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.