Hello darkness my old friend

I've got a plot now.

Might be a wee bit too much in it.

I went into this series with two intentions. First was to be able to play with pseudo-historical materials without lending them further support. The other was to draw from experience and, basically, write something that was fast and didn't take a lot of research.

Well, the first is pretty much a failure. What I am doing instead is talking about history and archaeology, the process and the influence, nay the dialog, it has with the modern world.

So this one, I'm talking about Field School and CRM; about the realities of the Diggers at the front lines of actual excavation, as well as all the barriers against excavation. And also talking about the ways non-archaeologists are interacting with the historical record in ways that are both positive and negative; the metal detector crowd, the urban exploration crowd.

And that's what I mean by a lot of stuff. Field School is what gets Penny to the site of the adventure. Coin Collectors first find the MacGuffin, and Detectorists are involved. And that's why I titled this post with lyrics from Simon and Garfunkle and if you get that, you've been exploring some weird corners yourself.

But that's too staid for the Lara Croft/Nathan Drake side of Penny's alter-ego. So the Detectorists don't have much to do with the plot. Instead it follows urban explorers to get some running and jumping in, chases a HEMA hanger-on to get some swordplay and so forth accomplished (the last book had a slap-fest fist fight. This will be the bladed-weapon equivalent.) And the explorers and the secrets in the earth and the uncovered material from the Blitz and particularly the Underground shelters and, way in the background, the Thames Barrier and the North Sea, all lead towards another urban exploration only this one heading in true Campbell fashion into the Underworld.

On the gripping hand, there's probably no Roman stuff involved, theatre may form a very small part of it, and there's no even that much of typical tourist stuff. Although I'm still trying to come up with an amusing incident to make a trip to the Tower a thing.