No More Tribbles

I've been having a real problem with Fox and Hounds. 

I constructed it as a stealth plot. It is what I call a "Tribble" plot, after David Gerrold's excellent description of how he constructed that fabulous Star Trek episode; things are happening on the surface and they look important but every now and then the camera cuts away to the tribbles getting more and more numerous...until suddenly everyone realizes the tribbles are the real plot.

The problem I'm hitting is that this is Penny floundering in Field School and finding London confusing, and Graham is dragging her out on a rather "Steed and Mrs Peel" series of interviews with colorful local characters.

Which means the poor reader is presented with a whole bunch of stuff and no way of knowing what of it is supposed to be important.

Part of this is intentional, and something I mean to continue: I call it out explicitly in this book as something The Doctor does (Doctor Who); that there are all these things happening that look like background detail or throwaways until at the climax one of them matters.

In the television series Eureka this is multiple and blatant. Last episode I remember watching, there was a new computer gizmo being tried out that predicted disasters before they happened. One of the ones it tried to warn about was a leak of cooling gel in one of the labs, and it looks like the gag was entirely about the Sherif Carter getting it dumped all over him. Except at the climax, the computer core is running so hot it is predicting that it, itself, is about to overheat and explode...and they save the day by dumping the cooling gel all over it.

Well, the way I've constructed Fox and Hounds, it it 16K words before The Blitz is brought up, 21K before the dig at the air raid shelter begins, 33K before they got shot at and realize there really is a mystery afoot. Graham isn't even brought on screen before 10K, and the connection between his Roman Coin problem and the Nine Elms dig, although hinted at, isn't made explicit until 60K (out of 77K current draft.)

That's because it is unfolding as a mystery plot. But there's no backbone. It is fine if Spenser walks around Boston for fifty pages before finding anything out, because he goes into the story knowing he is on a case. Penny doesn't know she's on an adventure. She even calls this out right at the top of the story; "I'm here for school."

So my editing problem now is to reveal the tribbles. To put in more of those scenes David Gerrold described where it is obvious that despite all the running around after Klingons and annoying Federation Trade Representatives, there is something important building.

And as of this moment, the best way I can think to do it is to make it Penny's perception as well. To have her actively addressing the idea that school isn't fulfilling enough and despite wanting to leave Athena Fox behind and become a real archaeologist, she'd love to have some interesting historical problem to dig into.

***

I complained before about how easy it is to put everything on the nose. I avoided doing that. But that means the historical focus is weak.

Story starts at the ancestral home of Lady Jane, the Nine Days Queen. There's a few random bits but the next big chunk of history is Armistice Day and the Great War.

With Nine Elms the focus finally zooms into the Blitz, specifically, 1941. That's an all-sides envelopment; the Blitz Experience walk-though exhibit at the Museum, cosplay as Ack-Ack Girl, the dig, the discovery of Linnet's diary.

But at the end of the dig there's an epic trek through Battersea Power Station as an artifact of the 20's (it isn't, but that's the main focus), then a trip to Shakespeare's Globe, before we finally go into the tunnels...but even then it is largely about Crossrail and a bit of Bazalgette and really not much of the Blitz at all.

So I've got some work trying to find a focus here.

Double Chin

I was sicker than I thought. But now it has broken and I'm full of vim...and tempted by far too many things.

Like...I've been thinking about picking up a cheap violin, swapping my octave strings to it and making that the chin cello, and reverting my first violin to, well, violin. Or more importantly, to silent violin so I can get some more practice in!

But here's the crazy idea. I have a short-scale bass -- it is a baritone ukulele with extra-dense strings that plays in the same pitches as an electric bass. And the electric bass and the orchestral double bass share the same pitches (and octave.) And I've seen people use a violin bow on a guitar.

Well, it works. I can actually bow my u-bass. But only sort of, as it lacks the cutaway and the curved bridge. That's the bow from my chin cello, which means it is carbon-fibre and has bass rosin on it already.

So...why not hang those Kala strings on an electric violin and make a chin bass?

Right. First problem is the scale length. The scale length on my u-bass is 21". Scale length on a violin is under 13". Ah, but viola goes up to 17".

Next experiment. Held the fourth fret (roughly 17" from the bridge) and retuned to the open string pitch. And yes, it still plays. And it still bows.

Past that, I really can't tell. The next problem is those strings are just too massive for standard pegs, so have to redesign the peg box. But it is probably do-able. It wouldn't sound great, I imagine, but it would be a heck of a cool thing to build.

How long goats live

Not a fun week. High temperatures and higher smoke -- smells like a dumpster fire outside and it went into the red zone several times. I come back from work into a hot apartment and what can I do but open the windows and let smokey, slightly less hot air in?

Plus we are clearing out a warehouse. To make room for all the stuff from a warehouse we're moving out of. We recycle, though, so this means taking everything out of the packaging and binning it correctly and is not the kind of labor to be doing in this sort of weather.

Saturday I couldn't face editing so I dragged the gaming machine out of the closet. Thing about open-world games like Skyrim and Fallout 4 is you can ignore the core game and go off and do things. My favorite Skyrim pastimes are either being a bard, or running a farm. I want to play an archaeologist and poke into Dwemer stuff but that would take more modding to make really plausible.

So my current Fallout 4 I assumed the Sole Survivor's mind snapped and he has decided he is a Roman legionnaire. I'm ignoring most of the quests and all the main plot line and using mods to let me build all the crap I want. I'm not even using the stock settlements, but instead building my own forts and townships up in the nearly vacant Northeast corner of the map around Vault 111. Unfortunately I can't find any Roman armor, and because of how settlements work I can't build roads from one fort to another (much less a Hadrian's Wall).

***

Editing is not going well. I have no confidence in the story. Or my writing.

I've started redrawing the coin at least. And although this week has not been one for either writing in the evening or thinking during the day I still managed to solve one scene re-write. Really, what I need to do now is put on the appropriate music, open a beer, and charge through the remaining big hole.

But I think I'll focus on getting it ready for beta instead. Maybe I can deal with the grammar checker. (Dammit -- and I have the Geordie Dialect check to do as well. Plus I am still fumbling for Linnet's voice, and that needs some attention).

Picking a Book

Dratted Apple. I suspect PhotoShop and their new stupid requirement to run their Cloud application just to let you use the software was also at fault.

My computer was running ridiculous hot, and stalling out on simple tasks. I checked Activity Monitor and it was Apple's Crash Reporter that was the culprit, taking up as much as 70% of the CPU and running constantly. 

And of course this is part of the "it just works" under the hood of Apple. Meaning no preferences pane, no control panel...ah, but there is the UNIX core down there and a power user had figured out how to delete it. I ran Terminal and sudo'd the fucking thing gone and my computer is back to not being the hottest thing in a small room on what are predicted to be several very hot days in a row.

***

I'm plowing through the "blue line" part of the edit.

Also took time to draft up my first scene/part divider idea so I could prep manuscript for the beta readers in something resembling final form:

And I don't like it. Surprise! I might try a new inking; I had thought damaging the coin might take some emphasis off the hat but it just made things worse. Time to try drawing a trowel and see if I like that better.

Anyhow.

What I did was read the book quickly from top to tail looking for places where there was a big block of description or expositional dialog. I marked all of those by changing text colors; blue for "this could be condensed," and red for "I really don't need this."

The next pass is going to be for through lines and necessary information. I'll be jumping around a lot more with that.

But there are a couple of scenes that need to be re-written completely and I've hit the first big one and I'm stalled picking out a book. The scenario; Linnet is in the Nine Elms shelter, reading, and Wentworth passes by and says something.

But what book? Every book I've looked at so far goes way off into things I don't want to have come up in that conversation. I want her to be cautiously optimistic and I want him to not have an easy dismissal of "That Buck Rodgers stuff."

First problem. Rationing and attacks on convoys. She's not going to be getting what's hot off the American presses. Second problem; most of what's exciting and appropriate in SF at that point is in pulp magazines with gaudy covers. Which is actually sort of cute in a geeky way and I might be able to work with that.

Third problem; SF in period, especially from British authors, was depressing. There was a big phase of rise-of-fascism dystopias going on. SF, even in the pulps, had moved a bit beyond Buck Rodgers and was already into socialist, psychological, feminist, and other themes. It was at that point straining to be literary -- even though the New Wave was surprisingly far in the future.

So here's a few I considered; Olaf Stapleton's Star Maker. Ridiculously cosmic scale, philosophical in outlook (although Brian Aldiss describes his take on the nature of existence and the future of humanity as being told in terms "vast, cool, and unsympathetic.") 

Contemporary C.S. Lewis was appalled, and yes he also gets on the list with Out of the Silent Planet, unabashed Christian polemics on a basically unrecognizable Venus; to my opinion, Narnia if it was trying to be serious enough for an adult audience (but only succeeded in being ponderous).

Gray Lensman is on the list but was being serialized in an American pulp. It does come up later in the novel...but I'm not sure I want to establish it quite so strongly as a running theme.

L. Sprague de Camp provides Lest Darkness Fall. The hardcover British edition wasn't until 1941 but I suppose I could let that slide. The big advantage is also the disadvantage; this is a Connecticut Yankee story in which the time traveler tries to stave off the Fall of Rome. So on the one hand, it lets Wentworth get on his horse about last stands and fallen empires, but on the other, it is off the tracks for Linnet.

There's a peculiar little book in the rise-of-fascism mode that was in Britain in 1937 and got recommended by a Leftist reading club. Written by a woman under an assumed name, it describes a future England under the deified memory of a savior Hitler. It is both future history and feminist dystopia and there's a lot of fun resistance and fifth column stuff going on. That title jumps out at one, though; Swastika Night. 

Which makes my conundrum even more complicated. I am going to elide most of the details -- this is a novel, not a book review -- but leave in just enough so the reader would be able to recognize the work. "This de Camp fellow is one of those fantasists, right?" "No, I believe he studied history."

In Katharine Burdekin's case, though, the novel is obscure enough (just recently got a big push from a feminist press) she really should get her details recorded.

(That's 1943 or 1944, I forget which. The title story is an absolute snooze, written by the editor himself and having nothing to do with the previously-painted cover.)

Music Notes

 I am so overdue to record something new!

Trouble is, my skills keep improving, so I keep putting it off until I am "good enough." Well, that, and until I have time (and with the current plan to write the next two Athena Fox books before I stop trying to push that series...)

That practice really needs to include more reading and more ear training. So I opened the theme to Deep Space 9 on MuseScore but tried to do the trumpet part by ear instead of looking at the chart. I was getting that high note with the screamer mouthpiece, but when I checked it with the chromatic tuner, it was only a D flat. So what's going on?

Oh. My chromatic was set for Trumpet, so properly transposing, but the MuseScore track was in Orchestral pitch. So actually that part is a whole-tone lower than I thought it was. Still a high trumpet note for a non-jazz score.

Incidentally, this isn't just me making up terminology. Kelly really does call the MPC that:

And, yes, that really is a "non-whistling" string I ordered:

I put the new set of nylon strings and the aluminium E on my newly re-fitted bridge and I do like the sound. I had confidence to go through a couple of practice pieces with the mutes off.

See, this is where the chin-cello really helped me. The violin is another loud instrument and it makes terrible noises when you are still learning. This makes it too easy for someone like me to go at the strings weakly, which besides poor tone also leads to things like poor bow control, a lack of authority in string crosses, etc.

I have to hammer at that chin-cello to get it to play, especially on the C. Plus my current chin-cello is based on a solid-body electric so there's not a lot of volume either way.

Notice the extra-thick strings. And that's my carbon-fibre bow.

***

So I have the latest "that would be amusing" project in mind:

I've had versions of this thought before but I woke up with it feeling even clearer. There's a sort of rather formulaic fantasy/epic music with lots of repetitive figures and basic chord sequences that doesn't keep a composer up all night trying to work out the harmony (something that's killing me right now in, say, trying to do proper voicing on the Hellboy theme).

With random ethnic instruments, of course. Well, to some extent, I now play both basic elements of the orchestra and a smatter of ethnic instruments. And although my music theory is basically pants, I know enough to fake my way through a I to IV chord change and a minor second key change on top of it.

It is also more-or-less how I used to build music on keyboard. Question is whether I can do this with real instruments in any sort of efficient way...

The Big Black Mamba

 So after a good week of hair-pulling, I've realized the decisions I made for the book were pretty much the right ones in the first place. 

Not even sure I could structure it better if I chose to re-write from scratch. All my notes ended up being variations of "do what is already there, just punch it up a little."

I did have some good insights as to some of the key things happening in the sword fight scene, and how to better work with the pants scene. And I'd already decided to re-write the panto scene from the top, and I've more or less come around on extending the final sewer trip a bit with some more incidents.

I used to think of re-writes like surgery. As I get better, it is more and more like a laparoscopic procedure. Not quite out-patient, but getting closer.

And that's good, because line edits always feel a bit like murder. A story and the people in it have a sort of false life, and getting down to the individual sentences and word choices strips out the illusion. It becomes like waking from a dream.

What I mean is, when you are having a dream, there is this illusion of all sorts of lovely detail and consistency, but when you try to remember and write it down you realize just how little was actually there. Story is the same way. Strip it down to words and that face that you picture in your mind so clearly is a mention of a hair color and a frequent grin. And with one edit, the grin can go away.

***

None of my beta readers so far read on a computer so I have to have a print-ready manuscript before they can even get at it. Makes me less eager to make use of their services. But even the paid readers I've been eyeballing, I don't want to contact until I've at least run my own grammar check. And that needs to wait for me to finish the clean-up and tightening.

And I'm so over this. I wish I could just send this off to a publisher and let them worry about it. Well, sure, their in-house editor would mail be back with a list of things they need me to do, but at least that would be a month from now.

***

Finally got into it yesterday. The only good thing that came out of being sick (although I spent most of today feeling so ill I watched the pilot of Deep Space 9 and the first half of Megamind). 

I already blue-lined around the spots where there was a big lecture that either felt extraneous or boring or out of character or more like all three. Well, I'm finding it surprisingly easy to throw out half those paragraphs entirely, and re-write the survivors to be more compact. And also more in keeping with the characters and the themes and arcs as I worked them out through writing the rest of it.

Pitch?

 Preview of the revision-in-progress:

So that's with the Tomb of Atreus background, new render of the calyx with cleaner ground and no bullets and a godray that took ten hours of render time even at 1/4 resolution. I had the side lighting cut because Dad complained about it, but I needed them to detach the pot from the background so rendered those off as a new layer and comped that in this morning.

One thing PhotoShop does not do, apparently, is let you adjust the kerning on individual letters. I'm still delving into that, though. (You can, of course, turn them into a bitmap and manipulate that.) It's really a sort of awful font -- Diogenes, and it was free at least. But it has the "Greek without being too awkwardly Disney Hercules" look about it.

And I just realized I'm breaking another rule by using a serif font with a sans serif. Well, with a decorative. The serif font is Archaeocaps, which is a caps-only font with a slightly awkward look that does sort of put across "history, but modern."

It's a tough cover problem, trying to juggle archaeological thriller with detective cozy. The other is worse. I haven't quite figured out how to not make it look like a crime novel.

And rewrites are going very slowly.

***

During lunch at work today I took the bridge off my violin and thinned it down. The main reason was because the mute didn't fit and it was cutting into my practice opportunities.

It's funny. You look at the "how to fit a bridge" and they all explain how to use sandpaper. Then the old pros speak up, horrified that you'd use anything but a very sharp knife. Well, I'm lazy. I used sandpaper. Although I did use a knife to fit the feet a little better than they had been.

The bridge fit. The violin also sounded nicer, much nicer. I am not into the bright sound and I just splurged as well for a "non-whistling E string." And a set of nylon-core (not the really expensive silk-and-gut ones, though). Strings don't last forever anyhow, and my A string had just unravelled and I had to scrounge up the strings I had before I got the Alphayues.

One thing led to another and I swapped back the old chin rest and it is finally starting to feel like it is placed right on my shoulder. Still some tension though, mostly in the arm.

Anyhow!

I put the strings on but left them a little slack so everything could ease in a little. Came back a few hours later, and with no reference pitches in my ear over that entire period tuned in the E to as close as my tuner could register it.

So maybe I do have perfect pitch? I really need to spend some more time training it up.

rough comp

 It doesn't feel like a productive weekend.

I've identified the things I want to edit in the new novel. Other than that, it has been a lot of poking around trying to learn about Amazon categories and font use, looking through stock image galleries, trying to work up the blurb, and so on.

The concept for the new cover is to this stage now:

Of course I still need to model, texture, and render the bit of wall that says "Nine Elms Station" in that lovely Leslie Green tile-work. And purchase assets and take the real photo with something other than 100-baht pieces.

The select-float-change tool-move-anchor layer routine of Gimp got really old for me so I've installed the (bah) membership version of PhotoShop. Which has mucked up mightily with the Adjustment Layers -- I think they still do the same things, but that simple functionality is now harder to access.

And I had Poser running for 10-12 hours rendering a single god ray for a revised and cleaned-up version of the old cover. I want to play more interesting games with the font, and I re-rendered with a new color map for the ground (and no bullets) and this time I'm doing most of the adjustments before I collapse all the layers.

And, yes, on the work list is Third Printing revisions to text of the first book.

I don't want to be doing ANY of this right now. Actually, I want to be playing Fallout. I'm burned out. 

Or writing something new. The Japan book, for instance. (Which is to be followed by the Paris Book, except that one is more of a multi-city National Treasure tour as Penny clashes with a gang who have Templar Secrets on the brain).

And then a break from Penny. I need it.

Came up with another possible project, though. Was using PublishRocket to look at the Amazon keyword and category listings and realized I was getting really tired of the Slab Beefjerky heroes. And this is one plot bunny I am keeping under my top hat -- all I will share is the tag line:

THE WEIRD WAR JUST GOT WEIRDER

***

Oh; here's the current state-of-draft of the Amazon come-on:

AN AMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGIST IN LONDON. 

Penny Bright is going to be a real archaeologist. She’s not going to let tough classes, obnoxious fellow students, or her rapidly dwindling funds stop her. Nor the fact that she doesn’t, apparently, even speak the language.

Then things get interesting. Penny gets an opportunity to dig at an old Underground platform. At Nine Elms, she is drawn into the story of a young woman who sheltered there during the London Blitz. Meanwhile, a prickly and eccentric coin collector has come to her with his own mystery.

Before this is over she’ll have met mudlarkers and pantomime players, and gone from an illegal expedition into an abandoned power station to a bloody encounter on the very stage of Shakespeare’s Globe; all in search of answers about a lost love and a secret buried for over seventy years.

And when she is trapped deep under the streets of the old city and unsure of who her true enemy is, Penny is faced with the choice of becoming once again...Athena Fox.

Cover Girl

Before I get it into the hands of beta readers I have to do packaging. That includes things like interior graphics, cover, description...

First snag. When I started writing the come-on for the Amazon page, my first thought is I didn't have a lot to come on with. There's no big stakes, there's no clear antagonist...

Oh, but then I realized the book I'd written was not the book I outlined. When I outlined, I wanted the diary as part of the mosaic. Well, turns out it is the heart. This is a mystery story, but it isn't about the coins or the guns, it is about Linnet's lost love.

So I've several pages of scribbles on that and no editing done and I still have to do the scene dividers and the cover and...

You know, that's a really boring cover. A trowel? What, is this a gardening handbook?

There's nothing in the cover that says romance. Or London. The only thing it manages to say is "underground." And that's if the art works and after another search through Shutterstock and a purchase of yet more 3D software I'm not much ahead there and not looking forward to the work and maybe I've got the wrong idea all along.

Back to revisit the idea of putting the human in the picture. This isn't so much a mystery or a travel story as it is Penny's story. Like the last. Like all of them. So shouldn't I put a face on the cover?

Research time!

And, well.

With some new search fields I turned up a bunch of quirky female protagonist having adventures with an archaeological bent. And they're basically cozies.

But this is weird. Whereas a cozy set in a New England fishing village or set in 1920's Rochester has the typical cozy cover -- painted or hand-drawn, quirky, and no human figure -- the ones that are set around a dig in Egypt or something Maya or whatever have...artifact covers! (Most of them. There's up to a quarter -- from this completely ad hoc survey -- that have the quirky hand-drawn stuff).

Yeah, we're back to artifact covers. The samples I found lean cozy in that they tend to be a fully-lit artifact posed as if in a cabinet of curiosities; the thriller types (typically with an ex-SEAL with a ridiculously macho name as hero) have lots of Fog of Mystery, or for bonus points, fire around the object de jour.

And why am I tempted to write the Private Skippy series now? 

So I'm back to artifacts despite nothing coming to mind for the London one. Maybe I should bit the bullet and write to Transport for London? Naw. Even if they'd let me use the roundel, the price would be too dear.

I don't even feel like arting right now. And I'm too burned out to do editing. Something about this series destroyed my confidence in a way that writing military SF/horror doesn't (or I hope it doesn't).

And just to add to my work list: the whole reason to kick out another Athena Fox story -- and, yes, a third, as fast as I can write it -- is because multiple books multiply. Which means I really want to go back and do some clean-up on the FIRST book before I'm ready to push the "Publish" button on this one!

And so I'm right now doing test renders seeing if I can clean up some of the things I don't like about the first cover, while also taking another look at just paying someone -- because while I'm bad at a lot of things, typography is something I'm really wretched at and I can tell how amateurish the thing looks at present...

Weeding

I just went through the woods with a can of orange spray paint, marking all the dead wood that needed to go and the thickets that needed to be thinned.

I'd call it the most productive couple of hours I've had in the whole writing process.

Did I mention I finished the first draft? Finished early Sunday Eve and I was completely wrung out physically and emotionally.

The books say to put your story aside for as long as you can and come back with fresh eyes. I should do that at some point, but right now -- now that I've just written the chapters in which I had to take up all the dangling plot threads and knot them off -- I have the best understanding of the architecture of this story I ever will have. This is absolutely the best time to go back and see when I introduced ideas and if I repeated myself or said too little...

...Or more often, said too much.

The worst repetition I see right now is that there are too many diary entries that tackle what living underground was like. There may be a way to collapse or trim these but that will take a separate work session. There's no overlap...so this will be a matter of losing what right now feels like important world-building details.

There's also two pub conversations which are basically mid-career management for the CRM archaeologist. There's overlap there.

Otherwise...not too bad. And the best part? I was able to take a whole bunch of things I'd brought in either because I thought I might need them or because the research was at the tip of my tongue, and mark them to be trimmed or removed. 

 

I mean, I don't want to lose James Henry Greathead, but if it helps the story...

I'm feeling good about the editing process. I think I can tighten this one quite nicely, and it won't take but a week or two (work and health permitting).

***

And I was reviewing comments I've gotten and I realized something else. In this book, I can explicitly flag some of the things for the reader as "you aren't expected to get this reference."

The Athens book was about trying to fit in around people who knew and appreciated the Classics, and there was a lot of "But everyone know about..." in the dialog. In the London book, I've underlined many times that the Brits are competitive. Hey, there's a scene in which Penny says, "can you please explain to the poor American" and they say, "nope, no can do."

The Japan book will offer an option to go this one better. They don't expect the foreigner to know or understand anything. She's not Japanese, after all! So anything Penny actually gets, there will be a big reaction. 

But the important thing is that I can flag for the reader, basically telling them, "No, you aren't stupid, nobody is expected to know this."

Still better to take out stuff if I can. It doesn't take much to leave a flavor of there being a whole world out there.

Speaking of. The Panto scene is up on the block for major re-write. That's going to end up longer, I'm afraid. It went far too much tell and not nearly enough show to justify it being in the book in the first place. I'm at 79.5K total, with a good 500 words already marked for deletion so...not bad.

There's a post office box in Poughkeepsie

In yet another entry on the "I want to write a novel but where do you find ideas?" this morning's news:

A mysterious hole is growing in the Siberian Tundra

An eccentric tech billionaire thinks the pyramids were built by aliens (the Egyptian ministry of culture has invited him over to check out the recently unearthed tombs of the builders).

And that's just the ones that would fit right in to the series I'm currently working on.

***

Did I say I'm getting tired of Penny's narrative voice? I've reached the point where I don't even know how it works. I never did write out what her grammatical style was; I just wrote. That may be coming back to hurt me. There's a process called Flanderization, where you take one aspect of a character and make it bigger and bigger until it takes over the character completely.

Works for ideas, too. One Klingon said it would have been a glorious war? Whoops, now they are all Space Vikings.

So one thing I have noticed, and it feels like it is taking over, is her stream-of-thought edits. It fits with her mile-a-minute act and the way she is making mistakes and very conscious of them. But it is annoying me. Things like (making this one up on the fly). "I should know: I used to play violin. Sort of play violin. In junior high. But I could still recognize when someone was singing sharp and she was singing really, really sharp."

Well, there's bigger fish to fry. Besides...ProWritingAid's grammar checker will flag the hell out of it and I'm likely to clean up quite a bit as I go through.

***

I'm writing the climax now. I expect it will be short. With any luck I can finish that and the epilogue today.

I've been pushing hard to finish. No patience for tweaking the emotional arcs or researching anything. I just need to have a complete draft that I can look over and then see about the high-level edits.

Yeah. My notes for the post Zero Station sequence were nothing but, "another epic tomb crawl." I toyed with idea of passing through other bits of infrastructure, reduced that to hearing the passage of a subway, but when the draft finally came it is basically all sewer.

Or something. I had never really intended to do sewers. All my research was subways. And I found some nice pages from drainers so there were lots of intriguing technical bits but I'm not prepared to spend a week trying to understand the sewer systems and then try to figure out how to make the journey work within it.

And besides, this is like the radio. Penny's done AV and she can plug it in and she even manages to work out how to replace a tube. But that's where her understanding stops. And this would be true even in third person, because the most common third person POV these days is limited, which knows only what the viewpoint character knows.

So she doesn't know how Bazalgette's grand system works and she hasn't the data to even theorize, so to her it is a tube lined with bricks and she has to do some climbing.

And, really, I should do that more. This book is if anything more dense than the last. Japan, my intention is to try to be a camera. To be almost completely ignorant of everything and describe only what it looks like.

There's reasons we don't like this. "There was a tree with sort of twisty branches in a dark green color and lots of leaves that..." is so much harder to read than "There was an olive tree."

And, of course, it isn't about the descriptions per se. We are writing books, not manuals. We're not trying to capture all the essential details accurately enough to reproduce it. We're trying to place the reader in the scene. In the Maryland suburbs the trees lining the streets are just trees. They might be happy or sickly or covered with snow depending on what you are trying to make of them, but they aren't the important detail. In Greece, there are olive trees. They are an important part of the visual and the cultural landscape and you have to put them in the reader's eye.

So sometimes you make jumps. You give them a term they shouldn't have known or let them make a lucky guess or even slip it in sideways (like saying the tree has olive-colored leaves). And if you look at it wrong -- take a clear Watsonian at it -- then the POV character is either being too informed or perhaps even psychic. The Doylist is that if something is going to be used through a scene you just can't keep calling it "the box that was mostly yellow and had three big buttons on it."

***

Lastly, I don't know about the arcs. That is going to be the first step of the edit process. Taking a long look at what the basic themes are. Because right now, it feels like the last third of the story suddenly leaps off in a different direction, leaving the settings and the cast that had been established and central. And the last big episode comes off as, well, depressing.

The end of Wentworth's arc is he died alone. The end of Penny's arc is she stabs a man. These are what I'd been writing towards the entire time, but they aren't feeling good to me right now.