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.
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