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.

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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.)

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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.