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.

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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.