Great Klonos' carboalloy claws!

I've reached a very annoying scene.

Over the third part of the book I've been trying to sneak in a parallel story. While Penny is digging with her fellow archaeologists ahead of the construction crews at the old Nine Elms Station, a local paper has been publishing excerpts from the diary written by a young women who sheltered down on the abandoned platform during the Blitz.

I didn't get the parallelism as good as I might have liked. Well, I also didn't like it to be too obvious. Well, the way the scenes shook out for me as I moved from outline to actually fleshing them out, Penny's relationship with her friend Graham is hitting critical points just as Linnet has finally managed to start writing about Captain Wentworth, the man responsible for sticking an Aux Unit depot in the Nine Elms shelter.

And they are bonding over SF. Which was a somewhat late addition on my part. Wentworth is mooning over the glorious last stands of the past, from Rorke's Drift to the Siege of Acre. Linnet, not to be a passive part of the conversation, is coming back with the armageddons of, well, Buck Rogers.

And this is already tough as hell to write because while an educated woman of 1940 -- particularly one that educated largely on pulp magazines -- is a familiar voice to me, quotes within quotes are just not much fun. The scene I'm working on, Penny and Graham are discussing Linnet's latest diary entries where she discusses what she and the Captain talked about and this is less Phillip Nowlan and more Christopher Nolan.

(Cue the Inception sound effect).

There's two other things on the table at this point. Penny has been zig-zagging back and forth between being a responsible -- but boring -- worker bee of an archaeologist. A junior digger. And in the excursions inspired by Graham, she's been running around meeting eccentric people and eventually getting into more and more "stunts." Like breaking into Battersea Power Station.

So this is coming to a head as well. At the center of this particular story, as much as it is wrapped in a mystery and a Blitz story, is Penny feeling forced to decide between Serious Archaeology and being Indiana Jones.

But there's a subtler side to this. Whatever happened in Athens that let Penny be a real-life Athena Fox, it is an uncertain magic. The main reason she got shot with a bow at Highgate Cemetery is so she could be bleeding and in pain for the rest of the story. Stunts don't always work and real violence isn't like the movies.

One of the things Captain Wentworth is hiding is the kind of violence he experienced first-hand in ugly things like the Arab Revolts. And Linnet is in the same naive stage where she is going to volunteer for SOE before this is all over.

And Graham may appear to be an ordinary, out-of-shape guy, but he's a serious Roman reenactor. Well, something he did let him understand something of how violence really works. It is a lesson Penny is going to be learning deep under the streets of London. It is something I'm going back and forth on endlessly and having a lot of problems with myself because it totally changes the feel of her stories.

So I'm trying to fold this in as well. My Inception conversation over chicken tikka masala is trying to parallel not just Linnet and Penny both spending their days/nights down in the Nine Elms shelter, it is both having too close a contact with worlds of fantasy and having an older male mentor figure (though not Mentor figure) who is for whatever reason unwilling to try to explain to them the true cost of violence.

And thus it is going to suck. I mean, sure. I can write it. I can cut out a lot and it would probably be a better scene for it. Allusions the readers doesn't get just makes them bored and confused. The thing that really sucks is I can't possibly put in it what I wanted to put in.

All those months of figuring and outlining and researching and everything I know about Captain Wentworth and his past and his relationship to Linnet I can only touch at third hand, through a half-dozen snatches of quoted dialog. And that ain't enough.

The other thing I realized this weekend is that Penny is exhausting. Maybe it is just a quality of First Person. Maybe it is her energy and raw nerves and the way she jumps around like the later regnerations of The Doctor. Or maybe it is the peculiar effort of going inside the head of someone very different from you and having to feel what they feel as you speak in their voice.

Whatever it is, I had to take frequent breaks. So I'm happy I got 2-3,000 words done over the weekend. Even the first draft of the Lensman scene. Next chapter includes the sword fight, so I know I'll lose a little time doing some specific research for that. Might even open my book on the New Globe. Assuming I still have it!

Reductions

Fox and Hounds has finally gotten to the point where I'm thinning the cast instead of adding new bodies. I used to love this point when mixing microphones on stage musicals; "Oh, he's left the stage, and I'll never need his mic again for this performance."

Just wrote the good-bye scene for the Nine Elms dig. So Tim and Tony, Stu, Hanif, Susan Morris, and Frank/Joe have all said their last line and have left the stage. So has Leslie Cuvier, although Steve is going to be around for a little yet. Probably. I'll see.

Of course the previous chapter I got to let go of Cynth, Cephrin, and Petrichor. But they were all introduced in the same chapter, as part of the Battersea Power Station hack. Which also finally brought the much-talked-about Guy on stage at last.

***

I've been thinking again about the numbers game. There's a lot that I should be doing as a writer, but that doesn't currently make sense as an author. Spending the time to grow my craft. Editing, beta readers. Time in research and in careful writing.

The numbers game says you need enough titles to get the snowball effect to start. It is tough finding your audience (or, rather, helping them find you). I finally have a review -- it is by a family friend but especially as she's been out of communication for decades I think it achieves a sufficient degree of separation.

More reviews would be good. They don't even have to be positive. A book without reviews looks suspicious somehow. And once again it is a circle game; reads get reviews gets reads. And reads gets placement gets views gets reads.

The simplest hack at my level is the series. The advantage over multiple stand-alone books is that people tend to read a series through; if they read one, they'll read them all. Plus, a lot of people are looking for the long read and they are more likely to take a chance on a series.

So that means that, paradoxically, the best thing to do is to slam another novel or two or three without even taking time to do them right...or spending any money on professional editing. Because all of that only makes sense once I've started to achieve an audience.

(Assuming that actually happens.)

***

But all this might change. Everything we are doing these days is an exercise in assuming the old rules hold, or will become true again "when this blows over." History says...more or less. History has been changed by plague, not just slowed down. Already we are seeing signs that work-from-home has gotten a new life (lets see how long it lasts this time) and Amazon has jumped ahead in the battle against brick-and-mortar (since they didn't have the robust delivery systems in place).

And that's before you get to BLM.

So that's one more thing that makes me feel like it is a futile exercise when I go to the blank paper. The publishing industry has changed once again. And the world is changing. The specific questions I was talking about in terms of CRM or...well, anyhow.

***

Spent yesterday with painfully swollen lymph nodes. Recovering now, so was almost certainly a bug but probably not the worrying one. Probably. I made it a point to stay tucked away in my shop in the back of the building all day, and I might call in sick tomorrow.

***

And now trying to work out the "pants" scene.

This is a problem scene. Possibly problematic. Way back when I was brainstorming I thought of Penny getting put up at Graham's flat when she can't find an affordable hotel. And I dreamed up a couple of funny bit for the being uncomfortable and being acerbic and still working their way through how this friendship of theirs works.

Well, several months and a detailed outline later and this is part of a key scene in that friendship arc. It is the last blow-up they get before the big one, and there's no follow-up after that one.

So what was light-hearted fun is just playing wrong.

Right. Just outlined how I'm going to handle the conversation. As light-hearted verbal jousting that accidentally veers into innuendo that was possibly intentional but in any case is merely an alias for a larger discussion to take full shape in a later scene...

Oh, that sounds easy to write!

In a white room with black curtains by the station

Battersea sequence is almost finished. In the middle of writing it I realized it was a pretty good Tomb Crawl.

Well, duh, that's why it was in the outline in the first place. I sort of forgot in the struggle to write the thing. So my protagonist is deep in a maze of passages, climbing and crawling and otherwise struggling to break through to spectacular hidden chambers, solving puzzles and dealing with dangers both environmental and human. Well, not really the puzzles. That will have to wait.

So about as close as I can get to a classic "steal the golden idol from the booby-trapped ancient temple" and not completely violate serious history and modern archaeology.

***

The rewrite was great and reinforces why the "get the draft on paper first" style works. I'm a revise-as-you-go but the idea is still there.

The first version of the abseil scene was perfectly functional. I had Penny open a few stitches so focus would go on that after the rescue and I wouldn't have to figure out what everyone's reactions would be otherwise.

Yeah, better choices. The revision, there's more emotion. She does not have a plan when she grabs him, so there's more tension and it helps advance the theme of her plunging into things unwisely -- something this book is going to make her think about more. And the obvious aftermath was, when I thought about it, that the guy she rescued would get angry and blame her for all of it.

I won't be surprised if I don't come up with a stronger way to play the Goldeneye N64 scene as well. That went decently. The Station A control room is really harder to describe. Little annoying stuff, like I can't say a paneled ceiling because it makes it sound like there's control panels up there. And it is also showing me that more and more I'm changing a place slightly because it is easier to describe that way. That's not good historical fiction work there.

***

I'm almost done with Battersea. Should clock in around 5K when done, right on estimates. Just have to figure out where I'm going with the White Room.

The only reference I've seen on it is it was a "minimalist mock-up" of a luxury flat with hot tub and walls that were mirrors when they weren't white. Here I'm changing history and making something more interesting but I am having trouble deciding what.

The conclusion to this is a grudging acceptance of preservation of history via redevelopment projects like this, where the old control room can be rented out for weddings (yes, just check their website). So I'd like that whatever the white room is, it pays homage to the original station and doesn't just use it as a convenient shell.

But I don't know what. Maybe I should just go with the hot tub. And black curtains.

***

White room scene is done. Going by the dates on blog posts, that's 6,400 words in 7 days. I'm hoping to get some of the next scene on paper before the weekend is over but I suspect it won't be many.

(And, yes, that means that over the Battersea sequence I name-dropped two movies, a game, two songs, an album cover, and four or five fictional characters. Plus made two more veiled Doctor Who references and there's a character who has clear roots to Blade Runner.)

My poor Krell

Two steps forwards, one step back.

I figured out the basics of how the Goldeneye N64 scene should work. And decided the way I'd resolved the Eiger Sanction bit didn't.

Fortunately I'm getting better and better at changing the whole thrust of a scene while keeping bulk of the work. Basically, I'm getting faster at knocking out raw prose and I'm not in such a love of my words I feel I have to keep the original draft. So I can throw out an entire dialog exchange and, using what I learned in writing the previous one, whip out a completely new one in almost no time.

I hate to agree with the "rough draft at any cost" crowd, but having something on paper, anything at all, does make it easier to work out the wrinkles.

So, yeah, I've got skullduggery in the control room. And Control Room A is pretty wild:

That's the 1930's one; construction started n 1927, they started generating power in 1934 and tidied up until 1935. They spent money lavishly on this side; it was all designed to let important visitors stroll around admiring the "Temple of Power" (yes, they called it that).

And I was so careful to set things up so my characters infiltrate through to Station A. But even though they weren't able to finish Station B until after the war, spent a lot less money, and had to "make do" with stainless steel. this is what they ended up with for Control Room B:

And that's the one that looks like a set from Forbidden Planet. Also easier to describe, and could make for more convenient blocking (that is, arranging the not-really-a-fight scene.)

Well, I think I've already bollixed up enough of my description. I'm using the excuse that the building was changing almost daily once the reconstruction started, and I'm selectively drawing elements across a span of a couple of years, anyhow. But that doesn't excuse that I am really not sure what the turbine hall looked like. For all the time people have been writing about this place, getting complete descriptions is tough.

Well, I'm also thinking of going wild with The White Room. Somewhere, if you read the right trade magazines or knew the architects, you could get the correct story on the mock-up of a luxury suite that was constructed some time between 2008 and 2012. As of 2016, it was apparently one of those rumored grail-like objects among the roof and tunnel crowd. And almost certainly less spectacular in reality than it is in the stories.

Well, I'm thinking of doing something a lot wackier. A modern Art Deco, probably, although Spaceship Cabin is mildly attractive, especially with a Diesel Punk flavor. Thing is, it all depends on how the Control Room scene arc works out. It may be that the chapter will end there instead and we'll never see the White Room. White or not.

(There's a running gag in the Nine Elms Station dig about the Green tiles which are mostly white. You take your fun where you can find it.)

***

And I'm already wiped out after recovering from sick and pulling a full day at work in the heat. I'm glad tomorrow is a half day.

Rapping crab

Well I dunno. I went to work, didn't feel good, and even though I stayed until 2:00 took myself off the clock for the day. And called in sick today. Probably not the virus. Feels familiar. Sometimes my gas line just gets some water in it and experience says the best thing to do is rest and wait for it to go away.

***

Moved my Animals and did some other minor edits but most of yesterday was doing a cover-to-current-point re-read of the whole text. This time, the politics stood out and some of the history was repetitive. It's a timing thing. I wanted to have the diary-writer give her W.W.II experiences but I wasn't able to set it up so that's the primary account.

This morning's task is to work out the mechanics for the abseil scene.

Here's the setup. The infiltrators are abseiling down into Battersea Power Station. Fawkes is showing off, makes a stupid mistake, and Penny has to put her own life at risk to save him.

My constraints, then, is I have to describe this so it sells the beats to the reader; that Penny knows what she is doing and Fawkes doesn't and the only choice open to her is a risky stunt. It would kill the scene if the reader has constructed it differently enough in their mind that they are yelling, "Just grab the rope, you idiot!"

It has to be concise, both for flow and to avoid the conservation of detail trap (aka the Chekhov's Gun problem). And for extra points; it should adhere to standard practice if any part of it reaches the standard of reproducibility (don't tell the kids how to make explosives at home), and it shouldn't require bad-naming manufacturers or products.

I was playing with having him set up for an Australian, but that just adds too much time and detail to the moment (even though it simplifies the rescue tremendously). Same goes for Dülfersitz technique.

I was tempted to use a gri-gri. A backwards gri-gri is an easy-to-make real world mistake, and they occupy that perfect place where they are suspiciously new and high-tech and novice climbers very much are attracted to it's auto-lock and ease of use and, as a result, put themselves and others at risk through not understanding it properly.

But that's too much explanation, and it puts too much emphasis on the particular tool and manufacturer thereof.

So I'm still flirting with a double-carabiner setup, wrapped incorrectly. The big problem with this is that the rope is still there and that confuses a lot of the rescue. (We call it rapping/rappelling here and shorten carabiner to 'biner. Europe prefers abseilling and shortens it to a crab.)

The best I've come up with so far is the basic tubular belay device (I'd call it a Reverso to make the text flow more smoothly but, again, Petzl.)

And this is where I feel my kind of detail is the right choice. Because this isn't a Wikipedia vomit. Sure, you probably could construct the mechanics of this with enough time reading up and watching videos. That's more or less how I learned. Except that I've actually done it. I've done standard, Australian, I've even used a gri-gri. And I've gotten it wrong. Nearly hurt myself bad at least once (used a belay device on a line that was too thin for it to grip properly and nearly burned my hand as well as pancaking).

Here's the trick, and I hope I can describe it with economy in the actual scene. The typical tubular belay device (sigh) has a wire loop that keeps it from sliding up the bight and also makes it easier to carry around. When you rig for belay (or abseil) you form a bend or bight in the rope and shove it into the device. Then you take a crab and clip it through the loop of rope and the wire loop as well.

I've done it a dozen times. It is always so obvious I've never gotten in even the slightest danger over it. You clip the wire loop (which is kind of in the way, especially if you are fumbling at this with gloves on) ...and miss the rope.

The clean way to do it is to unclip everything, attach the belay device to the rope, then bring the crab back to your harness and clip it to the belay loop. Then of course you do a buddy check, but Fawkes' arrogance in omitting that is easy to describe.

The lazy way, especially if you already have the thing clipped on for easy storage, is to pull the rope to you, shove the loop in and feel for it with your fingers so you open the crab and close it again without losing the wire loop. Spin the lock closed on the crab and you are done.

Now I just have to write the scene.

***

That scene is done and I count a thousand words of new material but yesterday was mostly editing to that knocks the average down to five hundred. Unless I can figure out the NEXT fun sequence. Penny knows that one of the guys on this infiltration shot at her. What I want to do is having her sneak around the turbine hall or something trying to get behind him without giving him a chance to get the drop on her...and without being sure which guy it is!

Well, the turbine hall is gutted. The electrical rooms are still there and I might be able to plausibly do some sneaking. I suspect it will come out less exciting in print than it was in my imagination. That's what happened to the Highgate sequence.

Man, there's still a lot to go. The sword fight may take some figuring. And then the solo hack into the tunnel is going to be a few pages.

Hey, batter batter!

And now I'm excited again.

That's a crop from a brochure produced for the current redevelopment; officially begun in 2012 but wouldn't have opened this year even without the virus.

I cranked out 1,400 words of the Battersea Power Station excursion yesterday. Add 1,700 words for the UXB scene and that's a good weekend's work. Feels nice. I was still hot and feeling drained today -- I'm hoping it isn't mild/asymptomatic virus because I haven't been self-quarantining. But I'm hoping to get through the scene with the death-defying abseil stunt.

I do need a light rewrite or two. The "animals" is still happening on the coaling jetty but the framing is different. And it is so good to finally meet Guy (the closest thing I have to a pure antagonist in this book).

Just for my peace of mind, nobody on the Battersea hack has a regional dialect. Or an unusual way of speaking, even. There's only four of them and they are never coming back and Cynth is doing most of the talking anyhow so I am fine with just having a bunch of dialog tags here.

And the luck for this evening: I decided I really wanted to know which was Station A and which Station B. It took a bit of searching -- search results clogged up with far too many articles about the various redevelopment schemes -- but the one I finally found gave me the older Station on the West. And since the infiltration starts from the East, that means they will have to cross No-Man's Land (and, yes, real urban explorers gave it that name).

***

The thing that's worrying me more is, yes, that is a real redevelopment. A consortium of Malaysian developers, and several big names signed on for shop space and office space, including Apple Computers.

The big word around trademark questions is "Don't mess with the mouse." Well, I'm not sure I'd want to mess with Apple, either. Charlie Stross did, though. He had his character talk about "the cult of Jobs" in one book, and blame "a level-III glamour" on his purchase of what he identified in narrative as a Jesus-Phone. Which he booby-trapped, leading to a bad guy being magic-enhanced electrocuted by the ear buds, dancing in place with the wires white-hot before turning into a blackened corpse.

But then, Stross can afford lawyers.



My current rule of thumb is, if I am going to mention a real business it should be treated neutrally at worst. In fact, I just edited a line I had written about the fish & chips you can buy in the museum cafe at IWM London; from "They weren't good," to "They were better than I'd expected." Okay, honestly, museum food? Despite that particular cafe going out of its way to strive for and claim a higher standard. But it didn't harm the scene for the chips to be actually good.

The point is, during the Battersea hack I'm going to be saying some mean things about SP Setia and Sime Darby. And this is where I have to fall back on the second line of defense; it ain't libel if it's true. There should be a certain protection for opinion of characters and author, especially if it falls well within what a review or opinion piece might say.

Yeah, great time to realize that. The London Field School, the Lambeth Larks, two pubs, several shops and a few social clubs are all fictional. However, I'm also not just mentioning, but actually doing things in or with Transport for London, Crossrail, the Northern Line Extension, IWM London, The New Globe Theatre, the Trafalgar art project, Bradgate Park, the University of Leicester, The Foundry, The India Club, Potter's Field, Highgate Cemetery, Doctor Who, James Bond, Time Team, Detectorists, Dad's Army...

And Battersea Power Station.

I guess this is another bright line problem. Parts of this are historical fiction. Sure, the Nine Elms Shelter is fictional, but I am staying within what is reasonable for the place and time and I am very much getting the details right about the "ladder" shelter at Kennington Park or the Balham Station disaster.

And it is in part still travel fiction, so yes Trafalgar Square and the Tower of London and Black Cabs and, yes, fish & chips should be right.

So it just feels weird and wrong to have events suddenly happening at Chelsea Power Station and The Museum of the War and Bushby-on-Thames and The Wooden O, just because I might have a sword fight happen on the premises or say something mean about the fish & chips.

What's the vector, Victor?

Finally got to the Battersea Power Station sequence.

Not even sure I'm looking forward to it at this point. I've reached that point in the book -- I recognize it from two previous books now -- where it has become a total slog.

And I'm really concerned by how much shit there is in it. A cast full of Brits being verbally clever. Yeah, that will go well. Everyone is dropping local references constantly. Yeah, I suppose that would happen anywhere and a good writer would probably cut them out. Dialog is, after all, selective. It is an edited experience, a more focused version of what actually happens. Like everything in fiction.

So I got done with the scene when there are protesters outside (there's too much redevelopment happening in the area, mostly foreign money too), there are survivors from the time of the war and their family and reporters and someone from IWM London and they are all swapping stories about wartime London. And then they find what looks like a UXB.

At the moment, as generally happy as I am with that chapter, I consider it a greater gain that this is the last we'll see of Helen and Martha and poor old Douglas, Nyovani Brent from the museum and Marc the photographer. And Sir Anthony Robinson, but he was only there for a walk-on and one stupid joke. "Don't worry, mate. I'm sure she has a cunning plan."

(Yes, that's another unexplained English pop-culture reference. What did I say?)

***

And now I'm into the chapter where Penny is hooked up with a bunch of Urbex folk who are breaking into Battersea Power Station and one of them is the person who shot at her. So, yeah, it's Eiger Sanction with glowsticks and goth make-up.

Sort of. The Urbex folk are showing off and will be talking up a storm about their own mysterious world of sloaps and toads (Temporary, Obsolete, Abandoned or Derelict Spaces.) But they are also making a compelling case that by breaking in and taking photographs of abandoned spaces they are in their own way opposing the mindless bulldozing of redevelopment and helping to preserve a memory of the past.

So the first thing I needed to do was the meet-up. And that was thirty minutes of Google Map, the NOAA Solar Position Calculator, and TimeandDate, which I've been finding a little easier to work with lately than the Weather Underground. And, no, they can't do the Animals album cover, but the Urbexers can at least pose against the twilight sky with the power station a black silhouette behind them.

***

The damned name-drops are not going to stop. Once the excursion is done, the next is the Black Cab Chase (which since I don't have The Knowledge is not going to get well described) then a talk about a talk about comparing some themes in pre-war Pulp SF with famous sieges from mostly Western history. With two different undertexts going on.

And THEN I get to visit a theatre just long enough to get Pantomime explained, before running off to have a sword fight at the Globe.

The next chapter after that I hope I will have finished reading up on the "BRO" by then because that's when my protagonist finally figures out about the stash of guns and incendiary devices under the Nine Elms station. And her fellow reenactor babbles about ropey types pranging a cheeseeye kite on bumps and circuits but that's a nothing. I'm cribbing the one famous one and will leave it.

Although same scene we are also going to explain why a pig's ear, the sweeney, and nice bristols.

Japan. Japan is going to be way different.

Pity the long plan says Templar Secrets in Paris next....

"Sword and magic heeeelmet!"

Yeah, I guess I got bored at work.

I've been working "Ride of the Valkyries" and the silly idea occurred to do a "learning the trombone" video that just cross-cut from first notes to simple scales to, well...  And add a helmet and some flames or something. Except that I hate wrestling with my green screen and it is too small for shooting a trombone performance.

So I made this an exercise in exploring all the "if you don't have casting resin, here's a hardware store substitute you can use" techniques. Substitute my little shop at work for hardware store, and I have several things that that are not really hardware store. Like a bolt of muslin cloth, like some industrial resin, like the white expanded foam. Even barge cement.

So I did this without a real plan, without mock-ups, and with a lot of "oops" moments as one of the materials didn't behave as intended. At least at the end of it, I'd managed to throw out all my Oomoo and Rebound and three cans of Bondo that had all gone bad. So it helped with the house-cleaning, too!

If you really need the whole list, I made a rambling post at the RPF. The shell is glue-muslin, the horns expanded foam reinforced with resin mixed 3:1 with Durham's Water Putty to thicken it, the studs are cast in Durham's using a mold made of white bathtub caulk on an original carved from the end of a dowel.

So, yeah, learning experience. It works fine for what it was intended to be (really, I would have been just as happy with something even sillier and cruder looking. Maybe I'll add a shredded-paper beard when I do the video). The main complaint I had is too much going back and fixing stuff that didn't work right.

Not many people can pull off a decorative vegetable

It was probably a mistake to read so many things from UK authors while I was working on this novel.

Well, it isn't like I read most of what was on my want list. I just turned down a diary by a woman who worked at a lathe building parts for airplanes. During the war, that is. And there's another one which is mostly about the East End but still (from the sample chapters at least) all sorts of amazing things about being urban working poor during the war.

(And no, I didn't finish either of my archaeology books, either. Although I did read cover to cover a book about CRM planning. It wasn't actually much of a help but it was cheap.)

UK writers love being obscure. I was just reading a comment on Cockney Rhyming Slang that explained how the greatest art was coming up with one the listener had to strain to get. There's no street cred in using the slang everybody knows already.

And, well, using Ben Aaronovitch's books as an example isn't completely fair. He is writing for a post-Google audience. I think he completely expects you to notice when he is making a pop culture reference and, if you don't know it, type it into a search engine then and there. (Especially for ebooks as you can do that within Kindle Reader).

Example; when he's mentioned that some of the "Falcon-Aware" (as in, they know that magic exists) street cops have started joking about putting garlic buds in their lapels, "Seawoll suggested celery but I was the only one who got it."

So he's told you right off that celery in the lapel is a pop-culture reference and it is an obscure one, too. Oh and Ben used to write for Doctor Who.

***

I think I mentioned somewhere else that one of the things going on in these books is learning language and having fun with language. So Penny is picking up various sorts of UK usage and slang. But whereas the first book was largely blow-by-blow, covering every waking instant, this one crosses several weeks and there is quite a lot of "three days later..." in it.

So there's an entire scene where someone explains what "pants" means in British English. But within a scene or two either way Penny is referring to a cell phone as a "mobile" in the narration.

I'm really everywhere with the narration, anyhow. She's mostly using the American terminology and I've gone out of my way to assert it in a couple of places -- she describes Graham's place as a row house with entrances on the first floor, for instance. But various bits of correct (aka UK usage) language sneak in over time and most of them aren't explained to the reader except in context.

***

I have a scrap of graph paper where I jotted down the numbers from a couple of podcasters who believe in more structured plotting. It isn't quite Save the Cat level, but it is very much, "The first plot point must occur at 22% of the length of the book..."

Well, a quick stroll through the page counts and I'm coming within a few percent so far. And that's without having nailed down things with a heavily structured outline. Just instinct for how long to run a chapter and when something needed to happen. That's good to find.

***

Took a day and a half off work. Was so tired I ordered dinner so I'd have to stay awake (and hopefully get some writing done) while I waiter while I waited for it to arrive. Well, delivery was quick. The food arrived in under an hour and I was in bed in another. Slept twelve hours, and still was dragging today.

But I also got some four hundred words done that night, and another four hundred in the morning. Perhaps I've finally hit the place where it will start to go quickly.

Of course I'm plowing through another crazy conversation right now. The outline is, "Things become increasingly uncomfortable between Graham and Penny." (There's a blow-up scheduled in another couple of chapters). So subtext happening during a conversation. And what's the conversation? Why, about how the war changed society. Yeah, there's a few things there I have to look up as I go.

***

Stayed late today to have some peace and quite to practice brass. The trombone is now...functional. I can more-or-less get through a tune on it. I'd like to work the higher, sweeter register more but, really, I picked it up for the low end and all in all I like the trumpet better. The trombone lip is just too big and blubbery and the slide isn't as satisfying as tapping those trumpet valves.

So I pulled out the trumpet and my lip is still mostly there. Blew the cleanest, nicest-sounding (aka bright, sweet, brassy tone) "Slag Morning" (aka Pazu's trumpet tune from Laputa). But I've just barely got the C above the staff. I have lost a little lip in the reduced practice hours.

Oh and yes "Masterpiece Theatre" is next in my practice rotation and the damn thing starts on the second C. With a trill that's either on the top of the staff or just above it.

Plus I built a helmet. But that's another post.

Blitz Spirit

I've gotten through the biggest of the "Diary" scenes. There's more to explore, but I've at this point said all I'm going to say in this book about the Blitz experience and particularly sheltering in the Underground.

I've been archive-binging at the History Girls blog, and they have some wonderful stuff on W.W.I -- particularly in late 2018.

Yeah. Because rotten historian I am, I set out to write a book set in London in 2018 but exploring secrets of the Blitz, and it wasn't until I'd worked out the main plot I realized that the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day falls right in the middle of the story (the first weekend of the three-week span of Penny's adventures, in fact).

Well, it does reach out; she gets to take part in some W.W.I reenactment activities at the Imperial War Museum London, and she watches one of the candle lighting ceremonies they were holding at the Tower of London over that week. And the Captain Wentworth who appears in the W.W.II diary discovered in the Nine Elms shelter is a veteran of the Great War (as well as several other less savory campaigns in the interwar years).

Once again, I'm at a place where I am depressed about or afraid of writing for at least as many hours as I actually write.

(And, yeah, I finished the Steve talk and the Who's on Pants routine. And two days later, cut the first completely -- it isn't in character, it puts the focus places I don't want it, and it slows the narrative to be where it is. And edited the second and am thinking about cutting it, too.)

Yeah, and the scene this was all supposed to lead up to, I've already decided won't work in the original form.

***

So I took the day off to write and to do some errands. Around ten, took a walk around the block, picked up groceries...suddenly felt tired, lay down, half-slept until six feeling terrible the entire time. This isn't right. I am spending far too much of those valuable waking hours struggling to concentrate. And I don't have a solution.

This chapter is pants

I mean that's practically the theme. I hope it actually comes out better than that.

It is another struggle. I'm looking forward to the simplicity of some action sequences. I made up a mix tape of the stuff I was usually listening to during the first book. After messing around with a couple alternatives to iTunes I found that the old stalwart, VLC, does a bang-up job in doing shuffle play from a designated folder. Or CD, if it comes to that.

But it doesn't help when I have a thinky scene to work through. The "pants" scene at the center of the chapter I'm working on is when the tension of the shared living arrangement between Graham and Penny comes to a boil. But I realized -- again, late in the day, and why I don't believe in nailing down too much in the outline -- that this is set up by what turns out to be the final scene in the Penny-and-Tony relationship arc.

Which is yet one more conversation of people being clever and snarky. This is, after all, the chapter that will also include the "Hercules Hedgehog" conversation that's been in my notes since the first week.

But before I can get there, I have to do a Penny and Steve conversation and this one is extra annoying. I still haven't worked out Steve yet. I'm pretty much going to have to write through the climax when he finally does whatever it is he will do, and then work backwards from that point, adjusting previous scenes to make his behavior fit.

And that's where I am this morning. Fighting a fatigue that even Peet's coffee and my brand-new electric kettle (very British) can't cure, being depressed about how many more months this is going to take and how few copies the previous one sold (I'm counting on the power of a series to finally turn the numbers to green ink...but that's two or three books away).

Basically, this is the conversation where Steve says, "What's a pretty girl like you doing in a job like this?" Only, you know, not quite as crassly. And that's not even the worst part. The worst part is how she's going to reply.

Maybe I will try the music. It's gotta be better than avoiding it entirely and surfing Quora and updating my blog...