"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!