Read dead contention

This is the bookshelf that has most of my Japan books:

It does not include the manga, including a great many back-issues of the Japanese Language through-manga magazine Mangajin, or the history books concentrating on the Pacific War (which is, oddly, how I got into Japan in the first place; not through anime, not even through Kurosawa, but through the Kaiten and the Never-Die ship and...well anyhow.)

Besides the new Turnbull ninja book, the one I've really been spending time with is the Lonely Planet Kyoto that I actually had on me in Kyoto. Which has helped a lot in trying to remember what it was I saw there a decade or two ago.

I'm about 2/3 of the way through the big Philosopher's Path chapter. Which as I've been tinkering has grown from a walk for my protagonist to stretch her legs to an introduction to Japanese religion, the most being-a-tourist-in-Kyoto scene yet, a long musing on archaeology and the Artifact, and a sort of Tomb Raider sequence with a (slightly) hidden shrine and with a tough hike standing in for jumping from rock to rock, white-painted ledges not included.

By the by, I finished Shadow of the Tomb Raider, main campaign and all but one of the optional "Challenge" tombs. I've been feeling unwell for far too long this time. Today has been the longest I've been able to sit at the computer and work and I still only got another thousand words or so finished.

And since I'm still unsure where exactly I'm going with her investigation of the cult I can't even tell exactly where and how or even what information I need to feed to the reader. So a lot may be changing when I get into revisions. As much as I'd love to shove another book out there I need the editing time. And besides, any inertia left over from the last release is already spent. Really, I should have waited until I could dump four books on the store within a couple of months.

And that's the other reason I haven't opened up most of my books. This time around, the stuff I need on the general shape of the culture and the historical and archaeological stuff I'm keying the adventure off of is already in my head. This is more detail stuff, feet-on-the-ground stuff, meaning I've been spending most of the past few days scrolling through maps, watching travel videos, and reading menus online.

Yojiya is one such bit I had to look up stuff on. She goes there for coffee, but the cafe is a relatively late addition to a popular Kyoto make-up store which claims to have created blotting-paper (for skin, that is) and made a start selling theatrical makeup at the turn of the 20th century but is named for toothbrushes...well, there's way too much to put in, especially as there's a conversation about seasonal and festival foods as well. 

But I do seem to be making some progress in down-pedaling the facts and the names and especially the Japanese words and filling a lot of pages with more generic "stone and leaves" sorts of descriptions. That, and a focus on physicality which is going to be about a third of the book. Basically, she's getting back into shape, and this gives me a chance to talk from experience about muscle pains without having to, again, put in all that stuff that some of my readers complain about being "too much detail!"

***

Finished the first draft of the Philosopher's Walk scene and am a thousand words into a "Walk around Nanzen-ji" scene that basically continues the action. By the time I'd finished with blotting paper, matcha cappuccino and stone mice temple guardians I needed to put in a scene break. I'm now up to the point where I'm going to do a description of Penny's first day "on set" as Athena Fox, as this chapter has also become a critical beat in her accepting of her new life.