Quick Reference

I don't know why I never found out about this before. (Probably because I didn't have the dual monitor setup to use it before). Scrivener has a function called "open as quick reference" that opens the current document in an independent window.

"Document," in Scrivener world, is a chunk of text with its own name. It is the lowest order of the nested organizing hierarchy.  Mine are scenes. Actually, I tend to write a full chapter in a document, then use the "Split" function once I'm done to turn it into individual scenes. 

So now I've got the new Gion scene open in the main Scriv window, one of the scenes I've cut and the chapter notes on the other monitor. Much easier to reference back and forth.

Now all I need is a wider monitor to really get some use out of this. My big monitor is connected to the gaming PC and if it wasn't, you know, Windows I'd be tempted to move Scrivener over to there for even more real estate.

***

So far the rewrites are going well and the story is feeling exciting again. But I'll see how it goes; I'm still on her first day in Tokyo. According to the Scapple layout I'm throwing out 8,000 words worth of scenes in a story that was just under 50,000 when I had to stop and rethink. But it isn't so much cutting as it is focusing and adding more intent. So some of the existing scenes may get longer. And I'm combining a few things -- like the Gion sequence, at least as much as I can.

So this is great for me as a writer. It is showing me that I can take what seemed to be a manuscript all tangled up with dependencies -- this scene needs to be here because it gives the information that causes this following scene to happen, etc. -- and break them all and rebuild another set that works just as well. I was starting to get concerned I couldn't do high-level editing.

It is really high-focus stuff, though. I can only do a few hours of it in a day before I need to take a break. Which these days is like as not driving aimlessly around Medici (Just Cause 3) on my big gaming monitor. I finally got the best sports car in the game into the garage. Had to steal a big Army helicopter off the Black Hand and sling the car under it to get it over the mountains...

***

And I still need to do the new covers. Trying to come up with a scheme that will work through the series and give it identity. Lot of work, and I'll be paying for help with all the things I'm not good at anyhow. But I did get a mock-up of the second book that I think might work:

Don't even worry about the Spielberg Gun there. If I go with this I'm doing a face-swap, adding the fedora, painting new hair from scratch, losing the extra belt, changing the colors on the clothing...and that's before getting into lighting to really sell the tunnel.

And I'm playing with the idea of running a filter then hand-painting portions on top of that to give it more of an illustrated and less of a Photoshop Paste-up look.

But that's all secondary. I'm not even assured I'll finish the Kyoto book. Much less write a fourth.

Sad piano music

Actually I'm feeling quite good about the re-writes. This is really what I was foot-dragging about. The narrative is just boring description -- even if action is happening -- if there isn't a driving goal. And Penny's voice needs that go-for-broke craziness; the few scenes or bits that were working for me was when she was making strong (and surprising) choices.

Planning is going well enough I might be able to start editing actual chapters this weekend. 

***

Too early to take a break, but music still calls. I broke out the trumpet again to see how much of my lips I'd lost. I'm a couple notes shy on the high end but mostly it is my tone that suffered from being away from daily practice.

The flute, I'm finally finding the ways to get that second octave with a clear tone and without having to play FFF to get up there. I've started playing two-octave scales, and the changes to the embouchure as I go up and down are becoming muscle memory and instinctive.

That's the problem with teaching an instrument, you know. And why most good players are lousy teachers; it is because they have internalized certain things until they are merely instinctual. I am no longer conscious of rolling the flute slightly with the octaves -- but I know I'm doing it, because that's how I got there in the first place.

What I think would be simple and easy is some noir noodling. The sort of moody background stuff which is mostly bass, harmon mute, brushed snare, and vibraphone. Of course I have a bass. But I don't have the acoustic bass I want.

I should have bought that fretless ukulele bass I saw. Well, okay. I can play bass parts on my chin bass. There's just the little matter of finishing the build.

I cut a neck out of...can't remember the wood now, I think it was yellow maple:

As a visualization, rough-carved a styro body and painted it glossy red, but I didn't like the look:

So I've picked up a cheap violin kit and I'll try fitting to that. I don't care too much if I waste the current neck; it was a first trial of the kinds of shapes and dimensions I believe I need.

I have new toys; finally got around to making a rolling cart for the smaller bench-mount tools:

And I also dropped a few bucks on the oscillating spindle sander I've been wanting for so long (which is currently at my work site doing a big project.)

And maybe all of those new tables I built will give me enough space to do a couple recording sessions after hours...

There's no business like snowmobile business

It looks like we're going to have another COVID surge. That's one good reason not to do the trip I was thinking of. Another is that if I'm going to spend all that time and money to go somewhere fun, I really want to be able to eat out when I get there -- eat out and feel safe and civic-minded about it, too. So I can wait a few more months.

Besides, I've got a big project at work, big enough I might need to pull some overtime -- right in the middle of where I might be making my reservations.

***

And, really, learning about snowmobiles is not the most pressing task on the book. I read the draft today, doing my best to try to see is as if I was coming to it cold without having read the rest of the series or even the cover copy.

And it doesn't work. Basically, there's a fatal flaw in the plot.

All three books in this series so far are shaped much like mysteries. In the Athens book, it isn't at all clear to Penny what the sherd means and why people are chasing her, but this is a "becoming a hero" story and at around the mid-point she turns it around, where instead of being chased she is actively pushing back. So sure she larks around at Oktoberfest and learns lots of things that don't matter to the plot (like the lyrics to "Ein Prosit"), but she went there with intent and she succeeded enough to move on to the next question.

The London book had the apparent stakes Penny's troubles with field school, with the mystery a light, useful distraction from her problems. Until in the later parts of the book the stakes went up. But at all points Penny had active goals, and active questions. It was also a bit more focused, with a great many of the seemingly random things all pointing towards the Nine Elms station.

The problem with the Kyoto book is I'm still doing the process of useful information being found out, but Penny isn't actively looking. She isn't even aware of it happening. And it isn't just that she lacks agency -- although that is an issue -- it is that there's no sense of movement.

No, it is worse than that. There's all these places, all this description, Penny is wandering around Kyoto doing stuff and looking at stuff and as the reader who didn't know where this was going I was seriously asking "Why is this stuff in the book?"

I can't even fall back on personal goals that are being interrupted by the adventure at hand -- as was sort of the case for the early parts of the previous books -- because the choices I made of where she is on her arc and how it is progressing means she's not talking about it. 

Like the fear she is carrying from London. She is so afraid of that happening again she won't even talk about it in her internal monologue. Well, that could be an interesting choice, it could work, but I need to have something that the reader can be following, some obvious goal, some conflict, beyond, "Hey, I wonder what I should eat for lunch in Kyoto?"

So for the external, I can make some easy edits by throwing out two full chapters; the entire trip to the Gion Shrine, and everything prior to Nanzen-Ji on the Philosopher's Walk. And also dropping most of the Kyoto Porta, and some other trims. Among other things, that pushes the first ninja attack a bit sooner.

But that's not really getting at it. I need stakes, I need tension, and I need reason. I also need conflict, and this is where planning the revision gets tough. Because the best conflicts arise out of (or echo) internal conflicts. 

What's going to make this work is finding ways in which Penny can be strongly conflicted and actively doing things in regards to that conflict. And because this is basically the concluding part of the Origin Story arc, that means I really need to define what kind of a character she is going to be in the following stories.

At least I have some hints. I've a conversation I wrote in one of the few scenes I thought actually worked:

“You didn’t used to be brave.” Aki was carefully keeping her voice neutral.

“I’m still not.” I drew in a long breath, pushed it out. “I just hide it better.”

“By running at trouble instead of running from it.”

“Thank you Doctor Aki.”

And then there's my earliest note on what I wanted to do with this; "You've got to be kidding me!" I think it works that Penny is always realistically afraid and ever surprised that she's getting away with the crazy chances she is far too often forced to make.

And maybe, just maybe, if I get the conflict and pressure and make Penny explain more how she is hurting I can build this up to the "Christmas Cake" moment I want -- and the final resolution.

But all in all, it means I'm going to spend the next couple weeks digging deep into character motivations and trying to figure out just what this series wants to be if it is going to continue. How much she's going to be the scared kid who thinks of herself primarily as an actress, and how much the cool and competent character she plays becomes her reality. I think the tension between those is ever interesting and I don't think I'm going to lose it...but I've got a lot of work to do.

So Lola may have to wait. The last words I typed were the first words of her introduction.

Whatever Lola Wants

 I look up too damn much.

It's my way of solving plot problems/blowing through a block. I've got a scene set in the New York Bar atop the Shinjuku Hyatt -- aka the Lost in Translation hotel. Of course I had to look up the opening hours first and, dammit, the scene needs to be in the adjoining grill and no the live music doesn't start until the evening.

(That's not actually the room -- I just thought it was cool there's some people who put together these architectural illustrations of famous movie hotel rooms. I have actual floor plans for Penny's room. Of course.)

I thought it might be cute to have a show tune playing, perhaps something semi-obscure, a Cole Porter say, that Penny could recognize. Well I'd seen that the bar and grill take that "New York" to aggressive levels. I saw a Yankees-inspired artwork in one of the photos. And that's when I flashed on the 1955 musical Damn Yankees. Which I always thought was obscure but I guess not really. Anyhow, the breakout song of that musical is "Whatever Lola Wants."

Cue a comparative listening session to Ella, Carmen, and Sarah Vaugn. Because I might need to know. And then when I wrote the scene it never came up. Well, isn't the writer supposed to know four times what they actually put in the book?

***

But does that mean I want to blow six-hundred bucks plus on a research trip? My up-front costs for a week in Crete were under a thousand (flight and hotel). It's over a hundred bucks to rent a snowmobile for a couple of hours, and the nearest snow that's snow enough for snowmobiles to be there too is a long enough drive I don't want to risk my car on it, meaning another couple hundred in rental. Then since I'm tired of forty-dollar motel rooms and it is sort of research (and sort of affordable luxury) something both nice and interesting to stay at.

Similar costs to get onto a go-kart, and it would be indoors, electric, closed track. Of course if you could rent one to go out on the city streets (there is one that does downtown SF) I'd be terrified to try it. I'm not much for driving in city traffic even in a real car. They are all about the racing and the idea of a check ride just isn't on. Pay for a year membership, then pay by the race, and you will be racing. I still might do it. If nothing else, it's a shorter drive.

This novel is taking forever and I don't feel comfortable about it. And, yes, this is the scene where I introduce the Takakarasienne, who I intend to be a striking and pivotal character...and I still haven't finished reading the book!

And this is going to need another round of revisions, and lots of pruning. Revisions because I don't think the conflict is visible enough or the stakes visibly high enough out of the gate. And pruning? In the current draft of the Shinkansen-to-Shinjuku hotel scenes, I've name-dropped or referenced Shakespeare, Metal Gear Solid, Minecraft, Mario Kart, Cinderella, Blade Runner, Chelsea FC and the League Cup final, Superman and the Daily Planet, 1984, and The Big Sleep.

Real Life Writes the Plot

Was dragging this week but never got really bad. So fingers still crossed that the mystery bug is finally over with. Have just enough energy to start looking at reservations again to see if I can get any snowmobile and go-kart riding in. The latter turns out to be a real pain in this area. It's all electric and indoors and it is really designed around party of 24, mostly kids, staying all day to ride all the other rides and buy popcorn.

So this is the third book in the series and more-or-less finishes up the origin story, or "Hero Begning," as Half Life, Full Life Consequences puts it. So there's still this aspect of gathering the necessary tools and skills to be the full-fledged adventurer she's going to be. One of which was going to be fast-talking.

Come on, it is right in the name. The fox, which is a trickster figure in pretty much every mythology. So I had this bit in mind where Ichiro would demonstrate fast-talk at the kart rental place to get around her not having her International License.

But when I researched, it didn't seem that easy. They are pretty good on their paperwork (considering that, for just a license and a twenty-minute safety lecture they let go you go out in Tokyo Traffic with a gas-powered go-kart!) Plus it made Ichiro look callous, and just when I'm trying to heat up the relationship.

The timing was also tough. I was dreaming of a Yojimbo sequence on the Shinkansen, except there, too, there's not much in the way of dining car or other chances to get together and etiquette is pretty much against conversing with strangers during the trip. And that would happen before Tokyo, so...

That's when I finally got to the meta-question; Do I need this?

And the answer is no, even if it does kick some stuff downstream. You see, the fox -- the kitsune, more precisely -- in Japanese mythology is a trickster but it is a casual, light-hearted trickster and its real thing is shape-shifting. It is the European fox that really gets clever -- so save Reynard for the proper setting of Paris. Keep the focus of this story on mirrors, masks, blurring lines of shape (and gender, a little bit), etc.

The useful way to play this scene is Ichiro has procured the license for her (they really aren't much; there's no test involved or anything. It's more like a translation of an American driver's license so they can read it in other countries). So once again she's an imposter, in a situation that she doesn't feel she has earned or is ready for. This is after all in the context of the Tokyo sequence:

Fast cars, luxury hotels, fancy parties, expensive clothes. That's the New York Grill, by the way -- top of the Shinjuku Tower and part of the Park Hyatt Tokyo. 

I've also given up having anything particularly weird happen during the kart tour. There will be a man in a ninja costume. And, yes, I've pretty much decided she's getting the yellow jumpsuit, even though this makes problems for me all over the place. It is far too easy to tweak things to make the cinematically or thematically appropriate things happen and I'm trying not to write like that. Well, not completely like that. So that means the tour can concentrate on the excitement of basically driving too fast in Tokyo. Look; the actual tour crosses the Rainbow Bridge! Goes through the Shibuya Intersection! That's crazy enough already.

And I'm not really making the Tokyo sequence the "isn't Japan weird" part. Like I said, it will be mostly in the Hyatt and the Imperial and about the high life which is largely floating free of local culture. But there will be a big chapter in a somewhat crazy night mostly in the Akihabara.

Lost in Translation

No longer feel wonderful. Don't feel horrible, though, so that's progress. I was of course hoping to plough through a couple of chapters this weekend but of course I didn't.

I actually need to do some of my reading. I'm about half-way through the book on the Takarazuka now, but I also really need to open a Lonely Planet Tokyo and get a sense of the big structure of the city. I'd like to keep the action limited to a few locations but...

The problems for me stop the moment Penny steps off the shinkansen. Where does she meet Kit? Where does Kit teach? What is the fancy hotel she'll be at? Where is this big gala thing (and what is it...a gala, a fundraiser, an auction, a dance, a buffet, what?)

Well, I have a leading contender for the hotel. Shinjuku, which is good and bad. Tokyo Takarazuka is in the Ginza, and from the number of ballet studios around there I'd say this was where Kit should be as well. And the Hikikomori Night is going to take place mostly in Akihabara. But the Yamanote Loop should get me to most of these places (I was only in Tokyo for 2-3 days but it is starting to come back to me). 

Anyhow, the top floors of the Shinjuku Park Tower, the weird triple-tower skyscraper facing another Kenzo Tange construction, the "Minitrue" like Metropolitan Government Building, contain the luxury Park Hyatt Tokyo with its New York Grill -- floor to ceiling glass and live jazz.

Just the thing I needed when I'm so desperate to finish this, though. More stuff to look up. That's the thing about Japan; it really is a foreign country. A non-western nation, for all that has changed. So you can't assume; a simple scene of a character hailing a cab and going downtown to shop for clothes could be thrown off by, "Oh, they don't have cabs here." Or whatever it was you assumed was there but are sadly wrong about.

So, down the road, if I really do write more of these, I either have to relax my standards a lot (and start doing Dan Brown geography), or I need to plan a few more overseas trips!

今日も, 新幹線 を ご利用 くださいまして, ありがとう ございます

 Finally on to Part III.

I wanted to put a little parallelism in the Shinkasen scene. The opening chapter of the book, directly following the prologue, she is on a JAL flight and confused by the announcement; "Shiito beruto wo shikkari o-shime kudasai…"

Which is also a setup; her friend in Boston explains the first words are "seat belt," as translated through kana into Japanese. In the next scene, she's confronted by several serious men saying, “Kochira Ashina Fokusu-san desu ne?” in her direction. (The name of her alter-ego, rendered into katakana, would beアシーナー フォックス according to an online converter. I've omitted the lengthened vowels and otherwise simplified slightly to make it even slightly plausible that she eventually figures it out.)

And, yes, this is Scene Building II. I've answered so many Scene Building I questions over at Quora. People keep asking, "How do I write a scene where..." and the answer almost always includes, "find a way to dramatize it." Find the conflict, find the stakes, find what gets the reader involved in reading to the end to figure out what is going to happen.

But, you see, in the length of a novel, not all scenes are like this. Not all scenes are directly load-bearing. There's a pattern of stress/relax, sometimes built into try/fail cycles; it can also be considered as action/reaction cycles. A big action sequence when things are happening quickly and big developments in the plot are flying by is followed by a recovery scene where the characters take a breather, take stock, discuss what the heck just happened. Oh, and maybe move the B plot (particularly the romance plot) ahead a little.

So not all scenes have a primary purpose of being dramatic and moving the plot forward. As much as I'm not in the mood for writing a slow scene, I need a slow scene for the opening of Part III for several reasons. I'm coming off the last exercise scene, her big "Drago!" moment. 

I'm also changing venue. Changing style; the Kyoto scenes are traditional Japan, slow walks, lots of food, and of course working out...during revisions I found a place to do a total Karate Kid shot. Tokyo -- this is where we ramp up to full spy stuff, fancy parties and fancier dining, fast cars, fast-talking, and so forth.

You can transition from one place to another in the white space; "The next day we were in Tokyo." You can transition over a paragraph. But it isn't always the right choice. Sometimes you have to feel the journey. "Five weeks later Frodo and Sam arrived at the Black Gate." Yeah, doesn't work. 

But back to Japanese. I'd looked around, and I'd found a recording on YouTube of the actual announcements in 2019 on the Nozomi from Kyoto to Tokyo. It was even subtitled. In kanji of course. 

If there had been no other way I could have got out my Kodansha's and tried to work it out character by character. There was audio, but this was an actual recording inside a train and it wasn't exactly clear. Ah, but I also found a discussion on a language forum with some examples of other train announcements.

So that began a cycle of making my best guess based on what I understood of Japanese pronunciation and grammar, putting that reversed into GoogleTranslate so if I came close enough it would show me choices in kanji, then comparing the kanji. Fortunately, a chunk of the announcement particles and verb ending stuff and I did once memorize my hiragana. Like, I can definitely see "-imasu" at the end of the phrase. And, doesn't 

just leap right out?

It takes longer to say than it did to do. At the end of it, all that is going in the book is, “Kyō mo, shinkansen o go riyō kudasaimashite…”

(The full phrase is Kyō mo, shinkansen o go riyō kudasaimashite, arigatōgozaimasu. Which idiomatically is "Thank you for riding the shinkansen today" but in Japanese is a bit more like, "From today, shinkansen using-please thank you for what you are doing.")

And as it turns out, the english announcements were recorded by a certain Donna Burke, an Australian singer and seiyu who was, in fact, the voice of the iDroid from Metal Gear Solid.

Which is very close to the James Bond beat I'm trying to work in here. (Since no scene ever does just one thing, this is also a short reflection showing how Penny is starting to adjust to becoming Athena Fox, continuing set-up on a "robots and neon" running gag, and a brief but extremely necessary discussion of the Atsuta Shrine, specifically, how Kusanagi no Tsurugi is claimed to be kept there but nobody but high-ranking Shinto priests have ever seen it personally.

And, yes, I wanted to have her anime friend in Boston jump in with a "Major Kusanagi? I know her!" But I can't afford to get that far into anime/manga so there's no way of properly exploiting that. And although it is a fun character beat, it wouldn't mean anything to half the audience without further explanation.

Dense City

My readers (especially on Hounds) seem to be complaining about density. I can't really see it; I'm too close to the setting now and it all feels like perfectly natural language and geography and so on of South London.

(Of course I had a bit of this when I realized that the really, really basic Edith Hamilton level mythology in the Athens book was unfamiliar enough for my readers for some of them to mention it.)

And I'm not really on a path to a solution. The scheme for Wedding was "raw description." Lots of color and five-senses writing but not a lot of names and particularly as little Japanese as I could manage. This sometimes gets a little weird. I have her mention the "little water trough with the ladles" several times, which is an awkward way of describing the temizuya.

It even means that when she's having sushi or the multi-course dinner at the ryokan I can't give a sense of the variety by including names -- unless those names are very common (she mentions shabu-shabu in the latter, and yakitori in another scene).

This is something that's been increasingly bugging me in the series but it is going to change as she matures and gains experience. She has several times noticed the Jīzo around Kyoto with their red bibs, but she doesn't know what they are (neither did I, when I was there!) or what they signify. This goes way back; in Padua she went through the old Jewish Quarter and noticed that the streets were narrow and the buildings looked old and cramped but didn't know what it signified -- so she couldn't explain it to the reader. 

I think this might be something the reader regrets; I've given them a "what does Kyoto look like if you've just stepped off the plane" but they might be hoping for an informed guide who explains more about what it is they are looking at. Even if that guide's expertise strains credulity at times.

The other arrow in the bow I'm using on this one (the Japanese call it a yumi) is exercise. When I first brainstormed this book I thought there'd be more action. Even the ninja that I ended up using, though, don't give me lengthly action scenes -- they tend to attack once, then retreat. There's only so many paragraphs one can get out of "threw a shuriken and missed."

But Part II is mostly an extended training montage. Something I underline and lampshade enough the characters themselves comment on it -- at least partly thanks to Aki-on-headset playing the appropriate soundtrack. 

I don't know if it is working. I feel I still have too much Japanese concepts slipping in, even if I'm mostly leaving out the language (which, as I said above, can actually make it harder.) And there's more dialog than I expected, although I'm ending up with far too many scenes of Penny wandering around alone again. And the generic descriptions are killing me; I've run out of synonyms for "winding" as I've had to describe all these lovely little garden paths and forest trails and mountain roads.

Well, the Penny Solo stuff is a weakness of First Person. I was able to get the reader involved in Linnet's story in the second book, though, and I need to think about doing much more of that. To have a secondary character who is actively doing something and who we are watching through the book as they go through their own character arc. Not for this book, though.

But at this point, my best thought for the Paris book is I'm going to be filling a lot of pages with aesthetics. Not so much grounded descriptions of rocks and plants, but emotional descriptions of how art and music and literature and philosophy affect a person. And maybe I'll name-drop a bunch of artists and their more famous works. Maybe. I want to have as little French as possible in the book, in fact, to make a joke of how little Penny actually gets into speaking any.

But I'm early enough in that book yet. I haven't even made the final decision that it's going to be a Templar Treasure story. But I have decided that one way or another, there are going to be Masons.

***

(Also probably new covers on all three books for the debut of Wedding. Did I mention I tried a face-swap on the model I'd chosen? Not the perfect face but it works and there are nearly enough on her series in order to go through the process on all of the books. It's a pain, though. Especially hand-repainting the hair. That's why I'm re-hiring my Fiver to do a final pass!)

Weekend

 Ah, Saturday.

All I have to do is finish re-writes on Part II of A Fox's Wedding so I can move on to the third half of the story. Start collecting rent checks. Do laundry and a bit of room cleaning. Wait for the developmental editor I found on Fiver to get back to me. Purchase the stock for my revised covers. Finish watching Attack the Block*. And write a review of a book on Greek Mythology.

My other Fiver hire agreed with my reasoning on the new covers, and when I bring out Wedding I intend to have the new branded covers on all three books. And I'm sending them all to her for final tweaking.

I may send chapters from Wedding to a developmental editor as well. Getting a full line edit, though, is expensive even on Fiver. Four hundred bucks barely gets you in the door. (I've also been reading some critical reviews on Grammerly and it is good my instincts had already told me to stay far away from that software.)

At least I've finally accepted the directions the story is going. I just read back through my development file on Wedding and I'm okay with not going in some of the directions I was thinking of when I started. I'd still love to stick some high-speed vehicle stuff in there, especially something sexier than a car, but I may have to settle for my misplaced Nara snowmobile and the "Neintendo" Mario Karts through Tokyo.

Plus I still have to write the romance, particularly the "Casino Royale" black-tie affair on Christmas Day, with all the little black dress and coaching in the earbud and so on.

I'm hoping that for Sometimes a Fox I can change my process enough so I can write the story before I have so many ideas I can't fit them all in. I do have one possible advantage; I know damn little about Paris or France (despite being in the former for a couple of weeks). There's no risk of me putting a French lesson in, for instance.

But you know? I was thinking about it earlier this week and I could pretty much sit down and start writing The Tiki Stars right now. I think I've solved all the essential meta-fictional issues I was wrestling with and with that out of the way it is a used-furniture, trope-happy universe of all the stuff I enjoyed as a kid (and continue to enjoy uncritically).

Well, maybe my Fiver will tell me to drop the Athena Fox series now instead of continuing on through the next two books. Then I can sit down and write something else.

***

*Attack the Block finally came around on the "free to stream" rotation on Amazon Prime. It was on my research list for Fox and Hounds. The very first scene opens with Jodie Wittaker (!) exiting the Oval tube station. It is all in South London street dialect, many of the lines written by real kids. But just as well; I never ended up with any of the Post Codes or other gang activity in the book.

(The Greek Mythology book isn't because I need to bone up on that, too. It is because I need to earn more points at Pubby so I can get some reviews for Wedding when it comes out.)

Boom Headshot

 Woke up with a splitting sinus headache and called in sick for the day.

But the phenylephrine worked. I'd paid a gal on Fiver to give me a cover opinion, and not only did she concur the new cover made a better fit with the book's contents, she liked the old cover, the calyx, and asked me for advice on 3D. Oh, and gave me some tips going forward with the new one.

But while this was going on hacked and plodded and worked my way through most of my remaining plotting problems step by careful step. Even got a bunch of the work notes transferred to the working files.

The plot and themes and arcs all sort of works and I know how the book paces and what is going to happen in each part. There's less happening within the cult itself now, but to compensate, more meaningful plot is happening in Tokyo, making it a better thematic stage (moving from traditional Kyoto to neon and robots -- and internal and external plots are moving to a new stage here as well.)

The sequence I'm calling "Hikikomori Nights" is one of those good ideas; it keeps growing. It's allowed me to fold in "Sukeban Deka," some "travel on the cheap for Tokyo" stuff, the right-wing sound trucks, more about the Yakuza, and of course the outsiders of Japan; shut-ins, otaku, homeless, immigrants.

Other sequences which are coming along nicely from the original germ are "kurisumasu ni wa kentakki" and "Guns and Monet."

But a lot of rewrites. Half of that is moving scenes around for a better flow, then going through fixing the pointers (all that "yesterday we'd been at the Golden Pavilion." Well, now that is happening tomorrow instead...)

The other half is stripping out a lot of stuff. There's a long discussion on what "artifact" means, and that both is getting cut to a single discussion instead of re-appearing 2-3 times, and getting a lot taken out.

And then there's new scenes and recasts. Before I can move forward to the Tokyo chapters, I need to rip apart a short talk I've got in Godzilla coming back from the Not-the-Miho Museum, and turn it into a longer scene at a sushi place in Kyoto, with flirting, life stories, and bad chopstick handling.

And then the shinkansen, and I really need to finish reading that book on the Takarazuka.