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.