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.