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.