Recalibrating Goldilocks

I'm not going to London.

Well, pretty sure.

Instead I'm going to write. I've reached a point where I'm just theorizing in empty space. I need to start putting down text. I need to blow through this thing and see what I learn.

Okay, I think I learned a lot from the last one, and from editing it and reflecting on it and trying to figure out what I need to do better and how to do it. I know I go on a lot about "look and feel," and I haven't changed my mind about how that is subtle and difficult to find. I would love to go to London if it was the only way to get the three precise words that gave a sense of the brown mass of the old Battersea Power Station looming against the overcast sky.

That was the reason to pick things I knew, things I'd done, places I'd been. That hope that I had somewhere that strong sense of the gestalt of a thing. Not necessarily a truth. More like a convincing lie.

Anyhow, there's a Goldilocks zone between not knowing enough to write convincingly about a place or a thing or whatever, and having so much it was a lot of wasted time collecting it. I collected what the signs looked like inside German train stations.

Okay, sure, I did end up with a line in the final novel. Part of a line. "The signage was in German and English and was very good." But, really, I didn't need that line at all. And there's the sneaking suspicion it wouldn't be there if I hadn't looked up the stuff.

So, yeah. I think I've honed my sense for what is going to be in the final manuscript. I've outlined this next book about as much as I intend to, and I've got a basic breakdown of how many words there are actually going to be about certain things.

I'm opening in Bradgate Park, with the field school in session to learn about survey techniques and get a live demonstration of metal detectors. There's going to be some banter and probably a Simon and Garfunkel reference. I need to know if there's a named open meadow and if this really is a dog run and if you can see the folly from there. And that's about it. Two words about trees, three about grass and I already know two of those because I'm doing a gag about wellies; drawn from -- yay! -- personal experience on a parachute jump into Maryland.

And the metal detectors? If it comes up in dialog, a brand, and probably some gaff about how you listen to the signal.

But that's all I need. That's my new Goldilocks zone. I don't need to go there to get enough to sell the scene. I don't need to stroll over the park with Google Maps or whatever. A couple of pictures will do me -- and the rest is character interaction and dialog.

Oh, but this doesn't mean no research. That first scene is about archaeological methods. No; this book is about Penny learning them, but it isn't about teaching the reader them. It will be mostly left off-stage; "We studied all day. That evening at the pub Doug said..." (I'm going to make her run a dig in a later book. That's when it will come up!)

But I still have to read the Excavation chapter in at least one of my books on Archaeology.

(There's a new rant building in me about how the whole "Athena Fox" angle has nothing to do with the story I want to tell about Penny in London, and how it isn't giving me the stories I thought it would. But later.)