A Fox's Wedding is officially started. I would really like to kick this one out in six months. (On re-tracing of notes, Fox and Hounds took eight actual months -- although stretched over nine in calendar time, it was interrupted by a month of editing work on The Fox Knows Many Things. And on that note! I am doing another edit round on Hounds, meaning it will technically be in third draft before it is published.)
But back to A Fox's Wedding. As much as I'm already generating ideas -- and putting a few things off the table as well -- I really need to hold off on brainstorming until I've done the pre-planning.
That's a bit of brain work there. I want to identify what parts of the process could be better. I want to find where I could have written a better story, and even more, where I wasted time.
But anyhow. A few things I already know: I've largely given up the idea of a strong overall character arc through the series. Penny is still growing and learning and will do so for at least another book, but the place she is emotionally and in relation to her character and archaeology at the end of Hounds is really not where she needs to be to make Wedding work. So I need to think of these as episodic, not as strictly linear.
I want to use things I already know. However. The Writing Excuses podcast had a recent episode titled, "Write what you want to know." I like that. So the Takarazuka Review is in the book and I've bought my first book to start reading up on that. (Because I know almost nothing about it but I've always been fascinated).
I'm also pretty set that there will be scenes in Kyoto, and in Tokyo. And the Fushimi Inari shrine (the one with all the torii gates), and Toei Uzumasa Eigamura (the Edo-era standing set near Kyoto). Business that is probably in it is the earphone bit (with her friend Aki giving her lots of not-always-useful advice), dressing up as a Geisha (possibly with shamisen), and a big training sequence.
Things that may or may not be in it; wartime Shinto, Kusanagi (the sword, not the anime character), the Zanryū nipponhei (the last of whom probably died in the 1980s), Lupin III, UFO cults, Iga Ninja, a Rocky V twist to the training, and a "Yamatai" episode (aka the death island from Tomb Raider 2013).
Things that are probably not in it; the Tokyo Tower (anything I want to do with it, I'd rather do with the Eiffel), and Moe.
Re the latter. There's not going to be a lot of people calling her "cute" and trying to get her into amusing costumes. It could be fun but there's a better book for that (specifically, the No Man's Sky archaeological survey/Great Nintendo Burial book). So the joke I'm going for here is that to most of the Japanese she encounters she is westerner; crude and suspect and freakishly huge. And yeah there's a ton to unpack there so that's a lot of fun stuff to be writing with.
I've also decided to use the stuff I know: Speed Tribes, the Home Dramas I watched on TTV, other things which are really a decade or three anachronistic. I don't think this virus is going to calm down in enough time for me to fly back there and do more on-the-spot research, and I've got a bookshelf full of stuff I'd like to get some use out of.
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