Echo...co...co! But why...y...y..?

Part I is finished. Just under 20K. I've accepted that this basically ends the "traditional Japan" part of the story, or at least the tourist in traditional Japan. It will be back at the crux, but for now the rest of the story is going to be increasingly modern Japan, fancy high-tech stuff, plots that are largely divorced from the specifics of the setting and, basically, jumping the shark.

Not the only tough choice I've had to work through over the past few days. I've been wresting with how to present language and language difficulties. I'm at the "write an apology in the back matter of the book" stage on that. 

Refining my vision of the plot sort of following the three Imperial Regalia as a set of three red herrings, with the plot seemingly pointing at the implications of one only for the inconsistencies to finally re-direct.

And the nature of the cult. The next scene is the introduction to some of their buildings and operations so I really do have to nail down things now. They definitely have to collect artifacts, because that's how I get the plot to work.

But I still haven't decided how deep they are going into Ancient Aliens stuff. There's some good reasons to do it. There are also some good reasons to mine popular science fiction for cult terminology; lots of other cults do it. But at the same time I don't want to make them too silly. I want to respect what is actually going on in the New Religions of Japan. And I feel like I want to write a book that is really centered on Ancient Aliens stuff, possibly built around a Bro Adventure crew shooting a cable TV show. And maybe wrapped around a murder mystery which is only archaeology-adjacent.

And I even have a strong leaning towards two different and seemingly incompatible belief systems going on between two different founders of the thing. A dialogue if you will -- and my character gets into the middle of it. Which is sort of my dialog, too. Silver jumpsuits are a little too silly, but I'm not going to read fifteen books on esoteric Buddhism either.

Well, right now I'm trying to nail down the "factory" of the first visit. After looking around a bunch of maps I'm stealing the actual location of the Miho Museum for the cult headquarters and their own museum. I haven't quite decided if the factory for the first visit is elsewhere -- I'm thinking Nara at the moment, as I am attracted by the ancient Nara jades, but I'm finding it extremely difficult to pull up good information on the modern Japanese jade industry.

(It's all Myanmar, Myanmar, Myanmar. Which is true, but I ran across something about jade carving in Japan so even if it is just cottage workshop artisanal stuff, it does exist as an industry. Somewhere.)

And Godzilla is in the book now. Sort of.

(I also just watched The Octogon all the way through. Now I've started Enter the Ninja. All ninja, all the time!)