Queen's Royal Horse

Wrote over a thousand words today.

In a notes file which is now 20,000 words long.

I still haven't solved my plot issue. I mean, this isn't a single plot hole. It isn't really that kind of plotting. As far as getting my protagonist in or out of trouble I have a hundred options.

The problem is doing something that supports the themes of the story. And the problem behind that problem is; what are those themes?

I stopped at one point to look up a little something and, well, that turned into a bit of a problem too.

So I had the thought of doing some stuff with Roman reenactors. Those do exist in England. Possibly (probably) in the London area. But when I did a general search I found a ridiculous amount of historical reenaction. All the way back to mesolithic. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised by the number of Viking groups. I was mildly surprised by the Regency, and more obscure but recent periods. And then there's world wars one and two. The one list I was looking at had a full dozen different groups doing reenaction of German units of the world wars. Two that did American GI's.

So this is a good insight. But it also changes things a bit.

Add to this a sort of problem I was already running into. See, I wanted to have a guy that was into swords and stuff, but of the mall ninja type; lots of posing, no real skills. But England is absolutely lousy with HEMA and HEMA has gotten deadly serious over the last decade or two. Collecting stainless steel show swords you don't even know how to use is probably still a thing, but I don't think it is the rule anymore. That's the 70's.

And that's the weakness of writing from experience. My experiences are more and more out of date.

And that's a pity because that is my major insight of the day. Made before I wrote any of those thousand words in my notes file, of course. That being that going from experience is a way to avoid research glut.

See, there's too much in the first book. But I need the "stuff." What I want to avoid is the detail. I need to get it down to the plums, to the essence, to the precise ideas that are interesting but without going into endless descriptions to get there.

This links to what I was talking about last time. I chose to use the real map and realistic time schedules and so forth. So I couldn't really have my character detour to a Rhine Castle, much less scale the walls (not without some very time consuming legal problems). Which meant I ended up with less interesting places on the map.

As I said, even the stuff that was fun in, say, Frankfurt, the schedule and the realities meant I couldn't get into that stuff. In later chapters, I invented new characters just so I could have dialog instead of internal monolog, and something to do other than look at walls.

But back to the problem. It takes a lot of research before you can get the overall grasp of a thing or subject. By the time you can write that tight little observation that gets to the emotional heart of a thing, you've learned way too much. Like Sam Starfall says, sometimes the less you know, the easier it is to make things up.

I might have been better off thinking of cheesy fake Roman stuff as common and as typical. Instead I see a world that is going to be a lot harder to construct a plot in.

Once I figure out just what that plot is.