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.

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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.