Ten-to-One odds

Not me, fortunately. Apparently my arteries are all good. So it's "just" a heart rhythm problem. And I get to get Borg'd up for a week now with a new monitor.

I'm slowly figuring out how Goodreads works. Ran a giveaway and had over a thousand entries! Unfortunately, I only had one hundred copies set aside (and you can't edit a giveaway after you've started it).

Maybe that got my confidence up. Or the walking I've been doing (now that I know it is safe...well, safer than my cardiologist was inferring). Finally pushed through that killer first scene and I'm moving ahead with the latest novel. I've written, um, 1/70th of it.

The research has reached the point where it is starting to reinforce. I am after all focusing largely on Montmartre during the belle epoque, so sure, the Lapin Agile, Gil's insouciant rabbit, run by Aristide of the famed slouch hat and red scarf, the "laundry boat" where Picasso painted, and so forth, are starting to become familiar.

There's a darling strange film I may go through again when I've absorbed more of this. Dilili in Paris, a 2018 hybrid animation in which a Kanak girl from New Caledonia meets a whole spectrum of Parisian characters and turn-of-the-century settings, before taking a strange turn into the unmasking of a peculiar and nasty cult hiding in the catacombs.

Dilili has so many, many of these figures...put it this way; the title character is introduced to a bunch of artists hanging out at the studio of one, and no names are given in that scene; just each man or woman seen for long enough to say "bonjour" in front of a famous work of theirs. And I'm there going..."Is that Matisse? Oh, okay, this one's a Gaugin: I'd recognize that anywhere..."

The same for the setting...a quick shot of the facade of the Palais Garnier and I only figured that out because they find Emma Calve singing in a motorized (steampunk-ish) swan boat in the lake under the opera house...