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At worst case, those are going to move from pop-culture and game references to historical references.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.