Train Station Zero

One more bit of plot nailed down.

The wartime "Zero Stations" are far too perfect. The Auxiliary Units, with connections to the Home Guard and W.W.II with all the "camping in the subway station during the Blitz" stuff and even the idea of invasion are wonderful for stuff to talk about, archaeology to discover, and theme to integrate.

I'm still thinking of an older thing below it. Why? Because I want some trowel work, and the kind of archaeology involved in digging out a W.W.II building is a bit different. Haven't decided on that. One problem is, relatively speaking, the archaeological history is shallow.

What I mean is, about a meter of soil was deposited on the ancient walls of Londinium. The Tube stations are in geologic eras, far below any human landscape. Well, except for the amount that's been shifted around and that's a problem, too. The beginnings of the Underground were cut-and-cover and that means anything that was higher in the strata is well and scattered.

***

A different thing I'm puzzling on is how much to go beyond the probably and into the possible. I've more-or-less ruled out Penny's big Tomb Crawl from getting into live subway tunnels or the secret passage to Number 10 or anything. Stuff that is critical infrastructure is well known, well explored, and well guarded. Every dime-store terrorist has thought of it and every cop has heard of Guy Fawkes.

Which isn't to say I can't talk about it, even have her underground adventures relate to, pass near, detect evidence (the shaking of passing trains) of the other life that's down there.

But still doesn't tell me how big I dare go with what she does find. Or how to explain how it is still accessible.

Hit that like button...with a large hammer

I swear I didn't click on anything. Watched a couple random videos. And suddenly my YouTube feed pops up with Jdn Ptrsn, at least two other mansplainers, and vx dy himself.

(The suspects were disemvoweled to keep the One who "knows when you are sleeping, when you are bad and when you are good, and how much science fiction you buy each fiscal quarter" from deciding I need to be fast-tracked to have all my manosphere needs met.)

It is getting to be a bit like spam and the golden rule of never click, and absolutely never follow the "please unsubscribe" link. I have put any and all reviews of the latest Star Wars movies off my viewing list, for instance. Not that I was going to watch them anyway. The reviews...or the movies.

Ah, brings me back to the good old days of using iTunes as a theatre sound designer. Monday I'd need "YMCA," Thursday I'd need "Summer ist icumen in" and on the weekend I'd be checking out some independent band that I would have to be mixing Sunday. Next time I logged in iTunes would be frantically trying to find electric guitar covers of medieval folk tunes set to a disco beat because it was sure it had finally figured out which bland identical product it could sell endless slight variations of to me until I died.

***

I'm being depressed about writing again. I have three people reading the last book at the moment. One of them got as far as the author's bio (he skipped to the back). The other should be just about at the scene were Penny buys a bra and I'm wincing internally at the thought.

The "quick and dirty" was only relatively so. Took me a year, I cut some corners I should not have cut (no beta reader, no paid editor). I'm flailing around wondering if there is something easier to write than a story set in the real, modern world that cares about the details of history and culture and geography -- both in getting them right and in covering them in detail.

I have the idea traipsing through my head right now that the bulk of a near-future military SF novel would come out as fast as I could type. Once the world is built, it is all combat scenes and the drudgery of soldiering and of course shit-talking with buddies. Pity the idea I have for that is an off-kilter close-to-singularity world with strong horror elements, various trope elements, and at least one character who has spent four hundred years reading literature and it shows.

***

So I'm still nailing down plot elements for the London adventure. I have the majority of the set-piece scenes I want to do, but still figuring out the physical layout and the who knows what and who cares. The "Churchill bunker" as my notes still call it (it is probably post-war), is growing in importance and I won't be able to consider this outlined until I've figured it out properly.

And I have to change history. I knew that already. I want to make a thematic bit about a North Sea storm surge, and there wasn't one of note in the time period I'm probably using. (Most likely right now is November of 2018, which was noted for cold snap and some rains). I am also more likely than not to follow most other people and create a Tube station rather than try to re-work an existing one.

Although there is one possible candidate. In the real world, the Northern Line being built to Battersea power station and opening in 2020 or so decided against a route that would have required expanding Vauxhall. But I'm still sort of caught between multiple things I'd like to throw in, which may not be all compatible; a closed station, a new construction project, an archaeologically interesting site, a W.W.II air raid shelter, a hidden phone/switching/intelligence/i dunno bunker. And a lost river, but there are a bunch of those and nobody is going to complain if I move or even invent one.

I just found a huge new resource for underground London so I have reading material for months. That's also getting in the way. This would be a really good week to actually write.

See, writing is best done in long blocks of contiguous time. Enough to get into the flow, then enough to make it worth while. Plotting, on the other hand, is oddly suited towards the work week. I get an idea, it lead to another snag, and I think about the snag for a day or two until I have an idea how to work past it.

Sitting and staring at the outline is exhausting. So I'm wasting all this lovely time off by being where I am on this book. But, since I have no other book that is in a better place, what choice do I have?

I can do this

I think this is the first time I was able to read through the entire book without interruption.

I haven't changed my mind about the flaws. It is still too busy, too unfocused, and the protagonist doesn't really speak to me.

But I also see how I have learned and grown and how I can do better. The last few chapters are the action chapters and cut way back on the excess excursions. And after the solo adventure of so much of the first half, the banter between Biro and Markos as they join Penny in exploring Athens is just so nice.

The next book is free of the language stuff. Or rather, is a different kind of language stuff. But there's less of it anyhow. The next book is more focused on London and it's history. And it is -- and this is mostly to the good -- largely stuff that Penny doesn't know and when it is plot-important, the reader gets to learn it with her.

Really, the first book was a lot of groundwork. I recognize that. But the strength of the London book is going to be focus, a lot more interpersonal stuff, a fair bit more action, and that I think I've learned how to write better. Basically, it should be more of the stuff that was good in the last one.

So basically, the main thing I got from the last reading: a lot of "Oh, I know how I could have done this better."

***

It is funny. I've run into several people who were impressed I got a book printed. Printing? That took almost nothing to learn (well, I did have a head start in most of the essential skills) and not that much time to do, either. If I hadn't done my own cover it would be even less than that (and probably better results but anyhow).

The writing is the tough part. Hard to do and takes a long time, too.

Sure I do, and so's the Queen

I'm watching Time Team and getting distracted by dialects again. I can't help but notice the British don't correct each other. Or even pause, or seem to notice. But I've heard the same thing in podcast discussions between an international group of archaeologists or historians.

Sure, let's just pass over "Mycenae" versus "Mykenae." That's the c-k problem inherited from the long history of Latin within other Western cultures. I've run into people who make a point of not just pronouncing, but spelling "Akropolis" et al. And other more accurate transliterations, which can slow your reading a bit while you puzzle out the new form of a too-familiar name.

I'm talking more of distinctly different pronunciations of other words. Like mesolithic; in one programme I recently watched, there were conversations between a mezo-lithic and a miso-lithic.

In the one I'm watching now, I'm hearing tsu-nami (the wall of water), su-nami, and tu-nami.

Oh, yes. And this on top of dialectic distinctions that can be generally made between British english and American english; shed-ule/sked-ule, gla-ceer/glay-seer, geyser/geezer, etc.

London Calling

The numbers are not looking good on The Fox Knows Many Things. It is largely a numbers game; the Amazon ecosystem, for instance, functions a lot like a game of Civilization. You get more sales when you have more exposure, but you only get exposure with sales. Leading to many people gaming the system, but that's a whole other conversation.

I'd like to go to London and do some research. Not because the book would earn it out but because I want to travel anyhow. Aside from dropping in over the holidays to catch a Panto (the only local panto is closed this year and won't be back until next December), I'd want to go in April-March when the field schools open as do the tours to various underground places of interest.

And that's a little far ahead. I pushed the last book out without outside editor or beta readers or feedback, and without working up interest and pre-sales via whatever kind of social networking. I just needed to actually finish something for once. And now I find it isn't over. I need a second or third book before I can start really playing numbers games. There's options open right now like BookBub advertising and promotional pricing, but none of it makes sense with a backlist of One (1).

The London book is dense, though. Not the kind of details I need to research -- although some of them are potentially daunting, I have a better idea of how much I need to know before I can write and how much is actually going to fit in, and even with putting in Theatre and Shakespeare and Panto and HEMA and Roman re-enactors and combined sewers and the Churchill bunker and the Thames Barrier it isn't really so bad.

Worse is all the Britishisms, particularly the way some Brits like to talk. Lots of witticisms and references. Verbal one-upmanship. Ribbing. I might be able to take a few pages down to the pub and let the Geordies have a look.

No, where it is dense is in the interpersonal interactions. There's a lot more character stuff and social stuff here. It isn't a largely solo adventure. Graham continues to grow on me and this is going to be a prickly and sometimes difficult but rewarding friendship. And that's just the start of it.

***

Now that I've done a book, it all seems so much simpler. Or at least more straight-forward, even though it is a lot of work. So I'm digging up all sorts of schemes, even though it seems most sensible to do the London book before anything else...and maybe the Japan book following (Kyoto, post-war Japan, the Takarazuka Dance Troupe, weebos, a bit of Tokyo, San Francisco, the Internment).

Stil have a hankering to do a generic fantasy. One of the people at Quora came up with an interesting wrinkle that I'd like to integrate.

Then there's the lightweight version of the Bronze Age novel. The misfit crew of heroes up against the Sea People.

And the techno-werewolf book. Which is basically brooding gritty mil-SF.

And the all tropes all the time space opera. Which should really involve singing. And is currently trying to see if it can morph around the title The Tiki Stars.

Incidentally, another thing I'm turning up on Amazon with the right search filters (well, actually, what I did was log out then try to ignorantly find something like my own book. I kept at it until the algorithm finally showed the ad I'm paying for. At which point I found out I needed to edit the ad!)

Anyhow, another thing I've been turning up is a fair number of, well, call them Manly Men adventure stories. A serving of retro with a side order of Take That, and not a small whiff of Eu de Sad Puppy. And that's the thing. The Tiki Stars doesn't want to be PC. But I don't really know how I can make this work for me.

To thine own self be true

I'm not in love with my protagonist.

It's actually a little annoying. I mean, this is a character that was designed to be a bit Mary-Sue. Either the traditional definition, or the modified, "yanks the entire plot and universe into orbit about her own gravity."

Penny is going from naive tourist to Lara Croft in one easy lesson (or two, or a dozen...) So on the one side, she comes on stage with a ridiculous number of pre-existing skills. And on the other, she is walking into a universe that seems willing to bend over backwards to let her succeed.

Well, at least that was the first book. The London book is the "reality ensues" book.

Of course this is also the Everyman Hero from so many films. The guy (almost always a guy) whose claim to physical competence is "played some sports" and is just so "gosh darn that's terrible fellows hey maybe if we all worked together we could fix it" the person who walks into an existing situation and instantly becomes the most important person in it.

But none of that changes that I just don't have an emotional connection with my protagonist. Who is my narrator. Who is my first person narrator; the entire story is told in her voice.

The main thing I connect with her on is that she can get really geeky about history. The whole series is largely an excuse for me to get geeky about history. (And lecture about pseudo-history, but so far there hasn't been an opportunity). Other than that she's largely defined by a list of what I didn't want to do. I didn't want her to snark or make endless pop-culture references. I didn't want her to act like old people. I didn't want her body-conscious or shy. There's a list of things I've seen done too often and am tired of, and there's an equally tired list of things I would do if I wasn't trying to stop myself.

So, sure, I sympathized with her struggles. And I expect to sympathize more in the next one, as it will have lots of cold and damp and dirt and bad food and so on. And uncomfortable work situations. But it is just a physical sympathy. I'm not feeling her goals, her concerns.

I'm not rooting for her, not yet. And maybe it isn't her, maybe it is the situation. Either way, this is something I have to solve before I can finish outlining this thing.

Taking Stock

I'm thinking of trying out a new cover. A more "stock" genre cover, using stock pictures (all the advice says; unless you are a well-known author, don't get creative with your covers).

ShutterStock already turned up a hero pic, from a model that has enough of a series in that costume I could do a long run of books off it. I'm tempted to do it just for the fun and challenge. Of course dropping a hundred bucks on ShutterStock, on top of everything else I spent this month...

But then I didn't really write a "stock" book, either. Although searching through top sales in categories, there are some similar things. What I was aiming for was the generic "go to exotic places, have adventures." I did a little too much "go to" and a little too little "adventure," though.

***

So the London adventure is turning into a zig-zag plot. Not one big arc, but more like a bunch of reversals. Rather pulp-ish, now that I think of it. I also think of it as a Tribble plot, in that there are things building slowly in the background that suddenly become a foreground problem.

So I'm still on for detectorists, dai-london binbo seikatsu manual (err..Down and Out in London), Romans, coin collectors, Panto, a bit of tourism, Doggerland, urban spelunking, train spotters, archaeological methods, the life of a shovel bum, and of course Underground London.

Just read an introductory book on Panto. I'm a little early for page counting, but it feels to me that I won't be getting more than 10-20K out of it, without it turning into filler. Plus might not be the right season for it (the big Panto season is the winter holidays. Do you know The Hoff played a villain several seasons running? He apparently does a great Captain Hook.) Anyhow I might set it in April; "Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote..."

I'm still lacking for villain. I mean, to really connect him to the themes and the plots. And what I'm calling the God Game is still way in the background. Anything supernatural is still entirely deniable, and also doesn't tie in any way to apparent entities of the last book.

(To lay it out baldly...in the last book there's a strange-acting little girl on the Acropolis, someone gives Penny a Medusa amulet, the ship that rescued her was called Hermes, she had a moment of power, competence, and rage in the big fight that the text is careful to place closely to a mention of the aristeia, but the only difficult-to-negotiate moment is that the Art Squad detective tells Penny he heard and saw her give a rousing speech -- in flawless Greek.)

So I can't use whatever the Immortals might be up to as a way to fill plot holes. Whatever happens, happens for clearly human reasons. Penny is going to wonder if there is more going on than meets the eye, especially in regards to the Whisperer in Tunnels, but there isn't going to be anything inexplicable in this book.

What there is, is much to develop in the relationship between Penny and the character she plays. I knew there was going to be. But I thought I'd be further along. This book is still in the figuring-out-how-it-works for her, and I've still yet to come to grips with the problem of pseudo-archaeology. And the way an Indiana Jones ripoff character tacitly supports it.

Well, this may be the book where I reverse a previous statement. I think Tomb Raider (that is, the games and movies and books) exists in her world, and this is possibly the best book to admit to it and start coming to grips with that.

Stop, Youth!

I have the bones of a plot. Trouble with sharing it is, it is easy to list "they go here, they do that" but it doesn't capture the reasons that place and that activity are going into the plot. Theme and pacing and the hidden structure that makes a story out of an event are much harder to put on paper in this way.

This is why writers seem to go out of their way to collect silly-sounding terms, and keep waving them around. Thing is, when I say "I chose a three-act structure" that is not just descriptive of the form, it is also documentation of a process; that I am saying I considered and rejected "save the cat" and "heroes journey" and a number of other structural/analytical frameworks.

So I need this, as I am working through plans and notes. I can't write out the entire thing every time I want to ask myself "do I want to do A or would B work better"; I have to have short-hand methods of describing the parts I am trying to fit.

Well, this one is original with me. "Stop, Youth!" doesn't describe the whole plot. It describes a plot where there is a sharp turn, a specific sort of sharp turn.

It comes out of the second Lensman book. Kinnison has defeated Boskone, saved humanity, and is strolling into the sunset with the girl. Then Mentor of Arisia stops him dead with a telepathic warning. Turns out "Boskone" was just one face of the vastly larger and more deadly Eddore, and Kim has just burned every link, every clue he had towards finding the real enemy. A real enemy who, by the way, just saw them using the super-weapon that ended the last book, and can now reverse-engineer their own...

I had wanted to make an arc that points down for most of the book, but for various structural reasons instead I have an upturn. An interlude that lasts far too long to be called a Hope Spot.

***

So caveats given, here's the nascent outline:

Part I: Penny is at Field School in the London area but everything is going wrong. She's not gaining the contacts and professional experience she so desperately wants and she's going broke, too. So lots of down and out in London stuff, street views of living London, and of course stuff on the practicalities of Archaeology as a career and the actual process of an investigation.

Part II: someone she met on the previous adventure shows up and now there is an enemy that is a little more obvious and basically everything is a little less serious. So a romp through dead parrots and Roman re-enactors and the New Old Globe and even Pantomime. Culminating in a real fight with fake swords.

Part III: a rescue dig in the subways. A real chance for real experience and camaraderie...and then it goes bad in a flash with violence that can't be faced with a costume and a quip. And this is where I really have fun with underground London.

And, actually, they are all interwoven. She's still down and out through most of it, just she has increasingly better living arrangements available. The reality and the reality of violence is under the surface through the Dead Parrot stuff. And the rescue dig came in about half way through that sequence.

So, yeah. It is ALL getting in there. I'm still at about 60K worth of plot so there's more to play with here but having that long "comic interlude" and then the sudden "stop, youth" moment as the sharp turn into the pit lets me get the coins, Romans, metal detectors, wartime London, field school, theatre and all in there.

***

But there's another thing. Another thing that makes this slow going.

This plot is going to some dark places. There is violence, and a strong undercurrent of sexual violence. I'm uncomfortable with it, and uncomfortable thinking I'm going to be putting it in front of other people. So this is even worse than feeling my research is not good enough, my characters are not believable, my dialog is unrealistic, I'm culturally appropriating all over the place and I'm basically not a good writer.

Basically, I can only work for a few hours, then I have to put it aside until I can work up the courage and confidence to go back to it.

Would help a hell of a lot if I had more sales. I'm entirely within my personal predictions; lifetime sales of around a hundred, meaning 2-3 a month, meaning the first month can go by without a single book getting sold. At least my KPP page count is still there. The algorithm is opaque (apparently genre changes the "pages read" that the algo generates) but my best estimates still say there are more pages read then there are in the book. So that's a good sign.

***

Reading list time. I wanted to outline as much as possible before hitting research so the research pool was smaller. I really do have to do some general reading about what is under London, though. And browse through some materials on theatre, especially pantomime.

Dad Read

One of the things you do as you are writing -- and especially as you are editing -- is to try to read through the text as if you were coming at it fresh. Or coming at it with certain assumptions.

I read through about half of it assuming I was dad. He decided life was too short to get distracted by smart phones and social media and all that rot and I can't say he is wrong.

Heck, I'm not exactly up on all that myself, but I was trying to write from the experience of a younger person who is extremely comfortable in the digital world. It's built in to the concept. Penny is a YouTube personality and that is a key part of the plot.

Heck, one of her badass moments is when she says she's going to update her Facebook page (it makes sense in context). And, yes, I know Facebook is way, way old school. That's actually part of the setup for that moment.

So that's the first hurdle. Chapter One, Penny is making a video for her YouTube channel, courtesy of her Patreon supporters. In later scenes she uses the GPS and map app (yes, she talks of apps) to figure out where she is, does some Internet searches on her iPhone using her cellular data plan (complaining all along about how much it was going to end up costing), and even buys train tickets via the Deutsche Bahn site. Oh, and there are selfie sticks all over the Acropolis.

When the plot started rolling, she was in conversation with a would-be influencer whose channel started with unboxing videos (and mentions Fyre Festival in connection with him), and an Internet bad boy who basically rides on online notoriety (a familiar character to even those of us who don't spend a lot of time on Social Media). He also has a lot of sock puppets. And PewDiePie gets name-dropped.

He does in fact have some friends in the nastier corners of the Internet; the chans, Something Awful, even some MGTOWs. She describes a couple of web sites that haven't been blocked in her location in terms of their landing page, and on one of them discovers an (from the context, animated) GIF. She also comments on how damage to one's brand on the internet can be damaging in the real world, and that's not even counting direct financial damage like a DOS attack. Oddly enough, she never mentioned doxxing. Or Twitter. Although she does make a mention of Russian Hackers.

Way back in Chapter Three there was already a text conversation, with emoticons off her phone and an "eleventy!!!" from her. That same person later gets hold of video taken from a streaming HD camera. And that same person has been responsible for updating Penny's Facebook status as she is completely uninterested in that platform.

So that's the online and social media world. There's also a brief mention of Wikipedia, I think, but that's it for that. I had originally intended that a key photograph was already in the cloud and thus couldn't be destroyed with the phone, but it never came up.

I mentioned a number of posts back how I am tired of the stock hero character who keeps making snarky pop-culture references. I particularly wanted to assume this is an abnormal person who just doesn't get around to mentioning games that much. Because otherwise it would be coming up all the time, especially when I got into action sequences.

I couldn't stop myself completely, though. In Germany she mentions both Wicker Man and The Blues Brothers, specifically in the context of Illinois Nazis. And of course there are numerous references to Indiana Jones (the same kind of blindness is also at work in that, for some reason, nobody in her world seems to have heard of Lara Croft. Otherwise every single conversation she had, the moment she mentioned she was an archaeologist the other person would be making a comment on the size of her guns. Or lack.)

Oh, right. And a name-drop of Topkapi, and oblique references to Marathon Man, Rocky IV, From Russia with Love, Ghostbusters, Harry Potter, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the series) and Hogan's Heroes. And an unattributed quote from Labyrinth and a very subtle reference to The Pirates of the Caribbean as well as paraphrased quote from and oblique reference to The Shining. There's even a quote from 1984.

It probably goes with the territory that Zorba the Greek comes up by name, and 300, BBC's Troy, the 1970's Iphigenia and even Never on Sunday are referenced.

As for games, she describes a figure painted on the outside of a ride at Oktoberfest as looking like Master Chief, during the chase in Venice she makes a throwaway comment about Ezio Auditore, and after the lagoon water has done a number on her stomach she comments she normally has the constitution of The Wasteland Wanderer. She name-drops Doom, Ơblivion horse armor, and makes reference to a "fetch quest."

So there's not that many references Dad won't get. The problem is going to be more understanding the online social world, how someone can make a living being a personality, how the fortunes of a YouTube celebrity can change in a moment. Also, how data connects people to such an extent that looking up bus schedules or opening maps or even keeping track of phone numbers is hardly a thing.

Search results

More weird findings via the Amazon algorithms.

There are a fair number of books that base a thriller plot on something from history. The category lists over 1,500, but there's an unknown amount of crossover with actual Historical Fiction (which also crosses mysteriously with Alternate History and Historical Romance.)

There's some strange code words I've been seeing lately across various genres of adventure story. "Clean" is one. "Language" is another. Apparently it is important enough to some people to at least advertise their books as not crossing certain lines of decorum. Whether this matters to the readers, I do not know.

Another inevitable is the biblical. A substantial number of amateurs dabbling in history do so to dabble in, well, biblical history. The "tells" here are subtler, as you don't even have to go to Dan Brown flirting with the Big Bad Church to put any number of powerful names with Christian associations in your title.

It usually takes a reading of the synopsis, but I've found between title and cover image a mere paragraph into the blurb it becomes quite clear what you are in for. Generally proving the truth of Jesus. Apparently Siddhārtha Gautama doesn't get as many fans.

Well, the main metric I have now for mine is page reads via the Kindle Unlimited/Owners Limited Library programs. Either one person has been reading a couple of chapters every night and is up to the meeting in Padua, or eighty-five people looked at page one and stopped there. Or any point in between. The Kindle measure is of course taken from their own hidden algorithm and it is difficult to place it exactly in terms of page/word count. They also changed their rules recently, otherwise I'd be getting full cover price already (too many people had been gaming the system with novellas.)

Anyhow, there's good reason I'm working so hard on making it so the series contains more than one book.

Coverage

Just thought I'd collect in one place the process I went through in making a cover for an eBook.

The rest is below the fold because this is a long post.

Trowel Tales

My Marshalltown (trowel) arrived today. Serious archaeologists sharpen theirs.

The author's copies (printed at cost, no mark-up) arrive in two weeks or so.








The Solstice is the 21st and my workplace goes dark from the 20th and doesn't open again this year. That's a lot of time I could have used for something. Instead I took time away from work to upload the novel. And to be sick. There's that.

This morning while visiting Quora I came up with the Parts for the novel I'm outlining. These, like the scene names I used for the last, are entirely internal references and will never be seen client-side.

Fox and Hounds

Prologue
The Show in Which Everything Goes Wrong
Down and Out in Soho
Three Times is Enemy Action
Daleks in the Subway
Yamatai

Yeah, if I wasn't me I'd need a lot of explaining. I don't actually know which are going to end up as numbered parts and which will be internal. There's several emotional revolutions not documented in the part names. I dreamed them up while helping someone outline a YA zombie book and not all my attention was on it.

And, oh yes, everything is finally approved at Amazon. I'm even spending a buck or two on ad space.

Gobble gobble gobble

On the day I uploaded, I woke up to a bit about the Ohlone on the radio. And I knew I had another edit.

In Chapter Three, about 2/5 of the way in, there's this exchange:

"Mound builders?"
"Not intentionally."

I remembered exactly what I had written and where I'd written it and I went right there and changed it to "Not the ones you are thinking of."

That's the level at which I had to deal with the text. I remember everything. And I was dealing with commas and double-spaces.

I'm a wee bit worded out now. Put together the start of a new website and added the first how-to-article to it. Edited my blurb, and my bio. And worked on the London book.

PENNY IS IN ENGLAND, and although parts of it are very old, none of it is merry.  

She’s finding out being a real archaeologist is harder than she thought—particularly when old enemies and an old shame come back to haunt her. 

She’s kicked off the dig, her channel is shut down, and soon she’s penniless in the cold streets of London.  

Then things get interesting. Deep under the streets of the old city, dragged into an ancient mystery and fighting for her life, Penny must come to grips with what it truly means to be the hero she once played. 

This should help a bit in outlining; I'm starting with a clear sense of where the book is going to be. I am committed now that The Fox Knows Many Things is going to be followed by Fox and Hounds.

After that it is still a bit up in the air between Go and Tell That Fox and Sometimes a Fox.

(The fox in question in the latter quote is Napoleon. The fox of the former is Herod!)

And I've already written the first 800 words. It's a stand-alone prologue, that's how I can do it without having to complete the outline first. Only gotta do that again, a mere hundred times more....

The prologue's about Doggerland. Why do you ask?

Harry Potter and the Formatted POD

I picked up a Bloomsbury edition -- in London's Heathrow -- of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Not "Sorcerer's," you bloody parochial classics-deprived Yanks!

Sorry. Getting in some practice.

Turns out the POD (Print-On-Demand) publisher I'm using doesn't do pocketbooks. It's been rather a struggle to understand the terminology. Everyone wants to talk about "paperbacks" and "trade paperbacks" and even though they sound like they are talking about the basic, you know, paperback book, they are actually talking about the larger sizes typically used for non-fiction.

In any case, the smallest I can print is the size of that Harry Potter book that's right now sitting on my desk as reference. 5.06" by 7.81", that is.

The eBook is live. I've started on the Amazon Author page and my own WordPress writer page. PDF conversion is done -- painful; there's no way to transfer the minutia of settings in Scrivener so I had to flip back and forth between formats transferring everything manually.

Turns out the mechanics of trim and bleed are pretty simple. Amazon will calculate it for you from your uploaded PDF (333 pages, cream paper, black and white with matte-finish color cover) and generate a to-scale template. Since Gimp is fully WSYWIG, I know anything exported from there will have the correct dpi and all that (just have to remember to collapse all fonts).

And once everything is approved and live, and I have the various social media presence objects properly built, I'll hit the publicity engine with some promotional sales and advertising.

Wrong Lever, Kronk!

My head is splitting. Some of that is the head cold.

I did the small edits, then crawled through the entire manuscript looking for bad dialog punctuation and doubled spaces. Don't know how ProWritingAid missed those last ones.

Uploaded all of the files to KDP. All that is left now is to hit the button and the book will be made available at Amazon.

Print is going to take a little longer. I have to make camera-ready text and a correct-to-the-bleed paperback cover.

There's also advertising and promos to consider.

And second thoughts. Do I want to change that one word? How is the new blurb working? Should there be more front matter? Is the cover too dark?

So much, I just had to guess where it was going to be when it all came together. That's the fun part of projects; when that much time is invested, there are early forks in the road that it simply isn't plausible to go back to.

The Fox Knows Many Things

And this fox's brain is starting to hurt.

Or maybe that's the sinuses. The pot is mostly rendered. The dirty secret to 3d art is the endless round of render, tweak, render again. As the final render series is over 4K pixels, those are long renders. Built the Mauser ammo and dipped into the appropriately named Bullet physics engine to drop a pile of them on the ground. Poser11 continues to not play nicely with the spherical world map function; first IBL/HDRI light map didn't work properly, and now the reflections look like shit. Something has changed. I've been doing reflection maps since Poser9 at least.

At least I've learned; to render in lighting layers so I can fix them in the final comp, and to let small stuff go if I am confident I can fix it with a paint brush a lot faster than I can fix it in the 3D scene. (No examples will be forthcoming. I have some stuff at a...different...graphic sharing site under a different name.)

I mocked up the cover with all the words and other graphics (well, waiting on the final renders), read up on fonts, wrote the blurb, put my data into Kindle Direct Publishing, and started an author's web site.

There's a lot of work in packaging a book. On the book itself, I need to do a couple small edit passes, including one looking just at closing quotation marks to make sure my various softwares didn't monkey up the capitalization on dialogue attributions. ("I'm not angry!" she shouted, but, "I'm out of here." He left the room.) And make sure I've set all the flags correctly so scene and chapter breaks come where they belong.

The blurb needs to be edited and there are some other bits and pieces that need to get added to the full text that shows up on the Kindle page. And I have to take another pass with Rocket at categories and keywords -- especially since I am going KDP Select and I have some additional keywords I can plug in.

The final assembly of the cover, of course. And then once the eBook is completed, go through the formatting and cover art stage again to get the paperback version into the shop.

And there's the usual mess of bio, picture...advertising, publicity, links...

Oh, yeah. And I really want to have another book in the store as soon as possible. I really should have started this with something other than Athena Fox. Because I know better now what I need to plan and outline a novel, and the Athena Fox series is constrained to stay in more-or-less the real world and be as accurate as I can afford about it. I could knock out two volumes of The Tiki Stars in less time than it would take to complete the London research for Fox and Hounds. And that's not even counting taking a research trip of my own out there.

Especially attractive if I could come up with the five hundred quid to "volunteer" at an archaeological dig whilst I was there...

What deaf banjo player gives Max Planck quartz?

I guess I've decided this is the cheap book. That is; not worth hiring editor or cover artist.

Well, not that cheap. But I'm hoping this is amortization. Get the tools, learn the stuff about cover design and so forth now, and then the next book it won't be a problem.

As long as I make December. And my new stretch goal is to have prints delivered by Jan 1. No pressure!

So.

I knew this way back, when I was still aiming for trad publishing, and sending off loads of short stories to the magazines. The best way to make money as a writer is to make money off writers.

This got really clear when I listened through a podcast on cover design. Which turned out to be basically an advertisement for the podcaster's course series, meaning the entire thing was pushing courses like the one that they were sort of but not really previewing here by interviewing a guy about his course and book, which does actually have some advice but is just as much an advertisement for his book-cover creation business.

Okay. It felt more Inception than it was. Still, I did feel several shells deep in the effort to actually get at useful information.

Once again, I've discovered the problem of being a fast learner. I quickly move to the "gifted amateur" stage but it is hard to find the resources to move up from there. Top-level searches and resources with wide circulation are inevitably aimed towards the first-time learner. At least for some things, past the transition hump are the serious resources. Which are usually serious money and time -- this is a good reflection of how "jack of all trades, master of none" works out with real subjects.

Come to think, Penny has the same problem. I should put this in the next book.

So there are a zillion tutorials on how to, kludge something up in PhotoShop. Rather fewer on useful techniques and pointers once you've gotten past "how to turn it on and what a layer is."

Anyhow, right now I'm trying to learn a little about fonts. Hours of podcasts, tens of pages, and one full book purchased and read and I have enough actual solid useful advice to fill maybe two typewritten pages. Double-spaced.

 Actually, assuming the more decorative design fonts actually work and don't distract too much from the total design, the main thing I got out of searching a bunch of fonts sorted by keywords was a desire to write the stories/settings that went with some of those fonts. Like, ooh, I want to do a story involving Celtic Britain so I can use that font in the title!

And the calyx is in renders. More adventures there. I am tempted to open Poser9, despite the broken Flash (Aaaah!) problem. Because I just can not get IBL -- HDRI lighting -- to work properly in Poser11. And apparently it doesn't work at all in the Superfly render engine, or so forums tell me.

Of course I'd already seen the problem coming. Red-figure Attic ware means large parts of the body of the pot are black. Especially the sides, if I am framing the central image. And I'm doing it against a black background.

I reversed the artwork, though, and I didn't really care for the black-figure look. Not for any connotations; just because so much red pottery just didn't look right in the composition.

So a couple of tweaks to go, then I'll render three to five layers. Since the light shaft is so hard to control, both the top light and the associated atmospheric effect (the "god ray") will be rendered on a black image. That light will be removed from the main color render. I might do the rim light as a separate layer as well. For that matter, it might be safer and easier to do a reflection layer separate (I mashed together some free pictures to make a semi-spherical "tholos interior."

And haven't decided if the bullets are going to be in this. I don't want to diffuse the focus but I also want something that says "action" -- a pot doesn't. And then back again to render a trowel for the back cover. (8×57mm IS rounds, since the appropriate rifle is an FN Model 24).

And, yeah. Back when I thought of using a pot instead of the Parthenon against mysterious brooding clouds, or a stock photo in a leather jacket running away from something out of frame, I was using artifact-based titles. I was amused by the idea of continuing to have the contemporary character and appropriate scenes showing up in ancient art; as the stamped image on a Roman coin for the story that was going to be called The Aurelius Dupondius, for instance.

Incidentally, for those that have forgotten, this is the image that is being referenced, both in the art and in the actual story:

Probably better than a paste-up of stock photos. We'll see. Here's the kind of covers you tend to see if you pop "thriller" and "history" into the Kindle search engine: some good. Some...not so good.