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.