Red light, blue light

I found the reviewer who left that very cool review of my first book. (She said she hated the main character's politics but enjoyed the book anyhow, giving me five stars.)

So I could go on about history being intrinsically political, but instead, this was a much better review that I could have gotten from a red state, Trump supporter (who doesn't appear to have drunk all the Kool-aid, though.) I also got a four-star from someone who writes quick-read erotica with a very slight sheen of F&SF. Not even sure why she chose to review.

The thing about Goodreads is that it is a more in-depth, more direct reader-to-reader (and sometimes reader-to-author) dialogue and thus they tend to be more critical. Amazon reviewers generally understand the Kiss of Death of the five-star system; that five stars is "Average," and anything less than four stars is, "caught fire then exploded."

Anyhow, I'm finally moving into outlining the Paris book and some of the other characters are American. That's putting me perilously close to some class warfare, red-state/blue-state, and Ugly American stuff. I'm going to try to keep that out of the book as much as possible. Still, the main bad guy is basically a spoiled frat boy and it is going to be hard.

So right now, I would be trying a couple of scenes out. But I am having trouble picturing Paris well enough, despite the "hub" location of the story being the same street corner in Montmartre where I'd breakfast each day when I was in Paris.

Paris Match

I finally have a plot. Took from November to nearly the end of January. And I'd been thinking about the Paris book pretty much since I started writing the Kyoto book.

So much for writing faster.

This may be where my process goes wrong. I read a lot of stuff about how you can plot by taking one of the basic plot structures and plugging stuff into the holes; I need a hero, I need a villain, I need a third-act crisis...go. And I am hearing a lot in writing podcasts and so forth about how writers will do these sort of skeleton books and only in revisions do they figure out what the themes were.

Which is totally the wrong way to write a Tomb Raider story. You start with whatever historical McGuffin is in the latest issue of National Geographic, contact Central Casting for some villains to get in the way, pick a couple exotic locations from the same issue and there you are. Oh, look, we're searching for the Horn of Roland this week. Why do the bad guys want it? It has magical powers (didn't do Roland a lot of good, though).

Which is a problem right there. I didn't want to lie about history, or be cheap about history. And I'm equally uncomfortable with backlot "foreign lands" full of appropriately colorful locals (who do damn-all without the help of the white protagonist).

But theme? That's the problem. I'm still out there trying to figure out what it is I'm trying to say about history, archaeology, and modern society. About the abuse of the Classics, the Elgin Marbles, and, yes, about how too many people think the Horn of Roland should or would have magical powers.

And while I'm thinking, I keep exploring ideas, and too many of those ideas stay in the final mix, and they mean that inevitably, half-way through the book I have to revisit some of those questions and revise what I am doing. I stopped for rewrites twice on the Kyoto book. That's not good for my throughput.

(On the other hand, I put it up without further revision. Once again, I'm listening to these podcasts where professional writers are doing four rounds of beta reads and multiple revisions and several rounds with editors. But the numbers don't make sense. The self-published are rarely selling enough to pay for that kind of time or help, and the ones who do sell well, seem to do so regardless of whether they did or not.)

(Sure, a nicely edited book is more pleasurable to read. But saying that is far from saying that well-edited books sell well. It really doesn't seem to be the case.)

So anyhow. I have a plot. The themes I chose to weave give me good enough excuses to do the water tank under the Palais Garnier, the Jules Verne Cafe atop the Eiffel, the Moulin Rouge, a parkour chase sequence, goings-on at the multimedia Van Gough exhibit, and a climb up Notre Dame the night of the fire.

It just means I need la Boheme, Cavalry in WWI, Chanson, Collette, Montmartre, a Mummy, Napoleon, Parkour, Phantom, Steampunk, Theater...

Omicron to Omron

"If it ain't one thing," Yogi Berra said, "it's something different."

The way the past couple of years have been going, I'm expecting the seas to turn red any day. What haven't we had? Well, the locusts were mild and expected. There was only one big volcano. Still...!

So our workplace took a week off for the holidays. Except that we had to use our own vacation hours for that. Of course, right around then, I got sick with something that felt like it might be COVID. This was when you couldn't find a test anywhere and the lines were way too long for a sick person to stand in.

And no sick days or vacation left. So HR already hates me. Hey, they should know what happens each time they send out that email; "Someone in your working group tested positive, and..."

That was finally over and I was putting in a solid week's work again. We had yet another COVID scare and got a four-day weekend -- paid this time -- but on MLK day I collapsed at my desk.

Still not sure of the sequence of events but my BP went to something like 210/120 in the ambulance (I wasn't tracking well enough to memorize the numbers) and I spent a nice evening in a -- fortunately not terribly busy -- ER.

I'm back on hypertension medication and I haven't had coffee since. Still not fully recovered, though. Like the ER doc said, a hypertensive "urgency" (yeah, that's what they call it when you will start damaging organs but haven't yet) is like watering your lawn with a firehose. It can take it for a few minutes, but don't leave it on for too long.

But that makes me wonder. You know how car people say you should get out on the highway every now and then and "blow the crud out of the engine?" Well, maybe it works like that. I haven't had any gut trouble since then. Now, if only the ringing in my ears would stop...!

***

Yeah, I still can't concentrate on writing. I do have a nice movie night due at some point. Going to watch Phantom, Les Miserables, Moulin Rouge, la Boheme, and maybe Gigi while I'm at it. Have decided that "Collette" is going to be a major figure in the book and the big chunk of history.

And I've decided I really can't not have a scene down in the lake under Palais Garnier. So now I'm trying to plot in such a way so that sort of a thing makes sense.

A Penny earned

I tweaked my Amazon advertisement settings once again and at least now I'm not paying for as many click-throughs. The last book moved around 11 1/2 copies, and the only ones that don't belong to a friend or a reviewer are that "1 - 1/2." And maybe one ebook in addition. There was a brief uptick in the other books, mostly Kindle Unlimited page reads of Book #2.

So...the theory is still untested. I think if I had a half-dozen books in the series I'd see more of this cross-support.

Thing is, I don't even know if this is what I wanted to write. I'm calling it Penny's fault. When I wrote the first book, I thought I had to make it plausible that this person could be young but know a lot of trivia about history. The needs of the story also seemed to push her to be athletic and especially to be friendly and open and be able to get people to talk to her.

So basically the standard skills of your typical RPG character. Everyone trusts Aloy with their problems and asks her to run errands for them that usually require some death-defying climbing stunts and of course a bunch of robots to fight.

It all feeds back on itself, a nice little feedback loop. For better or for worse these became stories not about the history, the archaeological mystery, or the action-movie stunts, but about Penny, her personality, her growth, her internal conflicts, etc.

And maybe that's why each book continues to be hard. They have yet to become formulae. For the Paris book I'm still asking deep questions about the purpose of the series and Penny's personal arc and all of that related stuff I thought I was done with already.

Those numbers would look better if I could throw six books up this year. The last book was uploaded in November. And as of mid-January -- I still don't have a plot.

"Oh, I've got plenty of muffin..."

My silicone muffin tray finally arrived and, yes, you can make muffins in a microwave. Now to see if corn muffin is low enough in wheat so it doesn't make me sick.

And now I'm listening to Porgy and Bess.

I keep thinking of ideas for the Toba book. I sort of hate that those ideas fall into such classic lines. I've got a naive youthful hero with an older mentor/buddy figure who is himself a Gentle Giant, and he might even have a talking magic artifact.

(Since the original of that artifact is a "Stellar-nuclear bomb" this might not be that good of a thing. But we'll see.)

The Paris book is moving along slowly. Increasingly, I think half the story is going to be sitting in this one cafe in Montmartre. I've got several plot things to work on and I'm not sure how many of them are amenable to research; they might need to be brainstormed instead.

I've got a young man of well-to-do background coming to Paris at the turn of the century. Who will be a cavalry officer in World War I. And who will be involved in one of the victories of cavalry in that war. It would be nice if he was German or Polish or something because that would put a nice limiter on how fast his book can be translated. But that's still up in the air. For research I am definitely watching War Horse. After that I'll see where I want to go.

He also discovers something that, for lack of a better idea, can be creatively interpreted as him carrying or discovering a lead on, of all things, the looted gold Napoleon may or may not have left behind in the retreat from Moscow. I've been having trouble finding good sources on that one but I haven't started delving into research trees yet.

That's McGuffin stuff, though. The real driver is the conflict between Penny and a group of parkour addicts. Or whatever they are. They could be anywhere from street workout to Dérive. The thing I accepted today is that whatever it is they are doing, it makes external the internal conflict Penny is having over where she wants her show to go.

Which is striking at something even external to that; the idea of learning about and making discoveries in history via running and climbing and swinging on ropes around historically and archaeologically significant sites. That is, the exact "fun thing" the series was written to exploit!

This better not be "long"

Still feel weak and brain-fogged. Saturday was the first day since I called in sick that I haven't had to take a long nap in the middle of the day. I managed to do laundry today and I'm wiped out. Can't focus on anything, not even fiction (pity, because there's a couple of books I already have bookmarked that I could read for the Pubby points.)

The Paris book is still pre-outline. Where I am is seeing the general shape and feel of it. Gonna be a lot of scenes in the cafe -- probably one cafe in Montmartre.

And I'm going to avoid doing any more research than I need to establish that the plot is going to work. That is something I discovered over the last books. On the London book, by the time I finally got to the stuff about the shelters, I'd lost some of my notes and links and had to go back and re-read everything anyhow.

This time, I hope to research the details I need only when I am actively writing the scene they are in. But there is a risk there, too. I went back through the Kyoto book and I dislike it more and more.

Looks to me like it isn't the big names and big events that are the problem. I explain the Meiji Restoration several times, with examples, and Tokugawa Ieyasu gets enough on him so I am convinced, once again, that it would be stupid to make an appendix for his sake.

No, it is all the other guys and incidents. Tokugawa Yoshimune comes up several times, Tokugawa Yoshinobu once. And it isn't all Crown Prince Naruhito and of course Emperor Meiji; I name-drop all the way out to Emperor Go-Daigo. And there's Minamoto Yoshitsune, and Benkei, and Nasu (a hero of the Gempei War), and...

It almost looks as if at some point I stopped paying attention and trying to keep the clutter down. But yet; I had this sequence in the London book and nobody complained about needing a cast list!

“Paternoster Row was not as lucky. It had been months since I had been in our little cozy shop with all the friends of my lonely girlhood. All gone now, all returned to ashes. The Dickinson and the Dickens, The Republic in the blue and gold binding and Amazing Stories with the color already bleaching on that gaudy Frank R. Paul.

I did cut more than a few references, even in Linnet's diary entries, on my various edit passes. Maybe I should have spent longer editing the Kyoto book but I was just tired of the thing. And worried about my numbers.

***

The Toba book is actually coming along. I've reached that strange point where it exists for me, now. Not just a collection of ideas, but a place and people and stories that I just need to find the best ones to focus on. Even if the biggest chunk of planning I've done so far is to list the starting attributes of the "gods" and even then...I want to do a lot more with different relations to the "gods," ranging all the way from working with them as equals to having never heard of them.

At some point I need to sit down and do some charting to figure out what exactly is going on ca 75,000 years ago.

And I keep thinking about World Anvil or another of those programs. But every one of them, when I've drilled down through all the fluff about how many different kinds of things you can plan, look to me no more useful than a good sheet of graph paper.

If I used world building software, I'd want something that can crosslink the hell out of the data. Something with nesting levels and the ability to see the tree or explore multiple branches for the cross-links between them.

So far, the major thing I've seen that pretty much ALL of these software options offer is the chance to pay a monthly subscription because they are keeping your data hostage -- either in the cloud, or in proprietary formats that can't be read. And tables that might not be proscriptive, per se, but prescriptive can be just as limiting as the urge to fill in the blanks on currency valuation and specie and stamping and issue dates and all can blind you to the need to think about devaluation and currency trading and inflation.

(Or I could have said filling in hair color and eye color and favorite lipstick and you forget to ask how old they are.)

Oh, and Campfire? Yeah, my private name for it -- I still haven't seen a reason to change. It looks fancy, but they have yet to fix even one of the things that really bugged me when I first tried it (you couldn't change the background. Which meant while you were filling in details on your Iron Age civilization, you were looking at a generic late medieval European fantasy village. Really threw me off! And you would think, swapping a background image...oh, right. Proprietary file types, baked data fields...sigh.)

 

-- This time, he's mad!

Either all of this has jogged my thinking out of the ruts it was in, or the fever (my body temperature is going up and down like a yo-yo) is burning out synapses. I've finished the origin arc for Athena Fox. Now I'm ready to settle into a style and format -- or I'm free to experiment with pastiche.

I've known for a while that if I want to back it off from the over-the-top action heroics of the Kyoto book (well, at least that's what I had intended to do) I could still manage to get Penny back to a place of being a young naive student facing unexpected danger. But I'm realizing I could take her in other directions if I accept that each book is a bit of a soft reset.

Which they already are. Athens was an "innocent tourist pulled into danger," London was a "serious archaeology student finds more than she expected," and Kyoto was "dragged into playing a larger-than-life role."

I don't know why watching an old episode of Chuck 2.0 made me think of this. Maybe because parts of it were clearly filmed on the Jeremiah O'Brien. And maybe that linked into the research I've been doing on Paris, or the stray link that dumped me into a bunch of reading about the current struggle in Classics departments to re-define themselves, or a Let's Play of Tomb Raider 2013 (the one that got particularly survival-game gruesome) after that particular player no longer had any more Horizon Zero Dawn for me to watch.

But it is exciting to stage Penny as student or even junior academic, or running her own dig, or being a tourist, or even being an artist again. But more than that, to have stories shaped like proper murder mysteries with a first-act Body Drop and all, or as action, or as discovery, or as survival stories...

But once again, I am faced with the question of how to cut out a lot of the wasted effort and write more efficiently. So far, all I've managed to do is type the question, "how?" into my working notes on the Paris novel.

(Also finished the 2019 Les Miserables. The one that takes place entirely in one of the banlieues, largely amid the Islamic community. Pretty much nothing that I mean to put in the Paris book, but was worth it for the perspective of a very un-romanticized look at modern Paris.)

Putting a name to the numbers

I finally relinquished one more iota of my remaining privacy by joining the Goodreads eco-system. And now I've discovered that two of those low ratings that have been haunting my review scores on Amazon come from actual people. Who didn't leave reviews there, either. So I still don't know what it was they believe I have done badly.

It reminds me not a little of Booktube, anyhow. I've watched a bit of what flies around Booktube. It really seems like a small circle; all these people discussing books that I've never heard of, but they all seem to think are the hot topic of discussion. And a great many of the authors being reviewed also have a YouTube presence, making it even more incestuous.

The thing that hurts most, I think, is that I feel that the London book is probably the best thing I have written and might be the best thing I ever write. Not that it is great, mind you. I mean the best that I am capable of. History, culture, the human interactions, the underlying mystery, the action sequences; all organically link and support each other.

The Kyoto book limps, really.

(Plus I'm not sure I am happy with the directions my protagonist is going. But that's a different discussion.)

So I'm sick at home all week with something that feels so much like COVID that, with the lack of available test kits or the strength to wait in line for two hours, I am choosing to be careful about. Staying home, hoping to get by without grocery shopping even. If it wasn't for the brain fog this would be a good time to get some productive work done.

And I've completely come around to the idea that I'm writing too much. I mean too much care, too much research. And above all too much time. I love doing this stuff. I love I was able to come up with a plot for the London book that wrapped up the Aux Units, the Underground Shelters, and Crossrail/the Northern Line Extension. I had great fun with maps and calculators working out if Penny could survive the night in the Adriatic but still beat the ferry back to port.

But nobody is going to check that. My dad once told me of following along in the long chase that ends Stoker's Dracula with map in hand, but this is rare. Most people are going to read casually enough they won't even remember which city the story is in if they've put it away to go to work and didn't pick it up again until the weekend.

And with all my cleverness, I still had to change dates, change weather, change geography. And half the lovely things that drew me to the locations and things and people wouldn't fit in the book anyhow. (Shirawaka-go was actually the setting for a horror manga and anime. But there was no good way to work that detail in, and it didn't involve yokai anyhow. But that was one of the reasons I chose to locate a major sequence there.)

And as I said last post, the readers don't care. Mostly. There will always be a crank but they rarely get structural, as in discussing the idea of secret histories. Instead they'll be pedantic about whether a particular Roman coin should be considered "small change."

(Pedantry in free-form discussions of history almost always revolve around semantics. You really have no choice but to call a formation "effective" or the testudo "rare" or a gladius "short" within the context of a lively discussion. And that is all the opening someone needs to ride in their hobby-horse about how long the gladius is in context with medieval weapons or something.)

So you don't turn off the majority of your readers if you play loose with history or geography. The reader is generally getting...well, "sophisticated" would not be my word. Educated, perhaps? In any case, their expectations are greater so if you show Mexico City as a sprawling bodega of ignorant peasant farmers you are going to take flack. But at the same time, if you name one distinctive landmark, they will feel fulfilled, they will feel as if they are learning something. Getting the true "vibe" of the city isn't necessary.

Faking it with Wikipedia is good enough for most readers, in short. But that's just the research side. I think there is something else standing in my way and it might be something I was trained into over a short history in role playing games. And that is that the real world isn't convenient for heroes. It is one thing to say, "we'll sneak into the bank" or "we'll surprise the two guards" or whatever. It is yet another to actually do it. Humans have a long history and they learn from their mistakes and in the real world if you throw a rock you don't get a single guard leaving their post to check it out.

So there are certainly remaining obstacles. I am even more focused on the goal, though; to learn how to write books FASTER.

Fools! I'll show you all!

 

So the experiment is still inconclusive. I'm getting a nice batch of Kindle Unlimited page reads but very few book purchases. I can image that having three books is helping, but I can't even be sure of that, much less whether they need to be in the same series.

And I'm reaching a bit of a crossroads. Despite ambitious travel plans, I want to take the series places I can't realistically spend the same amount of time exploring (either physically, as with Kyoto, or in books and other resources, as I did London). Plus, I want to move past neophyte traveler struggles and more into World Adventure territory -- more of a "jaunt to Berlin to track down the next lead" territory.

Underwater archaeology. Pre-Columbian. Archaeological tourism. Israel and the Holy Land. Dubai and the Emirates, even.

So anyhow. On the way back from work, I jotted down this note: "Tomb Raider style adventure, both in emotional idea and when possible in specific details, but without being insulting."

Insulting. That's the fun part there. Not mentioned in any of my advertising materials, because I don't see a way of doing it without sounding boring, and because none of my readers seem to care. I really am not seeing a groundswell there.

And there's something very specific about that. It isn't insulting to have weird science in an SF context. For some reason one can just roll with it. Perhaps because physics is generally on firmer ground/a higher pedestal? If your plot depends on and your characters go around explaining that stars are electric or the world is flat or the speed of light is just a foolish notion the reader will understand this is a position shared by cranks and idiots. They are willing -- under the right circumstances -- to accept it for the purpose of the story. They aren't going to agree with it.

But saying that history or archaeology or paleontology got it wrong? The reader is more likely to stroke their chin and say, "Sure, this Lost Kingdom in this book is fiction, but I totally believe there could be things like that."

Left unsaid is, "Because historians and archaeologists, etc., etc., are morons." I'm not even sure this is implicit, but there very much does seem to be an air of "those ivory-tower intellectuals, never letting us have any fun."

They obviously haven't met any archaeologists, who from the small spectrum I've encountered in podcasts and nonfiction books are totally willing to play with any idea, no matter how absurd.

Okay, sure, there is often an insult to real peoples, ancient or otherwise. Half the "vanished civilizations" mythologies are rather explicitly white. But it is quite hard to look at real Egypt or real Greece and say, "Ah, but of course none of those Greeks or Egyptians noticed the half-buried freeways of the greater civilization under their feet." Especially when you add the typical Ancient Aliens motif of myths and legends being the incoherent attempt of primitive people to describe perfectly ordinary flying machines and light bulbs.

All of this basically makes ancient people look stupid. And the modern peoples who still haven't noticed the gigantico UFO control tower buried in jungle just outside their quaint little village look stupid. Along with the Mainstream Scientists who never thought of looking up from their LiDAR scans to see what was in front of their noses (or more insultingly, closed ranks to preserve some Official Dogma against any idea that wasn't there already. Begging the question of who came up with that dogma in the first place and how much of a struggle they faced to get it accepted!)

So it isn't necessarily racist. It could be just generically insulting.

I also find it cheap, because the real world always provides stuff just too damned interesting and weird to be believable in a work of fiction. Making up some dudes in togas on a desert island making the dinner trays float around with their quartz crystals is, I feel, a hell of a lot less interesting than Cahokia, or the real Rapa Nui.

But as much as it is a passion with me, and a passion among several bloggers and podcasters who I follow (generally, academics), it isn't the sort of thing that people looking for a good genre adventure have in their search terms.

Which is a way of winding up to, well, a small compromise. I'm unwilling to right out ignore real history and to replace real places with the easy stock stereotypes (try reading, sometime, the story conference between Lucas, Spielberg, and Kasdan, and realize quickly that George knew nothing and cared for nothing outside of movies. Right there, he doesn't care if the next scene is in Arabia or Africa, it just has to be "some squalid village, you know the type...")

But I am willing to go for less depth in research. The way the numbers game works right now on Amazon, you have to be publishing a new book as quickly as possible. Once a month if you can manage it! Spending a year on a book...might as well not even bother publishing it there.

Dérive, Désolé.

I'm committed to the Paris book and have started outlining. I've taken heart from a (small) number of Kindle Unlimited reads. The numbers for that last campaign stand at $280 spent in advertising, 111 click-throughs, and an estimate of about six bucks to me out of the Kindle Unlimited monthly pool.

The Athena Fox stories are about the meaning of history and the role of the archaeologist. And it has been in my writing before; Shirato was underpinned by the long history between Tojima and Koyama, some of it long enough ago to have become myth, all of it re-visited and re-interpreted and, yes, propagandized.

For The Fox Knows Many Things it was nationalist narratives. I hadn't even intended it when I started, but when I was doing the Athens riot sequence I realized that the Prespa Agreement and North Macedonia, and yes Golden Dawn, fit right in with the Dorian Invasion and the Sparta stuff and the Classics v. a more nuanced history.

The "Role of the archaeologist" there was about the antiquities trade, from early generations of archaeologists who were little more than looters themselves, to the appropriation of cultural objects as art objects to be traded and used to purchase status.

I was a little more conscious of this goal with Fox and Hounds. It focused on Cultural Resources Archaeology, very much in the context of rescue archaeology against the pressures of new construction, but with the Battersea Power Station urban explorers and the metal detector clubs and mudlarkers, about other ways of engaging with and celebrating a past that some wished to move beyond. The most direct intersection of history is how the "Blitz spirit" -- understood at the time as a mythology for outside consumption -- continues to shape and inform.

A Fox's Wedding was possibly the least successful here. I was trying to talk about how the Japanese viewed their own historical culture as almost outside of them, as something they could sell and as a source of ideas for new creative work. There is a layer here, too, of nationalist myths, but really the influence of history is of the Asset Bubble Collapse and how it shaped the lives of several key characters in the story. Or, rather, how they chose to let that past shape their current preoccupations.

Archaeology as a field and career is hardly here. It is the public and specifically pop-cultural idea of the archaeologist that drives much of the story and is essential in the resolution.

***

Sometimes a Fox will look to the engagement of history along several hopefully related axis. The first pole here is the idea of playing with history. With the mock Victorian revivalism of the Steampunks, with the construction of a Dan Brown style conspiracy and lost treasure, and with parkour as it intersects with the various movements to re-colonize urban spaces.

Another is an exploration of what is too lightly touched on in most steampunk; the delayed future shock of the industrial revolution, moving from the fin de siècle of turn-of-the-century Paris through to the Great War, when the fading flower of French Chivalry met a new storm of steel projectiles.

And lastly, not really history at all (although it has its own history), the arts, the pretense of separating art and commerce, and particularly the painted harlot of the performance arts, given a symbol in the crassly commercial but still surviving Moulin Rouge.

***

The last day of a short winter vacation. The local cafe closed for the changing of the year. And I'm dining on hand-made hash browns, omelet, bacon, and especially Bavarian pumpernickel with British butter and hand-canned preserves from a family friend. Whatever I've got in my guts is slowly blowing through the medications I'm on but I think I can stay healthy and in good spirits until the Omicron wave passes and it is not quite so insane trying to get in to see a doctor.

That's a lot of cooking, though. When the work weak starts I'm back to non-wheat muesli with soy milk.