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.