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.