A short healthy note

They put me on the treadmill again and this time they actually got some data. I've got SVT, which is bad enough, but also clear signs of starvation of the heart muscle. So I'm on a half-dozen drugs and I'm scheduled for an angiogram Tuesday.

Friday was bad. I had to do some work on a live electrical circuit way high over the shop floor. So at least two reasons to get my heart rate up and I was feeling the flutter and the pain but I couldn't set the thing down without breaking it.

Spending this weekend as quietly as I can. 

What's wrong with Henry?

Maybe, when you get all the way down to it, the problem I have with the bad history and magical artifacts and all that of a certain genre of adventure is that it is leaving out the good stuff.

This must be kept in mind because it is possible there is no really good reason not to do the kind of fake history a Dan Brown or Indiana Jones story depends on.

***

First off, let's look at the Ancient Alien stuff. There's a reason why the candidates for this stuff fall into certain cultural and historical matrices. To be a good Ancient Alien artifact, it should be; 1) Superficially impressive (the Giza pyramid group), 2) The real background should be sufficiently obscure (at least to the average reader or movie-goer; Egyptologists are pretty comfortable on where the Giza group sits within the history and technology of Egypt), 3) Sufficiently exotic (Stonehenge gets a pass, but there is generally less interest in how medieval masons made cathedrals or whatever). And; 4) "Looks" alien. (Which is why the Rapa Nui statues are always showing up in these lists. And, no, they look a lot less menacing and inscrutable when their proper topknots are placed!)

By itself it is fairly insulting to the ancient culture as well as to modern researchers. It only gets really hinkey, though, when you look at it historically. Weird little long-headed alien guys mostly communicate that all of humanity are dullards. The historical theorizing about Great Zimbabwe, the Mound Builders, even the Greek Miracle is very specifically racial, or perhaps more properly nationalistic; "Our" kind of people built these, whether Dorians or Hebrew tribes or Solutreans.

I say it is more nationalist than racial in the context in which these were first proposed. And not at all unknown; there are a dozen different nationalist mythologies tying various civilizations back to Troy. Even England got in on that action.

Today it really does take the flavor of White People. Which is amusing and exasperating to any scholar of the ancient, hell, even the medieval world, as the peculiarities of recent American history create a mapping that had no real parallels earlier.

And lest we think this is an old forgotten history of bad ideas hidden behind the modern bad ideas, sorry, Von Danieken was openly racist, and there is very much a racial flavoring in much of the writing today. And I don't think you escape by recognizing that the outright White Power crowd are relatively small in number; because the much less outspoken biases are much more wide spread.

This is what I mean, specifically; there is direct, quite readable and obvious religious symbolism in King Pakal's coffin lid. Anyone who has studied the culture can recognize the lotus leaves, the Snake of Heaven, etc. The specific gesture by which this academic understanding is tossed aside (if it is considered in the first place) is "who cares what some backwards brown people thought they were painting? It's all primitive nonsense anyhow." (Ah, but aliens...that's a worthwhile discussion.)

And, yes, the bottom line is what is really moving this. Indiana Jones sells movies. Lara Croft sells games. Von Danieken sells books. And even the most die-hard racist web site still wants eyeballs (and maybe Patreon supporters or at least a few t-shirt sales).

Thing is, I can't decouple these in my mind. Sure, the purpose of creating yet another epic in which ignorant present-day people are saved by a (usually white) adventurer from some magical/alien/lost technology artifact the ignorant past people had hidden away in an elaborate booby-trapped temple (breathe!) is to make money. But you are selling poisoned narratives that do get into people's heads. It isn't "just entertainment" when there isn't another channel for facts -- not with the same popularity.

The Mound Builder myth wasn't just a fun tale for the salons. It guided Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson (he says so, in his letters) and ends in the Trail of Tears.

Right now Russia and Ukraine are trading historical narratives about how each of them is in the right because of past connections, past promises, past actions. This stuff doesn't just live inside the movie theater; the ideas get outside.

***

But that still doesn't answer if changing history for a better story is itself a bad thing. Asked that way, I tend to think it isn't. I'm all up for Abraham Lincoln stalking vampires. I'm all up for steampunk Romans. 

Is it bad (or worse) to do this and claim this is the historical truth? That's a little shakier. A lot of people think Braveheart is history. (A lot of people think The DaVinci Code is talking about real history within a clearly fictional adventure). And this is potentially damaging. It sure as hell is insulting.

***

One thing that comes into the mix when considering another "Lost Wickett of the Phoenicians" story is the level of detail. Face it, on paper, many adventure stories spend no more than a dozen words scene-setting modern Cairo or an Andean peak or wherever. The meat of the story is on the interchangeable ruffians/cultists/minions who are going to attack the hero next. Any description of the market is just there for color, not to learn about the dye trade.

Hollywood (or a game) gets a little more mileage out of the background of a two-minute chase scene. It can show you details about the people of the market. Are they poor? Dirty? Honest? Friendly? Intelligent? And more importantly, are these just colorful weirdoes for the background or do they share the essential humanity with us, the viewer?

The level of specificity matters here, too. In a lot of stories, "A street in Tokyo" is all you get. So you can very well paint it as clean and prosperous, narrow and threatening, whatever, because all of these can be true if you find the right street. 

I tend to fault this both on humanistic grounds and on pure story-telling. Why hand-wave and do another quaint village full of ridiculous accents when thirty seconds on Google would turn up the real details of a real culture which not only has admirers (if not living members) who would be pleased as punch by your interest, but is probably going to be better and more interesting?

I give this advice to beginning fantasy writers on Quora; study history. The real world has created so much incredible stuff already, you can't help but make a better world of your own for being aware of it.

So I could make this a bone of contention but it isn't specific to the question posed. I dislike fiction that has generic towns or colorless dialog or blow-by-blow fight scenes or anything else which is stripped of all nuance and creativity. A book could have a totally original magic system but it could be -- and is, often enough to be disappointing -- shown in such a stripped-down and basic way the reader never gets a sense for what is is, how it works, what it looks and feels like.

***

I can say there is one specific kind of bad history that annoys me when I see it in fiction. And that isn't things that are errors in research (well, those are annoying, but not in the same way). Or original mistakes, even. It is when a work repeats some tired old historical myth. It annoys me because this, then, isn't one more random wrong thing that becomes part of the noise floor. It is a specific support, an additional buttress, to an idea that is already out there.

Plus of course, if an idea is coming around that often it probably has some reason outside of the strictly historical for it. That it supports some narrative about how people want to view a different people, for instance. So when we hear the tired one about medieval people only drinking beer, we dislike it because that forms a pattern of seeing medieval life as being soaked in filth and ignorance. 

And as I said above; many of these are nationalist or racist narratives. And not just lies about the Other. Every lie we tell about the medieval mind is a way we assure ourselves that we have grown beyond superstition, that we are now living in the best of all possible worlds. (In many ways, we are, but narratives that blind us to the problems and injustice that are still here are not helpful). And, yes, this goes way, way back; when Tacitus wrote about the German tribes, he was really writing about Romans (by contrasting them).

And that is one place where the Indiana Jones story and the Ancient Aliens beliefs combine, because the oft-repeated bad, from aliens building the Giza group to planes vanishing in the Bermuda Triangle, is already bad for lots of reasons but is already being supported and sold to people. Putting a UFO dragging limestone blocks around into a story isn't a neutral position because it doesn't occur in isolation. It becomes implicit support of a whole bunch of bad faith which is already out there.

And these specific bad ideas are so damnably pervasive. Half the juicy hidden histories you can dream up as a writer end up falling into a rathole of Templars or Jews. Pop-culture bogeymen like Rasputin or Tesla get even more attention. It is hard to stay away from these because, well, see above; your audience has heard of them already. It makes your job easier as a writer if you can drop a bit of Nazca Lines or Countess Bathory into the mix.

Hell, it is the same reason why the Usual Suspects keep showing up in historical novels. What's the fun of being in Montmartre in 1890 if you can't bump into a certain short-legged painter, absinthe drinker and rake?

So I am afraid I have no easy answers.

***

Right after I wrote the above, I discovered where Bret Devereaux had captured the same idea but, of course, with much more flair:

For a great many people, Westeros will become the face of the European Middle Ages, further reinforcing distorting preconceptions about the period. How we view the past has a tremendous influence on what we think about the present. In particular, the tendency to view the distant past as a time of unrestrained barbarism provides us with both an unearned sense of superiority and often a dangerous hubris – ‘we’re not like that anymore, that can’t happen anymore – people in the past were just stupid.‘

The Other 30-Second Rule

Blue has been doing a long discussion on historical accuracy in the Assassins' Creed games (over on Overly Sarcastic Productions.) According to him, during the first game they came up with a "30 seconds on Google" rule; don't put anything in the game that could be found wrong with that little effort on the part of the player.

Not a rule that attracts me.

My generic rule for historical fiction is "Change it reluctantly and only when it makes a better story." But that needs unpacking. It requires, primarily, doing the research properly (or at least more deeply than 30 seconds on Google.)

"A better story" is a siren song right there. Say we've decided to do a pirate adventure. Pirates are cool, right? Wouldn't it be even more cool if they had, say, jet packs and machine guns? Thing is, you don't go far down this path before the things that make it a pirate adventure aren't there any more. It is just an "adventure." Those very "restrictions" on what you might think might make a more fun story are part of that world you are inviting the audience to inhabit.

This is, mind you, before we've even touched the idea of historical accuracy for its own sake. Or, rather, for the sake of the audience who slept through class, who are only getting their history through fiction, and who let that history shape, among other things, their real-world politics. 

So the first thing the writer needs to do is study the real history. Some, I feel, hate to do this because they have this idea in their heads and they are afraid that real history doesn't permit it. This may or may not be so. What I am sure of, is that real history has surprises. If you do the research as early as possible in the process, you will discover things you would never have dreamt up on your own.

So the first test of "Change it reluctantly and only when it makes a better story" is to see if you have to change it at all. Maybe history permits the thing with some slight modification. Maybe history offers an alternative that has even more story potential than what you had originally been thinking.

I am also tempted to think of this as a young writer problem. Inexperienced writers agonize over ideas. They are always asking where they come from, and they are loathe to let go of them. One of the tells here is that inexperienced writers are often worrying that other people are going to steal their ideas.

With experience comes the impression (it may not be entirely true!) that ideas are floating everywhere. The skill comes in figuring out how to make a story out of them. Well, more than that; the skill comes in seeing an idea in the rough, and then, knowing if an idea is story-worthy or if it just won't work. And then the skill in constructing story around it.

In any case, the last part of this little "Change it reluctantly and only when it makes a better story" is that if you do end up making a change, you can do so in a way that is justifiable, and that fits the larger truths. You've moved your understanding up to the next rank of history; not the dates and numbers, but the motions and currents.

And you surround your change with enough truth that the reader who spent that 30 seconds with Google will nod and accept that you, also, know the real version.

A Mighty Wind

I have few enough readers so far that it is hard to do any kind of analysis. Certainly too few to check anything beyond the gross effect of advertising. That, at least, seems to track; I sell copies when I am spending money at Amazon to place my covers in front of eyeballs.

But there is a puzzling pattern that is almost there often enough to make theorizing possible. And that is several Kindle Unlimited page read counts that seem to get to about 30 and stop.

I have an idea for this. This marks the start of a second chapter in which the plot is unfolding as a (relatively) realistic travel-thriller. Or, rather...the start of a second chapter after the incident on top of the Acropolis.

Where a strange wind blows right after Penny thinks about gods and hubris.

So is it possible, this is the place where the reader finally clues in that this ain't Percy Jackson? That the gods are never going to be more present than a mysterious wind or a stranger with gray eyes? And that this is not the contract they wish to enter into; that they want something more urban fantasy?

Well, I went and started a give-away at Goodreads. Might be a mistake. Goodreads is a tough crowd. Books I've liked and personally given four or five stars are being ravaged by other reviewers there. If anyone actually reviews (the usual ratio is rather lower than one review per 100 copies read), I had better be in a good mood when I read them.

Game of Computers

So it kind of goes back to Horizon Zero Dawn, which when I booted it up complained my graphics card was too small. After a lot of hesitation I went ahead with the upgrade.

The new card arrived roughly the same time I had a bit of a recovery from my cardiac woes and was brimming with energy. So I vacuumed out the gaming computer, put in the new card, upgraded the RAM, and finally got around to mounting the terabyte SSD that most of the gaming files are on.

And while the tools were out...

My main computer -- an older Macbook -- was running hot enough that even the external fan wasn't able to keep up. Popped the case meaning to blow out the dust, and maybe redo the thermal paste if it didn't look too hard.

Discovered the battery was swollen. So a couple days later, new battery, new optical drive, upgraded RAM, new thermal paste, and, yes, the vents and fan all cleaned up. And I can finally ditch the external fan.

And I was still going. Stayed after work to try to make progress on recording a cover of Game of Thrones. Now that my brain was sort of working again I quickly realized I had a harmony problem and to solve it what I needed was a keyboard.

Which I couldn't get to work on the rescued MacMini I had at work. But by this point I'd started cleaning out the closet and not only did I find my old G4 laptop, but a rescued iPad (same recycling bin as the MacMini) that I'd totally forgotten about.

Mostly because iPads are useless. There's no connectivity -- unless it is only a year old and can connect via iTunes, and even then moving something you didn't just buy from Apple is a total pain. It, like the phones, isn't designed to create content. It is designed to consume other people's content. Preferably content you pay Apple for.

It does do one thing, though. It will run a simple Keyboard ap from the ap store and that's enough for me to solve my harmony problems. Sigh. I'd finally rehearsed the lyre part to where I could perform it on tempo. But now I had to retune the strings and learn a different and more complex part.

I also discovered the main key to getting a smoother sound on the Gue was to tune it up to a higher pitch. That, and switch the extra-sticky bass rosin for some violin rosin.

So the laptop works, though. I mean the other one. I've now brought it home and considering the next computer adventure; yank Cubase off it and see if it will run Reaper, because then I can mix the way I'm used to mixing.

Weird. The Mini has a much faster chip -- dual-core Intel i5 I believe -- but due to the internal firmware it can't be taken any higher than OSX 7.5. That's a perfect dead spot between stuff I've owned in the past and have registered, and stuff I use now and can find downloads for. Basically; nothing runs.

And, yes. Reaper installed and registered. Anyone need an old MacMini?

This all falls out better than I had intended

 The great thing about general background research is you find the things that should have been staring you in the face.

The Paris Exposition of 1900. Which was combined with the Summer Olympics (only the second one of the modern Olympics) and that included a motor race!

And as I'm finding, this is the turning point; where the belle époque slowly turns into the fin de siècle. This is very much another of those turning points, where a new world beckons but the new dangers are becoming visible; the motor cars and early airplanes harbingers of industrialized warfare in the trenches of the Somme. The social changes that bring a new wave of poverty and displacement...and, yes, Paris was suffering through a rise of new antisemitism and xenophobia and reactionary movements even in this moment of artistic and philosophical exploration, humanism, and feminism.

As so many times before. The revolution overthrew the monarchy and ended up putting an Emperor in charge. Who then got replaced by another king -- but at least this one was a constitutional monarch. This is the time of the Third Republic, limping even more than usual for French politics but, as always, striving for something that remains out of reach.

So...my desire to somehow conflate and compress some of the themes of Steampunk, the shock of the Great War, and the struggle of the artist, are all actually here and ready with an excuse for one young cavalry man to visit; the Paris Expo! 

(And another strangely steampunk-reality bit of timing; they are currently tearing up the streets to install the Paris Metro, with those fantastic station entries that ushered in Art Nouveau).

..and other French words

Another research book arrived today. I'm not really intending to read all this stuff, not that deeply. But I am getting excited about the basic concept of my next book.

Here's how I'm thinking about it now; at the outer layer, this is a DaVinci Code story. Run around scenic Paris visiting famous artworks and monuments and ferreting out clues to a treasure one step in front of the bad guys.

Under that, it is more a story of the hero conundrum; that the tough part isn't becoming a skilled martial artist or gaining super powers or whatever; the tough part is that the problems of the real world aren't so obvious and aren't best addressed with a fist to the chin. For this story this is happening on both sides of the treasure hunt; the people who put it into motion really want to be breaking into museums at night and scaling buildings and all that Uncharted stuff in search of a lost treasure. For Penny, she's accepted that she is on the path of being a hero but she's discovering she is actually really, really bad at waiting for adventure to come to her. Assuming it ever does and what happened to her last year isn't just a fluke!

Ah, but where this particular rubber meets the road (sabot meets cobblestones?) is Paris. Paris for what it represents in the arts and in the dreams and the inspiration, a million reflections of the City of Lights from a million different admirers all trying to grasp the intangible. The points of contact here are largely two; an American tourist, an art student wanting to find that inspiration in the place where so many others created.

And a figure from the past, glimpsed through his memoirs, who was in Paris in that heady, crazy period where the belle epoque, the birth of Impressionism and the Can-Can and the ramp up to the Paris Exposition slides into the fin de' siecle and the growing rumors of war.

And Montmartre, a ramshackle village on steep hills covered with windmills and vines, where the latest "commune" could live the Bohemian life and let the tawdry and licentious entertainments free writers and artists from the established art and literature. Which grew and became too popular and with the Exposition the energy shifted to the Latin Quarter instead, leaving only the bars and brothels. Always poor, the class lines are very visible across this entire period and beyond; Sacre Coeur was dedicated to the dead of the communes during the Revolution. 

And the funny thing is? I don't really have to have a deep understanding of the geography or the economics. I just need to name-check a little Toulouse Lautrec and show the seedy floor shows he loved so much, and the picture is there, or at least as much as I need.

There's a small cafe

There are writers who believe strongly in the first draft. For them, the story flows out all at once and should not be held back for research or revisions.

I'm not one of them. I revise as I go anyhow, and for the kind of thing I'm doing in the Athena Fox series, I am totally comfortable with delving into the deep research only when I've gotten to the scene in question. Of course the opening scene here sets the stage rather literally; a place that she will return to over and over through the book and two characters who will play pivotal roles.

Montmartre was a given. I stayed there myself. After a lot of poking around, I settled on the Place du Tertre as the location for the opening scene: this is the square full of artists (who are rather less Bohemian than it might be expected, having to be officially approved to dare create art in front of the buying public.) And it is smack dab in tourist central; being, among other things, directly below Sacre Couer.

And the first lampshade is being hung because the young starving artist and the probably-not-a-seamstress young woman meet here, at Cafe la Boheme de Montmartre. Which I do have to name, but otherwise have to be careful about what I say. I can say here that the TripAdvisor reviews are almost unanimously negative on the food and service, (and prices!) but this is a real business that makes much more money than I will ever see and I don't need to be seeing letters from lawyers.

The front-loading here is cafe culture, seasonal weather, basic language, tourist behavior, Parisian street fashion (or, rather, what people wear that will out them instantly as a tourist), Academic seasons (this is, for some institutions, Spring Break), and maybe a bit more.

Well, there's also the Headless Monk.

My other legal disappointment at this juncture is Colette. She is so incredibly quotable. Here she is, as a young bride, returning to her rooms alone as Willy worked; "...where she enjoyed...the leisure of a prisoner and the rest of an invalid."

Colette is probably out of copyright. Sadly, she wrote in French, and the translations are not (I ran into the same problem with quoting from Verdi operas; I could quote the libretto but I had to make my own unique render into English.)

One short scene

I've been working on the first scene of the Paris book for quite some time now.

Of course first chapters are hard. That's where you have to grab the reader's interest, introduce the main characters, establish the setting, and give them a hint of what the story is about (the contract with the reader). Which means you yourself have to figure out who the characters are and where you are going with the thing.

So the bits finally came together, with a bit of help from La Boheme, STEM, and Prince Valiant. All stuffed into a cafe somewhere in or near the Place du Tertre, 18th Arrondissement close to Sacre Couer.

(And I've been having a lot of fun getting speech to text to accept French names when taking a quick note during work. It has finally decided to accept Sacre Couer but nothing, it seems, will let it puzzle out belle epoche.)

Not helped by having to take my car in for a check engine light (it was due for the next service interval anyhow). Or continuing lethargy and pain -- they're going to hang a heart monitor on me next week.

And I'm spending some of my work time deep into materials science, reading lots and lots of manufacturer's datasheets. There's a product we build that was basically designed and managed by our department and it is sort of resolved to me at this point. So a company full of engineers, and I'm the one who is trying to puzzle out this stuff as we struggle to finally achieve a full Class A rating.

***

I have most of the stuff together for the Paris book now. I still have a chunk of research I want to do, because it is going in a lot of directions. Napoleon, but more than that, the Belle Epoche and the history of Montmartre. Fortunately, I can wait until I get there (that is, to the specific chapters) before I need to know more about parkour or the Palais Garnier or Les Invalides etc. 

It isn't that exciting a story for me, though. Not sure why. I set up this series to do some action but I'm not sure that making it chock-full of action sequences would do me better (there is a climb up Notre Dame de Paris, but even when she is clinging to the grotesques the stakes are "merely" personal. There's no grand goal here, no big plot, no ticking clock.)

Be that as it may. I'm looking for a bit of a kick by thinking about what story might be next. Besides; I've set as part of the style that every single book has a "next time" on the last page. Which implies I should have at least a sense of what the next book might be!