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.
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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.
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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.
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