-- 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.)