First person plural

 I've figured out why First Person POV is difficult. At least, why it is difficult for me.

It is because it is dialogue.

See, dialogue can be a challenge to write because you are balancing two elements. On one side are the needs of the characters and the natural flow and directions of a conversation. On the other side is your need as a writer to have certain things brought out in the conversation.

What is worse is that you want to bring them out in a particular order so you can have a build and progression. That ideas are introduced, developed, then something is achieved that gives that scene a reason to have been there.

In that order. Even if the instincts of character one is to ask the question the reader has been wanting to ask, and the instincts of character two are to blab everything they know. Well, there went your build and your tension, and you already gave away the sting line so now you have two characters trying to make awkward small talk to fill out the rest of the scene. Oh, and since they started talking about The Big Thing, you can't back them off to also bring the conversation around to a name-drop or a minor clue you were really, really hoping to work in there as well.

A book written in First Person POV is all dialogue. Every moment of the story is one person speaking, saying what it is that their character and their feelings of the moment and the natural directions their mind goes leads them to say.

So you are trying to "speak," as naturally as possible, whilst simultaneously censoring and prodding and trying to figure out just how you can delay realizations and drop necessary background information and otherwise shape this conversational stream to form itself into the arcs of sentences, paragraphs, and scenes.

Can you hear the people sing

Watching Rick Steves and Les Miserables -- but not the one you are thinking; a 2019 film (set in a Paris directly following the 2018 World Cup), but based on an anti-police riot of 2008. Bit of a contrast, as you would imagine! Although Steves does admit Haussmann's avenues were intended to make quelling the next riot easier on the Army.

And my rewrite is not going well. The further I dig into the Yuki-onna sequence, the more problems I have with it. So right now I am completely stuck; unable to move forward with the re-write but unwilling to accept the old version of the scene, either.

I've circled around and around, trying to find a way to fix it. At this point all I can do is basically wait for that insight, that bit of outside information that jogs everything into a pattern I can solve, like the cosmic ray that allowed a record-breaking Mario speed run that one time.

Wait staff

My cover designer got over her head with work. Not even an estimate on when she's going to finish. My mechanic sat on my car for a week, finally gave up without actually doing any work on it, and now it is sitting out the weekend at a new mechanic. And I did more blood tests for my doctor who apparently has learned nothing useful for them and doesn't seem motivated to come up with any new ideas.

And it is raining. The silver lining to all of this is I got a lot of walking done last week. Oh, and when I decided to stop waiting on my cover artist and push the button on the eBook version, I found two scenes I didn't like.

I'm working on the second one now. Sometimes, you have to wait for an idea or an insight to percolate through so now I'm waiting on...me.

Here's Pigalle in your eye

A lot of ducks fell in line today on the Paris book, and I've done my first bit of directed research; I checked some dates.

Yes; it is possible for someone who would later be fighting in The War to End Wars to meet a dancer at the Moulin Rouge. Interestingly, the original building burned in 1915.

I asked a question on Quora. Only one person answered but it was enough to get me thinking. I loved the effect of the parallel history in the London book. Well, this one I already have a book; it is the book found at one of the Seine-side book stalls that is sent to Penny as a gift and starts off the whole thing.

Which means she has good reason to keep her nose in it the entire novel. And it could be the memoirs or otherwise accounts of the young man who visited Paris...a few years too late for fin de siècle, perhaps, and as well for classic Steampunk, but I can juggle some times and weave those together.

And this connects two ways to the other themes I want to explore. The First World War is that rapid and destabilizing change as a result of technology, and accompanying dehumanizing, that steampunk pretended to describe before it turned into gluing gears to top hats. And that understanding in turn talks to the idea of having fun with history, as well as the boundaries where it becomes problematice.

Which is the (supposed!) A-plot; treasure hunters hard on the trail of something (probably not Napoleon's Gold as that should be all rights be in a lake in Russia), and going from the generally harmless fictionalization of history to the potentially harmful defacing monuments to get access to the purported clues hidden there.

Like that pair of Germans who chipped away at an inscription inside the Great Pyramid (at least, I think that was what they did...I am, at the moment, just theorizing in air. When it hits paper in the form of a fully edited story everything will have been just as fully fact-checked.)

And this may be the flaw in my method. I am working from a theoretical story-telling structure that says you should identify the central conflict, a conflict which may be a thematic statement, a thesis and antithesis. And then you work out from there to the actual who killed who with what garden implement in which room.

Thing is, this means I've already got a whole batch of things I want to say about history both general and specific, and about Paris, and a lot of fun stuff I want to put in the story, and all of that could very well get in the way of constructing an actual, you know, plot.

***

Meanwhile my cover artist hasn't finished the back cover yet. And it may be a couple of weeks before she can do the other two covers. I took them as far as I could in PhotoShop; now I need her superior design skills and experience to make them look like book covers.

Tell them we are from France

Just watched Asterix at the Olympic Games. Not that funny, but very French. Gérard Depardieu as Obelix! Alain Delon nearly steals the show as Caesar; "Ave Moi." (French, with English subtitles only).

So I'm in the final round of revisions and approval on the cover. Files are otherwise uploaded. I think. I'm pretty depressed about writing in general and I hate this part of the slog -- all that trying to make sure I didn't mis-type the ISBN and that I have the latest revision of all the files uploaded, etc., etc.

Still have to crank through new covers for the previous two books. Current scheme is I do most of the painting and the basic layout then my cover artist rips into the files and makes them actually work. 

***

This was a busy week at work. Following another couple of weeks of a lot of stuff. We aren't great with pre-planning; instead we just get a deadline and then go crazy. My hands are still covered in glue from yesterday (even acetone doesn't take it off.)

***

Spending a week having ProWritingAid telling me my grammar sucks and then explaining all my mistakes in terms I can't even understand -- that's depressing. The longer I go at this, the less I feel that I know. And the more I hate my own writing.

And if I can't even decide if I should continue trying, I'm hardly in a good place to figure out where is the best place I should be going if I do continue. So as a default, I'm brainstorming on the next book in the series. The Paris book.

I have sort of three boxes of things. One is stuff that could be fun or could work in that environment or otherwise intrigues me. I really liked the way Linnet's diary worked in the London book and I want to explore a slice of history from a close-up, personal view. But the mechanism of a set of letters is -- well, it is artificial, it's been overdone I think, and it isn't a style the series has done before. The diary I snuck in by artificially feeding it one page at a time to my cast, and then creating a situation where reading the day's entry out loud is something they did when they got together. Having something extraneous to the first-person narrator of the book is just too, um, outside the thrust of the narrative. I just don't see having letters home as working.

Pity, because the idea I was working on there was the experience of a young aristocrat seeing Paris, and then heading off to war.

Anyhow, that box has a lot of stuff that probably won't fit. Montmatre, Moulin Rouge, parcour, steampunk, Dan Brown, artistic interpretation of history, La Boheme... And some specific travel things like budget travel, like Paris Syndrome, like this being the one where she just can't get the language and gives up on that.

The second box is ideas I have about what I want to be doing with this series and in books of this series. I'd like each to talk about an archaeological subject -- often, the intersection of archaeology and society, as in antiquities trafficking, museum culture, repatriation, rescue archaeology, archaeological tourism... And each book to also have a slice of history. And of course have something that is unique to the place that story is set in and hopefully isn't something that's been done to death already.

The last box is reactions to the last book or books. Things I want to do differently. I still want an identifiable villain. I want Penny to have a plan. I want a plot to start on the first page instead of lurking as Penny plays tourist. I am getting tired of first person, and I'm tired of having Penny have the only character arc and I want to shift that role to some other character.

But around these three boxes is a larger box. I want to learn from what I did wrong and do a better job writing. I went through this with the last book and, well, I failed there. I had a couple of things I thought would help both the readability and how long it took to write.

First idea was to eschew the "Deep Dive." If I didn't try to get deeply into the lived experience of modern Japan, it would take less research time, right? Wrong. I already knew they stuff I was going to use. What took all the time was snags in the character journey; where Penny was going, where the series was going, and how best to present that to the reader.

Another was to skip dates and names and locations and as much as possible fill the text with description. Well, besides it turning out there are only so many ways you can say "narrow winding path between stone lanterns" it didn't help. The EVENTS -- the basic "get from point A to point B" required I go around naming and explaining shinkansen and ryokan and kabukicho and all that.

So I'm thinking about the first one. It seems so reasonable that I should read lots of French literature, watch French movies, try to understand the soul of the French. And I think it would be a funny bit if Penny read up this time and knows all sorts of French history -- just none of the history that's actually important to the story. But in this case, it might actually make for a shorter writing process if I do a very shallow, tourist-centric view of Paris.

And I am tempted to say description-as-a-filler didn't work, go for conversation. Except there was a ton of conversation in the last book. The Paris book might have a lot of conversation, though, that isn't doing plot dumps. So that would be new.

Or it could have a lot more events happening. Worth pondering on.

Punc punc punc punctuation...

I ran the whole thing through ProWritingAid. It is always disturbing to see the kind of grammatical and word choices you are making. Boy, Penny uses way too many "and" clauses in this book. The omitted commas, I can deal with. It's part of her motor-mouth, wildly darting manner. And I seem to recall that I went out of my way to avoid ellipses in the first book...

After that, I went through manually to chase down italics. To take a second crack at deciding when to italicize at all. But also, much subtler; checking the italicization of punctuation.

The Chicago Manual latest version appears to be that the only time you italicize punctuation is when it belongs to the word. So the musical Oliver! the exclamation is italicized since that is part of the name of the show. But if you are writing, "I can't believe we got tickets to Pirates of Penzance!" the exclamation mark is not.

There is argument that punctuation can be adjusted so it doesn't collide; a quotation mark directly following an italicized word looks ugly. But Chicago has deprecated that and the general consensus is that you'll have to put up with it.

So my punctuation choice is fairly simple; a sentence that is in Japanese is italicized including the quotation marks. "Sumimasen!" I said. A sentence that includes some italicized words does not italicize.

It is, however, hard to see, so I had to manually go through the whole thing and select closing quotes to make sure they were correct.

So, the words. I am using a fairly fluid "colonization" approach. It also might be thought of as "signal to the reader." If a word hasn't been defined within the book and is likely to be unfamiliar to the reader, it is italicized until the reader has had a chance to get used to it. Preferably, by seeing it defined, or at least used in clear context.

This gets especially fluid later; when Penny is using her bits of fractured Japanese, I italicize based on how closely she gets to making a proper Japanese sentence. One or two words, like her frequent "Ganbatte!" don't get it (she's using the wrong case, for one thing). A full grammatical sentence like "Athena Fox desu," on the other hand, does.

This gets particularly peculiar with Aki's weaboo Japanese. In early chapters, her words are italicized to point out how much Penny has no idea what she is saying. Even the "-chan" gets italics when she's using it. Later, entire sentences are left without italics to make it clear that Aki, like Penny, is often not speaking proper Japanese.

(And then there's English loan-words in Japanese sentences. Early on, "Shiito beruto wo..." appears. That's "Seat belt," if you -- like Penny -- didn't get it. But late in the book a man says “Ho ho ho, now ai habu mashingu.” He is more-or-less speaking English -- which to him is quite foreign -- and Penny doesn't get this one either.

Connected to this; words that are generally known by English-speakers -- particularly place names -- with different orthography are given the familiar English-speaker orthography. So "ninja" is never italicized, and "Tokyo" is not "Tōkyō." And I'm being completely inconsistent with long vowels, weighing each for how much they look like they should be pronounced or how they look on the page. Uchū, for instance, also appears once as Uchuu. And there is the entire range from arigatou to ōkini to Susanoo.

(For that matter, I've used both "Dan-no-ura" and "Taira no Tokiko.")

And this is the sort of thing I'm chasing down now. Like checking to make sure Kusanagi is capitalized each time (whatever choice it is, it should be consistent) and that senpai isn't appearing as sempai in any place (a problem that would basically be impossible in Japanese.)

I am thinking about dropping even more bucks on Fiverrr for a gremlin-check. Because even for basic stuff like not forgetting periods, ProWritingAid makes some weird mistakes.

(One that it did several times for me this week; given a one-word sentence in dialog with exclamation mark, aka "Yes!" it would respond "You appear to be missing a comma here." What the hell is it thinking? What comma could possibly be wanted there?)

At least I've cobbled up a "Next time..." to put in my End Matter:

April in Paris…

The Impressionists at Musée d'Orsay, the cluttered bookstalls on the banks of the Seine, the pink magnolias blooming in the Tuileries — and an ancient conspiracy that may shake the elegant buildings down to their foundations.

In the night above the lights of the cafés The Fox hunts. She’ll find the clues and solve the puzzle before rival treasure hunters tear the city apart.

If only she wasn’t making it up as she goes along!

Sometimes a Fox : The fourth Athena Fox adventure

Getting my MICE in line

Working at formatting A Fox's Wedding so I can upload it to KDP. Made somewhat more difficult by the fact that I'm taking the chance to clean up the formatting on all three existing books.

Oh, and the "next time" is going to be difficult...I don't have a plot for the Paris book yet!

***

So MICE -- Orson Scott-Card came up with the acronym and concept -- is a nice tool, but for understanding how stories are constructed. Not for constructing one. I thought I'd look at the Kyoto book since I am, at the moment, proofing it. That and re-writing the epilog, which is at least somewhat apropos. 

I think it is a Milieu story. At least, that's the outer frame. It starts with her entering Japan, and it ends with her ready to leave Japan for the next adventure. That's the way MICE works; when possible, they nest (ye wan timorous beastie) that is, first in, last out.

I was very conscious of location. The opening scene is on a flight but I set it up as being "in" Japan; it is a JAL flight, the announcements are in Japanese, and there are elements of the flight that are going to be part of her experience.

It is also very much about movement. In the London story, it was all about going underground; there were specific moments and specific choices all the way through that, over time, drove Penny deeper and deeper; physically as well as within the story she was exploring and her commitment to finding out the truth.

The Japan book works variations on, well, the architecture of the Japanese home. Interior versus exterior spaces, public vs. private vs. intimate; often quite literally and remarked on by the narrator, such as in the Edo village standing set, where the dirt-floor customer area gives way to the wood-floor family area gives way to the tatami-mat private bedroom. This movement is implicit in multiple places, from the inside-outside conundrum of the Torii gates on Fushimi Inari Taisha to the ring-like structure of Transcendence headquarters to the social; a key psychological moment late in the book where she is invited into someone's home.

That opening scene also introduces the next nesting item, Character. Character is really the driving heart of this story. The London story was also a Milieu story but within that outer frame it was either an Idea story or an Event story. I'm leaning towards Event; although there are puzzles to solve, they exist more to bring the characters into situations -- events -- which shake up their status quo and force them into new actions.

Character was in the London story but the purest form of it is when a character enters the story with a problem or, in the terminology of several including Mary Robinette, a lie. That is, something the character believes that they need to either confirm or move away from.

The Japan story uses the setting of Japan to frame a series of events that keep shattering the ability of the protagonist to maintain her current lie, forcing her to confront it.

Of course the Prologues confuse things. And here's where it gets extra tricky; the prologue for the Kyoto book takes place in San Francisco, but within a tearoom at the Asian Arts Museum. But here's the real trick (and this, also, I was very conscious of); the first paragraph shows Athena Fox, the person and the life that Penny believes so strongly she can not be and can not have that she isn't even admitting to herself how much she wants it. And the central paradox is right there; because, while it is a costume and she is in fact acting, for her history show on YouTube, Penny is, actually, there and moving with all the poise and style and expertise she thinks she can never have!

***

So does MICE help at all in the Paris book? Perhaps as a checklist. I do want this to be strongly milieu but I also want to move behind pure milieu. Also, I want a stronger plot driver. The previous books have been parlously close to a reactive protagonist and I want to see her being active; to have a specific goal and a plan.

She has been using the Dirk Gently method up until now; seemingly wandering around at random, looking at everything (with the reader not knowing if any of it will ever matter) then putting it all together at the end. Because of that potential reader frustration I want to have her more specifically and explicitly looking for information.

Which, actually, backs off on Milieu quite a bit. See, in all of the books so far, socio-cultural specifics have been important for finally figuring out the plot. She has depended on a gestalt of all the people she has interacted with and all the things she has learned about the society when she finally figures out what she needs to solve the puzzle/fix the event.

In the Japan book, the bubble economy and the Lost Decade are simmering along in the background of multiple characters but it is at the climax where she realizes this is the clue to why she was attacked by yakuza -- and how she can get past the last obstacle to finishing that story.

If I have her more directly puzzle-solving, it moves the focus somewhat, and that means that the Milieu of Paris becomes less central.

Plus, for this one I'm introducing the puzzle -- the Idea in MICE terminology -- right in the prologue. Or that could also be seen as Event.

Because I'm unsure of what is going in the book and what is going to be central to the book, but I am pretty fixed on the idea that a fake treasure hunt is at the heart of it. 

(At the moment, my inchoate thoughts are about "The Lie of History"; how history is interpretive, and how there are many none-academic interpretations as well, from pop culture to pseudo-history. And the intersect with Art.)

So I really want Montmartre, and a lot of museums, and arts and even a La Boheme sort of starving-artists-sharing-a-garret situation. And possibly steampunk. And there are a few other reactions to previous stories. I feel like having her being a budget traveler this time and having to really watch expenses. I feel like having this be the one she more-or-less gives up on trying to gain basic facility with the language. And I am split on whether I want her to regress on her skills as a world traveler or have her -- at least on the surface -- look like the comfortable seasoned traveler.

And two other inherited-from-previous-story things I'm thinking of making almost running gags. This time, no underground. No sewers, no catacombs. Also, no love affair. Not that she met a boy in London, either. But it just might be funny to be in Paris and not be in or even seeking a relationship.

***

Oh, by the way. Orson was writing SF, and he used Idea in his MICE as more of a proposition or theme. Writers who have built on his work sometimes change it to Interrogation or something -- nothing really scans well -- to mean a mystery or puzzle or problem to be solved by the characters that isn't primarily a status-quo disturbing Event.

Spaceship lands on a planet so they can have an adventure there. That's Milieu. Spaceship crashes on a planet, forcing them to try to survive/make a new life, that's Event. Spaceship lands because they are chasing the great space whale -- probably Character. Spaceship crashes and the rest of the story is trying to fix the damned thing -- that's more-or-less "Idea" or whatever it is they are calling it when they don't like the word Idea.

My text runneth over

Book is done.

And I went over my estimates. Through the last two books, it was almost magical how I managed to hit the target word count so closely with nothing but a story-teller's instinct to where the hit points were.

So I'm standing at 90K for this one and it isn't going to edit down significantly. I figured the whole end sequence from Shirakawa-go to the epilog was going to run 10-15K, and it hit right on 13,000 words. I wasn't trying to stretch it, and I wasn't trying to rush it. Actually, I thought the midnight drive in Godzilla would be more epic. Turns out there's not that much to say about driving a car down the highway even if it is a really sleek black sports car.

Basically the last act ran longer than expected. I hit a full 30K and the pattern of chapters was calling for more like 20.

So now I just got to edit, proofread, and format. And maybe put out an ARC but I have no patience for beta reading on this. I'm ready to move on to the next one.

Oh, and tell me cover artist to get moving. I've got three covers for her to plow through.

(And, yeah, do all that description and meta data and all that crap. Sigh. I tried, but I couldn't find anyone on Fivver to take those tasks off me.)

See the tree, acknowledge the tree, look at the path around the tree and move on

That bit of Zen up there is from an introduction to snowmobiling. I'm already on that scene and now is when I really wish I'd managed to pick up that real-world experience.

I've talked before about how the stuff I love to have in a book; the look, the feel. But the five-senses descriptions and the specific, concrete details are the things that are less frequently discussed. Read fifteen articles, and every one will tell you how many tons of bombs were dropped and what the names of the generals were but it takes all fifteen to get even a little bit of the slick mud and the stench and the reality of being in that battle.

Well, I'm realizing there's another, related one. Instructions are all about how not to get it wrong. As a writer, I want to know how to get it wrong. I want my characters to make mistakes, to get hurt. I want the part of the story that is interesting.

How many travel stories are about, "The train was on time, our hotel was fine, the museum was open?" Well, too many. The ones you remember are about being lost in the wrong part of Dublin at three AM.

So I'm having to go further afield to figure out what the experience is for a rider so totally neophyte she doesn't even know that going off-trail is supposed to be the advanced stuff.

***

And been keeping the printer busy. It sits on my desk at work and filament is cheap so every few hours I wander by and select something new on the thumb drive.

Someone mentioned my old circle was doing a Traveller game so I figured some SF "scatter terrain" (as it appears they call it these days) wouldn't be a total waste of filament. Besides, I'm still tweaking settings in the slicer (Cura) and seeing what tricks I can do.