Cut, Print!

Got the printer for work and the first projects were work-related. Protective caps (that we could have ordered from Uline, but it made a good starter project). And then curtain guides, which we couldn't find anywhere to order and the existing ones were...poorly designed.

I learned enough of FreeCAD to get those parts made, and even revise them (despite being parametric, there are operations in FreeCAD that only look reversible but in practice things break if you try.) And, yes, ordinary PLA was plenty strong enough.

Although I am tempted to try out ABS, metal-fill, and of course nylon carbon-fibre prints (or for the absolutely crazy, do a lost PLA casting in metal!) Have to put in an all-metal hot end, though, plus probably stainless steel nozzle.

I've been exploring a different aspect of the machine. How close can you come to the kind of detail and smoothness needed for gaming miniatures? Well, these are the current experiments:

The models were off Thingiverse and not terribly detailed to start with, but I lost almost nothing even printing with the stock nozzle and a mere .08 layer height (can go down as fine as .04 with the current nozzle but that of course takes twice as long to print.)

(The other tricks are reduced line thickness, reduced speed, possibly increased extrusion. And then lower the temp a little to reduce stringing.)

The upside to a resin printer for this sort of thing is with FDM you pay for footprint. The wider the base of the model, the longer it takes. With resin, the entire build plate prints and the time factor is entirely how many layers are involved.

Plus stringing. I printed the curtain supports sixteen at a time, the print head hopping from one to the next. Stringing wasn't bad on those but I sometimes lost half a batch when one got knocked off the build plate and then mangled several others with sticky debris.

The big print for me so far is a smart phone stand. Now that I can eat inside again I'm taking the phone to work at the cafe over weekend brunch. Get a ton of writing done...most of the day's writing between the first coffee and the last bit of fruit, in fact.

So it worked but it was boring so I decided to make the Iphonekythera Mechanism; paint it up like it was some intricate bit of ancient bronze mechanism that had been at the bottom of the Aegean for hundreds of years. Overdid it a bit. Eventually it worked again but one of the processes warped the base annoyingly.

(So that's Dremel distressing, wood putty, texturing with the stuff we put on floors to control dust during sweep-up, Rustoleum hammered finish, some new Golden brand high-flow acrylic tints, a rubbing with bronze powder to put raw metal back in the working surfaces and general highlights.)

Shirakawa-went

Imagine this scene; present-day, and our intrepid protagonist has a tense stand-off at the foot of the Great Pyramid. His goons show up toting guns and the protagonist is forced to flee into the trackless desert, hoping to find refuge there.

Yeah, that's kind of what I am doing with Shirakawa-go. Yes, there is a historic village of several listed houses in the old style, and it is on the edge of a national park and a holy mountain rises above it.

Sort of. It is also in the middle of a larger village. Shirakawa is a village, but has a population of 1,600 and forty-plus inns and guest houses and a large tourist population especially during the winter months.

And I've got my tense stand-off happening on the Deai Bridge:

But it doesn't go from the village to the national park. It connects the historic village to a parking lot...in the bigger (and more modern) village. Plus, if you are heading for the three peaks of Mt. Haku (which all have names and different things going on with them), the first thing you meet is the E41; the Tōkai-Hokuriku Expressway.

Besides mucking up the geography, I've also got a bit of a squirm because in this section, the gods/nature spirits/wandering monks/pure chance and circumstance favor the white girl over the superstitious locals. Who are imported chimpira from Kyoto, but anyhow.

(And I've been playing Yakuza 0 lately. They've changed the names, but that's Kabuki-cho, and even the Golden Gai -- the main reason why I wanted to explore that game world. Even bought a woolen belly-band at the local Don Quijote konbini, and played games at a Sega Arcade. But what I didn't expect is the game is set in the 1980s, and the real estate boom is a core part of the plot!)

Well, I can't worry about it. The plot is set, and I have enough problems to wrangle already. I've been plugging my way back through the third act turn-around for two weeks now. Somehow between health and increased work hours and distractions I'm getting almost no writing done...

And the Dotonbori! Yakuza 0 has scenes in the Dotonbori as well! Of course they don't call it that, but I'd recognize that crab anywhere...

And I got through revisions of the critical third-act turn-around. It was the model for the last two stories, too; this is the place where Penny goes from being naive and trying to learn about a new place to being dangerously competent. This is where she starts to put it all together. Starting with a "Dai Hado" in an abandoned village against the chimpira that went after her.

I'm still not going to make the end of September. But it will be close. If only I could take more time from work!

Christmas Cake

 

Penny Bright is never going to reach 30.

I mean, not because of a life of adventure. It is just that I came back from Athens and started writing a book that was set in the same year and month that I'd been there. September, 2018. Now I'm coming up on the three-year mark and finishing up the third book but Penny has just reached the last day of 2018.

The Christmas Cake is described as "better than fruit cake, but still no-one wants one after the 25th." Which is a funny observation, as the week after Christmas is a crazed round of cooking all the special festival foods required for the New Year, with all sorts of interesting rules about which ends of the chopsticks the gods use and all but I have to leave all of that stuff out of the book.

Well, Penny doesn't turn 25 until 2019. But at the current pace of writing, I won't live long enough to get her to 2024.

Had breakfast at the cafe today and it worked, again. I plowed through a huge number of notes and managed to come up with ways to solve my current plotting issues. It also added a whole extended chase scene through scenic Shiragawa-go so now I have that to deal with...

And I didn't even have cake.

Blood and Snow

It's not working.

I got all the way to the abandoned village where the fight scene is, and it isn't working. This sequence is the final crux and third act turn-around; it is the point where the protagonist reaches the lowest point and then has the "expected surprise" where it turns around again. And it is all up from there (at least, until the next book).

And I made trouble for myself by trying to set up a lot of stuff to be paid off in this sequence. This isn't really a mystery plot. This is an origin story. The external objective is just there to get my protagonist through that internal arc.

She doesn't believe she is a hero but has been stepping up to the challenge anyhow; working out, slowly gaining confidence. Sort of a sub "martial arts training montage" going on except not actually learning to fight. Because that isn't realistic, and it wasn't where I wanted to take the character. And that's leaving me an unfinished business where her growing skills aren't enough to take on an actual bad guy in head-to-head confrontation.

(But still, of course, having a whole sequence of "pay off" scenes in which all the other things she's learned and done are what she uses to save the day.)

Besides not thinking she is good enough, she's also troubled by what happened in the last book; specifically, scared of what she might do when placed in a situation where lethal force might be required. So that's already a problem because every bit of determination and training (despite thinking she will never be good enough) is also taking her closer to a place she never wants to be again.

And that's still not all! She is being offered the chance to become the globe-trotting explorer she has wanted all her life, but thought was so impossible she has put it out of her mind. Subsumed in her performance as Athena Fox, who was created as everything she thought she wasn't and could never be.

Except she is starting to find the flaws in that character, especially when taken off the sound stage and brought into the real world. And being pushed into that role with its assumptions and limitations is chafing. In the first book, she "became" Athena Fox for a short time (and won the day). In the second book, things turned real. She thought about Athena Fox but basically put that aside to do what needed to be done. And, in her mind, it was only barely a victory.

In this, the third book, she's being pushed to take the plunge and become Athena Fox despite all her doubts and accumulated experiences. So this is basically the second Spider-Man movie, where he rejects the costume and then comes back to it...but on his own terms.

So that means in a few short pages she has to go from being pretty much the same Athena Fox she used to play in front of the chroma-key screen, to finding out that a brief training montage does not make one a martial artist, to winning anyhow through sheer crazy fear and anger, to almost using deadly force, to fleeing into the snow in depression and despair, to discovering she doesn't want to die, to realizing she didn't, after all, pull the trigger, to turning around and going back in.

Oh, and then over the next chapter or two, throwing away Athena Fox as a failed model and winning through "this is how Penny does it," to finding that playing the famous archaeologist is the best option Penny can take to solve a specific problem, to looking into the magic mirror and realizing that there doesn't have to be a dichotomy; she can play the role her way, use all of her strengths.

And finally accepting that, for good or bad, she's now on the path of the hero.

And, oh yes, balancing between a world where things more-or-less fall out in a realistic and rational manner to a story in which it is possible to be a little larger than life and sometimes the chips fall in your favor more often than they strictly should. Made all the more confusing by a Japanese setting where pop-culture and role-playing and especially tatemae, the social face, is so very important. In a situation where even the Big Bad of the story is playing a role and is very conscious of doing so.

And did I mention that she has been stressing because the "chance to be an adventurer" the good guy has been offering her is basically being a spy, and the chance the bad guy offered her brings back the archaeology that she loves...!

So I spent all book setting these various plates spinning, and in these scenes is where they have to come crashing down in a very, very specific way.

Four revisions of the first scene. Two or three of the confrontation on the bridge, definitely three of the scenes with the yamabushi. 

And these are better than what I started with. But they aren't good enough. 

Auto-Discard

 I'm learning FreeCAD right now. It is work-related, and on work time, so not taking away from writing (except in spent brain cells).

I did check out the new price structure on Fusion360. It is nasty, but do-able; sixty bucks a month (less if you pay three years in advance). And...no way in hell. I had a lifetime subscription at the lock-in price of $25 a month. Until they decided to arbitrarily change it. And the current version no longer allows you to save off-line copies of your files; it is all in the cloud (not that it matters, since it it proprietary format anyhow.)

Their current hobby use license restricts how many files you can have access to, meaning your work is essentially held hostage in the cloud against any future changes in licensing. And many functions have been moved to the paid version only.

Which has tiers. Which means essential functions, plus, you know, the very files you are working on, would be day-to-day at the mercy of a software company that decided to alter the terms of their agreement. "Pray I do not alter them further."

This is software-as-a-service model. Even without the sudden changes in terms, Fusion360 was constantly adding new features (whether or not anyone had asked for them), whilst neither fixing existing bugs nor, even more importantly, getting around to documenting any of them. On their own site, the front-page-linked tutorials would use terms and describe buttons and, indeed, entire organizational-level (as in, do you move a sketch to the model room, or do you open a sketch panel from the main model window?) that hadn't been current for at least three versions.

Plus the inevitable upgrading until only the latest OS would run it -- forcing another round of upgrading everything. Fusion360 forced these upgrades. It would literally refuse to work unless you installed them. I was only barely able to finish the Ray Gun project by taking my computer off-line for a month and leaving it there (even resetting the system clock lest Fusion360 figure it out that way.)

PhotoShop has gone the same way, although there, at least, you aren't forced to upgrade and you can keep your files -- in a format other software can still open! -- on your own computer instead of sending them down the Tokkaido Road to hang out in Edo for half the year. Of course PhotoShop is all about the upselling and has the invisible, impossible-to-circumvent Creative Cloud which according to my system monitor is hogging 5% of my CPU right this moment...in case Adobe has some other new plug-in they want to try and sell to me.

***

FreeCAD had a bit of the "it is never the software's fault" philosophy. Fusion360, for all its faults, let you do a lot of stuff that might break the software (it rarely did). FreeCAD, like the late and completely unlamented Carara3d, is absolutely crazy with nagging pop-ups and will refuse to progress until every possible ambiguity is nailed down. Not that it will, you know, tell you where the ambiguity is. Just that you will not be permitted to close the window until what you've done meets some internal standard of perfection.

For all of that, I've made three parts already and I'm printing off a set of one them now.

Yes, I have a printer. Ender 3, possibly the best of the Ender series as it is basic, solid, dependable and there's a ton of after-market support. Basically the Crown Vic of printers. It has been running almost constantly since I assembled it (made one for a friend as well).

Llama booty

Did I mention how amusingly awful speech-to-text can be sometimes? Anyhow, I've finally reached the Yamabushi scenes.

This is another of the check-the-boxes for a proper pastiche. My protagonist is nursed back to health at a remote monastery, and gets some useful spiritual advice before setting out again.

This novel is dragging on way too long. Japan was a mistake. I think it isn't that I know Japan too well, it is that Japan is just, well, peculiarly detailed. I mean, all cultures have a lot of interesting things going on if you dig. There's just something peculiar about Japan that means every writer that approaches it ends up putting in a lot of details.

I mean, if you are doing one of the "It's a small world" diorama sorts of things, Germany is a guy in lederhosen and tyrolean hat holding a beer stein. I mean, there might be some half-timbered building or some clockwork, depending on how much Bavaria they want to put in the picture, but that's it. France, you've got a mime and the Eiffel Tower and probably wine.

Japan, you'll get samurai in kimono holding paper parasols in front of Fuji-san with Hokusai's wave and a giant carp and in the background isn't that Godzilla?

I don't know if there is something peculiarly divisible about their cultural detritus that means you can't sort it into a few easy boxes, or if it is so popular and permeable that even people who don't know a wurst from the Arc de Triumph will still know about ninja.

There doesn't seem to be an easy way to cut through. Not even assuming that the audience already knows and you can skip over it. Can you just say; "sailor suits" and everyone will immediately picture stereotypical Japanese schoolgirls or do you have to spend a sentence for the one lady in the back who hasn't heard the term?

I have a new theory. It isn't that there is so much more "stuff" in Japan. It is that there are so many more words. I think this comes from the (seeming) accessibility of the language. Japanese words look straight-forward on the page and are easy to remember and to pronounce -- at least, close enough that many people will understand you. 

So if you are describing Germany you probably say there are castles. Most people would't bother calling them "schloss." When describing Japan it seems to be the thing to give everything possible its Japanese name, and there are of course names for everything.

So you could just say that mountain priests are connected to mythological creatures who are said to have taught the highly skilled spies and assassins who variously opposed and supported the warrior class and their chieftain.

But, no, you have to talk about yamabushi and tengu and ninja and samurai and the shogun. Which is, I admit, both more precise and more concise. But there you have it.

Anyhow, I'm within 4-6 K of the end. But I'm having trouble judging. I thought the scene where she shows up at the historic village of Shirakawa-go and is chased into the national park by chimpira would be quick. It's almost 2,000 words. And also a dozen rewrites before it finally started working.

So I have no good idea if I'm going to be able to do it by the end of September. I could probably kick it out the door, but all these rewrites are making it so much better I can't not do them.

***

Oh, yeah, I also got a 3d printer. This isn't taking away (much) writing time; I got it for work so I have something that is at least vaguely job-related to do when there aren't enough projects to keep me properly busy. The hard part has been learning FreeCAD (and also a bit of Blender, as well as re-learning Cura...)