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...
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