The war we have

Four-hundred and nineteen words into the second half of the book and there was a trouble spot.

The idea was, my archaeologists uncover the diary of a young woman who was in the Nine Elms shelter during the London Blitz. Simple enough. She was also friends with an older man who in fact is the officer who caused the "Zero Station" hidden within the shelter to be built.

Yeah, and then I hit the scene where someone opens the diary. So I started building the details. And in the process, I found things I wanted to do. But there was a problem. The timing wasn't working out.

It took three days of basically letting go. Instead of struggling with the ideas and the research and trying to force them to go the way I had intended, of letting the ideas percolate in the back-brain until I was able to move outside the box and see what worked better.

And here's what I've decided. The diary doesn't cover the wartime use of the shelter, up through 1944. It covers only the Blitz.

Once I'd switched firmly to that track, the only problem to solve is how the diary is still down in the shelter after both characters have left the scene. But I can solve that.

At the moment my arbitrary cut-off isn't even all the way through the Blitz; it is Christmas. That in 1941, something-rank-someone (bio still under construction!) vanishes and "Linnet" volunteers for war work a little more exciting than the factory work she'd been doing.

The biggest thing I'm working on right now, though, is how much of the diary will actually be seen. Aside from not wanting to do all the research it would take to really do it right, I don't know why I feel so but I feel it shouldn't take up a lot of my pages. It turns it into a different kind of book. Or something. Instead the diary is one more story going into the mix, and the parallels to Penny's own experience should be soft-pedaled (because they are very much there.)

It is a lot of thematic balancing. I opened with the flooding of Doggerland, and the image of the rising North Sea is running constantly under the text, conflated with invasion and destruction and siege and made concrete in the last chapters when the rains flood the hidden shelter. But running in parallel to that is rising from mere resistance, choosing action, choosing the path of the hero.

Heck, I'd been quoting Shakespeare all along -- have to, it is England, we're visiting the Globe twice, plus it is one more version of the standing joke of this book. Every time Penny quotes, someone else corrects her or shows they know the source better. Anyhow, back in the chapter before the Highgate Cemetery she did a bit of the Hamlet speech; the "whether tis better in the mind to face the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or by taking up arms..."

So it makes sense a poet (an American poet but oh well) found me the focus I needed for not just the diary but the way it interacts with the main plot. And what poet? Can you believe -- Dickinson?

Quick! a sharper rustling!
And this linnet flew!