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.