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.