Done

I am so done with editing. Heinlein said never to revise except under orders of an editor. I wouldn't go that far. I just can't deal with this one any more.

So I'm running the pages with the most changes through the spell/grammar checker. And then putting the revised text back up on Kindle.

Because I really need to work on the next one. Ones. Probably still the London book.

But I've moved the Military SF one to a front burner to simmer. I think I need to hit my Jason Covalito now. And that may lead me towards other references on the evolution of the horror genre. Which I'll somehow work in around the rest of my research.

Such as, if I'm going to be having a lot of locals talking like locals talk, then I should maybe sit down with a few seasons of Eastenders.

Can't even

The Battersea Power Station would be wonderful for a chapter I want in the London Book. Except, the Battersea in 2012 -- before the current consortium moved in and actually started construction.

Similarly, Aldwych Tube Station is almost perfect. Except for some major details I'd have to change.

And sure, why not? The point is to have fun with history and place. You want a chase scene across Tower Bridge or a sword fight on the Tower Greens, despite the fact that in the real world the Beefeaters would break it up instantly and the rest of the book would be about how much fun jail is.

And I need to put in more action. I need to get more exciting with history. I need to cross that line and have archaeological mysteries and interesting discoveries that aren't, quite, legit and mainstream.

That's not a slippery slope, though. That's a greased ramp on a C130 in flight.

***

Editing is not going well. Sure, I'm seeing lots of stuff I could clean up, or at least try to do better. Just this morning I threw out the second paragraph of the entire book and rewrote it almost from scratch. It gets better, but the sentence structure and basic narrative voice in the first half is, well, horrible.

But it feels pointless. The response from all the beta readers has been, "Hmm." Not positive. No. And same indicators from clicks and page downloads.

On that evidence I'd say this was a failure. The idea for the book didn't pan out. There's no point in even thinking about a sequel.

So write something else? Well, if I missed so badly on this, then doesn't that mean my instincts suck? Maybe not, but there's that general depression and doubt that makes all the ideas and half-starts in my files look thin and trite. I don't feel as if I can write any of them.

A book -- any creative idea -- takes on a life of its own. By which I mean it has a sort of strange integrity about it. A sum greater than the original parts. There is a sense of what fits and what doesn't. And I've lost that sense. I no longer feel like I have grasp of this whole to which adjustments can be made. Instead all my ideas are floating as fragments no bigger than themselves.

But I'm reading another "archaeological thriller." And I've read others. And I know the form, and I know what is in it. And I have to believe that what I created looks similar.

And that there is a market for it.

Why is that watermelon there?

When you read a book, there will be things you don't understand. I know, it's a broken record. But I keep coming back to this because it matters.

Some of these things are within the world of the book. Why this person did something. What happened to the mouse. Others are external to that world; quotes, allusions, references.

We can subdivide the latter further; at one ends, there is that which is visible and that the reader understands. For anyone of my generation, any variation on, "Luke, I am your father" is going to be noticed, recognized, and understood. Despite the diminished place of the classics today, a reference to a Trojan Horse is still strong enough one can make it with little supporting detail.

Then there are allusions which are visible but not understood. Something sounds significant or like a quote, but they don't recognize the reference. For me, it was "Yngvy is a louse!" as it appeared in Fallen Angels. I simply hadn't read the right book yet.

(Thing is, the idea of not getting it is embedded in the very fabric of that book; it is about obsessive science fiction and fantasy fans using their knowledge as shibboleths to communicate under the noses of an oppressive future government.)

And finally there are allusions which aren't visible at all. Nothing stands out to that reader, at least not this time. I had this experience reading The Stars My Destination; I'd completely missed the Count of Monte Cristo thing, for instance. Finding these is one of the delights in coming back to a book years later, and discovering things you had totally missed.



Obviously this isn't just allusions. This goes for all sorts of references, quotes, historical persons, whatever. Say, a Huck Finn looking Mississippi boy named "Sam," who hopes to one day be a riverboat pilot. Okay, that should be obvious to most people.

It should be obvious that if the reader who gets it feels clever, it is because it wasn't easy. And if it isn't easy, then some readers wont. So getting some and knowing you are missing some is inevitable. Possibly even desirable; you feel smart for getting the ones you did get, and fairly tested by the ones you didn't.

***

A big problem is when these are plot-critical. They should never be plot critical. You should never have the reader told the hero has "Learned what Luke had learned" and then base the entire last third of the book on the implied nature of his relationship with the Darth Vader equivalent.

The thing is, how can the reader know they won't be? The biggest risk here is not when the reader never notices, but when the reader spots something, doesn't understand it, knows it has meaning that they didn't grasp, and agonizes that they won't be able to take in the story properly without it.

They should trust the writer, really. They should be able to trust that the reader will never play games with plot-critical information. If it is necessary to understand the story, it will be in plain language. But for some reason the reader doesn't always do so.

And this is where the allusions and quotes and so forth become a problem. The reader knows information is being withheld from them. Not from the "readers of the book" generically, but THEM. This specific reader, who doesn't like the same pop songs as the writer and the writer's little circle of friends and thus is being cut out of something important. The writer is so into sharing their esoteric knowledge with their fan club they are cutting the reader out of their ability to enjoy.

Not saying this can't happen. But why is this the default assumption of so many readers?

My guess at this moment is this is exactly why there are shibboleths. It is about the importance of defining group identity. The reader in question has cultivated that sense of "belongs in my group/doesn't belong in my group" and is quick to identify what they think is an attempt to test them, to ask them for a password, to litmus test them. They expect gate-keeping. They expect a book to be written to exclude them.

But, you know, they aren't entirely wrong.

And that's why I singled out Fallen Angels above. It is in large part a masturbatory exercise in making the facile "Fans are Slans" (another shibboleth) meaningful in a larger (if invented) context. It is a big signal saying, "If you don't know 'There will come soft rains' then you aren't the audience for this book."

***

There is in fact this sort of gate-keeping going on in genre. A better way of looking at it, though, is as contract with the reader. It isn't specifically about undefined terms and unfamiliar words but that is how the outside may perceive it.

Science Fiction, and fantasy, have built up legacies of tropes and assumptions and terms. As much as people are complaining about it now, for instance, the term "chainmail" is going to be instantly recognized by an experienced reader. They will form an image, an idea, in their minds, and this saves the writer a great deal of effort.

Because you really can't explain everything. Sure, you could create a future world in which the equivalent niches of teleportation and robots and so on are filled by things that are distinctly different enough to need explanation and probably deserve their own names. It can be done, but it is a very different book than one that gets right to the action.

And a similar effect is in certain areas of historical fiction. If you aren't recognizing typical words used to describe a Regency setting, perhaps you shouldn't be picking up book nine of a twelve-volume Regency Romance.

It gets weirder with, say, the military SF branch of modern science fiction, where certain things are simply assumed and let stood, regardless of whether they make sense outside of the genre. Accept that not just faster-than-light travel but communication is possible, that infantry (with only the barest nod towards combined arms) will continue to rule the battlefield, and nukes are mostly a nuisance. Accept powered armor is a good idea and has no insurmountable technical challenges. Or find something different to read.

When you do dive into an unfamiliar genre, you hopefully do so with a humble acceptance that the problem isn't with the writer, or with the genre they are writing to and the norms of that form, but with you. That this is going to be hard going until you've learned the basics.

***

There's a couple of other sneaky aspects to this. One is domain; as touched on above, you feel stupid if your experience is in the wrong domain. Again I think this says more about the reader than the writer, but since the writer works to define the domain for the prospective reader...

The first book of Stross' Laundry series opens with some computer geek references. This is fair warning of one domain; that you are going to get more out of the book if you have a certain bias towards programming/computer lingo and humor, as well as retro-computing and a couple of associated things.



For me, I suspect I flew right over the references to British pop-culture that were also there. It wasn't until I was in the third book when I spotted enough of them to realize they had been all over the landscape. So this is something that could have been a barrier; I could have spotted these too early and been convinced that I wasn't the audience for these books.

The other sneaky factor is that as writers our ability to understand the reader's experience is limited. What I mean in this specific is you hear from people who are on networks with you and thus share similar interests.

YouTube, and Quora, are two gathering-places that reach somewhat outside my usual cultural haunts. Just recognize that there is a super-culture of online/English literate and other, much more subtle gatekeeping going on; algorithms working in the dark to put you in places where you feel at home.

My experience there is both tossing out and encountering from other users what are clearly quotes. On a YouTube comment thread about something not even computer related was something like, "I have no moose but I must scream." And the upvotes said I wasn't the only person to recognize the Harlan Ellison quote. Elsewhere, I did a terrible paraphrase of a line from The Tempest and I got upvotes for it.

And this is the sort of self-filtering we get. It is easy to see that there are people who will get it. Whatever "it" is. What you can't tell is what that proportion is.

***

So is this a problem of writing, or a problem of marketing? Everyone has their own personal limit as to how much they are willing to have to learn on the fly as they read. My own line is somewhere around Eco and Robert Shea; I'm willing to read the truly dense and crazy, but I'd prefer to read something more comfortable. Actually, I'd say Joyce is right over that line for me. I may tackle it some day, is what I am saying.

I can't say this isn't domain specific because I suspect it is. It took me a long time to learn the trick of reading history. I've read fantasy and SF for so long I don't even think about the process. But I am not a terribly active mystery reader. The kinds of things you are supposed to be actively trying to understand in a mystery are things I am not focused on.

Show me a weird term in an SF book and I'll be happy to worry away at it until it finally gets defined. But show me suspicious behavior by a suspect and I'm content to sit back and let the detective figure it out for me.

The point I'm laboriously crabbing towards is this isn't something I'm dealing with in the book I'm editing. Well, not just that book. It is something I need to understand for any book I set out to write.

And it can't be put as simply as "putting too much in" or other such litmus tests. You can't define "too much" -- you can't even define what is a thing! Is Sacre Coure too much? Is Montmarte? Is the Eiffel Tower? Is Paris? If you are writing milSF, can you assume rank structures and ideas like NCO, PT, and Hurry Up and Wait don't need explanation, but kinetic energy is a pill the audience can't swallow?

How can you determine the domains that will be perceived by a reader as a barrier, and when do you actually want to accept those as barriers? Because like it or not, every genre has and needs a language and an assumed truth and you can't make a book serve all readers without making it serve all of them poorly.

I don't know. I do know why the watermelon was there...two different reasons, one internal to the text, the other external (and the second I find more interesting). And this example, too, forms a sort of test. Because the audience that was right for that movie responded positively to the watermelon -- even though it is never explained within the confines of the movie itself.

(There is an argument here that Buckaroo Banzai was specifically placed in that mythic space where it is staged as if it comes out of an existing canon already familiar to the audience. The first Star Trek movie demonstrated this on a canon and a fandom that did exist. The Road Warrior did this really well, although I am not sure it intended to -- it may have been a side effect of the Western template and general mythologizing within that particular script.)

(And can you tell I am now at Volume Six of The Tardis Eruditorium? Yeah. Post-post-post literary analysis of the evolution of Doctor Who in a psycho-geographic mode. Say that five times fast!)

At the moment, though, all I can say is that I'd rather have the history in my "Athena Fox" stories and try to find the audience for that, then gate-keep myself by taking out whatever makes them distinct.

So, actually

Some of these are sort of like that.

Yeah. ProWritingAid is flagging a lot of weak language. I was already aware of the missing commas and, on the other hand, comma splices, and the "tee-up" particles "like, actually, so," and so on.

And I'm fine with it. Really. I'm 2/3 of the way through a SECOND grammar and spell check (boy, am I tired of this book now) and the software keeps nattering at me about them, but I am fine. Really.

Because these are all good verbal tics for my narrator. Better than that, these are verbal tics that she can progressively lose as she gains confidence and poise through the series. She can use more certain language. More direct language.

Although I'd love to send her to Japan next and expose her to the whole idea of polite language and the weird way future tense echoes feminine speech. There isn't exactly a future tense in Japanese. There is a "It hasn't happened yet so we aren't sure how it is going to go" tense. And that's very similar to the "I'm just a poor woman who isn't certain of her facts" mode. Which is sort of related to polite speech, except polite speech is more about using flattering language on your superiors, the longer and more elaborate verb forms, and various bit of indirection; you don't say, "This is my friend Bob" you say, "Over in that direction is a person named Bob."

Sort of. I'm distorting things to make a point. Even if I've forgotten what the point it.

I also watched a few videos on "not like other girls" and similar harmful ways female characters are being written and portrayed. I missed here, too. Of course. I wrote my protagonist to be comfortable with her appearance (and sexuality). She sees no problem with caring about her appearance and liking to dress up and she doesn't consider that this has damn all with her equal willingness to rough-house and rock climb and all that.

Trouble is, the book didn't give her enough of a chance to show this. So instead there are just bits that stick out...in the middle of something seemingly unrelated she's suddenly gushing about shoes or worrying about her hair. I'm afraid it looks weird.

One more thing I hope I can do better in the London book.

F, as in Johann Sebastian Bach

I got to the last page of grammar check. And then my dad turns in his notes.

Some of them are very dad notes. Which is to say they are the sort of thing I would have thought of, and worried endlessly about. The difference...the reason I have a book and he doesn't...is that I can after enough effort put them aside.

I have a "leg clad in lederhosen" at one moment and he worried about the fact that lederhosen only reach the knee. So is "leg" the right word, or should you say "thigh?"

Yeah, this is the sort of thing that would make me pause in the middle of writing a scene. But it is also the sort of thing I know doesn't matter to anyone but me.

Of course this is one of the biggest conundrums for a writer. You see the story from the inside. So you worry endlessly about justifying and explaining things that the reader will usually take for granted or not even notice are happening. Meanwhile the reader is worrying about things which are so obvious to you that you never thought they needed explanation...

Then he has to note that in German, the musical note we call "B," they call "H" (which is how Johann Sebastian was able to compose a tune around his own surname). This is, mind you, after giving me grief for putting too much in; too much detail, too many obscure things.

The context here is I have a character named Sharpe. That was entirely setup for a third act joke. And he was always going to have a stuck-up name anyhow, but making him Edward E. Sharpe let me make another joke about enharmonics; on the piano, E sharp is the same note as F natural, just as F flat is the same note as E natural. (They are actually different notes in theory, which is why the Germans use B for B flat and H for B.)

But no way that would go in the book. Heck, on the draft he saw, someone else nicknames the guy B flat -- the current draft changes it to F natural.

***

Dad gave me several useful notes which I've folded right in. These are largely places he read too fast and stumbled, but that's fine. I'd rather catch the stumblers than demand all the readers pay perfect attention.

He's also, though, opened my mind to some structural changes. As has the Writing Excuses podcast I was listening to at work today.

Big one being not frightening the horses -- I mean, first readers. The podcast put this in context; within the Kindle ecosystem, a lot of potential readers are going to pick up the first first pages for free to see if they like the book.

Well, the first few pages include one of the toughest info-dumps in the book. Or at least what looks like an info-dump. Either way, it can be heavy reading. It's the lecture on top the Acropolis, and Penny doesn't do this sort of thing again until the book is over half way done. But it sets up an expectation that the whole thing is going to be heavier weather than it really is.

So I simply need to savage the thing even more. That scene is doing three jobs; it is scene-setting Athens and the Classical era, it is showing Penny being working and being competent (nothing worse than starting with your protagonist doing nothing, just waiting for the adventure to start). And it was teeing up things, like the autochthonous origin of Athenians to the Gigantomachy, that will come into play later.

Well, I can screw the latter. I like having things repeat and having layers of resonance but I like having a book purchase more.

***

The other part of what is turning into yet another big edit is thinking about what fills the space. I've ranted before that people don't like description, don't like dialog, don't like mindless action. What exactly does that leave?

I mean, I've been trying to take one of the spices that defines this book and, really, my style out of the thing. I can't just leave a space.

So what I want to try is to punch up the emotion. That goes into dad's notes as well; he had trouble with a couple of transitions and what punches them is not just making the facts clearer, but giving the emotional beat time to breath.

Penny is adjusting far too easily to getting stranded in the middle of Europe. Sure, she is focused on the way out and the text should follow that focus. But this is a place where I need to tell as well as show. I can't just let her emotions be inferred. I need her to own up to them.

So, once again, another edit.

These Rude Mechanicals, who never before now labored in their minds

I've done all the re-writing I can stand. Now is the mechanical work; running the entire thing through ProWritingAid again to catch any new mistakes.

Overall I am happy with that piece of software. It, like several other language tools, leverages an online databased and presumably a learning algorithm. Meaning it has to have an internet connection and it takes it a while to finish scanning a page. Means an edit session takes up most of a day, as there's a significant wait each time a new page is loaded. Which is where I'm finding the time to write this.

(The worst part of this is there is no progress bar. It is finished when it is finished. Many a time I've started editing, only to have new errors belatedly pop in as the algorithms continue to discover them).

But that also means it can handle things that would normally be a flag and laborious check. It recognizes famous names, oft-used quotations, place names, names from history, and foreign words. Some of these are not so easy to look up to verify.

Does mean there's a risk of SpellCheck error. If might have found, for instance, a word in the wrong language and thus failed to flag what is actually a mistake. It seems pretty intelligent about this, though; I've only caught it once or twice trying to fix something unrelated into a song title it thinks it recognizes or something.

Like all good tools, it flags and it lets you decide if you want the correction. The problem I have is that it hates passive tense and always flags it. It also makes some mistakes in dialog punctuation and it also doesn't always pick up idioms that include general-purpose words; I am often finding it marking me for subject-verb agreement on one word out of a compound that is, of course, in proper agreement. So I can't clear all the tags without a lot of extra work.

Fortunately, I'm using it off-line; it recognizes a Scrivener file and will happily open and even save to it, but for safety I aim it at a duplicate and make the actual corrections in the home file.

Maudlin Bedlam

And for a different view:

I had -- have -- too much detail in the early chapters of The Fox Knows Many Things.

There was a reason. These are about being lost in a strange land and not knowing how to do anything and thus having to pay attention to everything. Every sign, every social tic, every overheard word, until you get a grasp of what in heck is going on, how to get food, where to find transport, and how not to make an ass of yourself.

But it still drags, especially if the reader hasn't clued in to why it is there.

I just finished taking a bunch of extraneous details out, from a reference to an old movie to a description of a German breakfast. But that doesn't get at the real problem. It might make it worse.

I've got labored descriptions of fairly banal things. A typical DB train carriage. The Frankfurt airport. I think it would have been stronger to go ahead, have the crazy descriptions, and yes go way outside of the needs of the story, if it could be some of the things out there that are actually fun.

I felt at the mercy of maps and schedules. I couldn't do a scene at Neuschwanstein Castle, Mad King Ludwig's insane Bavarian gingerbread fantasy, more Disney than the Disney Castle inspired by it.

Okay, sure, I was able to juggle so I could go to a middle-ages street fair and even glimpse a little of the joust, and get to Oktoberfest. The former of which I'd been to and had photographs, so easier to write from life. But, really...I got my protagonist all the way to the fancy Frankfurt airport but the plot didn't allow her to reach the concourse. Not even the aging split-flap display, infamous for skipping letters thus announcing flights to "London, Deathrow" and similar.

I could do Piazza San Marcos but I couldn't quite work in the interior of the basilica or even a gondola ride. Much less actually make it down to Rome.

Heck of a Tomb Raider story, really; the deepest she ever got underground was the bottom of a cistern, the closest thing to a high-speed chase was a commute down the autobahn, and the big Artifact at the core of the story...is a clay pot.

But this is what I'm realizing as I plot up the next one. Sure, set-piece scenes are fun; to climb the Eiffel Tower or run with the bulls in Pamplona. But big or small is in the eye of the beholder. You can admire a vintage plane without having to fly it with a bomb on board and two engines on fire. You can go see a show in Bromley as easy as you can take in one in the West End.

Maybe Odysseus isn't the best model for this. Maybe it should be Ulysses. Sure, I did get Penny to get into a fight with a giant. But it seems to me that visiting a museum should be as interesting; as long as it is intriguingly different, insightfully observed...

And not too labored.

Quote Mine cave-in

I still have a couple wrinkles to iron out in the plot of Fox and Hounds (don't like the title, but haven't found a pithy fox quote that fits England.) Research might help, so I'm starting a new book on the so-called British Resistance Organization. I also watched an episode of Dad's Army. And the complete two hours of ITV's Christmas Panto Cinderella, with the usual who's who cast of British celebrities.

Thing is, every other page of the stuff I'm reading now has some pithy quote. Just this morning, in an article on St. Pancras, a quote from Kenneth Clark on the gothic revival; “...is that it produced so little on which our eyes can rest without pain.”

And that was a mild one. The tidbits are bad enough...the man who may have inspired the Napoleon of Crime is buried at Highgate, where I've already been advised to visit and intend to set a scene if I can. That's also a discovery of the morning.

Heck, even a mention of the Cybermen from Doctor Who can't resist describing them as "Quippothic parodies of humanity." No, that's not quotable (although it is pithy), but it does underline the delight in language of the writers I'm reading now.

I probably should have organized my research folders already. There's this gray zone when you haven't quite decided if something going to be in the book but you are already discovering details you will want if it is. Thing is, no matter how you attack it, it bulks up too quickly. Even without the machete edit I'm doing now, you have ten things in the notes for every one that gets into the text...but then you also, as the actual evolving text reveals new needs, have ten new things to look up or at least re-look up for every one that gets safely transferred from your notes.

It is not an exact science.

We have no cats, Kathleen!

I don't know if this is the right edit to do. But I can't look back.

Well, sure, technically I could. I have a saved copy, and the software I'm using allows me to do a line-by-line comparison. What is more accurate is that it doesn't make sense, not to me as a working artist, to do this. I can barely justify the edits I'm making. I can't justify double-thinking them.

And really, these aren't the edits I want to make. I want to focus in, but it can't be done without starting nearly from scratch. I can look back and I can say having a protagonist who knows a lot less out the outset, and who has more wrong ideas she has to unlearn, would be stronger. And to keep things hyper-focused on classical Greece (and some contemporary Greece), even past the point of realism; every name is a classical allusion, for instance.

Sure, I have two ships with names and one is Hermes and the other is Queen Parsisphae but... (and the bar on the Queen is named Metamorphoses...which is a reference not a lot of people are going to get, even if at the end of it I name-drop Circe.)

Thing is, Alexander and Macedon, the Roman Empire, and the Minoans (and Atlantis) are embedded so deeply in the plot as plotted I can't take them out or substitute them. Ariadne and the Atlantis Gallery are too central. The reception scene at the gallery is constructed around an Atlantis story.

It's too much to take out. So instead I'm chopping out the shorter bits. Any time I name-drop a historical incident or a location or a pop culture reference that can be excised without spilling blood, out it goes.

But I'm not replacing them with anything. So what I'm doing in effect is making the the story less rich. And, yes, having that stuff in there was intentional when I did it. I wanted to put across that my protagonist is well-read and that the world refuses to be simple. In fact, in the re-write I actually added a bit about the Frankish Tower, which a Victorian German (Heinrich Schliemann) demolished in his quest to restore the Athenian Acropolis to a Periclesian form.

That interplay and communication between different peoples and nations and periods and beliefs is a core element of the story. So going through and randomly taking out sentences that dared include "Byzantine" is not necessarily an improvement to the manuscript. Heck, I'm even intending to chop out "frustuck" when I get there (there is another reason; it allows me to move the bit to the Berlin novel).

***

I'm on slightly more sure ground with the other edits I'm doing. Basically my sentence structure can be garbage. I am conscious of Penny having a faux-naive voice, and putting on more of an academic/pedantic air when playing Athena Fox, but the narration -- which should straddle both -- slides too often into the merely inefficient or even convoluted.

Just this morning at the cafe -- the only productive part of this particular day -- I took an axe to;

One or two had bits of medieval garb on them. I caught a glimpse of a Mjolnir amulet around one neck. Asatru? Or maybe he was just really excited about the next Avengers movie. The scatter on the tables said they’d arrived before us and had been here long enough to privately celebrate what it was they’d accomplished. 

And replaced it with;

One or two had bits of medieval garb on. I caught a glimpse of a Mjolnir amulet. Pagan? Or maybe he was just really excited about the next Avengers movie. The litter on the tables said they’d arrived before us and had been here long enough for their own private champagne party.

And I'm on an adjective hunt. I had the wind put up me on those after a couple of discussions at Quora about dialogue tags. I'm lopping off every adjective that sticks its head out far enough for me to notice it.

It still isn't good. But I don't have, again, the heart or patience to do the whole thing. I already ran it through grammar check and multiple edit passes and one-and-a-fraction beta readers. I'd rather not create a whole new set of errors that need fixing.

Honestly, I'd rather write the next one. So I'm going to be very happy to get done with this edit and go back to that.

Down the Rabbit Hole

I'm sick, I'm staying in, I'm not up for serious editing so I'm looking at savage reviews of bad books and worse cover art.

It isn't helping my confidence.

I am once again wishing I could retroactively delete my book. Not because I'm embarrassed, per se. It is more about feeling I didn't give good value. Asking someone to read a novel is asking them to give up a chunk of their time and attention. A big chunk, these days.

I wouldn't want to serve bad food or be a poor worker when I'm getting paid (which is why I am home; I could drag myself in but then I'd have to park myself under the heater and get little work done. I'm getting paid hourly. If I can't give them a full hour's work for that pay, I don't want to be there.)

***

The savage edit continues. It is the only way it can work. I sweated these sentences, I sweated the details. I checked spelling, I checked dates, I checked grammar. But the only way I can get some of these excursions and extras out of the big is to chop them out with an axe.

I'm not even bothering to excise them neatly from an otherwise sound paragraph. Instead, out the whole thing goes.

I'm on the worst infection now. The chapter at the museum. Actually, there's less that's extraneous there. The problem it has it that it could have been better in the first place. So this edit is my excuse to try to focus it in more.

The weirdest part of the process is I'm having to edit my protagonist herself. I lived within her. I wrote 80,000 words in her voice. And now I'm gaslighting her; all of a sudden, the story needs to say she doesn't know anything about, say, Mycenaean Greece.

I'm changing the character because the story needs it, and that is a process that peels the plastic face off the robot underneath. After so long trying to make her feel like a person, she's back to words on a page. And that's the most uncomfortable part yet.

Especially because this means everything can now be on the table. Any part of her background or personality, I could stroke through with a pen as I complete this edit.

So I don't feel in control of the book any more. It doesn't feel like a book. It feels like a bunch of words, far too many of which are wrong. And it is only making me more and more feel like deleting the thing entirely.

Kitchen Sink

I'm still clubbing stuff out. I've also re-written a line or two, trying to give Penny a younger voice. Sure, that's part of her experience of Becoming the Mask; as Athena Fox she speaks more like an academic, and as the book progresses the two voices should cross and mingle. Right now, though, it is just lines that don't feel right coming from a 24-year old. At least, one that doesn't immediately appear to be "on the spectrum."

So Konrad Lorenz is gone. As is Rutger Hauer. Two paragraphs worth of stuff about the Minoans. Another paragraph (this one just to tighten up a transition). A few more references I can't think of right now that were not historical or at least not close enough to the theme, or an aging pop-culture reference. The Eagle's Nest is gone, too...although it got replaced by an entire paragraph about The Sound of Music.

I didn't get finished this weekend, though. I'm just up to the chapter at the National Museum of Archaeology. That one is the biggest edit. Not so much because I want to remove extraneous stuff, per se. More that I have figured out ways to focus in more strongly on the themes of the story. On Penny's growing disillusionment with Heinrich Schliemann, learning about the Mycenaeans, and basically being a lot less the person who gets to lecture to the reader and more a person who learns things as the reader learns them.

***

So I got accused of trying to fit everything in. I can see why someone might think that. The experience was almost the other way around. Most of the work was in trying to leave things out. Or trying to find and focus in on the stuff that mattered and needed to be there.

Heck, there's a bit on the ferry where a character pops up to give a talk about sailboats. Is he there because I knew a bunch about sailboats and really wanted to unload it on the reader? Hell no. He's there because Penny is going to have to run one in a few chapters, and she needed the head's up. And so did the reader. And everything he says, I had to look up in order to write that scene.

(One of the few bits of experience I could have brought to the table is my grandfather, who hated the people who motored about instead of sailing and called those tall fishing boat things with the oversized engines "stink pots." But it didn't fit...the best I could do was have Terry mention he doesn't use the motor if he doesn't have to.)

Here's what it is like when I go ahead and put in everything that is running through my head at the moment:

Alice was part of that same drifting set of international playboys as James, traveling corners of the world far from the short-list of hotspots the paparazzi hovered vulture-like around; places where they could smash up things and creatures then retreat back into their vast carelessness (and equally vast reserves of wealth hidden within Matryoshka-doll nests of holding companies and numbered Panamanian bank accounts.)

Okay, I cheated; I did look up the quote from The Great Gatsby. But I knew starting the paragraph roughly what it was and why I wanted it.

Inifinite Trojans

I woke up this morning with the thought of just deleting the book from Kindle. And giving up on that particular series.

No, I wouldn't give up on writing. I just don't feel strongly about that book. I can do some quick fixes but I can't deal with spending a lot of time on it, not when the basic foundation is unsatisfying.

So here's the slightly more productive -- but equally dangerous -- thought for this morning.

I never explained The Odyssey. I mean, I just got through adding in a few details for that reader that somehow hadn't remembered the story of Theseus and the Minotaur. And I took out a lot of the "In Critius" cites and replaced them with "Plato also says."

So why assume the reader knows their Homer?

***

But what is the option? Do I really want to explain the whole story? Sure, it would strengthen the connections I'm making both to Penny and her Odyssey from the Rhine valley back to Athens. And to the story of Schliemann "discovering" the historical Troy.

But the trouble with history is, where do you stop? If I have to explain even one episode of The Odyssey, do I have to explain the basics of the book? Do I then have to context it by explaining the Trojan War? Do I have to explain that in turn by talking about Homer and his time?

This is a sort of inevitable problem. You say, "Alea iacta est" and someone says, "What?" So you explain that Caesar said it. "Caesar who?" "Julius Caesar. You know, the first Emperor of Rome."
"Which Rome?" "Classical Rome, not the modern city..."

Obviously there is always more to say. That's not the point I'm making. The point is how to you find that place where the reader thinks they know enough and thus is comfortable continuing on with the story?

"Your father and I fought in the Clone Wars," Ben Kenobi tells young Luke. That's enough, for that moment, for that conversation. Later, the movies had to visit that time (and royally messed it up.)

So where is the equivalent point in talking about Homer? How much needs to be on the page in order for the reader not to stop, furrow their brow, and reach for a dictionary? If the reader doesn't know of The Illiad, how can you communicate to them that it is okay to skip over it, and it either won't matter much or the important bits will get explained later?

I find this particularly odd because Science Fiction and Fantasy absolutely do this all the time. No writer (well, okay, no writer other than Jack Vance) mentions "Fellbeasts" and then immediately explains all of their biology and habits. Instead, the story creates an empty box. And the reader carries around this box labeled "Fellbeasts"; two chapters later, the reader learns they are found in the Mist Forest. Another chapter, and that they were created during the Mage Wars and can not be killed by iron weapons. So the box is getting filled, bit by bit. And now they have another pair of boxes...what was this "Mage War" you were talking about?

I mean, think of the mystery story. We don't know who killed him. We don't really know a lot. And we are told right up front that the dame with the slinky legs who told us the reader that her husband is dead is lying about a lot of things. There might not even be a body at all!

But, no, you do other genres, and suddenly the reader is all "Portkin, Nebraska? What kind of town is it? Is it on the Federal Highway? How many people live there? Is there a Starbucks?"

Why can't they accept that they aren't going to learn everything, and that there absolutely is no practical way to tell them everything right at the first instant they demand it?

***

Maybe it is better not to mention it at all. I have an episode late in the book where my character is trying to single-hand a small sailing boat across the Aegean. She notices some kind of weird disturbance in the water, perhaps a sort of whirlpool, but in steering away from it finds herself getting far too close to some rocks.

That's how I described that bit to my Boston Latin graduated dad at the pub a few weeks back. "Scylla and Charybdis" he said.

So the reader who didn't know, still doesn't know, and more importantly, isn't left with a question. This really is a better way of doing things if you can.

A lot harder when the point of the scene is a visit to the Acropolis. "There was this old building thing in Greece and it was historically important" really, really isn't going to fly.

Savage red pen

I am not re-writing The Fox Knows Many Things. I am just editing a little.

I smacked over a hundred words out of the first two chapters alone. Entire dialogue exchanges went bye-bye without a moment of regret.

Some of it was trimming the extraneous. Some way mainstreaming so she makes less pop culture and gaming references and more history references. Some of it was dumbing down.

Really. If my dad, who actually studied Latin, and grew up at a time when the Classics were still taught -- if the man who introduced me to alea iacta est was getting lost, then I needed to take some stuff out and explain better what I left in.

Right from the first sentence. No more kernmantle; she's rappelling from a "climbing rope" instead.

So the Oblivion Horse Armor is gone. Master Chief only barely squeaked by, as did Rudger Haur. The entire American Highway system got replaced by a budget airline.

I also put in extra words explaining things like the Minotaur (although why anyone would need clarification...) Hey, in my fanfic I called it by it's proper name, the Asterion, and even name-dropped Taurapsichoreans for that Minoan connection. Of course in the fanfic Atlantis is real. All of them.

Even her swears got a little less dogmatically pantheistic. For that matter, Asatru are no longer mentioned. I'm still on the fence about the veiled John Norman reference one of Vash's online buddies makes, though. Actually, I take it back. Mock medieval is better anyhow. Struck!

The later chapters need a lot less. I was finding my voice and, as far as dumbing things down goes, if they made it that far....

No more horse armor

The book is in print and now the people I approached for a beta read are getting back to me. Well, if it works for game developers...

So I'm going to do a slightly deeper edit this week and upload revised text. No structural changes. All of that work I did during the actual writing (that is, stuff that should have been in the outline) gave it enough thematic structure and development to squeak by.

Yes, it still has nothing to do with the Indiana Jones "go to an exotic land, explore a lost temple, recover alien/ancient technology" story I wanted to write. And it is far from the quick-and-dirty I hoped to write. Using the real world, and trying to do "better" than the usual pseudo-history romp, is way more work than developing an original fantasy world.

Because unlike the fantasy, you have more of an obligation to get it right. Whether the stock fantasy Dwarves are a racist caricature is a thorny question. An Italian from Padua, though...you want to tread lightly.

The first book is still an origin story and those tend to be weak on conflict. After all, the major conflict is, "Will he put on the costume and become a hero?" Um...yeah? It is hard to make a strong conflict out of reluctance. "Cake...or death!" as Eddie Izard would say.

And the way I plotted it, it is largely a travelogue, and half the stuff she does has no payoff in this book. (Like the first episode of the second season of Relic Hunter; at the end of the episode Sydney gets a grappling hook gun. Which is never used in that episode. It is entirely setup for the rest of the season.)

It is even worse because I'm stealthing it a little. It isn't until the last couple chapters that Penny finally realized..."I'm not a globe-trotting adventurer who can speak seven languages. But since I arrived in Athens I've been to Germany and Italy and Greece, traveled by boat and train, and I've been faking my way through hello and thank you in all the local tongues. So...yeah."

Anyhow. The big thing I'm going to try to do is knock out some of the references. There's far too many places where my protagonist points to something the reader isn't familiar with and describes it by comparing to something else the reader might not be familiar with.

At worst case, those are going to move from pop-culture and game references to historical references. Which is at least in character and more in theme.

The Acropolis lecture; trim a couple of the stories (I trimmed it down twice already but it could be shorter.) The Prologue tomb-crawl; take out more names and replace with descriptions, and in general simplify. She's solving a puzzle. The reader doesn't need to be puzzled with her.

I almost took out the Museum of the Agora several times. It only stayed because it described cisterns and black-figure pottery, and name-dropped Alkibiades. It probably should go.

The Atlantis conversation is so tight I don't see an easy way of cutting into it. Could probably name-drop less about the Minoans, though.

The cistern climb, the bouldering terminology needs to cut WAY back.

And, yes, the Oblivion Horse Armor quote is going away.