Cosmic, Man

I just got done editing the scene where Penny talks with the half-crazy "idea man" of the cult. He calls himself Uchū, which is a reference so subtle no reader will ever get it to one of Lupin III's sidekicks.

So that brings me almost up to where I stopped to do a massive re-write. A lot of re-arranging. Today I realized the scene where Ichiro drives her up belongs before the rewritten scene in the ryokan. Which meant going through and changing or taking out entirely all the "are we in a hurry" stuff as well as, of course, all the indications of which direction they were driving.

And I was doing clean-up on the transition between the first meeting with Deacon to the first day in what Penny is calling the "Cabinet of Curiosities" and I realized I couldn't have Aki-on-headset with those lines of dialogue because I'd turned off the headset in a previous scene!

So I needed to move those lines to a different place. And that left so little left in that scene I chopped off the last bit, trimmed it down, and dropped it into the next chapter. Then combined the remains of Aki's speech with a completely different Aki conversation and condensed all that down. Saved two or three pages at the end of it, and managed to work in a bit that was originally going to take yet another scene.

(And as I wrote the above, I realized I hadn't gotten around to editing the "not wearing the earbud" bit to make it clearer Aki wasn't going to appear in that chapter. Done now! That bit was easy...)

I've cut a few thousand words. And better, it hasn't been all condensing. I've dropped several bits that weren't important enough. Today's big task was basically going over and over and over the big conversations about archaeology and throwing out as much as I could each time.

The big Uchū scene has tried to be a polemic on the stupidity of Ancient Astronauts, or a pean to human ability, multiple times. I keep writing those bits then taking them out. Paleolithic art work, Gothic cathedrals, Theosophists...all wonderful and all part of the process I went to coming up with this whole plot, but the scene didn't need it.

The last stretch for tonight's race was wrapping up the scene without Uchū saying anything that would make Penny think of kusanagi. Because she'd never let it go. So each time the conversation naturally went in that direction I had to prune it back and try again.

Will I make it by the end of September? Not with beta reads. But I think I will. I am finally starting to be able to do some of this stuff faster, if not necessarily more efficiently.

The Fox Knows Too Many Things

The end of the Kyoto book is in sight, and plotting proceeds apace on the Paris book.

And progress towards the new covers. (I swapped out the tokarev for a matsuri mask. We'll see if that works better.) New keywords are in, new categories soon. I’ll also spruce up my Amazon page and possibly start a GoodReads author page as well.

Might as well move some of that time I’m spending on Quora into a place where my posts get me noticed as an author…

But covers and categories and keywords has definitely brought thinking about genre and the intended reader to the foreground. 

I’m in the middle of a re-write of the scene where Penny learns some details about Kusanagi no Tsurugi from a historian with his own secrets. In the revision, she has to work harder to drag the information out of him, using what knowledge she’s picked up in the course of the story.

Handily enough, I read a novel titled Kusanagi which is all about how a financial wizard accidentally gets his hands on the Sacred Treasures of Japan and has to figure out how to proceed. What’s nice about this is I have an example of exactly what another author has chosen to tell the reader about the sword.

(He describes the camphor-wood box, with the wax, and the circumstances by which that box might have sunk beneath the waves during the battle. But very little else. Although worth mentioning the description of the box is from an Edo-era account, and the sword appears in the manuscript to be a katana, not the "calamus leaf" shape described in that same Edo-era incident.)

So I’m frightfully aware of the need for that artful balance of showing the characters showing off their knowledge without, you know, putting so much on the page the reader gets swamped.

But then the cover art — of all things — brought me to a new thought.

There’s three things I want to do in the Paris book, if I can make them work together. The first is Dan Brown, National Treasure type “archaeology”; hunting for clues amid the great art museums of Paris.

Second is steampunk. Not entirely sure why, except Paris is already described in those terms and it would be fun.

And the third is La Boheme — and I haven’t decided if it is more amusing to make my little artist’s circle transparent expys, or have them very much their own people but my newly opera buff protagonist can’t help but think it.

So I’m sorting out what I can do with the assets and within the style I’m starting to set on these covers. And doing a superhero-looks-over-the-city up among the gargoyles of Notre Dame would be great. (So would the Eiffel Tower, but the only way to show that at night is to make sure none of the lights are in frame.)

And that would be damned cool. I could see people wanting to read that. 

And that finally led me around full circle. Because there are people who want to read an Indiana Jones, a Lara Croft, even a Dan Brown type adventure among the hidden tombs and mysterious artifacts.

But I am starting to suspect most of those readers aren’t ready to dig into real history and real cultures with all their complexities.

One more argument towards taking a lot of stuff out and trying to write towards a much lower common denominator. 

A Singing Horse

I read the first book in a series and it was enjoyable enough to bring me to the second. But the author didn't quite stick it. It's a space western, sort of. I thought when I started that she was going to go more in the pastiche direction, without attempting to justify how things ended up so much like a western, but she didn't. In fact, the story, the theme, the plot continued to surprise me with new directions and that is one of the things that kept me reading.

That, and this wasn't your Firefly style gritty Old West elements brought out in a gritty, often depressing universe. I am sure the writer was thinking about Horse Opera because it is very much a 1950's Television Western sort of world -- at least, those elements which are western.

And that's another thing. It is so tempting because it turns out to be so damned easy to have things fall in thematic patterns. It would have taken so little work to get some space equivalent of stampedes or cattle rustlers or whatever in there...she's already got claim jumpers and bandits and a Lost Mine (among other things). She resisted, though.

The sequel falls to another problem. It builds on far too many of the elements that are in the previous book, and perhaps because there is so much that has to be explained, the explanations are not smoothly handled or organic. Instead the text keeps stopping to explain something that will turn out to be important.

Yeah, I was reading that as I was realizing already I had the same problem. This is why I've decided that each adventure of Penny's needs to be largely hermetic, in theme and background and in extraneous elements. When she is in Japan, she learns most of the history and archaeology and language she needs for that adventure during that adventure. 

I can do this better in other books; the Japan book has the problem of being essentially the book where she reflects on the experiences of the last two books and finally commits to being an adventurer. And there is a strong "Chinatown" element; she's basically having PTSD over something that happened in a previous book, so that does have to be teased out and gone into despite it not being organic to the current location or the "case" therein.

***

Anyhow.

I've got the notes in order and I did a re-read of the current draft for Part IV and...oh, this is a lot of work. I have to change almost everything. It would almost be faster to throw out the existing chapters and start again from scratch.

I'm cutting better and better at surgery, but every scene in Part IV has multiple things that are happening in it specifically because they come out of something else that is in that scene. In the "Dogu" scene, her recording the items in the cult's collection of artifacts reminds her of her friend on the Nine Elms dig which makes her realize the decor around her is consciously science-fictional (one of the diggers at Nine Elms was an SF fan) which makes her realize the significance of the Dogu figurine she's looking at.

When I go in for surgery on this sort of thing, it isn't enough to cut bits out and move them around. I have to create new connective tissue so when it is all stitched together again it all looks like one thing flows inevitably into the next.

Way too much work. I didn't feel up for any of it. I closed the window and watched old episodes of Bones. 

Low Notes

The Alto Trombone was a good move. It has helped me understand more of what I'm doing not just on trombones, but on the trumpet.

Today I tried some pedal tones. Well, I've been spending so long on Bb instruments (trumpet and tenor trombone) I hit a clean pedal Bb right out of the bat.

On Alto trombone. Okay, this takes some explanation. The Alto is tuned to Eb, but like all the brass family, this is actually the first harmonic, one octave up from the fundamental frequency of that particular length of pipe. On the alto, the harmonic series goes Eb, Bb, Eb again; that is, 2x the fundamental, 3x, 4x.

So 1x the fundamental is the pedal Eb. A pedal Bb is some fraction, presumably some sensible multiple like 2/3 or something. I also played the double pedal, which is half the fundamental frequency of the tubing or a mere half-wave. It doesn't sound much like a note at that point.

***

So the book goes slowly. I may or may not be back on schedule. I have some clean-up note left on Part III but I am actually struggling to move forward with Part IV and I've given myself two weeks for it.

One thing I discovered during the last couple rounds of rewrites reinforces what my beta reader said. And it isn't something that makes me happy. When I started this series, I intended for Penny to grow into her role, collecting experiences and contacts and specific bits of knowledge.

Which looks fine in the notes, but it is harder to make it work for the reader. Some readers are logging on late in the series and won't have had those original encounters. Others will have forgotten them by the time they get referenced later.

I'm already there within this book; Penny is meeting enough people and picking up enough clues she has to start recapping where they came from by the time we get to Part IV. As early as Part II, I had to start doing things like "...as Beni had said back at the studio park."

I hate this. I wanted to be able to have her contextualize new things in terms she is already familiar with; "I'd seen things like this in Athens." I wanted to be able to justify her skills, "I'd trained for that in London." Heck, even referencing things like the back story of the jacket or the medallion she wears is something I can't expect the reader to remember and I can't afford to veer away from the present story to explain.

The fewer of these things I have, the better. Generically, she is getting more experienced and more skilled. Specifically, each story is largely hermetic to that location and that experience. She can't draw on her experience with learning German to talk about learning Japanese, or her experience doing archaeology in London to talk about doing archeology in Kyoto. I need to focus in on the story at hand -- and make Penny more of a tabula rasa for each story.

Of course I've plotted this one around there being specific things in her past, and I can't get away from those. But those are proving really tough to integrate in. 

Schedule slippage

Never rains but it pours.

Good thing the new drugs seem to be working because HR was getting concerned about how many days I was missing. So this is a really, really bad month to be taking any time off to write. Not even a long lunch.

And the building owner decided NOW (at the height of a pandemic!) is when the contractors need to come in and I've had to run around making space and that means basically doing spring cleaning NOW. Right in the middle of trying to meet my writing deadline.

Which means here I am on the weekend, on my only time away from work, and my OTHER boss is running around outside and randomly knocking on my door to ask for things which means I'm basically still at work. Grr. 

(And I'm eager to record my Game of Thrones cover so I can cut my hair. Those COVID locks look wonderful in the test video I shot but they are annoying, too.)

***

I made a plan and the plan says I need to be back to writing on Part IV on Monday. And I ended up with a few more revisions on Part I but it is so tight now, so well told, I really, really want to see if I can get the same to happen for Part II. The drugs are cutting through the brain fog and everything seems so much more clear. I have been making tight notes, and at lightning speed.

I've also been ruthlessly chopping. I've got enough of the book in draft now that I can look at a bit or description or the set-up for a later story beat and say, "Naw, not important enough to keep." 

But it does mean that I'm still finishing rewrites on Part II. Haven't even opened Part III. I was hoping to get the final chapter finished this morning before breakfast so I could use breakfast...brunch...to review Part III and take notes for revisions on that.

But it took most of the morning just to get the "Kitaro" scene together.  700 words of Penny posing on top of a rock pretending to do martial arts. 

Alto'd

I picked up another instrument this week. An alto trombone. 

And I like it so much better than tenor 'bone. My lips are still swimming in that giant mouthpiece (it has the same shank as a trumpet and will fit a trumpet mouthpiece, but then it sounds a lot less like a trombone.) But I just find everything about the instrument suits me better. The feel, the sound, the lightness. Even the spacing of the positions feels more intuitive.

It is also a better instrument. Not a Cecelio this time, but your basic Moz. Street price is still only in the sub $300 range (the first decent student trumpet shows up at around $600 for an open-box Yamaha). The slide is so much smoother than my Cecelio tenor and it just all feels a little tighter, a little nicer to hold.

And I'm learning a lot about how I am approaching the trombone and the way it is exposing what are possibly bad habits on the trumpet. So even though I want to make this my primary trombone, it is teaching me how to play my other brass instruments better as well.

The Play's the Thing

I have given myself the deadline of published to Amazon before the end of September.

So I was doing a quick review to try to get a better idea of the cult headquarters chapters, and I realized I'd left a revision in progress way, way back in Part I.

It's the kabuki theatre scene. So, the first draft of that scene, it was all done in visuals, with a lot of "it looked like" and "I thought it might be" because Penny wasn't supposed to know anything about kabuki (or much, even, about Japan.)

Well, then I realized I'm never going to write bare bones globe trotting adventure of the "Outside a warehouse in Amsterdam, then a train to a cafe in Berlin" sort of gloss. I mean, hell, even James Bond gives you more local detail than that. Anyhow, assuming the reader is reading in part because they like that stuff, I wanted to do particularly scene like the ryokan, eating sushi, and the kabuki theatre as a chance to make the reader feel like they learned something about it.

So revision #2 was to have more things explained and more things given in their proper Japanese names.

But that was feeling weird. And given that she's spent the previous scenes going "what is this?" it didn't work that suddenly she was an expert on traditional Japanese theatre. So...have her do one of the lectures she does for her YouTube show.

Revision #3 was she is recording for her show and admits to having very quickly boned up on stuff about Minami-za (the famous kabuki theater in Kyoto). And that had given me trouble because now I couldn't fit some of the stuff that had been in the previous version, and that's why there was a hole.

And I looked at it. And there was a bigger problem. She is in that chapter right at the crux between being completely naive about her trip, and realizing she is being manipulated into running around Kyoto telling everyone she really is Athena Fox, World Adventurer. Stopping to shoot a lecture didn't work.

Actually, a lot of stuff didn't work. The Kyoto Porta scene. Her comments following the Izakaya scene. The encounter with the shakuhachi player and the mall ninja. 

And this is exactly the stuff my beta reader was getting on me about, and I'd already gone through a whole round of revisions trying to clean this up. Because there's plot and there's plot. Ninja jumping out are merely an incident. Her realizing Transcendence may have their hands on kusanagi...well, a kusanagi...that's plot. But the real plot is the internal journey. Luke may blow up a Death Star but Luke is also on a Hero's Journey. If Death Star was all that mattered we'd see a lot less of Luke drinking blue milk back on the farm, and a lot more about how Manuel "Manny" Bothans lost his life getting the plans to Princess Leia.

The interior plot is Penny finally accepting that Athena Fox isn't just a role she sometimes puts on, but that she can truly be that kind of a hero -- but in her own way, of course.

But back to the show. I had to find the points at which she should realize she's being asked to take the role out on the streets, the reasons she expresses to go along with it, the things she feels she needs to be doing as part of this.

I ripped the kabuki theatre scene into little shreds and rebuilt it bit by bit. And stitched pieces of it into later scenes and moved a lot of other little bits around, too; the "grinning motor-mouth in a Chelsea FC hoodie and a t-shirt reading “Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions!” gets moved two chapters later and is stitched in here.

And I leave off work on it tonight with the last echo, a revision of what happens at the foot of Osaka Castle, still to fix. I have, according to my new plan, until Monday to revise my way all the way back to the start of the "going into the cult compound" sequence.

At least the cover repaints are done. For now. I am liking the gun less and less, though. I may just need to replace it with...a ninja throwing star.

Quick brown fox

I don't do fonts. Don't know them at all, don't know how to properly use them.

So. I went through a butt-load of other people's covers in Kindle, seeing what I could of trends. I have some new ideas of what happens there.

The default for adventure/thriller is big, square, serious fonts, sans serif or with small serious serifs. ALL CAPS. Mixed case is almost always comedy (or romance, or fantasy). The main "serious" users of display fonts are largely three; Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Historical (okay, okay, Romance is serious business too).

In fact, anything with bold letters with weird angles or cut-offs tends to read SF, usually SF-action. Anything with fancy serifs and long swirly tails...especially ones that drop well off the line...reads as fantasy (and romance. Okay?)

The biggest exception to simple block fonts in serious contemporary action is for a few limited setting-related things. I mean, outside of nautical, and the use of stencils for certain military things (and I said contemporary, so ignore the Western fonts and the "Pirate" fonts), it really is "Greek," "Roman," "Central American," and "Desert." Well, the latter is mostly Arabian/Egyptian; basically, scimitar shapes suggesting Islamic calligraphy. 

The "Central American" look shows up in books about tough modern-day mercenaries fighting their way towards a lost Aztec hoard, and is typically huge, blocky letters with a crumbling stone look about them. Really, I saw a whole bunch of that stuff!

There also might be a strange subset of stories set in London with what looks like the Baskerville font; narrow letters with refined, bank-serious serifs.

The real trend in a lot of action books that have some strong element that might show up in font is to use a blocky, bold, undecorated font and fill it with patterns. 

***

The coding is very strong on this one. From my last cover survey, if it doesn't have a serious font...if it has any kinds of swashes to it then it is fantasy. Any change in case or clever letters beyond decorating the "O" to look like a trefoil or something, it is cozy/YA/humor/snarky first-person protagonist.

An overall slanting line is acceptable but curved or staggered or otherwise any re-arrangement of the line of text other than brick-like stacking in both horizontal and vertical -- that also codes non-serious.

And that's a problem because I do have a snarky first-person protagonist. And I'm going for these slightly cutesy titles which also code as Cozy Adventure (I just made that up; the usual term is Cozy Mystery, but there are more and more books that have a very Cozy sort of style, protagonist, situation, even if they get into thriller/adventure/horror situations within.)

I'm spending all this time with stock images and repaints because I'm going for a Bama cover scheme:

Having the same outfit on every cover helps the books establish identity as a series. Having the protagonist on the cover clues in the reader that they will be spending their time mostly in this one person's company. And the outfit is absolutely intended to put across the idea of "Indiana Jones type adventures."

The thing about a cover is it should have one strong idea. It should grab the eye with something interesting but more than that, attractive. That's why so many covers have faces on them; we have this urge to engage with a person. So a cover shouldn't have elements that are pulling in different directions, or be so cluttered it is hard to see the single strong idea.

Thing is, you can easily go too far. With the Cozy directions, or with the Pulp Adventure directions. Because both of them end up reading as comedy, and the latter, these days, as ironic pastiche. 

At the same time, a really plain block font doesn't support what the rest of the cover is saying. What I've been searching for is what seems to be the appropriate compromise; a generally squared-off, serious font with just a suggestion of fantasy/history/playfulness.

Here's the latest pulls:

That last actually came from the cover of a book I have...it caught my eye and I found it on a font lookup site:

And, yes, I am going to do some repairs on the figure art for the third book. I rushed it out the door this weekend to get it to my cover artist. So I guess I'm doing repainting this week. (The figure for the second book...well, it isn't as bad as I was fearing, but I am still not looking forward to painting trousers from scratch.)

Notes Mozart, there are too many hairs!

 I finally broke down and did a repaint/mashup for the book my Fiverr cover artist is working on. I'd already found a "look" that I could live with using a particular stock photo set from a Aussie photographer going by the name Faestock. It did require a bit of adjustment but I was okay with that.

Well, cover artist talked me into a "posing with gun" pose. Which works for the Kyoto book. (She does, briefly, take a Chinese-made Tokarev knock-off from a yakuza, but promptly throws it into the snow). Trouble is, the "Steampunk heroine" or whatever Faestock called my primary set didn't include that pose. So a lot of mashup and way too much hand-painted hair later:

I'm still tempted to run a "paint" filter over it to make the parts that actually are painted stand out less.

Photoshop fun you wouldn't think had to be done; distorting the pattern on the (barely visible) scarf so it looks like it is actually on the fabric and wrapping around. Liquify with "face aware" engaged to give her a slightly more heart-shaped, wide-mouthed face. The hair is all in her face because the original had messy blond hair and I got tired of hand-painting forehead and eyebrows to hide it. That is actually a proper Soviet silencer but wrong model and on a different stock resource, and matching the bluing was a huuuge pain. The belt was in the wrong place so half the shirt is hand-painted. The rear pocket was originally shiny leather and looked ghastly. Fixing the material was easy. Preserving the stitching was not.

At least the other two covers she is wearing a hat. Honestly, otherwise I'd be making the girl cut it off before she hits Paris.

Incidentally, the suppressor attached to the frame and make it so heavy it won't cycle properly. That's why the knurling; you jack it like a pump shotgun after every shot! (And now I'm sad there's no suppressor in the story.)