...And Virion of Gathus IV

I was supposed to be working on plotting today but ended up on another re-read.

Once again I'm feeling there is just too much stuff. It is too dense. But I get better. The first chapters of the first book are, well, lousy. And, yes, I've had a cluster of Kindle page reads during my recent advertising campaign and I was checking to see if I could figure out how far they got and when they, seemingly, gave up on me.

(And I'm worried about conversion. Impressions to clicks is running about 400:1, a little better I think with the current custom ad that name-drops Tomb Raider. But click-through to sales is 27:1 and the Kindle Page Reads -- one of the only metrics I have if people are actually finishing the book -- appears to show up to 10 false starts for every full read.)

(So the new covers...I think they are more representational of where I actually ended up going with the series. Penny is the center of things, not the history or archaeology. And for all her quirks, it really is more about her having adventures then her being the typical hero of a Mystery Cozy. It is all arguable, but I think I'll get more clicks and more conversion with the new covers. I just have to find the patience to do them and/or deal with an artist who can work on them. Which, given my lack of skill, is a better idea!)

Anyhow, one of the things I really want to lose is a habit of lists. I just can't help coming up with three examples, like that bit they kept repeating on Star Trek -- only there, always with two real names and one made-up one. "A simple agricultural tool, like the plow, the hoe, and the Markathian grabthar."

So the lists are a bit much. Just too much stuff to keep track of. There's a bit at some point where I just had to name-drop something but I didn't have the time to go into it, so I was trying to shove a whole story into one sentence. And that's another side of the same mistake. A clear counter-example is actually in Chapter 2; where I focus in on one story about Diogenes and take my time to really tell the story (it takes up a full page).

I feel that I did much better with this in the London book. Maybe it was the setting. In the current novel I'm having more trouble, it feels, getting away from glancing looks at the ridiculous amount of detail and more into focused bits or scenes.

For instance, I name-drop a shop just off the Philosopher's Walk, with just a bit about the price of a used kimono. But then I spent over a page visiting a different shop and having something to eat there and that's better. 

Okay, sure, it can be distracting in a different way. But this is where "James Bond Plotting" comes in. You chose some arbitrary place or thing and make a big scene set there. And looked at it from one angle, we're wasting all this time watching a show at the Robot Restaurant in Shinjuku when there's a plot to unfold and a bad guy to catch. But looked at the other way, this is the point of the book; the bad guy and his plot is just the McGuffin to keep us moving through these set-pieces.

And the reader isn't getting all of these lists of things thrown at them. 

The 39 Clicks

Sold another two copies of the first book. Spent fifty bucks in advertising to do so. (1,500 ad impressions, 39 click-throughs, two e-book purchases and a couple of page reads).

This is yet another case of the modern world moving too quickly. There is still lots of advice and books and training videos out there about publishing on Kindle, but the gold rush was in 2010. The market is tougher now. Readership is now in the two billion mark but the number of new books is growing even faster.

I feel more and more that some of the advice is dated. Such as "pay for professional editing, pay for a cover artist; it will pay for itself." Sure it would -- in 2010, when the difference between a well-prepared manuscript and a shoddy manuscript was in the hundreds of copies sold every month, and an eye-catching and timely book could do sales in the thousands per month.

Now even the leaders are moving tens of copies per month and only surviving because their back catalog is in the double digits. According to a recent Writing Excuses episode, "many" independents are reporting three or four figures in marketing costs, and half their writing income is going towards that. What's more, it is starting to look like diminishing returns even at those levels.

(Another bit of dated advice; book blogs, Facebook, and some other new media marketing. They have become saturated past usefulness as well. Having a Twitter presence is still helpful, but it has to be in the hundred-thousand follower range!)

In real world gold rushes, most of the success stories are of people who opened a store. Or a bank. Editors and cover artists are probably taking a lower risk. And, as always, a book that is sure to sell is a book on how to sell...or in this market, a book on how to write.

But that market, too, is more open than it perhaps should be. It is more difficult than ever to figure out if an editor or cover artist actually knows what they are doing, or if a training video is actually worth it. So another reason not to blindly follow the "just pay an editor, okay?" advice.

And it's a pity, because I would like to, at some point, hire both.

***

So the plan is to try a big push and see if I can get over threshold. There's two problems, though; one is getting in front of the wave. The other is staying in front. Amazon Kindle is currently optimized towards a fast turnover. The author who is going to do well is the one who is putting out a new book every month.

Which is really ridiculous. But audiences are fickle and reader are forgetful and six months between books is a stretch these days. The one thing that can save you is a deep back catalog, especially in an ongoing series; enough books, and you can write one or two more of them in the time it takes the reader to finish their archive binge.

So that push is going to happen after I have A Fox's Wedding in the store. And I'm also really, really hoping to be able to follow up with Sometimes a Fox within 4-6 months! (As a reminder, Fox and Hounds came out October 16 of 2020. So that's five months and counting, as of today, and based on the current revision plan I'm looking at up to another four months to finish.)

When you have a series, advertising for one is advertising for them all. Additionally, when you get over three you can start advertising series and yourself as a brand on Amazon Kindle -- at least this month, as they are constantly tweaking their system. Three books and a belief in the readership that a fourth will be coming puts me just barely in the window where the numbers might start working for me.

Amazon is, after all, a real-world game of Civilization. Visibility in the system depends on popularity, popularity depends on sales, sales come when you have visibility. When you are in the low numbers you are spending money just to try to keep from sinking completely out of sight.

I'm not committed to this series. I think it might be too niche to find its audience. The short campaign I'm running now is on the blurb "Romancing the Stone meets Tomb Raider." Not to say there aren't plenty of stories I'd like to tell within it. Biblical archaeology and archaeological tourism (Go Ye and Tell That Fox). Warbirds and the conservation question. NAGPRA and the southwest. Archaeo-gaming.

But I'd be happy re-visiting the idea of Weird War; the supernatural meets WWII, but (the latest spin that just occurred to me) focusing largely on the misfits and the less-told stories and other than professional soldiers; the Coast Watchers, the Bletchley Park "Computers," failed kamikaze pilots, French plantation owners, Union organizers...

That's why there are two things I really want right now. One is to figure out how to damned write faster! The other is to find ways to offload as much as possible all the editing, preparation, marketing, and other non-writing chores.

Oh, yes. Related to all of this, I'm contemplating re-staging the series to try to find that readership. Below is the first successful mockup I've had of the "girl on cover" scheme. That model has the wrong coloring, but besides having a big enough portfolio at Shutterstock to permit branding the entire series with her, she's also the first model I've seen that has a committed physicality instead of the usual "look, I'm posing for the cover art" look. (Well, maybe not so much in this pic. Oh well.)

Anyhow, having both the girl and more of the scenery might grab more eyeballs than the artifact cover. I just need to find a Fiver artist or something who can do all that magic cover stuff that I don't have the patience to learn (and probably don't have the talent, either.)

I'm scared to even mention it

 Woke up Tuesday with the pain gone. And it hasn't been back yet.

Experience says it will, tells me not to be hopeful but I can't help it. Because how I feel now is what should be normal.

I have to be how I am now, with just the usual stiffness and aches of being over half my expected lifespan, to really understand that waking up so stiff and in such pain it takes me up to an hour to crawl out of bed, to being so sleepy after lunch it is physically painful -- so much I sometimes have to lie on the floor -- to be out of breath just trying to walk across the campus.

Now I can (and have been) doing light calisthenics twice a day. My concentration has been good, and I've been making progress on work projects and on personal projects.

Which includes finishing up Part II of A Fox's Wedding. That brings it to about 40K and nicely past the projected half-way point. And, yes, I am going to need some serious re-writes. It kills me how many of the techniques of writing I forget when actually writing. It wasn't until yesterday I thought of applying MICE to the story (not the creatures who adorn to tremendously cute Otoya Shrine off the Philosopher's Walk. but Milieu, Character...and I've forgotten how it goes again.)

One piece of advice still holds. Finish the draft, then go back and see what it has, what should be focused on and what should be dropped. 

My Neck

Package just arrived from Shenzhen; a violin neck and fingerboard for my Double Chin experiment.

So time to post pics of my work so far. Here's the proof-of-concept, roughly shaped from white pine:

I think this was when it still had a 21" scale length, which turned out to be uncomfortable to fret. So I cut it down to 18" scale length -- slightly longer than the longer violas -- and that's not bad to hold. 

Oh, right. Metal-wound Ubass strings from Kala, viola bridge, bass machine heads. According to other builders standard machine heads are a little narrow to be comfortable with Ubass strings, but these aren't the original "gummy bear" (what they called pahoehoe) strings; these are somewhat smaller. Also what I currently have on my solid-body Ubass:

That's what makes this trick possible. Okay, to clarify; here's the Ubass beside a soprano ukulele, and a 3/4 guitar:

So, yes; the first part was a success. I can bow and fret and more-or-less comfortably hold it just like my violin...but play the pitches of a double bass.

Ah, but the next issue is, how does it sound? So far...not good. The first thing I tried (today, as it happens) is an under-bridge pick-up designed for violin.

For twenty bucks you get a lot of fun parts; 9v battery compartment with hatch, two band equalizer and volume, and of course the piezo pickup itself.

(If you are wondering why I bothered even cutting this in a violin shape, the above pic should partially explain. It allows me to attach standard violin chin rest and shoulder rest, to hold it like a violin, and as important as these; as a violinist I develop muscle memory of my instrument through landmarks such as where the upper bout is and where my hand hits the scroll. So making it a violin shaped as possible means I can leverage as much of my violin experience as possible.)

So I'm not sure why it isn't sounding good. I suspect I need to isolate the body from the strings, as there is no useful resonance there. Interestingly, there is one gang who took the same Convolution Reverb technology that's being used to reconstruct the acoustics of a cathedral into a simulated reproduction of the same space, to sample the body resonances of a collection of expensive violins so a simulation of those same body resonances could be applied to the otherwise rather thin sound of an electric (or "silent") violin.

But then, as someone at the Talk Bass forum said, it isn't about making an instrument that sounds good. We already have that, and it is called the acoustic or concert double bass. It is about the look on the audience's face when you place an arco BASS part on an instrument that's tucked under your chin like a  concert violin.

God of Cough Drops

Between depression and sinuses I wasted half of a generous four-day weekend (I took Friday off sick) before I finally started writing again.

And promptly hit a snag -- the kind of snag I could (and probably should) have just powered through. See, I decided to add a Shinto Priest to explain a bit about the Inari Shrine to my protagonist, and it seemed a fun idea to give him an errand to "deliver letters to the kami that helps cure coughs." 

Which I knew about -- I'd run into this reference of letters being hand-delivered -- but I'd forgotten to put down the name of the god and I also had no idea where they were in the actual shrine complex.

Oh, yes. And it seemed amusing to have him come up and help Penny when she's trying to ask someone at the food stalls where to get kitsune-udon. The fun answer is that there are cafes/tea houses all the way up the 4 km trail to the peak of Inari-yama. Sort of. See, I knew they were there because I saw them when I was there.

But this, also, was miserably hard to research. I was finally making progress when I also found the god I'd been thinking of. And a little more map digging and searching and I found where the shrine for that god is. And on that same map was one of the teahouses with an actual name to it.

And following up on that turned up the only detailed source (a Japanese blog) to the teashops that are actually on the mountain.

Gods, I hate the structure of the internet. No matter whether it is search engines or link sites or aggregators or help pages or speciality sites, it is all there to funnel you towards what everybody else can usually be convinced to purchase. It is the Tragedy of the Commons written in digital ink.

So easy to find five thousand pages on Fushimi Inari Taisha (the engines deciding that nothing else in my enquiry could possibly be as important as telling, once again, that this is an Inari shrine in Kyoto and has lots of torii gates. Um...got that part already!) Also easy to find teahouses and cafes all the hell over Kyoto. But finding the places that are on the damned trail between the spans of the Senbon Torii? Yeah.

Oh, by the way:

Oseki-san
Fushimi Inari Taisha
68 Fukakusa Yabunouchi-cho
Fushimi-ku, Kyoto-shi
Kyoto 612-0882
Japan

My sinus headache is coming back. Maybe I'll send a postcard myself.

Fox Tales

 I was reading a Wikipedia article a moment ago, and I recognized the author they were quoting. I skipped down, and as it turns out I've read the paper they are citing.

Yeah, that happens. Although to be honest, every in-depth article I've read on Ninja cites Turnbull -- but the book I read of his is only a few years old and hasn't quite made it into the citations of most.

I'm finally up to Fushimi Inari Taisha, the shrine that will adorn the cover of the book (once I've finally finished writing it) and where I've been (except I don't remember enough and I didn't understand nearly enough at the time.)

Which is a bit of a problem. I'm trying to keep the story within a limited zone of what is a complete nation, society, history and language. So I've made as little mention as possible of anime, manga, giant robots, Hello Kitty (which was actually an import), World War II...

(The last is because, despite there being so much story potential, and despite that being the one part of Japanese history I actually spent any time studying before I attempted this novel, I just did a World War II story and I need Penny to explore some other areas of history).

But by the time you combine the inner and the outer plot, the actual "thing being done by the bad guys" and the "psychological things going on with the protagonist", I'm left with trying to explain to the reader:

New Religions, especially in a Japanese (aka Shintoism and Buddhism) context.

Kitsune and their legends.

The Imperial Regalia of Japan, with reference to the legends in the Kojiki et al, particularly Amaterasu and the Cave.

Honnae and Tatemae. Plus a bit about the rapid social changes of post-war Japan, including the Asset Price Bubble Collapse which is important in the history of several of the characters.

And these do cluster around a few basic areas. Around Shinto, and around social role-playing. The Kitsune is a messenger of an important Shinto deity, and is also a shape-shifter.

And basically, there is such an incredible wealth in the connections between Kitsune, tatemae, Inari, and even wealth distribution (no, really!) that I have no idea how I am going to get any of it in at all. And I am frightened that even the little bit I allow myself is still going to be too much for the reader.

Well, one bit seemed to work. The actual Miho Museum has some Chinese poem built into the design of the garden (I can't remember the details at the moment). I repurposed that idea to allow Penny to more-or-less "walk through" the story of Amaterasu and the Cave as she enters the museum. (I did think there was going to be more to it -- I really wanted to work in the 8-tailed monster and all that -- but oh well).

Which is why Penny is visiting Fushimi Inari in the present scene. I'm about to drop a Shinto Priest or lay worker on her to explain a bit about Inari. But someone else is going to have to explain about those damned foxes...

Because he monkey

Non-writers misunderstand what we are talking about when we say the characters have a mind of their own, or the characters took over.

First off, they don't understand that it isn't a bad thing. When a story is "alive," you write as if you were merely recording what has actually happened. When a story is "dead," you are putting words down on a blank page.

In practice, you slide back and forth between these, usually feeling a little of one, a little of the other. Thing of it is? The novel I'm working on right now feels like words on paper. When I write, I am creating. The only thing that is keeping any confidence alive is that when I real the two previous novels in the series, I experience them. The words do that thing good words in a work of fiction do; they get out of the way, forming a mere proscenium to frame the world within.

First Person was a difficult choice and I feel that I am starting to push up against a fatal flaw in the series; and that is that my protagonist is always aware of playing a role. Penny can never relax into simply "being" Athena Fox, the way a third-person narrative would present her. She is always inside, working the wires, cruelly aware of Imposter Syndrome.

Perhaps I can make France different. Of course, this particular book is a book of masks and mirrors, of honne and tatemae and gender roles and social role-play. Penny gets to try out lots of faces here; the "grinning motormouth in a Chelsea FC hoodie" she describes herself at one point, the worldly Athena Fox she thought she was creating, the super-spy narrative Ichiro is role-playing (and is trying to drag her into)...

She's a hard enough character to inhabit anyhow (another of the joys of First Person). For this book, what makes it even harder to understand what Penny is going through is that she doesn't understand what she is going through.

And maybe that's why I'm only now getting my throughput up to a thousand words a day.

But back to character. Why does this work? Why do we have an innate sense of what "makes sense" for a character and have trouble forcing a plot-driven choice on them? Why is it things like Character Interviews work, where you pretend to talk to your character and they reveal personal details you aren't aware of creating? How is it that stuff shows up in dialog that you didn't predict?

Because you monkey. You are a primate, with millions of years of experience in constructing a Model of the Mind in order to understand the other members of your troop. And that's why having characters that go in directions your outline didn't predict isn't a bug...it is a feature.

More people have been to Russia than I have

Yesterday I had a mild cough so I begged off work. You don't want to be having even a mild cough when everyone is in a lingering panic. 

And I got 2,500 words written. Of course, today it had turned into a nice sinus headache and I have, so far, 140 words penned. Err, typed. 

And I updated my Official Author's Page with more photos of Kyoto. 

The scene plan is firming up, bit by bit:

I have a firm idea now of what needs to go into the rest of Part II. Part III is still a bit up in the air.

On this one, the four-part breakdown may not quite work. I'd love to have a part break when the action shifts to Tokyo, and for the previous two book I had the last break close to the Act III crux, the nadir point just before the "Let's get dangerous" turn.

This one, it looks like I want to get back to Kyoto and spend more time exploring the cult's beliefs and getting to know the people there before the trap is set and Penny flies out to Hokkaido (or wherever I mean to do the snow sequence...I'm still dreaming of doing it in Mie Prefecture but that is just too far south to be proper snow country.) So either Part III is going to run long, or I'll have to take the Part IV break well before the true crazy begins.

And I still may have to go around chopping a bunch of stuff because if I'm at 30K now it is going to be going over 80K by the time I get out of the snow.

And the first draft of the Rock Gym scene is standing at 1,500 words. Which is productive, but just emphasizes that I'm either going to have to cut like mad when I get to revisions, or change the plan of making this a breezy 70K book and let it have the pages an entirely alien culture and complex world is seeming to require of it.

BPM

I am thinking that maybe my story beats are coming too close together. I'm writing the first scene at the Cult HQ and I can only write one or two paragraphs at a time. Then I have to take a break and think on the ideas for a while because the next one or two paragraphs are about some NEW idea.

A new story beat. Or a fraction of a beat. A bit, I've been thinking of calling it, but that's because part of the writing craft is thinking about what you are doing and how you are doing it and everyone who has written a couple of books is fully capable now of writing a whole book about writing.

Anyhow.

I'm not outlining, not at that level, but more and more I'm thinking if I tried it would fail. My "outline" version of the current scene is that Penny starts talking to Random Old Guy, and they sort of bond over the whole Artifacts of Power thing, and it isn't until she gets back to Godzilla that she gets told this was one of the founders of the cult.

Except the conversation didn't quite unfold that way. Characters that act like humans act have a way of finding the real, sensible, emotionally believable directions to go, and they aren't always what the writer wanted or what the writer foresaw. Writing a scene is a bit like wargaming out a coming battle; it seems all predictable on the surface but until you get down to the details you don't really see how all those small details act together to make things go differently than you might have liked.

So I'm sitting somewhere around 2/5 of the final novel length and it feels like getting the first fold down in a sheet, when you are still fighting the thing and it is still billowing all over the place but it is starting to make sense. Plus I'm pulling out of depression/health issues/I don't know and it really is a claw your way out of a hole time.

I have this weird feeling, though. That I am right on the edge of finding what hasn't been working for me and how to finally write at what I think is a decent pace.

I can't put a firm date on when I started the Japan book because, heck, there was a teaser as early as the previous book, meaning I had that much idea well before I hit the "publish" button. But I've been focused on this one since basically October so it is only four months I've been at it. Even if it feels a lot longer.

I was staring at a huge mass of data and wondering how I could possibly remember enough of the feel of Japan to make a believable book there. Remember my language lessons and figure out the history. And sure there's a lot of stuff I still feel critically weak on, but at this point I have digested enough to be able to do the plot.

It feels like is it finally moving at a good pace. Now if I could just not have to stop every two paragraphs.