Still not writing

It isn't exactly burn-out, and it certainly isn't block. I more than half wonder if the stomach pills I am on are doing something, because I'm just not that excited about anything creative.

Including music, although I have fond hopes I might actually record a new piece over the just-announced winter break at work. (The reason? Besides being too burnt out by evening, I'd have a quiet space at my shop to record.)

Put the first book on a one-week give-away. Two downloads so far. Also made it up to #57 in Travel Adventure (Fiction).

So anyhow, the Paris book. Once again, despite having other ideas that might even sell better, (at the very least, I can place them more firmly in genre, and genre signaling is a much more sure way to find your readership) it is the next Athena Fox that is closest to being able to start now.

I think what I am missing on this one is the emotional connection. I wanted this to be the vacation episode. After all I dragged her through in the Kyoto adventure, I wanted to back off from the angst and have her, for once, face things as a confident hero. But I'm realizing that without the inside/outside plot structure, I am lacking much of the thrust that makes me want to write it.

And I've been wool-gathering too long. Brainstorming is cool but you tend to think of too many ideas. The part that I need to be getting to is plotting, where I focus the book in on the idea that will work. I still feel that this episode's MacGuffin is a National Treasure type hunt, with all the crawling around famous buildings and well-known artworks finding unlikely hidden clues. But I still haven't been able to work out what that actually means in terms of action.

There's also a few other stories I want to tell. I call this the Steampunk Superhero story, but that's a phrase that is likely to give the wrong idea. Exploring Steampunk in several ways; as a fairly shallow mining of history for flash and nostalgia for a class-ridden and yet somehow "more innocent" time. As the actual future shock of the trenches of WWI, but also the earlier glow of the fin de siécle era and the charming gadget future lightly mocked in the En l'An 2000 postcard set. And in the form of the tricked-out heroes and costumed villains of the turn of and the early 20th centuries, the Arsene Lupin and the Fantomas.

Oh, and there's also my La Boheme group of artist friends trying to navigate the search for a voice amidst all the pressures of popularity, Academie, criticism, and far from least, finances.

So I think this is mostly a story about the story of Paris, the illusions of Paris, the symbols that have grown up around Paris. The Paris of the Paris Syndrome, not the living city.

But, then, I intended for most of A Fox's Wedding to be in the areas of international hotels and the modern equivalent of the jet-set, a global culture of well-to-do that is almost completely divorced from anything specifically, organically, or traditionally Japanese.

And that didn't happen.