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.