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.
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