Someone has been reading the London book. A chapter or two every night. If my count (KDP is very strange about their math) he or she finished it last night.
And I've been following along, checking where they left off.
Those last chapters are...odd. Basically I've ended up with a sort of Pratchett excess; counting on the thrust of the narrative so that by the time the reader gets to certain events, they will accept them. On an emotional level, mostly; when you put logic to it, it falls apart.
Some people really hate this. Some people won't accept what Sir Pterry is doing. I look at it differently. No, not that "this is fiction so everything goes." Fiction is a different way of talking about the human experience. You don't do citations in fiction.
Despite what Twain said, fiction doesn't just stick to possibilities because that way lies the error of the norm. I call it the Logan 6 problem. Pick any random person out of the Domes and they will have a comfortable but short and generally uninteresting life. Logan 7 isn't a random representative. We didn't pick one man and somehow Our Hero managed to break the odds and escape the city. Instead we worked backwards; we focused our story on the one man who didn't have an average experience.
So, yes; opera brings passions higher than they normally are in life because this reveals something about the human condition that wouldn't be there if we kept within what can actually be observed in the day-to-day. Hell, they even sing about it.
So, yes, it is absurd that Wentworth found a lost Roman villa under London. I mean, it does happen and it has been done. It isn't as if he found a UFO. But if you just put that find at the top of the story; "A retired military officer pulls strings to set up a cache of weapons in an underground station in South London, and while building the station found and covered up a Roman villa" it just...what? What does that have to do with the number of ration stamps needed for cheese?
For the cache, I used the ordinary supporting details of such things. Snuck in bits of the actual history of Dad's Army, the Aux Units, TDR sets, Ian Fleming's brother, etc.
For the Romans, though, this was done with the same kinds of details that made Penny's extended quote from Hamlet when she finds Wentworth's body the "inevitably surprising" conclusion. And, yes, when I realized that was what I was going to do I went back and wove it in, from "Slings and arrows" to of course the Globe itself, and even tossing in a jibe about Yorick's skull in one scene.
***
I am tempted to argue I was stuck into it in this series because the original conceit was that Penny created this character she named "Athena Fox," and when she found herself in actual Athens, at the Parthenon itself, the real Goddess noticed and decided to make use of her.
But that's not really it. For the series, I really don't want to go that direction. Revealing that there is an actual race of Immortals or something is just...boring. At this point the most I want to do is speculation. But it has made it feel necessary that at some point in each story -- somewhere around the climax if possible -- there is a hint of the ineffable.
In the London book she actually talks to something in the sewers. Although she claims she was probably hallucinating a voice in the gurgling water. In the Kyoto book it is even more Scully-able; she sees lights at Fushimi Inari Taisha and someone else tells her the story of the Fox's Wedding. She looks into the Mirror and believes (admitting that she has absolutely no evidence) it really is the Imperial Treasure (Um..spoilers!) And at the climax on Hakusan, there is a sudden shift in the wind and spooky noises in the wind that might be massed yokai reacting to the chimpira who are searching for her.
And I intend for absolutely nothing to happen in the Paris book. It's supposed to be a breather episode anyhow.
