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.