Goodbye, Clarice

Finally got to a key scene. And I hate it.

Well, that's the thing about key scenes. They are places where you engage directly with the deep themes of the book. Which means they explore and test those themes. Which means this is where those themes can break.

I can tell right now I'm going to go through a lot of drafts on this scene. Right now, I just want to get something that works, push on through the climax, then come back and see how it all falls out.

***

The big problem I'm having with the "inside the cult compound" scenes is the book is running long and the meat of it is about being in Kyoto, especially traditional Kyoto. When I brainstormed this, I figured I'd use some of what I know about Ancient Aliens pseudo-archaeology, and stuff about real-world cults that went strange (such as Heaven's Gate).

But it doesn't fit the actual book. I need to keep the cult scenes fairly brief and to the point. And this has follow-on effects. It means I can't dress up the cults beliefs and goals in the kind of elaborate symbolic language it should be, where you have to spend months learning how they are defining certain words before you can start to glimpse what it is they are saying with them.

Basically, the cult should present like the Religion That Shall Not Be Named -- okay, let's just call them the "Hubologists," with years of learning what the hell a Body Thetan is, before you are ready to be told about Xemu. Instead, I'm having to write scenes in which someone goes up to my protagonist and says, "So, there's this guy, Xemu..."

(It doesn't help that these are also when the Glamorous Spy routine starts going Chuck 2.0, with Penny increasingly turning to wisecracks and her own peculiar ways of doing things and in general not quite taking the whole thing Piz Gloria serious. And it really, really doesn't help that many of the key conversations are already Dune style multi-level oblique.)

***

And my Fiverr cover artist is still searching for fonts. And she does good things and I like her ideas but she doesn't seem to be up for the kind of frankensteining I need to do to stay on-model across multiple covers. So I need to carve out time to do some PhotoShop work myself.

Writing about writing about writing

I've used up all my vacation days at work (mostly being sick -- what a waste.) But even if I took a week off to write I'd still fall short of finishing this book. I'm guessing 2-3 weeks of work yet.

I jumped the gun with a cover artist. Not that I can't have the cover ready to go before the book is finished, but I can't spare the time to finish my repaint so she can clean up all three covers. And I can try to get some readership.

Because my confidence in this series -- and my writing -- is at a real low. I'm just above the line now where I can't face it and I spend the weekend playing Fallout 4 or watching streaming episodes of Bones.

Complete re-work of the inside-the-cult sequence. And this is really telling. I already have a rough draft, I have copious notes; basically this is what I'd have if I had outlined the whole book obsessively at the start. But it still isn't moving at a NaNoWriMo pace!

I still have hopes that with new SEO and covers and all that and the kick a third book will give it, I'll get a smattering of sales. Enough to tell me this is worth continuing. I mean, I still enjoy writing, but it stops being a priority if I'm the only one reading it.

Ah, well. At least in all the Deep Thoughts about series strengths and genre styles and keyword optimization and cover design...and not to mention, rewrites and beta reader help...I've settled my doubts on the Paris book.

Sometimes a Fox is definitely the next book, and it happens in April and is set in Paris. And it is going to be a walk-back from living the Instagram life on someone else's charge card, and ninja jumping out of every shadow. This is cafe culture and art museums. I also have another idea to back away from the Too Much Stuff problem; to have a lot of very minor plot steps taking place, and almost all of it in dialog.

But following that is 20th Century Fox and that one plays with time. Because it picks up when it becomes an Adventure and the crazy really starts, but the groundwork happened months previously. Happened during the winter, in fact -- before she went to Paris!

And this is Space Race and Silicon Valley and probably a Branson-like figure and museum work and restoration. The theme of the new exhibit -- which is also a chance to show how Penny makes rent when she isn't pawning priceless antiquities, aka doing display work -- is The Future that Never Was. L5 Society, science fiction...and of course the Mercury 13. In social context, of course; both the museum and the story.

(Then there's space for up to a half-dozen more adventures before the lockdown begins. She does some serious on-line study when not getting pulled into archaeogaming and a whole story there, and is a grad student getting ready to think about a thesis project when the lockdown ends. With few prospects for employment as a junior archaeologist and the first post-COVID story would be the Bro-Ventures one...)

(But I'll probably be dead of old age long before any of that happens.)

The Key

Took the day off work to try to get some writing and associated chores done. 

Assembled my new keywords and plugged them into KDP. Chatted with my cover art fixer. All of this work in defining what the key elements are of all three books has made me think a lot more deeply about the themes and characters and everything. And oh yes, I still have stuff I learned in the beta read and am working on applying.

Wish I could get all three beta read. Wish more I could find the time to apply the notes I'd get.

Sometime in the last few days I mashed the first critical chapter into better sense. My beta reader told me there really weren't enough clues for a new reader to figure out who these people were and where they were on their character journey. Well, that was half of it. There was still confusion in my mind (and still is) that needed to be straightened out.

Twenty drafts. For one 1200 word scene. In fact, only six paragraphs of it. But I think I have a clearer definition of who she is in her life, her goals, her work, her emotional state, at the start of the book.

Anyhow, today was working on the "infiltration" sequence; from when she arrives back in Kyoto with an invitation to visit the cult headquarters, to when she leaves for Shirakawa-go.

I'd written 10,000 words of it. Wasn't working. Took over a day to break out everything that was in those scenes and chart them out. Then today, shuffled them around until I started to get a glimmer of how to make it work.

The weird thing is...well, maybe it isn't so weird.

Anyhow, the result of a very long, two-coffee day today is 3,000 words of notes that are mostly about the psychological state of four people. Deacon (the charismatic front-man of the cult), Sakai (the ambitious and short-tempered head of security), Takeuchi (the chief operating officer of the business; more-or-less the Scott Evil for this bunch). And Penny.

(Uchuu doesn't count; he is pretty much open about everything. And Ojiisan is being cagey so...okay, there's a few words there about him as well). Uchuu is the idea man, the mystic, the one-time academic who fell completely into the Ancient Aliens hole and ended up inventing a religion. Ojiisan? He's a close relative of the Emperor though not in the line of succession and he's there because he's been studying Kusanagi all his life. And Penny is there -- not that she knows it yet -- because he is there (the Imperial Household Agency is worried about him but for various reasons can't take more direct action.)

Spoilers!

The Death of Doctor Island

So my latest Fiverr purchases seem to be a slightly better deal. I got a very generic keyword list from one, but a couple of suggested categories to explore. And the other spent a while talking with me and helped me to nail down genre -- at least to the point where I can work on the series branding.

And my new Fiverr cover artist and I had a lot of fun brainstorming into the wee hours.

So, Amazon Keywords. It is a bit non-intuitive. They give you seven boxes and suggest that you use short phrases instead of single words for better targeting.

Well, that's only part of the story. I fired up PublisherRocket and "female archaeologist" ranked highly, and "archaeologist hat" ranked even better than that. Now you might think that using, say, "female archaeologist adventure hat" would only get a click once in a blue moon. But that's not what Amazon is actually doing.

I mean, we all know that Amazon ignores quotation marks and just gives you anything that matches one of the search terms.

So, courtesy of Dave Chesson at PublisherRocket, here's what Amazon actually used for its pattern matching on a test run he conducted:

 Of course the Amazon bot is subtler than it might appear. If the phrase in your keyword box never pulled up a book before, then Amazon will ignore it and not index it. And even more; if it doesn't seem to have anything to do with your book they also seem to be able to discover that. Somehow.

So overloading the keywords isn't the smartest tactic. Fairly short phrases still seems the way to go.

The problem is, of course, as the writer trying to fill out your Kindle book setup you are staring at the wrong end of a black box. Nobody has built the box itself. All of the available analytical tools can return is what has been tried before. So, in a weird way, if your idea for a phrase FAILS the tests, it might be the one you should use!

Buddy, can you spare a Fiverr?

My Fiverr experiment continues. I decided to see if anyone there could help me narrow in to what genre my book is. This is to figure out what kind of cover I should be looking at.

Covers are signifiers. The blurb, the fonts, interior design, those also play a part. A cozy doesn't look like a political thriller, mostly. But I've been having trouble figuring out just what "modern Indiana Jones" looks like. 

And, apparently, so do other people:

But the problem is getting to the ears of someone who really understands the genre landscape and who can say that the Athena Fox stories are really more like THIS thing or THAT thing and should have the semiotics to entice readers who like THOSE. 

Fiverr was almost a wash here. Lots of people wrestle with the categories at Kindle/Amazon. And with the keyword system there. But the problem is, the people who are up on Fiverr willing to lend a hand aren't coming from "I read a ton and understand the evolution of the field and what you have is less Steampunk and more Clockpunk with a YA flavor..."

They are coming from an SEO direction. They all want to tell you how to beat the Amazon algorithm to get the most sales.

Now don't get me wrong; in the big Civilization game of the Amazon marketplace, more sales is more visibility. So getting more books sold DOES increase the chances of them getting in front of the reader who will appreciate them. (The downside to category hacking is the people who think they are buying dinosaur porn, find they've bought amphibian erotica, and spam your market corner with 1-star reviews.)

But that made it an impossible search and, when I contacted several people, an impossible conversation. Nobody cared about nailing down the right genre. Nobody was advertising that. It's, again, a conversation that's been in progress for far too long. An evolved structure. The only thing that distinguished one offering from another is the number of keywords they would find for you at which fixed price in their price schedule.

And more signs of a conversation in progress; a fair amount of "I don't do creche-rampages like other people do" or whatever they are saying that I don't care about. Yes, people are competing bloodily on a playing field with complicated rules (that Amazon is changing as is their whim). But I don't care. I consider this more hobby than not, probably a net loss activity, and I'm just not that interested in chasing down the perfect card-counting mechanic to break the bank. I just want a seat at the table. For a little while.

***

So I dropped some bucks anyhow. And I looked at who was doing formatting -- the next ugly chore. And again, elaborate pricing schedules that are carefully listing all the crap that you would THINK anyone who could finish a novel could already deal with. And the elephant in this room; "Up to 30,000 words!" Um, excuse me? You are offering to format BOOKS for Kindle and your cut-off is a third the size of a novel? What the hell?

Well, okay. If the client is dumb enough to think 30,000 works is a good selling length, then they probably DO need help putting page numbers on it.

You get what you pay for. And apparently, with Fiverr, often less than that.

Serial Writer

My Fiver beta reader gave me her report yesterday. The stuff she had concerns about was stuff I already had my eye on. But some of the other stuff I was concerned about didn't seem to bother her, and she didn't raise any red flags, expected or unexpected.

Totally worth the bucks I spent (I'm coming back to that point in a moment). 

I've already translated her general notes into several specific rewrites. More will come after I've completed the draft and can see what didn't need to be there at all, or would fit better in a different place. Or needs better explanation than it has.

***

I wish I hadn't started off this run with a series. I don't want to look back; I want to take the lessons I learn and apply them to the next book. Despite there being fixes I could be making to the first book. (The second book, I haven't improved enough to be able to improve it. Not yet.)

But that does mean that the reader who is coming to this as a series has to wade through writing that, to paraphrase Howard Taylor,  moves from "bad to marginally less bad."

***

And the new job is a bit of a wash. I think I got the most done when I was at an hourly job on a short week. Back when I started this blog I was freelancing as a theatrical designer and technician, and that was a combination of scrambling from one crisis to the next, living hand-to-mouth, and expending a lot of creative energy during the day.

Or, it might be better to say, putting my urge to create into either the show I was working, or other (often related) projects.

An hourly position has given me schedule and financial stability. When I started it was a shorter week and I think that was the most productive time for me. Since we came back from COVID I've been on full-time. My income has basically doubled, my savings and retirement are leaping up, but my creative time feels impacted. 

Worse, we aren't getting outside the building like we used to, and I think meeting people and going out for installations and meeting vendors and so on was helping me with new ideas. I mean, seriously, it was an install in Burbank that made me pick that as Penny's birthplace, and my impressions of the place gave me directions for her character I think helped a lot.

But the upshot of it all is; right now, I have money but no time. This is why I'm looking so hard at Fiver and Reedsy and so forth. I want to hire people to do editing, formatting, cover art, interior art, marketing research, etc.

When you get right down to it, it becomes the familiar theater situation; you end up with other creatives with their own visions, that may support your vision or may clash with it. The thing is, large parts of the creative support structure is out there to, well, get you to pay them to be able to do their own thing. All the cover artists want a chance to paint something they like. Understanding your book is secondary.

At the lower levels of the price game this isn't even an option. Many cover artists have stock covers. Want to get a cover for a couple hundred? Look here; "grizzled guy with explosion in background" -- I'm sure that will work just great once we slap your title and name on it.

So not quite so bad, but I had two artists draw me two "inari" fox statues each and none of them are quite right (the last one may be close enough).

The aim of getting someone to do it, after all, is to SAVE TIME. If I have to spend that time wrestling with an artist over revisions, or worse yet fighting with them over a difference in artistic opinion, that's not saving time.

And even editing isn't a panacea. Because you get back a marked-up text that you have to personally go through and weed out which are good catches, which are grammatical mistakes you didn't understand and have to go and read up on before you can safely commit the change, and which are the peculiar biases of that editor and need to be ignored. And, seriously, that's a lot of work! The only reason to do it this way over software is that software is dumb and misses a lot.

But it still takes time. The money -- sure, at this point, I'm taking a loss anyhow and I'd gladly throw money at it. But time? That's what I can't figure out how to save.

Lost my voice

The book is boring me. Of course that's going to happen. One of the great generally un-celebrated skills of the author is to keep going through the slump. Which usually sets in by the middle of the book and only gets worse from there. 

Today I stumbled on a paragraph that's quite early on. I was going to paste it in here but I can't find it. Just as well. Basically, Penny's voice is what TVTropes calls "Sophisticated as hell." Bookish, immediately followed by Buffy-speak. Thing is, a couple reviewers got on me about the last book having too terse a feel to it. So I was consciously trying to do longer sentences.

And I don't know why, but that means I'm ending up with the labored, bookish stuff more often than I should. It is good for an effect; there's this droll, rather English understatement when you use ten-dollar words to describe a man with a gun jumping out at your hero.

But you can't use it everywhere, and I feel like I am starting to.

Anyhow...I sent off a request to six Fivers...or was that five Sixers...and one of them is taking fifty bucks off me to read the first ten thousand words. We'll see how helpful that is. (Getting a top-to-toe developmental edit read -- aka beta reader with better note-taking skills -- start at around 1.5K. That's US dollars.)

***

So other than that, I'm slamming words now. 9K into the final part of the book, and 4K of that I wrote TODAY. And I'm still going; 250 words into the "sneaking" scene as I break for dinner.

I did manage to lose the notes I'd taken on kusanagi no tsurugi. I had something that gave a sense of the number of possible copies that had been mentioned in different sources, and more usefully, a rather nice quote from I think it was Go-Daigo about how kusanagi isn't Excalibur. Not that he put it that way; just that owning the sword didn't make you Emperor of Japan, and being without the sword didn't make the Emperor not the Emperor.

I did find the Constitutional Peasants scene and watched that again, of course. Farcical aquatic ceremonies, etc. Incidentally, the Emperor has ANOTHER sword which he damn well does wear, and it's almost as ancient, but despite what my critics say I really do leave more stuff out than I put in.

Heck, for the purpose of this story, they are just "ninja." Nobody has even breathed the whole Shinobu thing...and lets not even try to talk about kunoichi and the whole strange fanciful etymologies THAT gets into.

***

Paris has been going slowly. I've been contemplating something that would let me tell large parts of the novel in third person. That's how tired I am of trying to write in Penny's voice.

How much is that Dogu in the window?

I've finally gotten to the point where Penny figures out the people she's been infiltrating are a UFO cult, Heaven's Gate style. And that means I finally get to use a book that's been in my book shelf for at least two decades, waiting for the perfect story.

Isn't this thing amazing? The text inside is even better. He has an upbeat, engaging style that shifts from subject to subject so quickly that even if you are familiar with a lot of the Ancient Astronauts claims it is hard to follow.

That, and he'll name-drop something without citation; "...and in 1954, Colonel Weston Henricks had ghost lights flying in formation with him as his B29 was passing over Athabasca..." Not helped at all by his casual approach to spelling; "Nostradomas?" Followed by an unsubstantiated claim; "all of the angles of the Great Pyramid of Cheops are exactly 91.003 degrees" or one that is clearly, oh so clearly wrong; "and yet the waters of the Ganges are pure. No scientist can explain it!"

***

But it's also given me another idea. I'd already given up on old tentacle face -- been done, bored now -- and was thinking about some sort of invaders from space for the potential serialized stories. Maybe some sort of Radar Men from ??? who were invisible until, well, radar came in during World War II.

But then I started thinking about King Pacal and his very early-high-altitude-flight nose clip and oxygen mask, the dogu with their corselets and helmet rings like a deep sea diver, the Coso spark plug et al...

What if the Alien Invaders actually did have the primitive technology described by UFO nuts like Daniken, (apparently mired in 1950's technology)? With some crazy physics that explains the schizo-tech that can fly from world to world yet still require internal combustion engines.

And yes, I was probably thinking of the recent XKCD as well:

But even better than a W.W.II setting is W.W.I.  Because Weird War I is a lot less done, and I'm frankly more interested in that time period (at least I am today). And it allows the humans to understand what the aliens are doing; it is advanced, yes, but not completely beyond their understanding.

Oh but there's an even better reason. Because this hooks into my idea of doing lost civilizations and ancient secrets and all that in a time when it might have actually been semi-plausible. When archaeology was just crawling out of the tomb robber phase, when hieroglyphs were still in the process of being cracked, etc.

But I really do need to finish the current novel first. Only 10,000 words to go!