Teosinte

Found one of the items Jane donated, and, sadly, she was very much of the Heinrich "hand me that dynamite" Schliemann school of archaeology in the acquisition of it. I have the location of the other various exhibits I mentioned in my notes, too.

Cafe-wise, I am tempted to sit my characters at the Place de Tertre because it is both very Paris and annoying; a well-known and crowded tourist spot, that is. It plays nicely to some of Penny's issues on her Paris trip to have her have to keep returning here.

And I have yet to find my memoirs writer. I really want a calvary man in the Great War, and it is even better if he is on one of the various cavalry victories that did occur. English-speaking is probably best as adding translation from German or Polish would be a logistical complication I don't need. I do have a memoir -- well, letters -- in my reading list, but it is from one of Napoleon's campaigns.

The more I write, the more I am able to limit what it is I need to know to actually write the thing. I might not even finish reading that book on Colette, as delightful it is with its almost Wildean prose and better quotes. I swear, I have a bookmark on every page I've read so far.

***

Friday was one of those days when ideas are just bouncing around.

The Athena Fox series isn't selling. The people who read it seem to like it, but I don't know if it isn't finding its audience, or if that audience doesn't exist. What little I've got in feedback says that I am delivering tomb-crawling, artifact-finding adventure with some cool bad-ass moments, and that the stealth game I am playing with staying within what is actually historically and otherwise defensible isn't distracting. But that's all I know.

I don't know if books outside would expand my audience, or find their own distinct audience. Be that as it might, the two proposals that are closest to the top are a fantasy and a genre SF adventure.

Anyhow. The insight on the fantasy one is bamboo technology. Here's the issue; I'm trying to create a technological culture that can vanish from the archaeological record. That pretty much leaves out atomic power, and probably a bunch of industrial chemistry. Worse, there's the scale problem; it isn't so much that you'd have a buried computer, it is that to get to computers you have to have an incredibly wide production base. It isn't just the agricultural surplus problem (although that is part of it); the personal computer as we know it comes out of a social and technological matrix that has widespread power distribution, resource mining, aviation; all sorts of things and on a scale that would definitely leave a mark in the archaeological record.

So I'm really aiming for at least one high-tech culture that is getting there sideways, using some sort of "crystals and togas" tech that isn't as easy to detect in the ground today. And then other cultures working their way up the tech tree or around it, right down to neolithic...

Oops. Because domestication of plants or animals leaves a fingerprint that would be even harder to hide. That's introducing a new and successful species and you have to jump through hoops (the Gros Michel?) as to why we don't see any of these grains or herd animals in the archaeological record of Sumer or Assyria.

And widespread is a problem. One tribe making a Clovis Point is one thing, but that is the kind of tech (improved methods of flintknapping) that would spread almost everywhere our species spread.

So it is in some ways easier to hide cultures that are far in advance than they should be, as a culture that was merely advanced from Paleolithic to Neolithic would have utterly changed the existing record of our species.

***

My insights for the SF adventure were less complex. I've realized anew how bad the temptation it will be to do call-outs, easter eggs, and deconstructions. 

With his 'ead tucked underneath his arm

Sometimes people ask if, when working a novel, the plot comes first, or the characters. Really, it is everything at once. I've started into outlining which means breaking down somewhat of what happens when in the novel and what the key scenes are. It's a bit like keyframing, really; you work out the things you really need to tell the story, then you fill in the space between them with something that seems to belong.

Anyhow, I knew the first chapters would take place in Montmartre so I kept working at finding locations. Found a nifty old church right behind the better-known Sacre Coeur. It isn't the church of St. Denis but there is a (modern) statue of that most famous of the cephalophores. But that led me to a couple of scenes, which between them told me not just more about the big structure of the book but also about the focus of some of the thematics. Which leads me to different directions for some of the characters.

Which is, once again, why I don't waste time early in the process writing down every detail of mother's maiden name and favorite root vegetable. 

So as of this moment my actual semi-planned scenes are Eglise St. Pierre de Montmartre, the steps below Sacre Coeur, the Place du Tertre, and some cafe or other. Which I still haven't chosen. There's a le Saint Jean on Rue Abbesses within eyeshot of the Metro station. Or possibly it will be Café des 2 Moulins which is on a corner of Rue Lepic (and has no moulins, despite the number of them still surviving in the 18th arrondissement.)

I have big set-piece chapters planned for Notre-Dame de Paris and the Palais Garnier (despite the reference book I really want to consult being only in hardback at $75 used). And the Van Gogh Experience -- not sure where it was in 2019 (I caught it in San Francisco). And Musee d'Orsay. And the Crypt of the Sphinx at the Louvre, although I need to do some deep searching to see if I can find any of the items brought back from Susa by Jane Dieulafoy.

I'm not sure if Penny will make it up to the Jules Verne Cafe on the second floor of the Eiffel, or past the front door of the Moulin Rouge. I also haven't decided if the Tintin exhibit will be at the correct Petit Palais location or will be the version I saw at the Pompidou some years earlier. I did like the giant moon rocket banner on the outside of the building, and the floor painted with colorful curses from Captain Haddock.

In any case, I'm still at it; doing virtual travel around Montmartre, learning about Napoleon, and reading a fascinating biography of "Colette."

By any other name

 Depression aside, back to work on the Paris book. A thing that is holding me back from putting actual words down is I don't have the feeling for Paris yet. I've forgotten too much.

Well, thank you Google Street View and especially that less-known button that allows you to view in the appropriate season and even year (when pictures are available). I found the breakfast nook I was at, and so far found one plausible cafe that has the things I was hoping for; crowded lane, view of a Metro station with their Art Nouveau ironwork, etc. 

And crazy how deep the rabbit holes get. Well, I have decided that Penny is indeed going to be following/creating a Dan Brown sort of mock-history treasure hunt. So...down from Sacre Coeur and once part of the same church, is the much older Saint-Pierre de Montmartre. Which is closely associated with St. Denis, a patron saint of Paris and one of the more famous cephalaphores in Varagine. But anyhow, the crypt that was there in 1534 was the site of a meeting and holy vows by Ignatius and others and was where the Jesuits got their start. And the whole thing was destroyed during the Revolution and rebuilt in current form in the late 19th century. 

So...yeah.

My measurable progress on the novel, though, has been to name the parts. These might change, but currently my names are; "An American in Paris," "Mona Lisa," "The Music of the Night," and "Do you Hear the People Sing."

Yeah, I'd keep it all in jazz if I can but Penny was a theatre geek. (And I'm listening to the Gershwin as I type this.)

I have to explain why naming matters, especially this early on. There's a question that comes around on Quora far too frequently (the search function there is pants). "How long should my novel be?" About half the answers are "as long as it needs to be." Well, I am not against pantsing -- I am a discovery writer myself -- but I side with the structuralists here.

No, I take it further. It is one thing to be aware of the genre expectations and publisher requirement and edit and revise until your book is the appropriate length. There's a lot to be said for the philosophy of writing draft, any kind of draft, and then shaping it but that's a discussion for another time. For me, knowing the target word count helps me to shape the outline. It helps me to know where the peaks and valleys of the action need to be, when the important plot points happen -- but more than that, it gives me a sense of how many characters I can support, how many locations I can visit. And when I'm writing, it lets me know if I am on track or if I am spending too long meandering off the through-line of the plot.

Having these names, specifically, tells me where certain break-points happen in the story, and where the focus is going to shift to. "American" is basically tourist stuff (another slow-burn opening. Sigh.) "Mona Lisa" is a lot of art museums and the bulk of the Dan Browning, at least in the sense of "visit famous place, notice significant symbology nobody else ever did." Of course Penny is faking it, but anyhow!

"Music" takes it in a darker direction, ending with the Notre Dame climb and ensuing fire. Um...spoilers? "People sing" is a direct reference not to what you would think, but to the way the people of Paris came together in the darkest hour of the fire (well...as dark as you can be with a Big Fire going on...)

Sigh. The comment I get from family is that I have great descriptions. Does this mean I'm frittering around looking at images and menus and maps to try to get the places I depict right, and my plots and characters totally suck?

Could be. Whatever. I only have a few decades of writing career left so I guess this is the direction it is going to go. I'm sure not getting any smarter. My struggles to make any sense out of the Napoleonic Era are proof of that!

Success is always 20 years away

 Like Fusion energy, I have yet to reach break-even. I hate to put money into Amazon advertising but it clearly result in people getting the books. I've tweaked the settings as much as I can but all the sales are still from search terms like "Kindle book." No indication that any of these readers went as much as a category search, much less a proper keyword search.

That means I'm spending money on people who have no idea what they are clicking on and immediately click away. That's why the best I've been able to manage is a 10:1 ratio; ten bucks spent for every buck earned.

Well, I didn't do this for the money. If I thought more people would read the book if I threw thousands into the advertising, I'd consider it. As it is, the most copies I've moved has been by putting it on promotional giveaway. Three copies moved after dropping another seventy bucks on advertising. Twenty copies moved by making it free for three days.

(And, no, the free readers didn't seem to move on to purchase the next book in the series. But that is at least partly on me. If it was a really good book, they'd be more likely to, right?)

***

It all seems so artificial now. I am clearly still writing. I've always written, even if I gave up on publishing for far too long and am now looking at far too short of a potential writing career ahead of me. I look at all the other things I threw time and energy into and I wonder, "why?" But at the same time, a lot of what I could write seems as meaningless.

I've got a handful of sketches that aren't this particular, slow-moving, difficult-to-write series. None of them feel real enough to go forwards on. None of them feel important...whatever that means. Something about this light adventure I set out on with a fake archaeologist who knows she is a fake is touching the kinds of things I really want to talk about. About cultures and societies and the ways people interact with them. About how we as modern human beings try to understand how the world around us came to be.

My process seems to be a slow simmer one. I talk glibly in writing forums about how you can set up a conflict and build a plot but that isn't how I work. I seem to just meander, doing bits of research, playing music or playing computer games, until the people living in the back of my head begin to feel real to me.

I don't even have names for most of the cast. I don't know how many there are in the "Bohemians" that Penny hangs out with in Montmartre are and if they are all involved in the same show. Or exactly what kind of show it is. I don't know how many people "Nathan" has in his group. I'm not even sure of the nationality of "Soldier." But bit by bit, just through the process of forgetting and confabulation over the passage of time, I feel as if there actually are fleshed-out characters somewhere in some other world and all I'm doing is biography.

***

Well, I found my favorite breakfast nook from when I was there. I also found my notebook and a too-thin folder of museum pamphlets and other things I saved from Paris. Even a card from my hotel in Montmartre. Haven't picked out a cafe yet -- I really need one of those outdoor table things for a lot of the encounters I am planning.

I'm also slowly soaking in something of France, the history and politics (though not the philosophy -- that's a bit much for me.) The Napoleonic era still just confuses me. Too many players, too many shifts in alliances and so forth. It is worse than the end of the Warring States era, when Nobunaga Oda, Tokugawa Ieasu, and Hideoshi...something... got into a huge multi-clan wrangle that finally ended in the unification of Japan under the Tokugawa Shogunate.

(And I couldn't have done that last bit if I hadn't boned up a bunch during writing of the last book).

Hey, maybe that's why it takes so long. The plot that matter to me is the underlying meaning and themes. If what mattered was "Find the Atlantean Orb before the Sacred Foot uses it to destroy the world" then I'd probably have the thing written by now.

SEO, bah

 So I purchased Publisher Rocket and also paid a guy on Fiverr to run search terms. I carefully optimized my Amazon ads, overloading the slots by using searchable phrases.

I checked the history of my ad campaigns this morning, and over the run of everything I did on the first book, the only click-through sales (as in, someone searched, Amazon decided it was worth placing an ad in front of them, they clicked on the ad and a purchase resulted from that click)....

...were for the search phrase "Kindle Book."

Now, I'm not sure about the internal wiring on Amazon. It is possible that someone did indeed search for "Female archaeologist world adventure" or something similar that ticked some of my carefully (and expensively) selected terms. And that landed them on the print book, so when they clicked over to "show me the Kindle version" Amazon somehow took that as meaning "kindle book" was the proximate search term.

The mechanisms are opaque. By design. Amazon doesn't want other people hacking the system. (They do want to hack the system in their own favor -- and given the margins, selling ads to a writer is just as lucrative to them as selling the book to a reader.)

But does that mean I shouldn't block that search term? Because I'm not getting any click-throughs since I added it to my "negative search terms" list.

Lockers

My boss is mildly paranoid. More and more, we have all the tools and all the supplies inside wall cabinets. I have two different rings of keys just to open the ones I used -- and that's in addition to my ring of building keys.

It reminds me too much of Subnautica.

 Yeah, it's all about the lockers. Crafting starts to take more and more of the time, because you need to craft new gear to make it possible to explore new locations. New locations which are very far away from base so if you need some lithium for a recipe you really don't want to go all the way back to where you found it.

And you can only carry so much.

So at this point I'm picking stuff up and throwing it in the lockers of the Prawn suit, then returning to the docking bay on the Cyclops to unload for another trip down to the sea bed, then taking the Cyclops back to base to unload it into the lockers I have stuffed into every corner there.

I've been a bit under the weather and the Paris book needs more planning and research before I can start writing scenes.