Half

Spent the morning touching up the Highgate scene. Took a while to find the right way to start Part III but finished the day with 1,500 words down and the half-way point achieved.

And it looks like no work yet. I could be done with the novel by the end of May if I could hit...about 1,500 words a day. Hm.

***

Japan is next. Sure, I could write something different, but this is working for me at the moment. These are finally turning into the closest thing I'm ever likely to get to quick-and-dirty. And that's half the reason to send Penny to Japan next. To a place she knows nothing about and can't lecture about, and to do an adventure in such a way that she isn't getting lectured at by everyone. Basically all surface textures.

Another reason is I want to change gears. Penny's spending the London book in overcast skies, digging in dirt, being cold and hungry. Basically depressing and very much about being a working stiff. The Japan idea is colorful adventure. Everything pretty -- and everything paid for.

This is also where it fits in her progression. London was the "have to work for everything" one. Japan is the free ride one -- but the free ride that's too easy (it's a plot. Of course it is a plot.)

What do I have in the mix otherwise? It is like the wishlist I started with for London. I got a surprising amount in there, too. Couldn't do Roman reenactors and as I worked got a lot more Blitz-centric (intentionally). Still haven't gotten to the Panto stuff and not sure how that's going to work.

Anyhow. Kyoto, mostly. Extra-scenic and extra-traditional, without being rural. Matsuri of course. Tokyo probably. The Takarazuka, somehow. The old Geisha quarter. The Toei standing set. I'm resisting the temptations this series throws at me to have things fall happenstance into being historical/genre appropriate but I'm willing to play with Ninja in a reproduction Edo-era town.

There's also in my notes somewhere a cult that has their own museum -- there's some stolen antiquities, I think that's how I heard about it -- and the museum is from the description I read a James Bond set sort of place.

I'm sort of off in a bunch of different directions with this one. I have the idea of her having an American otaku girl on the other end of a bluetooth earbud, giving her all sorts of not entirely correct cultural and language advice. I also have idea of Penny realizing the dangerous waters she is in and how easy it is to misread the cues of an unfamiliar culture.

Oh, yeah. And the title is A Fox's Wedding. Which actually refers to weather; when it is raining with the sun out. Connected to kitsune, of course it is. But it seems to hint that romance or some other life change is in the wings and I'd be happier if the title at least seemed to belong...

Last week of vacation?

I've got it down to a routine.

Wake and dress and check the news. Browse Quora over breakfast. Realize I am too ignorant of the world and too bad at writing to think I could write a novel -- and do it just as the post-breakfast lethargy hits.

Watch shows or play games until I can deal with it. Finally get some writing done before bed.

***

Finished Part II Friday night. The Highgate Cemetery scene turned out less involved than I thought it would be. I didn't even get to use any Karl Marx quotes. Then I speed-read the book to date.

The early chapters are a bit too tight and jumbled -- it relaxes more as it goes on. And I'm really going to have to go into that bag of tricks I've been lecturing about on Quora.

The last book was a very linear narrative, but this one is very "meanwhile, back at the ranch." Not only do I need to go back and put in better sign posts for the reader, I need to color-grade the scenes to bring out the contrasts. So at every moment, the reader should be reminded this is a Dalek Dig scene, or an Exploring London scene.

And I'm still tinkering on the breakdowns for Part III.

The paperwork says I need to hit at least 25K -- same length as Part II. The Scapple file had 17 boxes for Part II, which turned into 33 scenes (aka text separated by white space).

The Scapple file has only 15 boxes for Part III. Fortunately, I think they will be generally longer. On the other hand, two of the gray-green boxes above might be getting moved to the top of Part IV.

No, all of these are names for myself. The section names within the Scrivener file are; Nine Days Queen, Encounter at Trafalgar, Imperial Wars, Gasometers, In a Pig’s Ear, Field School Days, The King of Hobbies, Crossrail, The Red Poppies, Remembrance, Nine Elms, The Harp That Once, Sting, The Dalek Dig, About a Degree, Brixton, Platform  9-3/4, Kennington Loop, The Diary, The Guns of November, Losing It, High Noon in Highgate.

Probably not going to show in the final print.

Testing the Dialectic

Finally got over the hump, figured out how to make a scene that worked, completed 2,000 words and brought the novel to almost the middle point.

And this morning has all been in trying to generate a decent map of Highgate Cemetery. I think my google-fu has grown weak.

I remember how searching online used to be. Before the spiders had crawled up and down the web indexing everything, you searched in a dendritic tree. Tentative searches until you could find a hub, then exploring the branches off that hub, working crabwise, hoping you were going to finally stumble upon a webring that had everything.

Root searches have a flaw. I turned up one actual map of notable tombs at Highgate, but it was a copy by a retiree of what is apparently a free map handout from somewhere and there is no explanation. So many hours of trying to track down the names mentioned.

Can you imagine the difficulty in trying to restrict search terms to find a "Scrimgeour "who is actually buried there? If you don't make "Highgate" a required term, the engines fill with Harry Potter. If you do, then the results fill with travel agencies wanting to sell you tickets to go visit the cemetery. And low on the page? More Harry Potter.

This is both a historical novel (apparently BookBub calls them "Present-Past." No, I don't like it either) and an action scene. So I need to know the actual historical person and I need to know what the stone looks like in situ so I can figure out if my characters can take cover behind it.

Well, I have enough stones to make it work. And I've looked at the landscape. Which is really lousy for the kind of action I had contemplated. It is far from clear fields of fire. Plus there really aren't any handy stones lying around. And the place is public and crowded and sneaking weapons in there is a level of ridiculous that's only going to be surpassed by the sword fight I'm going to have among the stalls of the Globe itself.

I'm doing it anyhow. I'm trying to leave strict realism alone because that way leads to boring events.

And the stones aren't lining up at all right. Heck, the one guy I really wanted there (as opposed to the guy everyone expects to be featured), is on the West side. Which is guided tours only and restricted hours. So...it's gonna be more Bullit geography.

(I couldn't find a picture of Karl Marx driving a Ford Mustang GT Fastback, so instead here's a traffic light with, yes, a little picture of Karl Marx for walk. I wonder who is stop? Pick your Austrian School favorite.)

So my week total is off. I'm writing the last chapter of Part II, and before I gave up today put down 800 words of draft on it. Had to stop just as a medieval broadhead spanged off the tomb of Claudia Jones, British black feminist communist and that's a lot of ists. The "beat" isn't happening and I have to go back and find the moment. 

But I have confidence that by the end of the weekend I'll be in planning for the third part of the book. 

Ack ack

Well, that was a failure.

Spent the morning cleaning up and revising some scenes. Then several hours poking around for more information on ATS uniforms and assignments and all that.

After lunch drafted five hundred words. The wrong words. The bit is too much and it drags the flow of the story off. Wrote a brand-new two-hundred word version. And, oops, now I was missing some character beats I really wanted to keep. Spliced and diced and came up with a four-hundred word version that builds on the character beats and doesn't dwell so much on the descriptions.

And realized it was the wrong approach altogether. There shouldn't be a scene there at all. I needed to offload all of those beats into the following scenes.

So that's where I stand now as I break for dinner; 114 words of the current chapter. Which is projected to hit 1200 to 1400.

Okay, the other reason for the break is that means I have to do the Home Guard now. So read up on their uniforms and so on and so forth. I bought a book a while back. Still haven't had time to read more than the opening chapters.

***

Of course. I'm getting better at recognizing block. There are times you just need a break from writing. There are also times when the block is your brain telling you the scene isn't working.

Pity the line at the grocery store wasn't longer. I read as much of one of my books as I could. And watched more of a couple history programs. And took some time off to play Fallout and watch Eureka and that's what I needed.

This morning I was finally able to recognize the scene didn't work and what it was missing. And took a long walk to hammer out new ideas. And now I have a plan. It might not work. But if it does I'll have a much stronger scene than I would otherwise. And if it doesn't? Well, I'll still be ahead because I know I need something, and I've had this scene circulating around long enough so I can grok it.

And I can't help but think of this in terms of the "write it first, then fix" philosophy I've been seeing a lot of people arguing for. Sure; I didn't know the scene was wrong until I tried it. But at the same time, I didn't have to write the whole scene to find out. For me, it would be a waste of time to write the whole book without adjusting as I discovered things, only to throw it all away to try to make a better job with the next draft.

My feeling is, if that's all that's going into your draft, then why not solve it in the outline? You'd have a better grasp with a good outline and it would take less time. I don't think a whole text is a good way to capture all the ideas of a book so you can then look at them analytically and try to shuffle them into a better form.

But maybe that's just me. I'm of the clean-draft philosophy. Of course, it might just mean I'm creating a draft with tighter weaves that is harder to pick apart and re-structure.

Ron's Ron shirt was as bad as Ron himself

Tried to cut a character. Should have been able to.

The reason he is in there is I needed someone to speak dialog that didn't have an agenda to it. The two Geordies are always on the attack, Stu is too often being Serious Stu, and Susan Morris' thing is being quiet.

Thing is, dialog should serve multiple agendas. Having Hanif in there to make the conversations easier for me is a sign that I'm not a very good writer.

***

Plus that's one more character. Sure, there's only one character aside from the narrator who is in over half of the scenes. And the group that ends up on the dig is only four people. (And, yeah, honestly Hanif grew into his own way of looking at things that wasn't quite Tim or Tony or Stu).

That's Tim, Tony, Stu, and Hanif for the digging scenes. Add Susan Morris, Steve, Leslie Cuvier for the field school (there's a Frank but he has two lines and never comes back).

At the Imperial War Museum it is pretty much Mick and Sarah. There were two other women but just for one chapter. On the other hand, they were reenactors so they had two names each.

The thing that really adds to the name count is that Penny and Graham are going around talking to character actors; collectors and clubs and other peculiar people, and they all have names and they are all one-scene wonders so should this count against me? James, Hanif, Derwyn, Jackson, Cynth, Cephrin, Petrichor, Guy, Sahir Ganga Colwyn, Kenny, and I'm sure there will be more.

And I just added Nyovani Brent from the museum and I strongly suspect she's going to bring friends.

Still, this shouldn't be a problem as long as I don't have to have too much of the, "Remember what James said about what Kenny had told us the day we saw Cephrin?"

That and voices. I've given up on doing the voices for this draft. I'll come back around and put the right Geordie-isms and try to clean up the errant Americanisms.

***

And that's another issue. No, not that I'll never get all the distracting and wrong American usages out of a cast who is almost entirely not American. It is that my narrator-protagonist is starting to learn the language. And there isn't space to show her learning that an elevator is called a lift -- instead it just shows up in her narration.

***

So more luck. I've been watching an interesting BBC programme called Blitz Street, where they built two typical houses then blew them up. And I've been streaming various movies and series about wartime London via Amazon, including the amazing Home Fires.

I was doing some spot research to find some appropriate items to be dug up by my characters when YouTube tossed me a Time Team episode in which they dig up a row of flats that were demolished in the Blitz. Perfect! So perfect, I'm just stealing their finds for the book.

***

This has not been a productive weekend. Just before I broke for the night I decided my protagonist is going to have a small emotional breakdown at the dig. Then there's the next episode of Costume Porn to write -- I've decided on an ATS "ack-ack girl" for her, but Mick is going Home Guard this weekend and this is when I introduce the reader to the Aux Unit mythology.

And then a weird two-level conversation. Then a trip out to one of Charles Booth's "vicious, semi-criminal" neighborhoods to look for a hostel she can afford, and the big melt-down.

And then Highgate Park, complete with a ranged-missile duel. So there's a lot to go before I finish Part II. The word count still looks low but I think I might end up in the right place when it is all done.

Really, I've only been writing actual text since the last week of March. Heck, I only had the elevator pitch for the book on the 7th of December. And that's before I took a month off to do an edit of the last book.

So I guess this isn't bad progress. Still, if I didn't go back to work in May I wouldn't really mind...

The map, please

I've reached that point in research I reached during the last book; the point where I find out it is easier to zoom out Google Maps and just spin the globe to the spot I want. The shape of the Thames past Westminster and the loop it makes around the Isle of Dogs is so familiar I can find most of my locations faster by scrolling than I can by typing.

I'm hitting between 1K and 2K a day. For every hour of writing, I'm still spending an hour looking stuff up. But less time, now, contemplating the plot arcs and trying to figure out how to tell the story better.

The poverty arc really isn't working. The Steve arc is in trouble. I'll tinker with those in a bit, though. This morning's work is to cut-and-paste to take the site description from later scenes and move it to a brand-new earlier scene. On re-read the transition was just too abrupt.

And, really, the pacing would feel better if there was another thousand words in Part I. It is a bit crammed with background information and set-up and taking it slowly can't but help.

I haven't gotten around to yanking the previous mention of the Kennington Loop but yesterday I wrote a brand-new scene to Show, not Tell. Not that the Loop itself matters to the story. Nor does the proposed Tootencamden Line, which I got a chance to name-drop in this new scene. The scene also gave me a chance to put a rail fan in the book, so that was all to my advantage.

(Actually, I was going to explain how the Northern Line Extension is going to come off the Loop, but I don't want to set that up as an easy access to the system. I have something more epic planned for the big action scene.)

So the main challenge this morning is to put down enough words to make the scene seem comfortable and un-rushed, and just enough specific detail to give it a sense of verisimilitude without drowning the reader in gasometers and Tesco and cricket grounds and so on.

And then pick up the narrative again with my last big "poverty" scene, where I want to show the inside of a hostel. And that one is the same problem, except the detail I don't want to show too much of...I don't know myself.

Then back to the Imperial War Museum for more costume porn.

Rough Sleeping

Isn't that an amazing map? And it turns out, that strip through Limehouse and Ratcliff is still there on modern maps, except now it includes more of the Isle of Dogs.

But, alas, I really can't follow this up the way I want to. I know there are options beyond hotels and hostels and Air BnB. There are worlds, intersecting worlds of shared rentals and sleeping rough and shelters and St. Mungos and crashing at a friend's.

I'd love to write that book. I'd love to write the book in which the diary of the shopgirl (who is sleeping rough on a railway platform herself) is presented in full-page excerpts.

But that's too much work. Plus I think it might be the wrong kind of book. When you get right down to it, being hungry and having uncomfortable living spaces isn't the story of my heroine, it is a temporary obstacle. She doesn't do without because archaeology really doesn't pay that well and life is hard for everyone. She'll do without because she's lost in the desert while searching for the Golden Orb of Somebody.

The intersect with the past in this one is entirely filtered. It is through study and discovery and exhibits, not through direct experience. As much as in some other book I might have my protagonist re-live the experience of someone in the past (or just set the damn book in that period in the first place), the closest Penny is coming is with a little dress-up and some museum displays.

Besides, her poverty problem is artificial and temporary. She has her plane tickets. She has friends she can borrow from. She most certainly has people she could crash with. The only reason I've got her, in the chapter I'm working on now, taking the tube down to Brixton to look at a poor neighborhood with council estates and all that is to ramp up the pressure on her while I work around to the climax of the book.

Plus I need the page count.

So don't look for a deep look into the realities of being poor in London. This is just going to be enough surface impressions to sell emotional arcs of the story. Nothing on the practicalities of the hostel circuit. Just a bit of dirt and grime and the experience of riding the tube.

Includes Random Items

They actually printed that on the package of a new game. Oh, no, it isn't loot boxes, those are illegal in six countries. It just has extra paid content that includes random items.

FPS players get skilled at shooting opponents in the head. AAA game companies get skilled at shooting themselves in the foot.

***

I've refined my barley-cake recipe and they aren't bad. Especially since I found a tiny jar of maple syrup in the back of the fridge. I also ran out of rolled oats. The only thing I could grab on my last grocery run was, it turns out, toasted oats. So. Turns out if I soak them in honey thinned with hot water, then add finely diced fresh apple and walnut meat from some walnuts I've had in the back of the freezer since my boss made me take them home, it makes for a decent granola.

I did splurge on some ground beef and one night it was excellent with a bit of muenster and dijon mustard and between my last two bits of pita bread. But I'm seriously hurting for variety, for more greens and fruits, and for enough exercise to improve the digestion.

Still don't know if I have a job waiting for me when this is over. If this goes on for another three months, will we transition to an entirely new economy? Well, someone still has to farm...

Had a stretched pizza for an early dinner. Frozen pizza, Mrs Renfrew's diced green chiles, chopped white onion and the last of the muenster.

***

I just finished the first Rivers of London book, and looked at some review excerpts. It has some of the same London Lore I'm working with. But I'm looking at how much he put in and how he handled it.

And answering questions on Quora. I could probably make a book out of them. I'm quite sure a book on writing sells better than any book of writing. But it is the old problem of the difference between knowing how you are supposed to do it and actually being able to do it.

Yeah, so details? I now have one properly handled info-dump. And it still ends up as description and internal narrative. I sent my protagonist into a "Blitz Experience" exhibit dressed as a Volunteer Aid Detachment nurse and with a little kid to rescue. Anything I could put in that little adventure, I took out of the surrounding "Maid and Butler" dialog.

I've also decided a previous lecture is going to get ripped out and put in as a meeting on the Northern Line where a rail fan convinces the team to ride the infamous Kennington Loop. That should make that particular info-dump a little less obnoxious.

All in all, I would be better writing an original world. The idea of sending an obsessed history nut into a town rich with it, and tying the plot to clues hidden in that history, means, well...there's gonna be a lot of history on the page. And it is real history which means it is never simple.

See, there actually is a set of techniques for slipping in the background details. As one tradition puts it, don't have someone explain the hyperdrive. Have it break and have someone need to repair it. But here's the thing; every step you take away from just stopping the action for a Vancian footnote, the more pages it will take (or the less gets communicated.)

The route of the Northern Line Extension is one of those clues; at the climax she's going to (spoilers). But that means I can't just show the reader a subway station, or a guy in a hard hat. I actually have to explain the stops.

Sometimes, my Complicated Book on How to Simplify Your Writing would say, it interrupts the flow of the action least to just have the narrator explain it and get it over with.

I've also been alternating episodes of Chuck and Eureka. In both of them, there is a wealth of amusing background detail. And I'm not sure I even remember now when something that spent more than a minute on screen didn't end up critical to the plot before the episode ended.

(Eureka, I think, cheats. My head canon is that Sheriff Carter is actually a Warhammer 40K Ork. By which I mean, he's shown someone cooking a potato in a microwave, is told microwaves are radio, the new giant radio telescope outside of town detects a killer asteroid "shaped like a potato" and Carter convinces them to super-charge the telescope to blast the asteroid out of the sky. And it works, I am convinced, because he is psychically making it so. Funny thing is, it is obvious the writers know their science. I mean, the science in the show is ridiculous, but then they use a term so correctly I know it wasn't inserted into the script by a consultant but actually grew there.)

Well, maybe when I write the Japan adventure, I can trim out some of the clutter. Plus there are also edits. And beta readers. I am absolutely uploading this to private settings so I can print beta copies.

21K and it is accelerating. Still need to kick it up to 2K a day if I want to finish by the end of the month.

Research Triangle

A modern writer might ask, "What's the point in 'Write what you know' today? Can't you just Google it?"

And it is a fear. We remember the delights of the surprising and the obscure in so many books we had read. We remember having that glimpse into how to fly a plane or who the Hittites were or what a Lighthouse Keeper's life is like. We grew up as writers practicing how to do that; how to tease out those rare plums and then frame them for the reader. Is that all gone now?

I don't think it is.

Because here's the thing. There are still advantages in knowing a subject before you decide it should be in the book and then open that Google search page.

Three things come to mind.

The first is that you know the thing exists. That's not small. I had another "meet for lunch scene" I needed so I set it outside the New Globe theatre. Of course I looked it up, and found pictures, and looked at it on a map, and used the map to find somewhere to sit. But I did this because I already knew there was such a place (I've been there) and it was something that fit in with what I wanted to do with the book and the character.

I've done a lot of blind searches in which I wander around trying to find something interesting to have in a scene or to build the whole scene around. The India Club restaurant is one of those; I didn't know about it. I did, however, know that the most traditional London food there is...is Indian. So I had that head start in knowing where I wanted to look.

The second is you understand your results. When you know something about a subject, you have a better filter. You know what is good data and what is suspect.

You also have an idea of the shape of the box. That gets into the whole difference between a designed educational course and self-study; the latter tends to be blind to its holes. The former makes sure you get a proper survey of all of it.

Knowing something about a subject means you know when your source is only telling you part of the story, and you have to look in other places as well.

And of course, if you already know the subject, you know the resources. Or at least the shape of them. While I was researching the "getting dressed as a VAD nurse" scene I ran into a "Burda 125." I didn't follow it up, but I not only know what it means, I've done that before. How to look in the Burda catalog and how to find a pattern in it from the name or code. The fact that I knew something about the subject made what the Google Search turned up more useful.

The third and last is that when you know something, you have started connecting it in your mind. You know things that are like it. You know things that spring off it. When I wrote a scene with a Venetian busker in a previous book it was based largely on me knowing the operas being quoted. But I also have known buskers. And he has a little amp and I've helped someone buy one for her own performance so I know how that works, too. Not well. There's details I didn't know (but didn't bother to research because they didn't need to be in the book.)

The plumage don't enter into it!

Just finished a monster 2,800 word "scene." Actually, three scenes; I'm lumping several together for ease in editing.

Puts me at about 16K. It is moving more quickly. The research seems to have been about right. I couldn't do it just from the materials I'd copied and saved, but they told me what I was going to do and led me in the right direction to fill in a couple of details.

About James Greathead and Cretaceous clay and the proper way to describe a Norwegian Blue.

It is quite likely when I go through the primary edit passes I'll take a third or more of the various name drops and references out, and then explain better the ones I've left in. Greathead and Brunel matter, for the plot and themes of the book. Monty Python, not so much.

Actually, there's one more text chunk but it will be simple. They are going to get fish and chips near the Tower then watch the first part of the torchlight ceremony.

The following chapter is insane. I'm going to jump over the visit to the Lambeth Larks (my invention) at the Firehouse (my way of referring to an actual Kennington theatre) and head straight for the Imperial War Museum.

Which is dripping with poppies (don't know why those weren't in the previous scene), and otherwise going crazy for Armistice Day, and I haven't even figured out what costume the reenactor group is talking my protagonist into.

More research. (My thought is the next weekend she plays an ATS. For this one, some kind of nurse or somebody that would be seen on the streets during the Blitz.)

Monday, she finally gets to do some real archaeology.

I just found a "Dressing as a..." video (from a series I knew about before and always intended to use as reference) for a WW I volunteer nurse. And I found a book written by one of her experiences (same person who wrote National Velvet) Which was free. So...I guess the first costume is going to be a VAD.

And the Tower scene is written. It was just a little 200-word coda.

Remembrance

So basically I'm doing breakdowns now. Which meant opening a full calendar and seeing what day things fall on.

And oops. Remembrance Day is the 11th. So I went back and added a poppy to a previous scene. Talk about Easter Egg, though. There's a coin collector named Kishan. He is not described, although he seems interested in the history of Indian Independence movement. He also is wearing a flower made of red cloth in his lapel.

That would be the Khadi poppy, worn in remembrance of Indian troops who died in World War I. As opposed to any other red poppy in a lapel, without taking notice of the kind of cloth.

Anyhow, basically the novel covers the last three weeks of November, from the 4th to the 24th, with an epilog happening somewhere nebulously after the 29th. And now I know most of what happens on those days.

I know it seems a slapdash way of outlining a novel. But the method is working for me.

***

All this social distancing and hand washing stuff. It is reminding me of something from my paratrooper days.

See, an Army parachute comes in fast. We were taught to roll when we hit the ground so we didn't get hurt. And they trained us a lot on that. Constantly. Every single jump we'd go over it again.

So one of the barracks legends going around was that the Army had done some tests in the 40's where they found out if a soldier did an absolutely perfect PLF -- the Parachute Landing Fall -- they wouldn't even need the parachute.

Unfortunately, you just couldn't get the soldiers to do it perfectly. Not enough of the time. So that's why we still had them. But the Army kept training because they kept hoping.

And that's what I think about all this masks and sanitizers and so on. That someone is saying if people would just do it all perfectly, there wouldn't be a pandemic.

Just do it perfectly. Every one. All the time.

As easy as that.

(What's that you say? You'd have to go outside to get sanitizer and wipes and masks and gloves? On public transport which is now restricted because many of the local stores are closed? When there isn't any in stock and anyhow you can't afford it because you aren't getting a paycheck this month? Yeah. Easy.)

The game's afoot.

I'm at 12,000 words and the plot is being introduced at last.

Research-as-you-go is still a thing. Was prowling around neighborhoods finding a nice restaurant to hold a meeting and the choice -- The India Club -- required watching a YouTube video to understand the "back alley" comments made on a review site.

And I've decided I am fine with silhouette conversations. The bit I'm in now, Kishan, Derwyn, and James are all talking, but nary a one of them will be so much as mentioned after this scene. So I don't care a whit which one is actually speaking.

Sure, they've ended up having character. But the choice I think I need to make for this book is a lot of dialog passages where nobody is named because it isn't important and the reader shouldn't think it is important.

But anyhow. I've gotten through another day of Field School and more arguments and confrontations and visited the statue of I.K. Brunel and we've had tandoori. But now they are ready to talk about the plot.

Except it has been long enough, I have to go back through my notes to look up what the plot is!

10K/2 weeks

Braved the market. The bulk bins are gone and the pre-packaged is much costlier. This is the most I've spent on groceries in one trip since, well, since I moved into this town.

Less than half-way through this and I'm starting to go stir-crazy.

***

Considerably less than half-way through the novel. I'm at 10K right now with a typical productive day of 1,000 words. I would like to do better than that.

I still feel there are too many characters, and there's too many of the concepts being thrown at the reader in the first chapters. But that's not the worst. It feels too tense, moving too abruptly from one thing to another.

I messed around with one of the scenes and put several hundred more words into it just having my protagonist take a breath and think about what she'd just learned. That's a good direction to take. But I'll wait until I see more of the thing in context.

And the dialect stuff is getting really dialed down. With one glaring exception. I absolutely have to put in some dialectic quirks because, again, I have too many characters. There's two stereotypes of the Geordie speech pattern, for instance; using "like" as a sort of punctuation, and using "man" frequently. Which, unfortunately, can as easily come across as a Surfer Dude accent.

Still, that's the sort of thing I could be doing to make the voices more distinct. I'm drowning in attributions already and they are not enough by themselves. Nor can I really sell it by having different people have specific intents or knowledge bases, as none of that is clear enough to the reader yet as to allow them to sort people out by the nuances of what they are saying.

Well, I'm also stopped for the night because I'm loosely outlined. The outline for the next scene say, "Graham and Penny talk to some Detectorists."

Not a word in the outline about how he gets in contact with her, or what he tells her to get her to come along, or what he is hoping to achieve, or who these people are. The sort of thing, that is, that I'd normally be thinking about while at work (or at least in the walk down to work.)

NaNoWriMo approaches really work better when you've got a tight outline.

Boudicea

So I thought about turning Helen and Amy (the two TBM's) around and having them dig towards Battersea. Also thought about renaming them so I could make some remark about barbarians advancing on Londinium.

But I'm willing to go with history. The main things I have to change is to delay the work at the actual Battersea Power Station -- which is very close to but not contiguous with the Battersea Power Station Station (according to sources TfL is already making roundels which read merely "station," but I know some wag is going to stick a superscript "2" on the ones they can reach.)

And of course the original Nine Elms station is being rehabbed to serve a new line...which is probably lower and may be even across the railways or something.

And since I've got so much detail on Kennington Green, now, I'm using the real thing and because of the delays on the Northern Line Extension, I might even be able to use it as it was historically. To the best of my ability to narrow it down, the current (as of today) Google "satellite" image is within a month or two of when my story is technically set! The street view varies, with some of it being before the Acoustic Shed was taken down.

The main difference here is not only is the real Kennington Green very small, the archaeology was completed in June of 2015 and there was nothing of archaeological significance found. Basically, it was Kennington Common, along with the somewhat more fruitful Kennington Park. The only "structure" recorded is a pond, with a ditch running to Vauxhall Creek, and the residents filled it in sometime after 1790.

I'm thinking strongly of giving them some dead space inside the hoarding but outside the acoustical shed, where they can find damn-all but at least train on methods. I presume the Field School had a better idea, but whatever plans they may have made change when they get a chance to work at the old Nine Elms platform.

I still might slow down Amy and Helen, though. In our world they broke through in 19 Nov 2017, but it would give the story an extra kick if I delayed them by exactly one year.

***

In any case Kennington really works for me. I was going to explore part of the neighborhood anyhow because returning character Graham lives there and is going to put Penny up for a week or two. The neighborhood is a crazy-quilt mix of gangs and violence and cricket players and retirees and some extremely expensive housing and it is a gay mecca. So pretty much everything. All sorts of odd history, too.

And oh yeah. Within a year of the story, the police chased down a guy who was carrying what they called a "notched machete" (the picture looks like something from the stupid part of the Museum Replicas catalog) and someone fired a crossbow bolt at the pitch of the Oval during a match.

But besides being colorful, it is experiencing the same forces...a kind of gentrification, really...that is hitting along the entire Northern Line extension. The same forces that are gutting the Battersea Power Station and ripping down the New Covent Garden Flower Market in order to put up million-dollar condos with a mere piffle of low-income housing added to the mix (guaranteed 6.5% but they've changed it at least once already. Pray we do not change it further).

What any of this has to do with archaeology I'm damned if I know. But it is pretty much a success of once again throwing my would-be archaeologist into a situation where historical preservation is just one chip in an ongoing struggle.

A dog's breakfast

Campfire has a new version out. They are being very nice in letting people use the trial version free until the end of April. And they do seem very nice, well-meaning people.

I still quit without bothering to save. I still have my original problem, which is that it is proscriptive. As such, I find it too limiting. I wanted to try to block out my timeline. I started that, then poked into character arcs to see if that would help. Can't start an arc without a character -- well, that lets out the thematic arcs I wanted to chart, or the arc of "what have we figured out in the ongoing mystery." Started a character anyhow, and got stuck again on the "must have A first name and A last name."

Well, damn good thing no Russian novelists are using this, eh? Or to go from the sublime to... well, James Fenimore Cooper, whose "Deerslayer" carries more names than he carries bullets.

Scrapple bothers me in that you can't resize the boxes and even changing the color is a bit kludgy.  There's no useful variation in lines and they can't be labeled, either. But it is enough for now.

***

Spent yesterday planning out Part II of the London book. Part I came in at 8.7 K which is a little light, but on successive re-reads it doesn't feel overwhelming for the reader. Not too many descriptions or facts, very little strange dialects to wade through (much, much less than I expected). A few too many characters, though.

And today...was both curse and, eventually, blessing when it came to nailing down some details.

This is why we do research. Every time one door closes, another opens, as my old Gaffer said. Great guy but terrible cabinet-maker. Anyhow!

There already is a Herne Hill station. It's above-ground, but in any case the actual neighborhood is a bit in the wrong place. I might still use it but there's a bigger problem. See, the construction work at Battersea Power Station is part and parcel of the Northern Line extension off the Kennington Loop.

And a look at the real map and it doesn't make sense to put a station where it crosses the Victoria Line. It really does want to be close to New Covent Garden Market. And, oh yeah, Battersea Power Station Station (yes, really) is pretty much right on site, and the giant shaft and construction lots and etc. were there before the subway got very far because that's where they lowered the TBMs from).

So does this mean I can't have a scene at the deserted power station? And what about the supposed rehab of Nine Elms (the old historical, which is UNDER New Covent Garden Market)?

My plotting doesn't even like the....oh, boy. As I was typing this I saw the answer. It is a doozy. I thought about a low-key infiltration off a surface entrance. Well, the actual Northern Line Extension is deep as heck. It runs under the Victoria Line. But since I'm already sneaking into Battersea, seems like I could revisit and actually get into the tunnels that way...

Anyhow. I was worried about the scale of construction and the high profile of the project, but it works. Not in the "we're working on a little subway thing in the middle of a somewhat down-market suburban area" I'd originally envisioned, but in other ways. Ways that work in to the themes I've been building into this thing all along. I just need to juggle stuff to make them work.

So that's been my morning. Reading articles, watching videos of the construction, reading pdf's of archaeology/geology in the area.

And, well...still haven't narrowed down on what it is the London Field School is offering to their students before they start digging at Nine Elms. I'm close, though. There was a glassworks in Lambeth...somewhere...and a cemetery discovered in the work on the New Covent...that place.

And I think I have it. Pity I already talked about skeletons, but I can have them working in ground that is past the Victorian layer, with the good stuff already out of the hole but at least some stratification to identify as they see if there is...oops, yet another document...an old Roman road.

And, oh. Nine Elms itself is the name of a road that ran from York House (in Lambeth, a bit West of the Imperial War Museum) to Vauxhall. Presumably, back when it actually had a Vaux Hall.

M25 to Potter's Bar

I'm starting slowly to get a sense of London geography. There are so very many districts, and each of course has their own character.

The Imperial War Museum stands at the edge of Elephant and Castle, Kennington sort of southwest of it, then Lambeth, cross the Thames at Lambeth Bridge and you are in Westminster...

So far I'm still not regretting stopping research where I did. I did have to read up on pubs, and more about Crossrail, but I knew where to stop and I was able to get another thousand words down. I'm at 8K with two short scenes left and that's not too far off the target for Part I of 4. (the middle two are the long ones).

And I'm not being as much a stickler. I'm not naming the hotel. I am naming the pub, but it doesn't exist. I've already dealt with having to move the Tower Bridge knife attack back a year, delay the real-world construction at Battersea by 2-4 years, and move Diana back a week and upgrade her to a full North Sea Storm with Tidal Surge. So although I'm in general sticking with the new and generally unliked "upgrades" to the museum, I am comfortable with dragging one exhibit forward in time as well.

I probably don't have to move the Lord Mayor's Show, though. And my protagonist already slept through Guy Fawkes Night. I'm trying to keep this more focused on W.W. II. It's not easy.

***

Oh, and that's another oddity. I've been so used to using Expedia and TripAdvisor and so forth to figure out where hotels are, what museum hours are, basically sanity-check the action I'm writing. Well, I need to figure out how to use those with the Wayback Machine, because what they are spitting at me now is the reduced routes and inflated prices and closed doors of, well, the current pandemic.

***

Coffee arrived, and a new headset. And I discovered bluetooth is a dog's breakfast when it comes to running off a laptop. Spent an hour fighting persistent stutter, and it is still stuck in a lower-quality codec I need Developer tools to fix. And according to forums, this is a cross-platform reality.

On the other hand found a substitute for iTunes that doesn't hog all the system resources and re-arrange your files just for fun. So that's a nice change.

Bread and Circuses

Tried to order a coffee grinder on Amazon. Intelligently, they chose not to ship "non-essential goods" for a period of weeks or months.

Ah, but I could get coffee shipped immediately. And a new pair of headphones -- what with wearing them twelve hours a day both for entertainment and to block out the drunken bellowing from next door, my old ones have peeled through and are quite uncomfortable.

I suspect DVD's and boxed games are also considered "essential goods." GameStop tried that argument too. Didn't work as well for them.

Of course Amazon decided to hand deliver. Separately. Which means two trips, two contacts, two violations of quarantine for stuff that would easily fit in a mailbox. This is one more system that grew up in a different time and isn't managing to adjust to the new paradigm. China, they locked up entire buildings and only permitted one person out to buy food for everyone. We're still having a teenager run pizzas around town.

I want a pizza. I am hurting for meat and veggies. I am going on a no-carb diet when this is over. Oats in the morning, rice at night. Efficient, but...

***

I pushed through the next scenes and am on a new chapter. I am really liking this scheme of researching just enough to get the outline working, then fill in the details as you go. If I hadn't, I would have studied way more stuff about museum conservation. When I hit that chapter is when I figured out how much I could say and how much I needed to leave it off the page.

But my cast has just walked into a pub and that did mean an afternoon of catching up on pub food, pub names, pub etiquette...

And the outline is starting to look thin. It pretty much says, "Field school continues, Penny makes friends but is starting to feel the pressure, also goes around with Graham talking to British Character types like the first half of an Avengers episode" (the one with the bowler hats, not the one with the Hulk).

Edited down to 7.1K and I have enough aluminium-billet ground coffee for just one more cup...

Fourteen hundred words down today. The pub scene is in full swing. Wish it was NaNoWriMo so I had a public place to post my word counts!