to win. And then someone says, "Wait. I've got an idea..."

Well, the way out, I've already got. What I'm missing is why, exactly, this is the low point. She had a fist fight with the bad guy, there was a big explosion, the secret ally finally unmasked and the Artifact she's been trying to protect is finally safely in the hands of the appropriate authorities.

Really, she should be celebrating. Sure, the reader is thinking "This is it? This can't be it. There's still four chapters to go."

So I could take her emotionally in another direction. But that's when it turns into a multi-value problem. I'd like to do some shopping but then Biro should be there and he'd have questions and I'm back to her going through the evolution I'm trying to hold off on.

I want her to be at the Acropolis museum but already back in the hero outfit when she has that moment of, "Hold on, I'm missing something..."

So far the best I've come up with is to make it a, "Stop, youth!" moment. But that doesn't get the crisis moment the emotional arc of the book wants.

(Um...this is the famous opener of Second Stage Lensman. In the preceding book, Kimball Kinnison has discovered the hyperspace tube and led the Galactic Patrol to crush the Boskonian Fleet and is strolling into the sunset with the gorgeous Clarissa McDougal, Civilization's victory assured. Then on the first page of Second Stage Lensman, Mentor interrupts him telepathically to explain that not only is Boskone still around, they are bigger and more dangerous than he could possibly imagined and he's just given them the perfect weapon.)

Well, so that's not exactly what I'm going for. More the "So you thought the adventure was over, eh?" moment.

Part of my problem is Penny is so damned irrepressible. Nothing keeps her down for long. I didn't set out to make her that way. It just evolved naturally from creating a character that could believably attempt the things she'd have to attempt, and have the skills she needed to have.

This novel is a question and a premise, or rather, an excuse. The question is the meaning of history. Ownership of the past, the proper place of the objects of the past, the drawbacks of pseudo-history. I'm using the concept of the Indiana Jones kind of character to explore these questions. And the premise that makes it happen is a character who can stand on the boundaries between the fictions we make of history and the realities by being both a real archaeologist and a media approximation herself.

And so of course this crisis is just before the final turning point where she accepts the role and the baggage (good and bad) that comes with it. Which means it really should be where she and I ask questions about what exactly it means to be Athena Fox and how that fictional character can and can not work within a more-or-less real world.

Boom, baby

The scenes are finally starting to come quickly. This weekend, I brought it up to the moment when my protagonist is nearly blown up, loses the artifact, and is effectively thrown off the case. This is the blackest moment of the plot.

At 70K. Almost perfect.

The thing that slowed me most was having to do a little charting again of what the bad guys were actually planning and why they ended up where and when they are when my protagonist encounters them. But that gave me some new ideas and out of that I got a hilarious bad-ass moment. What does she do that's clever and daring? She updates her Facebook page!

>>>

The big project is finally in. Spent four days in LA -- actually, in Burbank, right next door to Universal -- and that was a strange experience. Kind of nosebleed up there. The client is a wee bit high end, and there was a lot of money riding on the gig, and the thing that brought this home was living out of a hotel room bigger than my apartment and drinking martinis (well, actually just beer -- the rest of the crew had the mixed drinks) on the company tab.

Oh, that and flying JetSuiteX, which is a business-class private airline that uses its own hanger and doesn't play TSA games for two hours before every flight.

>>>

The levothyroxine really seems to be helping. This weekend was the worst I've felt since starting it and I still got errands, a little house cleaning, and over a thousand words written. The last three weeks I did so many long days I'm swimming in overtime hours. A very nice paycheck and I've gone and blown a few bucks towards really straightening things up around here. Around my life. A few more weeks of hiking to work and I might even be ready to restart my gym membership.

Where is everybody?

I tried to do some Fermi estimations of the eBook market. Then looked up statistics instead. There's roughly a million books hitting the eBook market every year, of which 10% are fiction. There's about 40,000 working authors in the US. Today's high turn-over market causes genre writers to try to spend less than a year on a book, and first-year sales in self-publishing average 250 units (out of something like 200 million units worldwide.)

This is all orange-flavored applesauce. But anyhow.

KDP's algorithms start chopping the numbers after two weeks. So let's look at what is happening in a month. Roughly a thousand other fiction titles are hitting the system that month and that's why categories are important. Assuming you are in a popular and not too restrictive box, that's a hundred other titles gaming the algorithm to get display space. Means realistically you've got about a week when the rotation is reasonably likely to throw your book up on the "people who read this also liked..." listings.

Making some wild assumptions about the timing of the earn-out and the effect of the algorithm (and, yes, this is why having multiple titles out within a few months of each other really helps), half your yearly sales and 1/4 of the lifetime earning will be within that same week.

Carry the four, divide by cucumber, out of cheese error -- a couple hundred bucks, less if it is the first book of a series and you are trying to tempt readers.

Which is all by way of saying I'm not going to have a crisis of conscience if I only take six months on the next book.

+ + +

Oh, yeah. That riot scene? I just started writing and had no trouble deciding which riot to talk about and which to describe. With a certain amount of "You should have been here in February" stuff (even a guy on a podium who in February would have been Mikis Theodorakis but here in September is too far away for my characters to be sure.)

Oh, yeah. Mikis, who resisted the Junta, as did the students at the Politechnica, and yes they still march and otherwise remember the 1973 rebellions. Mikis composed the sirtaki, also known as the Zorbas, which is the name the Medicane of September 2018 took. Which is a dance my protagonist dances...with a university student.

I didn't plan any of this.

So I got that far, then stalled out again trying to figure out which way the cops were going (are they trying to clear Syntagma, or are they trying to keep the crowd from moving somewhere else?) Eventually I realized it was all fog of war anyhow...

...and then I hit ten hour days at work and had no more time to finish the scene.

+ + + REDO FROM START

Finally a (mostly) free weekend and took the portable keyboard to the cafe and finished the riot scene. Which is also the last Markos scene; I created him because I needed one more thing happening in the Museum sequence, he grew into a companion for several chapters and love interest, and the end of the riot scene is also their first big quarrel.

And that's basically it for contemporary Athens. There's an upcoming scene which is back in tourist land, clothes shopping, eating tourist food and going to the Acropolis museum. The scene might pick up just outside and skip over the other stuff, I don't know yet.

But the rest of the book is the adventure. Basically, the location shooting is done and the rest is on the sound stage.

And I'm looking forward to the return to the Atlantis Gallery. Because I realized I can make this a "Welcome to the Hellmouth" scene.

The kind of scene that happens at about the one-hour mark on the Stargate SG1 pilot; up until that moment they've thought of the Stargate as linking Earth and Abydos, and Ra being the singular Big Bad. Until Daniel shows them a room that is absolutely covered in seven-symbol groups -- every single one of them an extra-planetary address of what is then revealed to be a galactic Stargate network.

The gimmick to the Atlantis Gallery is it is weighted towards the intriguing. Less classic Polychrome ware, more Antikythera Mechanisms. Which means I can wave at Phaistos Discs and Crystal Skulls and Quimbaya "airplanes." 

Right, sorry, the "Hellmouth" example; after dusting her first vampire Buffy is confronted by Giles who drops a giant pile of books on the table, explaining Sunnyvale is over a thing called the "Hellmouth" and everything comes there...witches, demons, ghosts, werewolves....thus establishing the premise has all the plot hooks it needs for season after season.