Move with a Purpose

Had the vaccine, fully returned to 40-hour week (for first time in several years), have a big project in the shop which is going to keep me working all weekend.

So of course this is the time I'm pushing to get this big revision done and get back to making forward progress on the novel. The thing that really stopped me dead wasn't detail, or even focus. It was that there wasn't an obvious reason for some of the scenes to be there.

So every scene with a big rewrite is about putting a choice into it. Having Penny not be reactive, but making some strong active choice -- and explaining to the reader why she's doing so. 

Tough, because the way I've plotted this thing, the external plot is very manipulative; she's dragged to Kyoto on false pretenses and pressured into playing a role that has been written by other people. And the inner plot is almost worse; Penny has seen the opportunity to actually become the adventurer she dreamed of when she was younger, and she's throwing up objections right and left because she doesn't want to get hurt by trying and failing. But she's never outright admitting that this is what she is doing!

Anyhow. The scene I've been slogging along on today is the revised Nanzen-Ji. I'm pulling some stuff from the deleted Philosopher's Walk scene and plugging that in. But as much as I'm cutting and pasting, I have to rewrite most of the paragraphs anyhow to highlight the conflict and choices better.

It's a nice four-fer scene. She's walking out the tough run she had that morning, trying to keep from stiffening up, she gets intrigued by a mysterious path, finds a secluded little temple and realizes all in a flash that this was all a naif recapitulation of a Tomb Raider sort of adventure. She's also problem-solving on the case at hand with a pop lecture on some principles of archaeology -- which is also setting up a later conflict between the expectations of her handlers that she's there to play a role, and her own actual expertise. And there's world-building on Japan, particularly Japanese Religion.

I'm beginning to think Hikikomori Night may be the most straightforward scene in the book; it is just wandering the side streets of Akihabara meeting weird people who tell her bizarre things about the history of Noh, Cyber Cafes, and the Imperial Rescript on Education.

I find it hard to write during lunch at work, or when I'm waiting for glue to dry (the pieces I'm building for work have a lot of glue in them.) So I did the worst staining job I've ever done:

I thought the stain would come out much lighter. I rather wish I'd left it in blond wood, maybe just put a little amber tint into the varnish. Oh, well.

I reworked the tailpiece, glued in a hand-carved nut, and unwound the bass strings to get them to wind properly on the machine heads. Got as far as hanging the third string...

When the neck came off. Well, that had originally been intentional. I used hide glue (well, Titebond's "hide glue in a can" version) and was sparse with it because I meant to just test fit and then take everything apart again.

Well, it is apart now. So maybe I can actually shape the neck slot a little nicer. All I know is I don't have either the patience or time to do that now. Not until both work and writing have gotten further than they are.