Who was that masked samurai?

I had a weird criticism about the last book. It was a request to put a Dramatis Personae in the back.

I've never liked those. I've only really seen them on epic fantasy and MilSF which seem to go out of their way to have oodles and oodles of characters. Especially the MilSF, where they are endless lists of people who are in exactly one scene, on a radio, but we need to know where they sit in the Org Chart by rank and official position.

Well, I'm not going back and editing the book this week, even if I thought it was a good idea. Some people haven't quite made the jump to the electronic life. When I read, it is usually with a computer or smart phone near at hand so if I start wondering (as I did during brunch) what language a scene set in Tel Aviv would be in, Wikipedia is only a few clicks away.

(In fact, from within Kindle it is one click away).

But that's not it.

It took a while to understand this wasn't even about my core cast. Apparently I wasn't supposed to list those (after I'd gone and done so on my Author Web Site). It was the historical characters that were a problem.

In a book set in Japan, and that's getting close to the meat of it. My argument is that when I bring up, say, Ishikawa Goemon in the book, it is almost always put in context with "Ishikawa Goemon, the legendary ninja and bodyguard for the Tokugawa Shogunate." And that's all that matters for the story. (It is also most of what we know in history, as with so many other people of the period the story-tellers got into it big time and there is more strange stuff coming out of the kabuki theater than is ever documented about his actual life.)

And that got me to the edge of this complaint, but it took me another day to finally get it. It's the problem of feeling left out. Like you the reader are expected to know certain things. It can be a barrier; something I've cautioned new readers to, say, Military SF about; these books are in a field that has been developed since at least Heinlein and Haldeman, and there are a lot of internal terms and slang and assumptions about how the world works that you as a reader are expected to bring with you to the book.

And this is already a problem with Japan. Japan attracts Japanophiles. You cross the line very quickly between some assumed "normal" person who has heard of samurai but their understanding stops there, to someone who can tell you the complete List of Battle from any random engagement of the Genpei War.

Same with language; there the line is between "that's hardly Japanese at all" like "sushi" or "tofu" to "oh my god, you are one of those people" for "katana" or "geta."

The problem is basically one of trust. And I understand, and I have grappled with it. The reader has to trust that they aren't being expected to know this entire backstory, all sorts of things that will be narratively important but aren't going to be told to them. The previous book concerned the London Blitz and at no point did I go out of my way to explain that England was at war with Germany -- I expected the reader would know that.

And that's why I find this insolvable. For my critic, it seems so obvious; "You have to explain the stuff most people won't know." So I've got a story taking place in Paris. Do I need to explain that it is in France? Do I need to explain what the Eiffel Tower is? What about the Louvre? And, yes, at some point between the Pompidou Center and la petite Palais and Musee d'Orsay the reader isn't expected to know what that is or what they should know about it.

That part isn't as hard. I am quite comfortable in assuming this imaginary average reader has heard of James Bond but hasn't heard of Lupin III. (I can't think of any actual historical characters name-dropped in the Kyoto book that I could safely assume the reader had heard of.)

The real problem is, how do you assure the reader that you've told them what they need to know? I mention the Emperor Meiji several times. He's the emperor of Japan, I told the reader, he was a force behind the modernization of Japan, his rule marked a return to Imperial power (whilst constitutional) and the last of the Shogunate.

But this is where trust comes in. How does the reader know I'm not glossing this for the sake of the reader who already knows the importance of the Meiji Restoration? That I'm not expecting them to already know some other important detail about the man or his rule which is going to be important in solving the mystery/the climax of the book?

That's the thing. If I show them an obviously made-up person (or place) they are comfortable with the idea of "Her name is Natsumi, she's a schoolgirl who works at a shop, she's shy" being everything that is going to matter about this character. But there is some dark magic when they recognize that Yukio Mishima is a real person, and they get this terrible fear that they are being left out, no, that they are about to be kicked out of the club of True Believers for not being enough of a Japan addict to know ALL about Mishima.

And this was the last problem I had with the argument I had. Which is, how does repeating, "He's the emperor, etc. etc." at the back of the book fix anything?  

(And, yes, this can exist for fictional characters too. I always make a point of giving a few extra details when I pick up a character that hasn't been on screen for a while. I try not to just name-drop "Sakai" and risk leaving the reader floundering. Instead it will be something like, "And there was Security Chief Sakai, glowering as usual, in his spiffy red athletic jacket.")

(Of course, if the reader does have this terrible impression they should have remembered some important detail about this character from the last time they appeared -- how is a one-sentence blurb in an index at the back of the book going to do damn-all?)

My latest thought came in two stages. First off, that it may be a mistake to have, "Ishikawa Goemon, the legendary ninja" in the narrative, because it looks like you are saying, "You know, that famous guy." Again, I'm not sure why "Dale Carnegie, the race car driver" gets a pass but "Tokugawa Yoshitsune, Shogun" does not. But anyhow! It would be better to set this up as a lecture; "Yoshi-who?" "He was one of the Shogun who ruled Japan." "Oh. Thank you."

The second part of this, though, is what the index at the back is doing. It isn't supposed to provide any more explanation than is in the text. But when you see "Ishikawa Goemon: Legendary ninja" in the index, it tells you that, in fact, this is all the author thought you should, would, or needed to know. And, sure, the reader might flip to it in the middle of reading* but it it just to assure themselves that they didn't miss "And a notorious cross-dresser" or something that they really, really should have either remembered from a previous scene, or known themselves because the guy is so damned famous.

(He isn't.)

* Another blind spot for me. I read in Kindle. I originally wrote for Kindle. Flipping to the index is not quite the same as doing it in a paper book. You are always afraid the Kindle will lose your place if you flip around too much. And also, since you are already on a computer, if you are worried there's something about Yoshitsune you were supposed to remember, you can just double-tap the name and the Wikipedia page will pop up for you right there in the ap!

Writing about not writing

I'm still too disheartened to write, and either that or the slump of cold season and a week off work has kept me from wanting to create anything. Dabble, yes. Think about stuff, yes. But I don't feel like writing novel or recording instruments or even painting some of my 3D prints.

The KDP news is bad. I ended my advertising campaigns with no unit sales to show for it. Not a single copy. I did get over a thousand Kindle Unlimited page reads but it cost me over two hundred in advertising to do it.

Amazon is a numbers game. The more sales, the higher you list in the rankings, and the better you look to customers. Even better looking to customers is a high number of reviews. Even if they aren't all five star, as long as they aren't mostly negative it gives the reader confidence that other people thought it was worth picking up.

And I am suspicious. I haven't had a single unasked review myself. That is, they are either from people I know, or people I essentially traded reviews for (just done in a way that remains legal -- at the moment.) There are other sites and venues where you can grow visibility, including (shudder) Facebook (or whatever they are calling it these days). It just seems so much work and also seems very mercenary. But basically when I see a book which really isn't that great with a ton of reviews I suspect someone was out working Goodreads or something and begging reviews.

So with all that said:

I'm trying to reduce what is in the Paris book. This would be a great place to talk about colonialism and exoticism in art. But I'm not going to. There are some very strong economic and ethnic undercurrents, lots of intriguing subculture stuff, but I'm not going to go there. I really do aim to stay within the tourist-safe areas, sit at cafes and talk about Art; classical art, Academy art, not so much street art or outsider art or appropriated art.

I'm also going to largely skip the down-and-out. This is going to be budget travel, but middle class budget travel, slumming. As much as Penny can talk about having to watch her last euro, she comes from a comfortable middle-class background and she hasn't had to and never is going to have to live for years in a state of grinding poverty.

Things I'm not sure I can keep; Fantomas and the early generation of superheroes and villains in fancy-dress. The off-Broadway (or whatever stands in for Broadway there) theatre scene, cafe theatre and street theatre.

I'm not even sure I can do the Dan Brown clue hunt properly. I have mostly decided that although I love a good Dan Shea-complicated Illuminati conspiracy, I just can't indulge it properly in this book.

My cavalry officer and his adventures in the Great War...possibly the actual War Horse story. And for that matter, Colette, the Moulin Rouge, 1907 and the Rêve d'Égypte. That sexy mummy dance, and Colette herself, might be at the heart of the story. Or might not...I need to take more time to really sort out the pieces so I have a novel that can come in under 70K and not require massive re-writes to make all the mismatched parts fit.

It's not like I don't have time.

"On the third day it rained again..."

Video games have become the major platform for the epistolary story form. I finished both the main campaign and the Frozen Wilds DLC of Horizon Zero Dawn several days ago. Went back through to see if I could do a few things more elegantly -- craft more of a stealth build (sigh) and this time paid attention to upgrading gear. 

It did have one payoff. There's this one side-quest where you deal with a swarmy noble named Zaid. Aloy goes to a remote fort to rescue a captive, and on the way out Zaid pops up in ambush with a bunch of bully-boys and the Horizon-equivalent of a machine gun.

So I vaguely remembered this ambush on my second play-through. Went and mined the courtyard in anticipation and, it turns out, I was able to call the strider I had hacked earlier into the courtyard, too.

So I rescue the captives, Zaid does his big entrance... And his men stumble into the booby traps and the former captives polish them off neatly. Zaid does his big "I have you now, my pretty" speech anyhow while raising the machine gun -- I promptly knocked him over with a concussion arrow and Sparky the Wonder Horse ran over and stomped him to death.

So satisfying!

Anyhow, epistolary material in games is nothing new. Some games, like Bioshock and other Bioware entries, have all sorts of fascinating side-stories that are unfolded through logs and audio tapes. Even overheard NPC chatter can have little side stories. In some, the main plot engine is also explored through these -- often optional -- narrative clips. 

And games have an advantage over the novel in that, depending on the style of the game, they can be manuscripts that are read by a voice actor, voice recordings, actual video or holographic displays. So a bit more like those experimental theatre things where you walk around a site getting snippets from the actors.

There are games in which that is more or less the whole point. I think they call them "walking simulators" now. Basically Myst without the puzzles. Interestingly, a growing number of the big AAA games that have an interesting story to them -- like Mass Effect and as it happens Horizon Zero Dawn have a "story" mode that nerfs the difficulty allowing you to progress more easily from story point to story point. And, of course, explore the game world.

If I recall correctly, the original Mass Effect 3 added a third option; to automate all the dialogue for you so you could get back to the fighting!

In any case, I am very impressed by the way Horizon Zero Dawn handles the info-dump. In many games, there is a division between what are clearly side stories and the big background information, and the latter is pushed on you. This does happen somewhat in HZD, but even then the excepts are never "here's how we got here" or "as you know, Bob." They are made by people who are still concerned with the trivia, going about their daily lives and dealing with their own concerns, and the clues to what happened in the past are only read between the lines.

Even when you get a big dialog scene, where someone actually explains things to you (many of these are optional, too!) they are consumed by their own cares and give things their own spin. Nobody is going out of their way to paint a clear picture for the player. In fine epistolic fashion, the reveal of the war machines which wracked such havoc on the old world is in the form of a sales presentation!

(The closest moment I can think of to a "as you know, Bob" is when a Matriarch explains the origin story of the Nora -- Aloy's people -- to a group of children and young mothers during the evening festivities before the Proving. There is a level of euhemerism here as it does capture, however poetically, some of the ground truth of what happened in the past and how the world got the way it is. But you pretty much have to finish the game first in order to understand that!)

Of course HZD has an unfair advantage. Well, Bioshock opens with a complete outsider to the sunken city trying to figure out what is going on. HZD, however, very neatly maps the inner story of young Aloy trying to discover why she was cast out of her tribe and what happened to her mother, to her discovering not just how her tribe works, how their world works, but the quest takes her out into, first, interacting with other civilizations (the game calls them "tribes" but then Aloy is the POV character and that just may be how she views it), and then discovering not just what happened to the old world but that it is still happening -- and the mystery of her birth is of pivotal importance to the greater world.

I am slightly unhappy because of the usual AAA conundrum; for over a hundred bucks pre-paid the gamer is expecting at least forty hours of play. And that means the game has to both change things up to keep it fresh and also, unfortunately, it becomes a set of sequels to itself, each time upping the stakes.

You start the game as a Nora hunter silently stalking herd machines (which only turn hostile if provoked). By mid-game you are carrying a dozen kinds of high explosives and trick arrows and everything is a stand-up fight in a closed arena against a war machine the size of a condominium. But even Aloy realizes this; at some point she bitterly remarks that she went from being called "dirty outcast" by her fellow Nora, to being called "our savior, the Anointed One" and she finds the one fully as isolating as the other.

This is a smart game, in other words. It doesn't hold your hand...well, except literally, as the tutorial section is a very well done and admirably brief section where the child Aloy is instructed in hunting by her guardian and fellow outcast, Rost. And just when you might start to get tired of having everything explained for you, it dumps you into a scary, unarmed, cat-and-mouse against a dozen searching Watchers.

But this isn't a review. This is just me talking about a master class in backgrounding without making an annoying info-dump out of it.

I Love Paris in the Winter

 ...which is a song lyric from the musical Can-Can. And, no, I don't. I would like to go to Paris again but I've seen Paris in winter and I had some very cold days and one much worse night. A story I might borrow from for the next Athena Fox book.

Which is on again. More or less. I have a theme now with some degree of emotional investment from Penny and a change arc of sorts. Which is enough. I want her to continue to change and grow through the series but I can't put her in personal crisis in every single story. I have the bones of a plot and the basic forces involved in it.

I don't have anything close to a resolution. That's bad.

Anyhow, it is cold here as well and I'm well over it. Was sick with the chills for the last couple of days -- Sunday spent half the day wrapped up in every blanket I had with the heater running full blast and was still shivering. Bounced back today and went out with only my Henley in lieu of jacket. But still not quite feeling up to running down to the wood shop to record some more music.

I am still, all in all, feeling creatively depressed. I feel like creating again, and I have confidence in the act of creation itself, but it feels so futile. I am dumping advertisement money on Amazon right now and I gave away a bunch of ebook copies last week but the series just isn't catching on. Having a low number of reviews is a flag...not a red flag maybe but at least a yellow flag...to potential readers. There are probably other amateurish signs on my Amazon pages.

At least I've got a slight uptick on KEDP reads but as far as those numbers go...I'm paying THEM about three cents a page (if you go by what I'm spending on advertising.)

And, oh yeah, although I am feeling more creative, it all seems to be writing-oriented. Not feeling like doing music and more's the pity as I have this nice empty shop I could be hanging out at right now and at least get some practice in without feeling so self-conscious.

(Actually, some of my neighbors might be working anyhow. And trumpets and violins are LOUD. The sax is worse -- there is no mute for the saxophone, not a practical one anyhow.)

Cognitive Evolution

 I'm reading up about early humans. Realizing just how much work goes into planning out a new fantasy world. Except that this is faster work. Dreaming up shit is so much easier than trying to research.

Oh, but that's where I am right now. Yes, there is a fabulous space after the Toba Eruption; multiple human species, some of them retreating back again from what might have been a global cooling, the development of many of the attributes of recognizably human culture (roughly, the neanderthals had cave painting and flutes and burials but the whole package is probably later).

And today I got a glimpse of what the emotional structure should be for the Paris book. Now that I have admitted it really does need an emotional structure. This can't just be a mystery but I need that inner plot arc as well.

I hit #26 in Travel Adventure Fiction but I am also basically paying people to read the book. Spending about fifteen bucks a day on Amazon advertising and giving away the first book for free. But, hey, yesterday a Kindle Unlimited reader finished off the book in one day and that's money in my pocket there.

I should probably be getting involved at Booksy and Goodreads and all that to gain more publicity. I still have no confidence in my writing, though. Not enough to be that aggressive about getting people to read it.

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.

The Map, Please

I am SO over book covers. See, this is why people do traditional publishing; you let the publisher worry about figuring out markets, handling advertising, doing book markup and hiring artists and all that.

Out of all the Fiverr artists I've worked with, I'd say only one has my whole-hearted approval for what he provided and how easy (and fast) he was to work with. My last cover artist -- well, it wasn't his fault, he had a life event and that happens to all of us.

But I got so damned tired of looking at what were supposed to be temporary covers I finally broke down and just took the false starts and unfinished work of my last two artists and finished the damned things myself. They aren't as good as they should be. But they are better than they were.

Athena Fox Series Page at Amazon

And as soon as Amazon finishes approving the new uploads I'm going to put Book #1 on sale (99 cents, or maybe just give-away) and throw some new advertising money at it. I am feeling it is likely this series will never do well but I've been going through a ton of other books and the faults I know about in mine, I'm seeing in other books that are at least making some sales.

Not that I expect to make money. I just want the damned thing read!

***

So I had an alternate idea. Not for the first time, and an artist I brainstormed with came up with the same. I've gotten bored on my cover-and-branding research because as far as I could tell it was largely random where Amazon places a book. I mean, I got up to #120 in "Japan Travel Guides" with the Kyoto book. And I certainly didn't place it there.

Artifact covers are sort of the thing, if you include sites in your artifacts (aka, Great Pyramid, etc.) The exception seems to be female leads that aren't historical or cozy's (Amelia Peabody is both) -- those get the only three-quarters-and-up shots. Like I am using currently. (Some of the solo male protag or more commonly team-based ones have a distant figure, usually silhouette as well.)

Anyhow, so I could do map covers. Map and artifact, but this being something small and portable. The devil is in the details, and the worst is that maps have copyright. Anyhow; London book would work with map of the Underground, of the Northern Line Extension, or Bazalgette's sewer plan (at least that one isn't copyright!) And a dupondius of course. That properly suggests the "Roman stuff found under London."

Athens book? Oh, I have so much Athens stuff I'd love a street map, but also could push the Odyssey theme with a nautical map, particularly of the waters South of the Attic Peninsula. A potsherd would look weird, though...so a Medusa medallion.

Kyoto is weirder. I don't think a map would help. But building plans of the cult compound could be cool. Artifact almost certainly a magatama necklace.

And Paris ain't written yet.

Toba! Toba! Toba!

I'm still not feeling up to creating anything. I don't mean non-creative; there are still ideas coming. I meant I lack heart to follow any of them up.

Still working on ideas for the Paris book. That series is not selling at all (and I am in despair about all my efforts to get the covers revamped. Everyone I hired ended up having...issues.) So something SF would be good.

Fantasy doesn't normally do it for me, but the game I've been playing recently has some nice future-tribal stuff with a variety of decently deep cultures.

But I am so tired of post-apocalypse. I found myself asking; "What about a pre-apocalypse?" Well, I have no idea what that might be, but pre (known) civilization civilizations isn't completely overdone.

That's Ignatius Donelly, if you don't recognize him. Which immediately leads to the though of what might have actually went down if...the crew of the Dark Star (well, not them, but something a lot like them) are tasked to go to Earth to keep humanity from extinction. So, basically:

And way back, early enough so this could be believably our own past, with all evidence of whatever civilizations the aliens nurtured mostly lost. Although my first thought was not quite long enough ago; that would be during the "nuclear winter" and (today controversial) genetic bottleneck following the Toba eruption.

No, that's Toba.

There is a prior genetic bottleneck pointed at by mitochondrial DNA at something like 1.2 MYA. A bit earlier, still essentially genetically modern humans, still in the Age of Mammals -- but even at 75 KYA you've got smilodon and giant sloth to play with. (The Terror Bird, alas, died out around 1.8 MYA.)

But in any case I'd be writing fantasy. Aliens, psychic powers (call them psionics if you like, I call it another scientifical name for "magic.") And besides...even though we have archaeology from 75 KYA, it would be fun to use it. There are known stone tools, cave paintings, even musical instruments.

Because the essential idea was that the humans react in various and fractious ways to the aliens' efforts. Some of them rejecting the new ways, some embracing, some stealing the best ideas and running off to form their own civilizations. So lots of divergent peoples with their own cultures and languages who can be interacting in all the good fantasy-novel ways with each other.

And it occurred to me that the aliens might not be terribly practiced at this either. So they are fractured, with strongly different opinions and ways of interacting with the humans.

And then there's the idea of technological dead ends, whether the alien tech is naturally that way or whether they are afraid the human species may become a competitor if they learn too much. All in all causing us to go rather more bronze age combined with a hefty dose of magic quartz crystals.

Except for that one ornery group of humans who decided to take up metallurgy...and it won't be long before that results in a little war.

And with us close to genetic bottleneck, it is entirely possible for an entire culture and all their cities to number in the tens of thousands, tops. And for there to be characters who are the last of their peoples.

Which peoples might not even be the main genetic body of modern humans. The Neanderthals are still around then. All in all, every element you need for a good action-fantasy book.

The Ludonarrative Disconnect and Collectables

It has become a scourge on open-world AAA games. They all have a core gameplay loop and often that works well (sometimes it doesn't). And then they have dangly bits all over because they have to have some nascent RPG character building, dialogue choices, a crafting system, collectables, challenge missions...

Plus of course the basic RPG-lite upgrade path for clothing, armor, weapons, potions, other equipment.

The thing is, these can be from jarring to completely disconnected from the game world. In the mad rush to stop the Storm King of Maud your character is approaching the last Great Black Doom Castle through a shattered burning wasteland of blood and dead bodies...and here's this merchant with his cheerful little stall set up right in front of the spiked bronze gates of doom. "Hey, stranger, you know you can buy healing potions for only a few squirrel skins and grass?"

Or, hey, real example; Tomb Raider 2013, serious student archaeologist Lara stops to loot a few war graves...on her way to fight through hundreds of crazed cultists before they can sacrifice her best friend.

Sometimes you can sort of justify it in your mind. You know you are the only one who can save the world and you know if you run out of ammo that world is going to end. So in the middle of a desperate race to get to the world-ender you stop to open every random crate you see and loot their contents. Or in the middle of a big serious conversation with the Admiral you are wandering around opening lockers right in front of everybody. Heck, I loot bodies in the middle of melee!

But picking up playing cards because there is this out-of-game bonus for each complete hand? Urg. Even games that try to justify it by having this one card collector in the wasteland who, when you find him, will offer you a couple of bucks for them...yeah, it doesn't do it.

And it's a weird thing, but so many of these seem to have been done by a different team. They are just a little brighter in color (so you can see them in the challenge runs), less organically designed (because they have to fit different aesthetic needs). It all gives off the vibe of crass commercialism. On a heavily thematic game with really nice design, they stand out like a t-shirt stand on the Giza plateau.

***

Another thing that bugs me is maybe just a problem of first loves. You learn how to use the bow and you are finally getting through the story with it and it feels good, it feels natural, it feels powerful. But games inevitably level everything. The monsters get tougher, there are more of them, the basic cannon fodder start wearing extra armor and helmets so you can't take them out with the old headshot anymore, and so the game basically forces you to throw away that sweet little bow that's been your faithful companion for so long and pick up this monster with glowing bits and spikes and feathers that fills up half the screen when you use it. And just just barely enough more damage to make it necessary.

I'd been getting pretty good at stealthing my way through Eclipse cultists in Horizon Zero Dawn when the "Mother's Heart" fight came along. And there were so many damned enemies on the screen there was no longer a point in trying to use all the well-crafter sneaking and silent kills and what not. So I went back to my all-purpose AAA fighting style; run at full speed into the middle of the enemy formation and start swinging madly.

It is sad how many games this works for. The enemy AI loses lock on you and even though you are actually rubbing shoulders it still counts as "surprise" and half the time you get a stealth kill on them. The other half the time you knock them down and then you get another chance.

I have lost track of the games in which I'll jump around like an Australian jumping shrew. Because any game that gives you "death from above" as a special kill, you can activate it by jumping off a barrel, awning, wrought-iron railing, Louis XVIII chair, etc.

And I know, some people like the look, and you are really supposed to be looking at the scenery, but I hate the new clothes thing. I guess I'm fond of classic looks anyhow and the starting costumes and particularly the early armor pieces are in most games practical-looking and flattering. But, no, you are forced into combat with baddies who will one-hit-kill you if you don't put on the thing that looks like you are a broken LEGO kit covered in barbed wire...on fire.

I'm not even fond of the powered armor in Fallout 4. The armor bonuses aren't that great and the HUD is terrible. I'm more fond of stealth when I can anyhow.

***

When I said "nascent," what I meant is most of the parts are there but they don't work properly. There may be a skill tree, but I've found it inevitable that all the skills you really, really want in early game -- you can't afford. And then when you have points coming out your ears and you finally buy the "get fresher vegetables" perk you are entirely past the part of the game where you need to cook your own meals.

When you are in later game any idea of a specific "build" goes out the window. Sure, you leaned on the crafting tree. You were going to make an artificer character and you bought every crafting-related skill and left all the "better dance moves" stuff alone. But by mid-game you've already bought all of that tree, and you can't afford the top-tier stuff anyhow...so you start filling in the lower ranks and branching out into botany and music composition.

Dialogue wheels are also...poorly handled. In many, many games there is a benefit to following up all the branches. Often the game won't even bother to notice that you already asked the first question, and you have to go through that all over again. But the fact that you could ask about The Storm King first, or the Storm Castle first, means both answers have to be less organic than they could be.

And when the questions are more probing, more emotional...they can't be acted as such. Because you might have asked the "I'm sorry I was rude earlier" question before you got to the "Are you lying to me?" question. So all of the voice acting has to underplay and thus undercut any emotional arc to the conversation.

I'd favor closed trees. Mass Effect sometimes did this; if you started down one path, you'd never be able to go back.

Related to this is dialogue trees/character play. Because of the way games are structured, you need to go to the thing or clear the room before the next level loads. There isn't an option within the combat to spare the bad guy or chose to sacrifice an ally or whatever. All of that has to happen in dialogue.

Kotor led in having dialog choices play in specific directions you could build. And it mattered; at certain junctures of the game you couldn't do certain things if you were too far down the Light Side path or vice-versa.

Mass Effect used this less effectively; it really didn't matter whether you were Paragon or Renegade, it only mattered if your score was high enough to unlock the special options. By the third game it was no longer a see-saw and you could be both the baddest and the goodest commander in the Alliance.

Horizon Zero Dawn gave a promise early on with the "heart, intellect, skill" wheel; the game talked it up as if these would matter. Well, I can understand why branching story lines are too much pain (Dragon Age manages it, or so I am told). But the promise of being able to make early-life personality choices and have those reflected in all the dialogue later...well, that's a lot of lines to record, but I'd love to see it.

I give Horizon Zero Dawn a pass because this is Aloy's story. It unfolds the way it does because of her character. Same for Lara Croft in her stories. It is nice to be able to sometimes chose compassion (or fisticuffs!) but most of the interactions play out the same regardless.

Mass Effect again gets kudos because there's something about Jennifer Hale's voice that the same recorded dialog, the same programmed facial animation, reads differently if there is a different emotional context going on. You do make choices that matter in Mass Effect, even if they don't cause your day-to-day interactions to change (much!) but the fluidity of that voice actor makes it feel as if they do.

Mugato, Gumato

Did they not have Frat Row where they went to University?

I've been amused by listening to newspeople and other radio folk trying to pronounce "Omicron." I don't just mean short versus long "i" -- which I think may be another English/American English thing. I discovered during Doctor Who that "Omega" has the stress on the first syllable.

No, I've been hearing "Omacron," and "Ohmaicron" from various people. The "Macron" almost makes sense for French speakers...

And then there's the ones who can't remember where the "r" goes. From a labored attempt to follow the "m" with an "r" ..."Ohmcrama..." and that person gave up at that point -- to a more successful "Ocremon." Ah, Ocremon -- the sand-colored Pokemon. Evolves into Omega, one assumes... 

Horizon: Too Much Dawn

 Was just out all the long Thanksgiving weekend. Didn't feel even slightly creative, not even to do some cover art work. Didn't have the concentration to read. Even movies bored me. I'm not sure what I actually did to get through the hours except that sometime on Sunday the download on a new game finished up and I tried it and actually found myself enjoying it.

Perhaps too much. Kept getting killed in this one boss battle and when I'd finally solved it...it was well after midnight.

Might have still managed to get enough sleep if my smoke alarm hadn't decided it wanted a new battery and it wanted it now. When I'd finished dealing with that I was sufficiently awake that the early traffic and the early smoke break of my upstairs neighbor were enough to make sleep fitful indeed.

So despite there being various interesting projects going on at work all I feel up for today is putting in the hours and driving home in Einstein, putting on the headphones and losing myself again in the world of Horizon: Zero Dawn.

And maybe this time learning how to fight smarter not harder. Although I did stealth my way through most of "Warrior Chief's Trail" and that is one Assassin's Creed level stealth sequence. The way I did it, that is -- dropped down and crept through the bushes among the cultists and corrupted machines. Apparently...I am reading this now...you actually can do stealth arrow kills with the right bow...

Two parts Vodka, one part Grenadine...

I'm probably going to write the next Athena Fox adventure first. Make it as quick as I can, more of a plot, less history, shorter...

But the series just isn't selling. What really feeds the need many people seem to have is SF and fantasy. Those are the Romances of this era (not that romances are doing poorly, either). And I think I could push The Tiki Stars out of the single-joke, single book and into an open-ended, multi-threaded series.

I'm just caught on some basic conceptual issues. As much as I want to write boiler-plate science fiction, I can't let go of enough science. I can't unlearn the Kzinti Lesson.

Basic problem; getting out of a gravity well is a known amount of energy. A lot of energy. If you can do that trivially, you can do a lot of other things trivially. It is the same problem as the giant fighting robot; if you could put that kind of armor on a walking robot, you could put even better armor on something that looks more like a tank.

(Okay, there is some wriggle room on the giant robot. Agility sort of counts with tanks because at the current state of the art, frontal armor isn't as good as being behind fifty meters of rock and dirt. So being able to fire then duck into a better protected spot before artillery or air support finds you is a good thing. This would almost make sense with giant robots -- if you had a hand-wave to explain why guided missiles et al aren't seeking out the tallest most obvious thing on the battlefield.)

(The Gundam universe has Minovsky Particles. And then it throws it all away by having the heavy legged robots fighting in space.)

Okay, so the Kzinti Lesson. You can play with it a little by hand-waving an "impulse drive" that allows your ships to reach orbit with relative ease but for "reasons" only works for space flight and doesn't give you the kind of battery packs that make hand blasters and powered armor possible but internal combustion silly and wasteful. Some sort of inertia-squasher or something.

Hard to figure out how that can't turn into the hand-held battleship gun, though. Even if there is a black box "get to orbit, don't ask how, do not pass go and do not collect velocity" you still can't get away from gravitational potential energy. There still exist scenarios where all you have to do is turn the magic space-drive back off and you've got a dinosaur-killer on your hands.

Odd to think that Star Trek TOS (Those Old Scientists) got it right; in "Conscience of the King" a single hand phaser set on overload is considered capable of blowing the side of the ship off. The Mass Effect series also nods to this; an Engineer can cause enemy weapons or armor to short out, causing an explosion powerful enough to kill enemies in a wide radius around the unlucky one.

The odd thing is, though...

There is a similarly physics-defying problem with FTL. It is a violation of causality; once you introduce FTL, you've opened a not-so-very-back-door towards breaking the chain of cause and effect. But this is such a Necessary Weasel SF usually manages to ignore it entirely.

So why can't we ignore normal space as well? If we were to just drop a decimal place (pretty much everywhere!) then it becomes possible to get from surface-to-orbit on a reasonably sized fuel tank, but reversing the journey doesn't turn your ship into a terrifying kinetic-kill missile. And proper low-delta-vee journeys -- Hohlmann Transfer orbits et al -- take days instead of weeks, or (for the outer planets) weeks instead of months.

It is just hard figuring out where that magical decimal place goes and how to hide it. And also hard to avoid the temptation of other magic decimals that allow you to have things like...giant robots.

Me and George

I just binge-read a fairly basic space opera slash bildungsroman. Found a few missing words and typos, nothing out of the ordinary for a published book.

Then looked through the Amazon revues and half of them were going on about the apparently glaring grammatical errors all over the page, plus blatant disregard of the common comma.

Oh, boy. No point in claiming I wasn't reading with my writing hat on, because I was. If this stuff is so bad I should have spotted it. Okay; it is possible the author saw an editor between the time those reviews were left and when I read it -- that's the thing about eBooks, they can be revised multiple times, nigh-invisibly.

But it also might mean that I am so lousy at grammar I have no business writing novels.

I've wondered that before. I've worried enough about it that I've tried to study up. Doesn't work. Heck, I get lost before I've even finished the definition of a problem. I hit something like "...a subject complement or predicative of the subject is a predicative expression that follows a linking verb (copula)..." and I lose all track of even what it was I was originally trying to look up.

Yes, I've read Strunk and White and I have a copy close at hand.

I even use a fairly advanced (well, fairly expensive) grammar checker that not only flags problems but pops up a whole window explaining what rule it is and how it works.

Which I can't make head nor tails of, half the time.

I am at a loss here. My grammar checker keeps telling me there aren't enough commas and I need to add more. But when I send a sample text to speech output it pauses every few words with an affect like a motor with a clogged fuel line.

Probably good I'm taking a short break from writing.

A Machine for Driving In

I was looking at all sorts of cars. You know how low certain "entry-level luxury" cars can get on the used market? I even was tempted by a 2012 Lincoln MKZ Hybrid with charcoal finish, motorized sunroof, Sirius Satellite, cooled seats, backup camera and THX sound.

Not to mention a few bizarre outliers. Like a Midnight Edition Nissan Juke, which is like what happens when 1960's hotrod genes get into the design of a "subcompact crossover SUV."

I ended up with something that has four wheels and a radio. But it is still a lot of fun to drive. I traded the momentary luxuries of fancy sound systems and zoned air conditioning for flappy paddles and a terrible rear-view mirror.

Uphill push

I had a seller get back to me at 12:30 and at 1:00 the bank closes. Not to mention they closed two more branches and that meant I had 22 minutes to get 1.6 miles...uphill.

Made it. Was a little drained the rest of the day, though! The biggest upside to not having a car is with all the exercise I'm getting I am really starting to feel more my old self. (That is, as opposed to my old self.)

***

Just had another Fiverr artist: "Don't bother with the 3d book models, here's the page with the current book and cover, show me some different ideas."

Two days radio silence on a four-day order window. Then, "You forgot to tell me the book title."

Right. Not a good sign, but it was only twenty bucks and by this point I pretty much knew what to expect anyhow. Two days later, two (not the promised three) concepts...complete with 3d book models.

But they were different than anything I'd thought of before (well, okay, one of them is -- the other is actually the front image on my writing website) so I thanked her and marked it complete and payable.

No tip.

***

Meanwhile over on Pubby I asked for a KEDP review instead; that's the one that tracks page views. He completed and turned in his review...remember, I am paying for this service...at 73 pages out of 464 (Kindle Adjusted Page Count...has nothing to do with actual paperback pages or anything).

So he stopped short of where, by the usual structural measures, you'd expect the actual plot to start. Which is, alas, true for that book as well. He stopped at 16%. I have a distinct "refusal of the call" at 21% and a full commit almost immediately following.

And, okay, mea culpa. I lost track of time on a book I was doing for Pubby and had to turn in a review before I'd finished it. But I've finished the book since and wouldn't alter what I wrote before.

But...given the amount of time he spent at it (he ordered the book the day before the review came in), I wouldn't be surprised if my first "reviewer" stopped after the prologue. 

You know, that could be another reason why Pubby reviews tend to land on four stars. There is a slight air of paid-for about the process and that, and the fact that this is writers reviewing the work of other writers, means we may be more critical and we want to at least look like we are being honest with our reviews. I think I dropped mostly four stars, although my reviews are always long and in depth.

But it could be a different effect. If there are a lot of people who aren't bothering to read the book at all (something that Pubby makes far too easy to do, what with requiring authors to fill out a chart of the words and phrases they hope the reviewer will chose...!) then they are being Caesar's wife by carefully not giving out automatic five-star reviews. Three would be cruel; four hits the sweet spot of "Yes, I did my work and after careful consideration it is...good. Not great, but good."

I complained once to Pubby already. I think it may be time to cut my membership entirely.

"Sure I do -- and so's the Queen!"

I explained to the dealer in Freemont I'd only make the trip down there if I could drive the car back. He agreed. I took the train back.

I asked an artist on Fiverr to draw me a fox statue. He drew me a fox.

I've had so many conversations lately in which I explain what it is I am looking for, and I get back a reply that indicates they either didn't understand or didn't even bother to listen.

"I am looking for a movie for tonight. Anything but horror."

"Here are the horror movies you wanted, sir."

And you don't even want to know my conversations with my (ahem) "Primary Care Physician."

Okay, sure, I speak a bookish English, complex sentence structures, less familiar idioms. But English is constructed on the sentence. You can not make a less ambiguous English sentence by stripping out everything but noun and verb.

"Eat car" is not in any way less confusing or more straightforward than saying, "we should take the car to somewhere to eat."

Yes, I will take blame for not being easy to understand. But there is a hell of a lot more blame for people who are overworked, but more, fucking lazy. Who don't want to deal with anything more complicated than "third shelf on the left" as the necessary reply.

Almost every person I've interacted with at Fiverr has been all about figuring out the smallest, most limited box they can possibly fit my requirements into -- the box that looks the most like every other box they have done that month.

"I've written a heroic-age fantasy taking place around the great city of Hattusa..."

"Okay, urban fantasy. Here's my dude-in-trench-coat-with-wand book cover. Thank you for your order!"

Except actually my fox guy. He's now done two images for me that were absolutely wonderful and exactly what I wanted. It just took a little longer to get him to go back to the actual order instead of what he had decided to remember about the order while he was working on something else.

***

Oh, and none of my Pubby reviewers have convinced me they actually read the book. One of them turned in a review some 6-8 hours after grabbing a copy. Sus! I will give them one more chance...I'm switching to KDE so there will be a page-by-page track. I won't be able to confirm they read the book, but if I get a total of fifty page reads and a completed review...I'm going to raise hell at Pubby.

Back on the High C's

My trumpet lip is coming back. Finally back to that top C, although it remains tough. (I call it "top C" or "first C above the staff" because trumpet people get weird about the term "double C." Sometimes they mean this one, sometimes they mean an octave above that, and they consider it a sort of false valor if you claim a Double C out of something less impressive.)

The car I looked at in Fremont wasn't, actually, ready to roll out. He said he'd have it ready in the later part of this week. A car in SF had a sale finalizing today and it looks like it did, indeed, sell. And yet another car I heard rumor of is now right next door but they are closing the lot before I can walk back that way from work.

I was also waiting on a review via Pubby and it posted then un-posted. Seeing as the reviewer only got around to purchasing the book that same day, it is plausible Amazon booted it. I still have yet to make a single sale that isn't me or that review trade.

Oddly enough, I still hit top 140 in one of the categories. Currently the 300,000th best seller...in all of Kindle. They must be having a slow week.

And trying to build enough hours off to do things like visit the doctor. Haven't gotten there yet. It may be February before I have the time off for a full vacation. From the looks of the world, travel will still be awkward then. Hell, I'm going to need a new passport before we can start flying without a mask on.

Was in the middle of conversation with two cover artists and haven't heard anything from them for days. My original cover artist, after two weeks, seems likely to never return (taking with her the full layered PSD and leaving me with nothing but a single jpg as result of everything I paid her. Fiverr...largely sucks.) I am getting anxious about my sorry covers and dropped twenty bucks on yet another artist to give me some cover concepts. Who hasn't said a single word since accepting the gig.

So basically my life remains in stasis. I've stopped writing. It seems utterly futile.

Bueller...

The waiting game continues. I put down a deposit on a car but it was not ready for pick-up as promise so I am still car-less for another week. My cover artist was kicked off Fiverr and there are things I'd rather not do until I've seen if she intends to return. Kaiser is being stupid about availability of the COVID booster shot and I haven't been able to find an appointment nearer than five miles away.

I also broke down and "purchased" a review at Pubby. So far the Kyoto book has yet to be ordered even once (so if that reviewer turns in a review I will immediately raise a stir at Pubby over that!) I'm reading a cute time-travel story in the meanwhile to get my Pubby points back up.

At least my new shoes finally arrived. Because I expect to do even more walking. Rain included. At least it is only uphill one way.

The Clacks

In one of Terry Pratchett's books, there was a tradition among the operators of the Discworld's version of the telegraph; they would add someone's name to the list of messages to be transmitted, with a tag saying "please repeat." So as long as one clack station still existed and was sending messages, that person would not be forgotten.

The Kyoto book is published (eBook only; the saga of the print cover is still ongoing). Nobody has bought it yet. That means, with the exception of one beta reader, everything that happened inside the book, all the people, all the places, all the events, only exist in one place; inside my head. If I were to drop dead, nobody would ever know of them.

Having people read it is our version of the clacks. Those people and places exist only as long as others remember them.

Narrative Logic

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.

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.

Cut, Print!

Got the printer for work and the first projects were work-related. Protective caps (that we could have ordered from Uline, but it made a good starter project). And then curtain guides, which we couldn't find anywhere to order and the existing ones were...poorly designed.

I learned enough of FreeCAD to get those parts made, and even revise them (despite being parametric, there are operations in FreeCAD that only look reversible but in practice things break if you try.) And, yes, ordinary PLA was plenty strong enough.

Although I am tempted to try out ABS, metal-fill, and of course nylon carbon-fibre prints (or for the absolutely crazy, do a lost PLA casting in metal!) Have to put in an all-metal hot end, though, plus probably stainless steel nozzle.

I've been exploring a different aspect of the machine. How close can you come to the kind of detail and smoothness needed for gaming miniatures? Well, these are the current experiments:

The models were off Thingiverse and not terribly detailed to start with, but I lost almost nothing even printing with the stock nozzle and a mere .08 layer height (can go down as fine as .04 with the current nozzle but that of course takes twice as long to print.)

(The other tricks are reduced line thickness, reduced speed, possibly increased extrusion. And then lower the temp a little to reduce stringing.)

The upside to a resin printer for this sort of thing is with FDM you pay for footprint. The wider the base of the model, the longer it takes. With resin, the entire build plate prints and the time factor is entirely how many layers are involved.

Plus stringing. I printed the curtain supports sixteen at a time, the print head hopping from one to the next. Stringing wasn't bad on those but I sometimes lost half a batch when one got knocked off the build plate and then mangled several others with sticky debris.

The big print for me so far is a smart phone stand. Now that I can eat inside again I'm taking the phone to work at the cafe over weekend brunch. Get a ton of writing done...most of the day's writing between the first coffee and the last bit of fruit, in fact.

So it worked but it was boring so I decided to make the Iphonekythera Mechanism; paint it up like it was some intricate bit of ancient bronze mechanism that had been at the bottom of the Aegean for hundreds of years. Overdid it a bit. Eventually it worked again but one of the processes warped the base annoyingly.

(So that's Dremel distressing, wood putty, texturing with the stuff we put on floors to control dust during sweep-up, Rustoleum hammered finish, some new Golden brand high-flow acrylic tints, a rubbing with bronze powder to put raw metal back in the working surfaces and general highlights.)