Zero Hour

I've hit a place in the book where I both realize I don't have nearly enough understanding, and don't even know how to research it, and that I really don't care.

I'm just pushing through to the end. Penny has finally made it to Wentworth's ridiculous Zero Station, my one sop to realism that he may have repurposed an existing room  -- "Drainage or something," Penny guesses -- from the earlier station.

I had a nice collection of pictures of tunnel insides from the Northern Line Extension all ready, and I threw them on to my second monitor -- and they don't match. That took a bit of time, mostly staring at them (and watching another video of a TBM in action) before figuring out why they looked different.

While I was looking for explanation I stumbled upon the cutest narrow-gauge they had down there while the TBMs were still working.

So of course I had to put that in the story.

Did I mention how tired I am getting of Penny's vocal and narrative mannerisms? And here I'm facing a third book of them. So far my readership is some 90% older women who know my mom, but they are going out of their way to say how much they like the character so I guess I'm stuck with her for a while longer.

(Something about how she is heroic but realistic. I dunno.)

So I really had no idea how long the Tomb Crawl was going to run. And I wasn't padding it, exactly -- there's a wealth of material I barely touched. But I knew I wanted it to feel sufficiently epic. Well, from the moment she arrives at Kennington Green to the moment she realizes she's trapped in the Zero Station is four thousand words.

The plan is for another crawl, a crazier one through the Bazalgettian warrens currently containing the Effra, and onwards to a slightly-excavated Roman ruin. Haven't even decided what it is. I'd like a military outpost, because Wentworth has been going on and on about 300-type last stands.

***

And Japan is on. I still have qualms about where it sits in the overall character arc. It is in some ways too much, too soon. But I can play off those elements, make that part of the plot that having to suddenly be utterly convincing as the Famous World Adventurer, or falling head over heels in love, is indeed not what it seems and doesn't unfold the way you'd expect.

But, really, any qualms are outweighed by the ....oh.... anyhow, are outweighed by the fact that I could probably sit here and type the bulk of it with scenery descriptions and amusing misunderstandings and language fun without having to reach even as far as my own bookshelf.

And that's something I need right now. Even on this very productive day I've stopped multiple times to look up something, and that's not a good way to write. Worse, the sorts of things I'm looking up become a meal with way too much roughage in in. I need to write leaner -- even if I have no good idea right now what leaner looks like.

That "oh" in the middle of the paragraph above? That was me getting ready to type how I wanted something actually historical -- archaeology would be a bonus -- and then it hit me. As much as I don't want the reader to be facing pages of hard-to-memorize Japanese names, there is a historical but disputed business when Kusanagi was stolen by a rival clan. Or something. I forget the details, but there are reasons I want to use it...

Morns like these -- we parted

And, whoops, I may have just broken the law.

Or so Harvard wants people to think. Once again; Emily Dickinson may be long deceased but copyright may not be. Many of her poems were not published in her lifetime, but passed to family, some of whom sold them to Harvard, making them technically holders of a yet unexpired copyright.

The thing that surprises me here is not that it might be illegal to print your own book of her poems -- which I don't have argument with, as the university has been a steward for all these years, collecting and polishing. It is that academics aren't allowed to quote within literary analysis of her works and life. Not without written permission, at least.

Which would seem to me about as pure a case of fair use as is inscribed in the law.

And it took hours, crawling through resources that had been designed for academics with a lot of time on their hands to discuss minutiae of the poems, to find that this poem saw the light of day in 1891. So I think I am safe from any Harvard Lawyers on this one.

Of course there is one more wrinkle. There's always one more. As much as I might quibble with the substantiality, edited and revised versions may still fall under copyright. Fortunately Wikimedia keeps record of all published versions, and the lines I wanted to use are unchanged.

Have a butcher's

I'd take a day off work more often if I thought it would end in 2,000 words done and another chapter completed.

The list of "beats" I didn't manage to get in is getting longer than the list of random stuff I'm hoping to cut out when I go into re-writes. I wanted to explain more about Guy's unhappy life during the sword fight scene but it didn't quite happen. But I did get some tweaks in today that explain better how Penny is using the sword fight to taunt him into giving up useful information.

Yeah, that's the method a lot of writers use, according to an unscientific browsing of Quora answers. For each day's writing, re-read the previous day and do a little light editing. This is less about the editing and more about remembering exactly where you left off.

So this was the chapter with RAF slang, Cockney Rhyming Slang, Jackie Cochran and the Attagirls, and the strange life and career of Orde Wingate.

I was surprised at how fast it went.

Or, rather, the actual writing went fast. I spent the morning staring at the list of beats I was going to try to hit with no idea how I could line them up to best effect. I finally opened Scrapple and started dragging them around and sort of like building a molecule or solving a puzzle once I had three that hooked together the rest fell almost immediately into place.

And that's a great feeling. Pretty much high point of the day, though closing another chapter is a good one as well.

Also threw more of my reference materials up on my Wordpress site. It is still annoying but it works well enough for what I'm doing (and I'm surely doing far more than the traffic will ever warrant.)

I also ran into a book -- series rather -- at Amazon that was rather interesting. The description was of very rote space opera. There was a big typo right in the middle of the blurb, too. And almost fifty reviews, which were slanted heavily into the five-star range.

And I looked, and not only were a lot of these basically re-phrasing what was said in the blurb, they also all had certain grammatical/typographical errors that, at least to me, felt of a kind.

I can't swear this is a man gaming the system. He must be doing something right, though; he's in the top ten in more than one category!

Downloaded the sample to read. Hrm. Not formatted well, that's for sure. Workmanlike, at least. Isn't getting my interest though. I'll reserve a full opinion for now.

Cultured Villain

The sword-fight scene is finished. And that means Part III is finished.

I'm not entirely unhappy with it. Of course it was never going to live up to the potential of a petty crook gone nuts with one of those fancy fantasy swords and my Penny -- still in the costume she borrowed from a Pantomime theatre -- has to try to defend herself using half-remembered stage combat tricks...on the very stage of Shakespeare's Globe!

This book, too, takes the Nth hour turn to the weird. She was all about digging dirt and looking for a cheap room up until the last third. Then suddenly she's doing midnight rappels and other crazy business.

I'm also not entirely happy I'm now standing at 68K. I meant to hit 60K at the III-IV break, with the book finishing as short at 70-75K.

Also worked on my Wordpress site. Either they've changed something or I've figured it out because it became less annoying to put in text and add illustrations. That's one of the things I wanted to do. Really, it isn't going to accomplish much as an Author Site, but for my own amusement I wanted to put up some of the photographs and charts from planning this, these, well now three novels.

Writing Down the Sherds

Another of the random thoughts that came was how few women are in the London book. I mean that have speaking roles beyond "Here's your coffee." Really, only Sarah, Cynth, and Susan Morris. Jean Patrick (the professor from U. Leicester) is prominent in the first chapter but then drops out of the story. Cynth was only in there for the Battersea scenes but I think she made more of an impact on the story.

Well, there's forty things in the air for the final IWM London scene and I still haven't figured out the best order to get at them. It is another Traveling Salesman problem; there is no solution that optimally follows all paths without doubling back. According to my notes, we have to explain that Wentworth vanished, Linnet is going to Wanborough Manor, and Clarissa McDougal got her Lens from Mentor of Arisia (Linnet is a science fiction fan). Mick is going to talk some more about Zero Rooms and so forth, and explain who the heck Orde Wingate is, and if he has time left over he's going to attempt to explain some Cockney Rhyming Slang.

And, yeah, this is all essential to the plot! The plot is a web, a skein of connections. Penny went into this with a false choice between play-acting an archaeologist or being an archaeologist, and the division was made more artificial by the way she found herself working at a CRM firm (the boring end of commercial archaeology) and having fun in London with her friend Graham. So everything from Panto to the reenactors at IWM London has a part in describing the boundaries of this seeming choice.

Sigh.

Maybe the Japan novel will be simpler. Maybe I can finally figure out a way to plot that doesn't end up with these briar patches.

Another reason I'm not sweating things like paid editors, beta readers, Amazon reviews and author websites. I don't have confidence that my writing is worth it yet.

Oh, come on! How could I forget about Nyvoni Brent from the museum, Helen and Martha (who were kids at the time of the Blitz), and sure not-actually "Molly Malone" and the other one were only there for a scene but, right, should really be counting Linnet.

So, okay. There are some women in the book.

I was a teenage Beowulf

Finally into the fight scene. Just downloaded two books on stage fighting and already read one cover to cover (well...a lot of it was warm-up exercises so I skimmed it).

Once again there is so much wealth of things I can't put in the book or my critics will cry at me again. "Birdie" is one of those instant expert types (just add factino and stir). He's got a fancy "combat ready" sword from one of those Chinese companies but has no idea how to use it. Penny has had one class in stage combat, and she's ended up with a display sword with rat-tail tang. Graham is also in the scene and he's actually got HEMA background -- although he hasn't owned up to it yet.

And oh yes, we are starting in the Tiring-room at Shakespeare's Globe in Bankside. So there's props storage and a curtained alcove to stab your Polonius in and the stage is trapped and above the awning is the machinery for producing gods on cue. And the thatched roof with sprinklers in case another cannon shot gets loose.

Oh and just because that's never enough, "Birdie" (his name is Guy, he was calling himself Fawkes at the Battersea Power Station break-in, and another guy on that hack started calling him "Birdie" after, one presumes, the phoenix from Harry Potter) has a scouse accent which is he trying unsuccessfully to hide under the most up-town version of Estuary that doesn't slide all the way into Received Pronunciation.

At least this means no funny orthography. Although Penny does chose to remember that Tony, her Geordie foil, had called Guy a wanna-be "reet bobby dazzla."

So I had a bit of real luck on this. I asked on Quora and a very cool lady from Oxford explained a bit about the Globe backstage, and we shared a few theatre stories (and then I clicked on her profile and, oh, past president of an archaeological society? Whoah, I feel abashed.)

So I know more than enough about the Globe, stage fighting, and prop swords to drown my audience. The problem now is going to be sorting it and figuring out how much I can leave out.

All the time I was struggling with the second slot on my tenor trombone, I was thinking it might just be easier to switch. So I kept looking at alto and soprano trombones. The one advantage of the soprano is it slots exactly like a trumpet, so I wouldn't need to retrain my lips. Downside is it barely sounds like a trombone. There are some plastic altos that are really cute (and cheap) but they sound plastic.

And wouldn't you know. I'm starting to find the lip for the tenor. I still don't like the instrument. Trumpet is more satisfying.

But at least I'm not shopping for a new trombone. Oh, no. After the fuss with the contractor I ended up with the chin-cello hanging by my desk for "loading screen" practice. And I've realized I can really make use of that silent violin practice to improve my fingering.

So I want to switch that back to violin strings. And buy another electric to switch my octave strings to. So, yeah. There's always something in my Amazon shopping cart!

(That was an obscure post title. I'm pretty sure that was Book of Sequels. Anyhow, it promised plenty of "Saxon violence." I didn't manage to work in my continuing adventures with the Yahama Venova but, yes, sax is part of the picture of my growing stack of instruments.)

The quickest way to get to Harlem

Boy. A thousand words done this morning. It's barely lunch. I am just steam train. And that was with editing of the previous day's work, too.

Aladdin is still in at the moment. I might leave it to my beta readers. The competitors are Dick Wittington -- I did previously mention the Lord Mayor (he was having a big parade at the time) -- and Jack and the Beanstalk. I sort of like Wittington for being more obscure, but both are good Principal Boy roles and both are a rags-to-riches story which sort of vaguely tracks with other themes I have going on.

I did change the venue from Elephant and Castle to The Mudlarker and I'm going to add a storage locker proximate to the "under the London Bridge arches" original and future location of the Vauxhall Playhouse.

And I've done the last quoted excerpt from the diary. It was brutal. In that I had a dialog section within the diary, and since this isn't set out typographically with a scene break or italics this means quotes in quotes. I broke the rule of new paragraph per speaker last time I quoted from the diary, but that was what I had to do this time. And because of the rules of rolling quote, it looks like this:

“‘Rest. Recover,’ his mystery friend told him. ‘If you miss this war, there’s always another on the way.’ And without a change in his voice he turned to look up the stairs. ‘And I see you’ve already started training your own.’

“‘It isn’t like that. She’s a civilian.’

Yeah, my grammar checker is going to hate me. The mystery man with the Dick Tracey jaw is of course Orde Wingate. And once again a choice forced on me; I can't follow the proper last-names-only because then I'd have a Wentworth and a Wingate in the same conversation.

So Linnet is off to interview at Baker Street and in the final diary entry she'll reveal she is leaving for Bletchley Park or wherever. I've forgotten which of multiple addresses for SOE would be appropriate in early 1941. I've started looking stuff up while I get to it rather than try to keep track of it all now.

And another loss. I wanted to talk about pub names at some point and how a lot of the animal names "Red Lion," etc., whilst still rooted in heraldry and the partisan sympathies of publicans, are these days most often part of foreign-owned chains. Elephant and Castle being Canadian at present -- although I can't tell if they have any of the ones by that name in the UK.

All of this in aid of doing the title drop, of course. That, and I need to get around to pointing out that Vauxhall is or was quite plausibly Fox Hall. I had the thought today, too, of doing references to British children's books for the Part names. I already have two, you see. Well, time to see if I can't chase Fawkes back to his hole. Now that my intrepid pair knows who he is.

One slapstick sword fight coming up. I took today off work too. My boss is happy I'm taking some time off -- I was looking ragged, and things are as quiet as they are likely to get, and better yet, I have a bunch of vacation hours now and it looks to be many months before I'd be able to spend them in the proper way.

Perhaps by this weekend I'll finally have her exploring her first (approximate) tomb.

Loverly

2,000 words completed today. And there's an "oops" there -- I was aiming for as low as 70K but I am going to be crushing right up to that 80K by the time I get to the epilog.

Only 600 words was about Panto. I described the theatre a little more in the first draft, but before I'd finished the chapter I'd knocked out several descriptions that didn't need to be there.

And I never did explain what a Panto Horse is.

This whole sequence feels like it is pulling sideways, but then I've felt I've been pulled sideways since the dig ended. If I was the kind of person who could do a massive re-write, I'd try to work it so the dig ended suddenly and the very next day Penny went on her illegal entry back into it.

All along I've been trying to chart a course between getting too scattered, and being too on the nose. I just got done writing the beginning of a scene at the Elephant and Castle pub, which is in fact in Elephant and Castle and very close to the temporary spaces of the Southwark Playhouse. And then I found out there was a pub called the Mudlarker. Which would be perfect for a meeting with local metal detector people. And is right on the bank of the Thames near the New Globe. And, as it happens, near the previous and future home of the Playhouse; under London Bridge.

Could that be any more appropriate to the themes of underground and rivers and even the idea of theatre as a bit subversive?

I also should not have picked Aladdin as the show being done by the Lambeth Larks. I'd just thrown it out there during a much previous scene and didn't feel like going back. But there's cultural context that gets thrown into the mix. Plus the cross-gender casting doesn't really hold, not for modern productions anyhow (well, not for modern productions in general -- even Jack of the Beanstalk fame is probably played by a young man in modern productions). The sole grace is this is where Widow Twankey comes from but in the final scene I couldn't even put that in (plus the reader has probably completely forgotten that I referenced that character way back in Chapter One).

Well, I'll think about it. After I've reached the end of the book. There's themes and arcs I'm trying to weave and I don't know if they are going to work.

I think the other part of my discomfort is that all of this stuff, from the last working day of the dig to the sword fight at the Globe, is interstitial. Scenes that have to be there to wrap up certain plot lines and advance certain other plot lines but otherwise don't have an identity of their own.

I'm into the final Detectorist scene now. This was an arc that started back in Chapter One. Basically, local metal detector clubs got pissy, and she's meeting with them to tell them that as far as she knows archaeologists working on the Underground aren't blaming them for anything. But that's it. The entire outline for the current scene was, "She meets with them." It doesn't even matter what happens. Everything that plot line was supposed to do, has been done.

Except I ended up offloading some of my diary problems in this direction. I just couldn't organically work the diary stuff into anywhere else, so now I'm stuck with a scene where Penny is reading the diary to a group of strangers.

And this is the Diary day where we get Captain Wentworth's real name, and Orde Wingate stops in, and Linnet drops hints she's volunteering in the direction of SOE. Plus this is also where Wentworth tries and fails to communicate to Linnet how he feels tainted by the violence he partook in and the capacity for violence he discovered within himself, and Graham simultaneously tries to warn Penny that she is taking her arrow-dodging, bomb-daring "heroism" with too light an appreciation of the possible consequences.

The Panto stuff only has a tiny payoff in this book. It is another window to the dress-up character of the distaff Indiana Jones she's been playing at. And an excuse to talk about her flirtation with the role of the kind of hero that really only appears in fiction. Other ideas from this I intend to get into in the Japan book, where one of the main characters is a senior member of the Takarzuka Dance Troupe.

And I still have to struggle through the Old Globe scenes. Boy, there's suddenly a lot of theatre going on.

Oh and oops. I have one more reenactor scene to write before she finally starts her big Tomb Crawl.

Random House

I am having way too much fun with this. I added/changed two elements to the "borrow a costume and get Panto explained" scene and now I've found myself designing an entire company, production numbers, rehearsal venue...

I just checked to see if a certain pop song was too old hat to appear in a production and oh boy, a dozen videos right off the bat. Laughed out loud. That is totally going in the book.

Weird. I did all this research to try to be true to Imperial War Museum London. Right up to worrying endlessly about depicting accurately an exhibit (the Blitz Experience) that had actually been torn down a few years before the novel takes place. But I get to a local theatre, and I'm all "make something up."

I don't think this is organic to the subjects. It's just I need to push through and finish the book and I don't want to go off on another research tangent.

Plus, despite the thematic stuff I'm weaving in here, the shorter the Panto scene, the better.

Observation of the day: this is the year when smelling a bad smell is a good thing. According to the CDC temperature testing (we're doing that at work and the machine is ridiculous) is going to miss a lot of infections, particularly the pre-symptomatic but still highly infectious period. We're also filling out a form lately that asks; "trouble sleeping? aches and pains? tiredness? slight cough?" before adding, "we mean, more than usual." Because all of those symptoms are par for the course for working in a factory. The one symptom that really is unusual, though, is if you lose your sense of smell. That's when you worry.

I've been reading a bit of stuff on publicity and it has reminded me I should really do something with my Author website. What I want is to be able to put up essays and links and excerpts in a nice, organized form.

Blogger doesn't allow nesting. You can spawn sub-pages, which are static pages, and can link back to existing posts but that's it. WordPress, where I turned to for this functionality, can create a hierarchy with effort, but it is absolutely ass-backwards about just typing in text, or formatting something typed elsewhere. I love the way you can just type, do some bone-basic markup, and pop in a few inline images in Blogger. WordPress isn't that smooth.

It is also nagware, and here's the problem I have with nagware; if they were willing to badger you constantly about upgrading to a paid version, what's to stop them from badgering you constantly about upgrading to a premium paid version? Because that's been my experience for every other bit of nagware I've been involved with. All paying does is change the focus of the incessant ads.

It would seem the simple and logical direction is to go for a fully paid site in the first place, and one set up for commercial activity (well, for promotional activity). The books talk about email gleaning and pre-readers and affiliate links and all that other good stuff.

But that's just too much to deal with right now. There isn't a service out there that's offering bare bones for money. Instead it is way too many bells and whistles to make you think you are getting your money's worth, and I just can't wade through all of that.

***

Panto scene is in draft. 1300 words. And I might end up cutting it completely. As it was, it came so very close to getting out of hand over and over again.

Bridge over troubled waters

The question has come up on Quora several times about revise-as-you-go writing. Seems it is more common than not. There are writers who prefer the sprint-to-draft, but the rest of us seem to do some amount of fixing as we go.

Most of my revising is, however, before I write. It seems to work for me, no matter how agonizing it is at the time. What I mean is, when I go into a new sequence (scene, chapter, whatever) I have an outline that tells me more-or-less what is to happen, but I have questions how to approach it.

Sometimes those questions open up into larger questions about the book. The last one was one of those. I'm at 60K out of a target of 70-75K, so funny thing, I'm in the place where all those threads I've been developing all come together. Where certain subplots get wrapped up, too.

But here's where the revise-before-you-go is really working for me. I'd sat on this next chapter for over a week and in that time I came up with but ultimately rejected a half-dozen approaches. Had I been of the draft-first-don't-collect-200-words philosophy this would have been a half dozen drafts. I would have written each of them out, then looked back over to see how it didn't work.

Or maybe not. I have an approach now that I almost certainly would not have come up with in outlining. It depends too much on threads that simply weren't there or weren't prominent. On ideas that came out during the actual writing of the previous chapters. It remains an open question if I would have come up with this approach through the multiple drafts and revisions method. Probably. I can't help feeling, though, that as much as it felt as if I was making no progress, this was a faster way to go.

And, heck, it is iteration. By which I mean it is a lot easier to correct a one-sentence synopsis than it is to correct a thousand-word scene built on that idea.

So I've got a new version. The Panto stuff is now essentially diary-free and focused on the Panto -- and on the Athena Fox problem. Then I finish up the Detectorist sub-plot and use them to talk about Diary Fever and the way Penny has gotten entwined with Linnet, and the way Linnet is heading into dangers she is yet too naive to understand. And I also get a chance to do a sort of recap/catch up for the reader who has gotten lost and can't quite remember where this whole 1941 story came from and why it is taking up a chunk of the narrative.

Now if I can just resist the urge to drop more Simon and Garfunkle references...

(I did finally explain that; in the scene where someone name-drops Time Team they also explain about the TV show Detectorists).

And oops. To really get all this stuff right, I should really finish reading my books on the Aux Units and the SOE...and finish watching the first few episodes of Detectorists.

Knits up the raveled sleeve of care

Finally got some sleep. I was feeling physically ill from want of sleep but today, finally, there's no work, no contractor coming in to work on the apartment, no noisy party outside, and I could finally sleep in.

I am less than inspired on the book. Heck, I got mildly inspired by the thought of pulling an edit on the trunk novel (Shirato) and getting that out there. (That thought came out of house cleaning...in a roundabout way.)

Also new thoughts on Japan. What I wanted to do with it is too far along certain paths in the overall character arc. So I'm reconsidering which book in the series to do next. The "Paris" book, if I could figure out how to do it in a way that doesn't amplify my current faults. Or something new. I want to get her to Paris before Notre Dame burns but I have a few winter months to play. Boston maybe. Good thing the Big Dig is dug already...

(Yeah, there it is again. The "where do you get your ideas." Writing archaeology adventures, no week goes by without reading about something that would be cool to write about.)

(That said, I could use an idea that would work well in winter. I should go through my list of Fox-related titles and through the sticky elements of the character arcs. All I have at moment is I'd like an adventure that gets her some additional notoriety -- that sets up Japan better -- and that gives her a chance to get some more acting in and otherwise work on her poise before she has to pull off the Great Deception necessary for the Japan book. And also one with no romance at all. And it would be nice to get into some solid history. Not that London during the War isn't, but how about something from an era where there aren't living witnesses?)

(I'd like to send her mountain climbing some time, but winter and mountains is suicide. So is going to check out the Duga radar. Although I would like something outdoors. Central America? All the adventure archaeologists head that way eventually...  I guess I should hit up my travel experiences too but I'm running out of places I've been.)

***

I think the scene I'm stalled on now is another "the perfect is enemy of the good" problem. I had this idea of the big heart-to-heart between Penny and Graham being where she finally explained what happened in Athens, they read Linnet's diary where she talks about her intentions to join up, and Graham cautions her on the pitfalls of the path of heroism. More-or-less. It's complicated.

But the diary isn't lining up. Linnet's relationship with Wentworth needed another chapter to develop, and unless I can kick the discovery back a day the visit by Orde Wingate has to wait for next entry. And the Athens stuff -- at this point it feel better for Penny to indulge in a "how did I end up here?" when she's in the flooding Zero Room under Nine Elms.

Oops. Was that a spoiler?

Sigh. I had dreams of this great scene that would bring everything together. I haven't learned how to write that well yet, though. So the delay in getting back to work on the current scene is basically me letting go of the what could have been and sitting down to write the what must be.

In fact I think I'm coming all the way around until the discussion is in terse exchanges in the middle of something else. Quite possibly running after the suspect.

Hair

Pulled a fourteen-hour day Saturday. But we had the test chamber back in operation by Monday. And then I found out a contractor was coming into my apartment Monday so I spent all Sunday packing up computer and table and everything to make a space. By Wednesday I needed to take a day off...and I'm still tired.

Weird. Spent the lockdown just dealing. Now that I'm back to work, I'm finally getting to all the little annoyances. Replacing light switches and window cranks and so on. The place has never been cleaner (okay...it was cleaner before I moved in. But it is getting better. And more comfortable.)

Also re-haired a bow. My cheap bow -- not even the forty-dollar carbon fibre one. Boy, was it cheap. When I got it open, I found out the wedges were soft plastic and they'd been glued into place. But now I know basically how replacing bow hair works. And, yes, I've been back to practicing on the violin. Seems like all the music I want to write now has a violin part.

Unsurprisingly, not a lot of fiction writing done. Have had several ideas about what to do with the Japan novel. I still think Paris should be first but that one would bring out all my bad habits so I want the change of gears the Japan book will give me.

And on that. I had a nice talk with a family friend who just finished the Athens book. There's a trend here. Well, besides that older people seem to be liking it. And that women like the character -- and that's a relief, because male writer trying to write a female character (in First Person POV, to boot)...

But there's also a repeated "You must have done so much research."

Which is, right there, a writing fail. It isn't supposed to look like you did a lot of research. You are supposed to DO the research, but then you put in the book only what absolutely needs to be there.

And that's been worrying me a lot about the London novel, because it feels dense and complicated to me.

But this last time, and yeah some of the things my German friend said, are giving me hope. I am thinking at this point that just maybe the stuff I spent time researching is not the stuff they think I spent time researching. And maybe I'm lucky and most of the stuff I'm sweating in the London book is on me, not on them.

In the Athens book there's some Greek mythology and some Bronze Age history. And some other history (even a bit of Roman stuff). Heck, in chapter three my protagonist gives an impromptu lecture on the Thera eruption and its effect on the Minoan civilization. And this is what I meant. I already know this stuff. I didn't research it for the book, it was just there. Every single one of Penny's impromptu lectures was me, going off the top of my head just as she is.

Same way that every time in the book she quoted Shakespeare from memory, I wrote it by....quoting Shakespeare from memory. Okay, sure, I looked up the passages and I edited a little here and there, but the basic lines, like the lectures, was me just writing what I know without having spent any specific effort towards it. So I don't think of these as "hard" or "complicated" and when I weigh density of prose and all that I undercount all this stuff.

Thing is, names and dates are a flag. They code as Serious History. They codee as "obscure facts that someone had to look up." And I think that throws up a barrier to the reader, too. When they realize they are being fed history, they tense up.

Meanwhile, this is what I actually spent time researching:

What do signs look like, are there seats or compartments on the train, does the desert come after or with the meal, what time is check-out. A lot of daily living stuff, in other words.

So the London book might or might not pass. There are a few bits of "throw a lot of dates and names at you" things. Bradgate Park and a bit of the history of the Nine Day's Queen. The history of the Battersea Power Station. And of course stuff about the London Blitz. And there's a very brief bit about the geology of London which is likely to send some people screaming.

The stuff the reader probably won't have trouble with is stuff like what is in a Full English Breakfast or how the rooms are arranged in Graham's "flat" (actually a two-up, two down walk-up with an expanded garret). I think. I think it will just come across as description. That's my theory, see. That if it isn't really exotic (like describing a kimono) then it is just "stuff." It is still a pub and a cab and a train even if some of the details are different. Nothing to get scared of.

And the history stuff was largely unfamiliar to me so I had to research it myself so I'm a little more conscious of it.

But, sigh. There is stuff which I didn't have to research but which might or might not bother the reader. That is, give the reader the sense of being overwhelmed by facts and details. Stuff like British pop culture. There's a sort of running reference to Doctor Who (the idea -- not really made explicit -- is that Athens was a gods-haunted place but England kicked theirs out and replaced them with pop-culture heroes. So The Doctor is the functional equivalent in this book of Athena Polis in the last.)

Possibly not helped by something I've been doing since I was a role-playing game referee; that the world has a life independent of the protagonist, and there will be things going on around her that she doesn't understand and never will. In many cases these are what TVTropes calls a "Genius Bonus"; a reference that isn't spelled out but that those in the know will, well, know.

I named Doctor Who and The Doctor. But in a different scene the actor Tony Robinson shows up and someone says, "Oh, that's Baldrick." And later someone in his presence says, "She has a cunning plan." And there's no explanation for this.

Heck, I lampshaded it in a different scene. When they discover the fabled White Room at the Battersea Power Station one of the Urban Explorers makes a crack about a white room by the station, and another comments on the lack of black curtains...leading to a third complaining he has no idea what they are going on about. (That sequence started with someone talking about the Dark Side of the Moon -- but here Penny explains to the reader about the Pink Floyd album cover.)

Sigh. Breakfast is over. Time to once again put the computer in the closet, tuck the table up against the wall and prepare to stay extra-late at work because it looks like the contractor is going to be tearing holes in my ceiling through the weekend. 

Strange Days

This weekend has been exhaustion and depression. I haven't felt up to working on the book and haven't wanted to work on the book.

Today I finally got back to it. Maybe I'll take some days off next week. We're supposed to work this weekend anyhow. We want to redo the test chamber while nobody is using it.

Made a travel mug of strong coffee with my new electric kettle. Had an apple cinnamon scone. Put on my Athena Fox mix tape. And finally got moving again.

Oh, and had a weird insight. I'm listening to one of Carlos Elene's excellent game covers as I start this. He's been working with more and more performers lately and that's all to the good, because while he plays quite competently at piano, bass, and of course his lead sax, I heard something new this time.

And that's the performance choices -- those tiny nuances of accent and phrasing -- are the same in all his instruments. And that I feel is a weakness. I can hear the same thing in SquidPhysics and I assume in other one-man-band recordists. There's a dialog between players, but there is also more richness even if they record separately, because each makes slightly different kinds of choices.

***

But back to the book. This was the scene that felt most difficult. Sure, I'm wrapping up a lot of plot lines and that is either easier or harder depending on how much has to be pulled together and how much time there is to do it.

I just could not find what it was I wanted to say. Actually saying it is easier. Well, the current draft is a total cludge but I think I have something at last.

And did I mention the problems I was having with the diary conversation had propagated back? Yeah, I'm two scenes back, because the problems in the diary scene had grown out of choices I'd made back there.

I'm not looking forward to editing this mess. Well, not the work. I can do that. But rewrites (as opposed to spell check) is a place where you can revisit the roads not taken. And for anyone like me that is a horrible place to be because I'll be back at the crossroads agonizing over the choice again, while my little horse thinks it queer that I'm not pushing on to formatting for publication.

Oh, yeah. I got nothing against self pub. I've got even less against traditional publication. But I feel I have more to learn before it is even worth approaching one.

***

My music has suffered in this time. Being stuck at home unable to practice. Lacking the energy and the time to start any new pieces. I put new strings on my lute-back ukulele and I love it (synthetic gut-and-silk strings -- very medieval sounding).

My original 7C has corrosion pits inside and no longer slots clean. I'd really transitioned to the 5C anyhow, which is more secure slotting with mutes (which I have to use for many of my practice sessions) and is probably good training for the upper register.

But I picked up a screamer to try out. Don't know exactly where it sits but probably close to a 12-something. (That's Bach numbers -- nobody agrees on the numbers otherwise, not even the direction). It leapt right up past the over-the-staff C first time I tried it. But I'm liking more and more the full warm sound of the 5C.

And speaking of full sound. The trombone is still a pain. The second partial is horrible for me. I keep blatting on it. I keep thinking of getting an Alto (plus I could use a better machine -- this one has a noisy slide, no tuning slide, and is heavy). Or even a soprano, which slots exactly like the trumpet I'm familiar with and wouldn't be splitting my training so badly. I've been listening to Seb Skelly, who uses a soprano trombone and shifts it down an octave in the mix and it sounds decent. But all that sort of thing feels like it defeats the purpose.

So best wait until I'm making more music before I set out to add more instruments to my collection!

***

And the grind continues. I'm back up to the diary scene and it is slow going. The immediacy helps. I'm still not doing quotes within quotes, though, and I think I have to. I need to hear what Linnet and Wentworth actually said to each other, not just Linnet's reporting of it.

And there is of course still so much pushed onto the shoulders of this one scene. So slow going and even though it is only two PM I already need a break.

And I put on a playlist of Bardcore and somehow managed to shove my way through the diary scene. I have no idea how much I may end up editing this. The nested quotations are nearly as annoying as I thought they would be.

I offloaded some material on to the last two diary scenes. That's fine. I've realized how this works; the dig ended last chapter and with this scene, Linnet's story moves into larger prominence. I could even say that while the center part of the story is Penny spending her days in the Nine Elms Shelter and going on adventures with Graham evenings and weekends, it is now Linnet spending her nights in the shelter and Penny's adventures have become more serious.

Graham gets one more chapter. I'm still far from happy how I dealt with the complexities of their relationship, but it will have to do until I am ready for rewrites. And beta readers. I really need to score some beta readers. I'm making more these days, though. So I could actually go to the ones who charge for it.

Siege Mentality

One again I start the weekend with no confidence at all in writing. I don't think I can do it. And I don't think it is worth doing (not writing in general, I mean what I am doing).

So of course I also realized another place in which I ended up telling a different story than I'd set out to. I was looking at questions on Quora again and someone was asking about symbolism and that started a train of thought.

Well, the keyword I started this particular book with was "Under Siege." No, not the movie on the boat. That the arc of this book was sending Penny to London, having her suffer in cold weather and unfamiliar surroundings, go broke, and be shivering and starving while also being harassed by her fellow students as she's struggling to make a go of it as an archaeologist.

And the book would move underground in stages; starting with a "soft" introduction with the Tube as a place that is dirty and damp and scary and progressing towards both digging into and getting second-hand experience via what they were uncovering with the literal siege of the Blitz.

The big symbol through this is the North Sea, as a storm surge, a tide, paralleled with invasion and siege, from Boudicca's sack of Londinium to Penny's current situation, and it culminates in Penny trapped underground in a W.W.II shelter as the waters are rising.

But, you see, that's where plotting happened.

***

I've been writing about this on Quora and if I write that How To Write book it is going to be a big part. And that's the "Where do you get your ideas?" question. Because it is almost exactly the wrong question for someone who is writing.

As much as it makes sense for someone who has yet to learn how to write. And that's Quora in a nutshell. It is for people to ask beginner questions. It isn't like a forum, where you join, familiarize yourself with the place, learn the questions people hate to answer, and otherwise fumble around picking up the basics without, honestly, a lot of help. Quora is really not where advanced writers meet to hash out nuances in how to properly do an untrustworthy narrator in First Person. They are a place where people ask, "What is the difference between First Person and Third Person?"

It is a bit frustrating. It is like asking about what the controls on a car do. Yes, you need to learn that at some point. But it isn't something that really comes up when you are actually learning how to drive.

And that's really most of what is in a book about how to write. It is the stuff that everybody who writes already knows but, even more importantly, knows so well they don't think about it most of the time. You've got the basics. Now you are struggling with the interesting questions. It is nearly impossible for a book (or an explanation!) to do justice to both levels.

This is a long-winded way of saying that "Where do you get your ideas?" is an unanswerable question.

It isn't about the ideas. It is about the writer. The ideas are everywhere. But the ideas are also nowhere if you don't have that skill in figuring out how to use them.

So, yeah. I'm still learning how to use them. This was a good learning experience I guess. I'm not unhappy with the directions the story went. What I would like is to understand how it went as it did. Was it that I lacked the skills to tell my "siege" story? Or that the idea simply wasn't capable of carrying the story and HAD to be modified?

It is possible -- I realized this during the Battersea sequence and am even more confronting it over the Globe sequence -- that I had a basic error in outlining.

When I set up this story, I pretty much looked around and said, "What are some fun things to do in London?" I didn't realize how much it was going to turn into a Blitz story, not at first. So the idea that there are scenes at Trafalgar Square, The Tower of London, The New Globe, Highgate Cemetery, Battersea Power Station, and not even slightly to mention Bradgate Park in Leicestershire, is a bit off that model.

It isn't like there aren't a million Blitz related things I could have done. What with the Imperial War Museum, the new Blitz Experience near the London Eye, HMS Belfast, the Churchill War Rooms, the Deep Underground Shelters...

My objection was generally that this was a little too on-the-nose. That having Penny go to London and somehow every single thing that she gets involved in is about the war looks like author manipulation. Well, that was one reason. The other reason being I wanted to use the Globe, my dad wanted me to use Highgate, and I thought if I used Battersea I could work a Pink Floyd joke in there.

***

I recently watched a short video on the skilled editing job that rescued Star Wars from the dismal mess that had been the first cut. And a couple YouTube articles on writing. And I'm sort of giving up at the mid-point of the second book of a series I found on Kindle.

The first book had promise. It looked like he was figuring out how to write a story, and I wanted to see where he was going to go next. Well, apparently that was where he had been trying to go, and the second book was more of the same. It does seem that what he wants to write, somebody wants to read, because he's up to twenty-odd books between a couple of series and I didn't look at his numbers but he can afford full-painted covers so there's that.

I happen to want to tell the kind of story Ben is telling in the Rivers of London series, though, and that particular set of books is getting not just readers, but awards, a comic book, and options on a TV series. I'm not making a comparison, mind you. It isn't about that.

***

So that may be a lesson as I head into plotting the next book. Okay, I'm still not fixed on what my next project is going to be. Probably the next Athena Fox story, though -- because as much as I am getting really tired of First Person and finding it harder and harder work talking in her voice for the length of a novel, a series has more weight both among readers and in the numbers game of Amazon's ecosystem.

And I'm still a little split. The Japan book would make more sense a little further down the road. Especially, it might make more sense after the "Paris" book -- the latest thought being that one is more of a greatest hits, multiple city tour book. The "Paris" book is the Eco book; Penny is caught up in a fake Templar Conspiracy and at the climax watches Notre Dame catch fire.

The reason to do the Japan book first is I'm trying to shake some bad habits. Habits the Paris book is totally tailored to bring out in force.

So on the one hand, I'm assembling another list of "wouldn't it be cool" stuff for Japan. At this point some of them are so much in my head I'd have trouble letting them go, like climbing the Tokyo Tower (probably by the stairs but you never know), getting attacked by ninjas at the Toei standing Edo-era village set outside Kyoto, and getting lost at Fushimi Inari during the kind of weather that gives the book its title. And is going to wear kimono but that's a given.

I just hope that when I've got it all plotted out those won't end up feeling out of place, like the New Globe is for the current novel.

I'm still brainstorming but I'm seeing it in sort of three parts. Part One is the same Romancing the Stone game; Penny is getting mistaken for the YouTube character she created, and put into crazy situations she manages somehow to survive.

In Part Two, she finds out this wasn't luck. There's a very off-the-records effort by a flamboyant and charismatic agent of the Japanese Government to take down a cult leader with an interest in fringe archaeology. So there's an excuse here for the whole range of Junior Spy activities, from Embassy Balls with handlers sending instructions to a hidden earpiece, to a training montage in the spectacular scenery. But for me, one of the major attractions is being in social situations where Penny has to use every bit of acting skill and misdirection and social engineering to keep anyone from figuring out she really isn't Athena Fox.

In Part Three, the government gets a clue, a spine, or both and cuts their losses. Penny is left without support and with the illusion crumbled. And gets a chance to find out just what the real Penny can do.

At least, that's the scheme right now! I have a month of writing and basic edit and then I'll be scrounging for beta readers. For the reasons above, I don't feel I can afford to spend a lot of time in rewrites. I need another book up there STAT so I can build my numbers. And quality is going to have to suffer.

Thanks, I hate it

Wrote the scene. Next day was very tired after work but still got one thing done; I decided it didn't work.

What I was missing was the immediacy and the sensory impact. So instead of telling most of it through the framing story, I'm trying to tell it in direct quotes from the diary. Which is more work of course.

This is a crunch scene in that the outline said that Linnet was going to slowly reveal as her relationship with the Captain developed. But as I hit draft I find I don't have the luxury of time. Linnet only got six scenes total when I counted back to the earliest possible day I could have the diary unearthed.

I got two hundred words into the more immediate approach and I read that aloud and I realized I was name-dropping without sufficient context. So back to the drawing board again. The idea seems sound but the execution...?

Another draft and got a little further. And then realized this is where a lot of threads are coming together. This scene is having to do the entire "develop the relationship" in one go, and it is also the culmination of all the scenes with Graham because on the following day, he blows up at her and those are the last direct quotes we'll get from him.

And as soon as I realized that I thought of a couple of "bits" and directions the scene could go and beats I wanted and I realized...

I need to set it aside for another day while I think about it some more.