Untrustworthy

Penny is an untrustworthy narrator. I've decided this is going to be how she is going to be in the long haul; a self-doubting hero. An onion, or rather, parfait; she will in following books (assuming there are following books) do the typical self-effacing hero wisecracks to hide the fact that she's terrified and doesn't think she can pull it off. And she remains blind to the fact that she really is that kind of bad-ass as she once again does pull it off.

This book in particular, though, she is hiding things from the reader. First she hides the Nine Elms scar, barely mentioning it until Ichiro points it out and asks if she's covering it up because it brings back bad memories.

In the Cult HQ sequence, the intent was that she is also hiding the way she figured out it is Fake Aki, not her friend, on the headset. She doesn't tell the reader until later. I did something like this early in the London book; a street hustler is pulling the "gift bracelet" routine on her and as far as the narrative is concerned she is blandly going along. Until she reveals that she knows that hustle all too well from LA.

But here's a new problem:

I don't know if the payoff of Fake Aki is sufficient. I don't really need the extra betrayal from Ichiro, not the way their relationship actually developed on the page (I've done the "scars" scene -- the closest this thing is going to get to a sex scene.) It would help to have a native Japanese speaker for the moment when the Chimpira show up but I can get around that easily enough.

The downsides are that there is eventually an Aki betrayal. Of a sort. In the epilogue, she's implicated as being part of the Long Game that stretches through the series. So having her replaced by a fake for a few chapters just complicates things unnecessarily.

And then there's doing the cult scenes without Aki. A lot of the quips have been Penny and Aki bouncing pop-culture and other references off each other. I realized this the moment I started to explain the color codes of the cult's ranks, which are in my mind -- and possibly in-world -- drawn from Logan's Run. Aki would have a quip about, "If someone invites you to Carousel...don't go!"

Or something. Heck, maybe it would be better to remove one more temptation. I did cut the Garth Brooks reference and a couple other things I mentioned in the last post. And I still plan to cut more.

I've also decided to leave out detail on the Ancient Aliens theories of the cult. They talk about their own spin on it, but I'm going to leave off specifics. So no name-dropping Nazca Lines and Coso Artifacts and so on, not this time around.

So...maybe no Fake Aki. I'm at 1,000 words into the final part of the book and I've re-written the scene in the car twice already. Got as far as the front door but then decided that Greek/Roman classical architecture and "Quod est superius est sicut quod inferius..." wasn't the way to go. So now I'm going for a different classic.