Looking Backwards

Of course a novel evolves during the planning stage. That's part of what planning is for. Development, testing, iteration.

What is both fun and as often depressing is to look back at your original idea. I set out to play the same game Umberto Eco did in Foucault's Pendulum: a story in which someone makes up a conspiracy theory then to their dismay find other people are taking it seriously.

More to the point, I thought that what I was going to do was draw on the various conspiracy theories I'd encountered over the years to spin a yarn of Templars or Illuminati or whatever. I was sure I could make up lots of complicated plots from whole cloth very quickly.

This fell apart with the first draft of a scene. Because it turns out what I need is the mechanics of it; the specific clues that need to be puzzled out in order to construct the proper pastiche. The hit point in this kind of "follow the clues to the hidden treasure" puzzle aren't, "It was Templars all along!" They are more like, "The numbers along the edge of this painting are a street address for the next clue!"

That part is going a lot more slowly. There's actually a recent change I made that is going to help things along, though. I was going to make up clues based on the random stuff I know about the Impressionists. Well, my original timing put me into the Post-Impressionists, Fauvists, too.

But I've been listening to a podcast series on Napoleon (no, not the other two, although III does figure in some of the history I want to name-drop), and working along in a book on The Twilight of the Belle Epoque and getting more and more sure I wanted a slightly earlier slice of history. And then I was tracing some stuff of the history of the Palais Garnier or something and realized there was another exposition that is possibly even better for my purposes.

The 1889 one. Which lacks the aeroplanes and the speedy Renaults but otherwise is much more in the middle of Steampunk as well as closer to the Commune and, well, a lot of other stuff that fits better. Particularly the Impressionists. Sarah Bernhardt and Victor Hugo are both soldiering on...Victor is back in Paris, at least for a little, and Sarah might even have both legs left.

But so far as for puzzles, I have little. An uncompleted one about Monet's Water Lillies, and some guff about the Temple of Mars. 

And I keep going back and forth about whether I'm going to include the Church of St. Pierre.