In search of lost timelines

Finally, Chapter 1 is in draft. The first 4,000 words of the novel (counting the prologue), plus another 900 words into the next chapter.

That's seven percent of the book, right there. But I did just over-run my outline so I have very little planned for what exactly goes next.

I mean, I have the plot, and I know what the big hit points are, but I don't know yet how best to put it on the page. And because of the nature of this particular story, it seems Discovery Writing might be the best approach.

So here's seeing if I can plug through an entire end-to-end draft without having to stop for revisions.

The structure of this book is new. Not the dual-time thing; I've done that before. But all the previous Athena Fox books have been relentlessly linear narratives, presented in the "almost now" tense. That is, using an immediate past in which the narrator is reacting to what has just happened; as close as you can get to writing in present tense without being present tense.

That's always been something I've wrestled with in her stories. Since the narrator is in the moment, there has to be a reason in that moment for them to reflect on something from the past. It doesn't feel natural for Penny, in the middle of a fight scene, to say, "Oh and by the way I almost did cheer in college." It had to be triggered by something specific.

In the current narrative, I've actually got her ending a reflection with the realization that she had (in the almost-now of the narrative of the novel) been lost in a flashback. And there are going to be a lot of these. She explains early on that the old book she is using as a Grail Diary -- that is, a series of clues to follow across Paris -- jumps around in time. She even name-dropped Proust in that context. What she hasn't mentioned explicitly (because it would be far too meta) is that she is doing the same thing herself.

I've planned (in what little planning I have for actual chapter-and-scene breakdowns) that there are several plot-important events that will get revisited multiple times through the narrative, each time revealing a little more about what had happened, each time drawing a slightly different lesson.

(The first is her conversation with her friend and de-facto business manager Drea, as she plans the Paris trip. The second is her awful first night as her flight is delayed and the night clerk refuses to check her in to her hotel.)

This is happening, mind you, on top of what is essentially a lesson on historical method, as she analyses the memoir in terms of what Huxley knew when he was writing it (and what has changed since) and what his biases were. As well as changes in the names and places, of course. Not exactly new ground; there's even a bit in Raiders of the Lost Ark about how the length of a cubit depends on which text you are using.

But it does make it possibly challenging to read (I hope not too challenging). And challenging to write, and this is why I have the current opinion that I am best off just writing it rather than planning out every little bit to try to nail down when it will be "then" and when it will be "now."

Date with destiny

I haven't written a word all week. Work, a bit of illness, and what little energy I had left went into trying to complete my GOT cover on "Viking" instruments. Which is more about finally getting to grips with multi-part and section performance; all the trials of trying to play these parts in tune and on time despite strange fingering, strange harmonies, strange meter (strange to me, that is).

It took me weeks just to be able to get the ostinato locked in to the metronome.

The first massed strings came out well. The second, not so much. Where I am on violin, playing a slow line just exposes all my intonation flaws (as well as poor vibrato, poor bowing...) And playing whole notes in 6/8 time was just messing me up, for some reason. Anyhow, recorded six takes, cleaned them up (I was way off the meter in several places), mixed them together...and it sounds like crap and I need to try again.

Over the same period there was a "good" discovery, though. I finally decided the fingering of the B theme was too awkward for the Irish Flute (my Irish flute is a hybrid; an ABS low-D penny whistle with an interchangeable head. As such, it is a diatonic instrument and has no keys at all.) When I switched to the Western Concert Flute (my pink Medini with a C-foot) I discovered I'd improved greatly in embouchure whilst struggling with the Irish flute.

Still a very breathy, airy sound. That's okay; it works for this piece, and maybe by the time I finally get to "Commander Shepard" I will have improved my embouchure some more.

On the current novel, my biggest accomplishment is finishing some of my research materials. There is a lot left, though. This is probably the deadliest place for me to be; I'm not in a place where I can put down text so instead I wrestle with concept. It has given me a much better idea of how I want to work the CDG scene, and I'm finally starting to get a handle on Amelia (and some of the other secondary characters).

But the problem I have is I am always trying to simplify. Always trying to boil down the thrust of the story and the underlying theme into the simplest and most dramatic terms. But the more I work, the more it just seems to elaborate instead.

The underlying theme on this one is Engagement with History. When I finally got close to the end of Twilight of the Belle Epoche I realized Huxley, my memoir-writer from the past, is longing for the Paris he encountered in 1900 and the Paris he saw a decade earlier with his now-deceased father. He is writing now after the ending of World War I, as someone who had fought in the worst of it, and his last actual memory of Paris is 1913...when the artists had moved on to the less interesting Montparnasse, the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists had been supplanted by Fauvists and Cubists, Bernhardt was aging and Isadore Duncan was dying. And Stravinsky had just premiered Rite of Spring. So Huxley has never been back to Paris.

Meanwhile the main thread is two groups of treasure hunters; a pampered college kid off on a lark with his circle of friends, and a reluctant Penny with help and hindrance from the loosely-connected artists she is running into in Montmartre. Which through most of the story Penny sees in negative manner, especially as she is in the process of acquiring a proper History degree so she can move on to grad school as an Archaeologist. She is also ambivalent about the turn her "Bohemians" have made into Steampunk, seeing it as a bastardization that ignores the real threads of history.

And it all comes to a head when the treasure hunt is on the rooftop of Notre-Dame de Paris the night before the fire. 

But for all of this, I'm aiming for as short at 65K, preferably around 70K (the others have been lightly breaking 80K), without too much in the nature of deep soul searching, emotional outbursts, big character arcs. Or much action, aside from a few midnight break-ins, a death-defying climb, and some parkour. Pretty much a lot of sitting around cafes and looking at artwork; a nice vacation after crawling through the mud under South London, getting stabbed, and getting tangled up with one of the Imperial Treasures of Japan.

***

The Tiki Stars is getting closer. I might be able to draft the first episode without having to world-build much before hand; just try it out and see what I end up wanting to have. I've nailed down a little more of that first episode. This is where I put a lot of the series premise on display, so retro-tech, Space Adventure tropes, cocktails and exotica. A tiki bar with a dusky singer (modeled somewhat on Yma Sumac) who is one of the secret leaders of a revolution in a banana-republic-planet, and a down-on-his-luck space captain with a small but fast ship who is drawn into the middle of it.

Not really Spy-Fi (I want to to that up properly in a later episode) and not the whole revolution which goes both United Fruit and Jungle Planet directions, this is a bit more Casablanca -- but a better example might be Moon Zero Two (and, yes, the next episode is an extended Space Horse Opera with asteroid miners, claim jumpers, and an alien Space Cowboy).

But his ship is no longer named the Sad Puppy. That was a little too much on-the-nose.

I see you tremble with antici...

Very, very slowly I am putting my GOT cover together. Last night I stayed after work and played my very first tremolo violin part (on my good violin). And it was up in fifth position, too. So I set up the mic and the click track and played six times, panned the takes slightly and bounced them to a new stereo track.

That's the string trick I mean to be doing a lot of down the road. Especially in the next piece in my list; a "crime jazz" cover of Miracle of Sound's "Ballad of Commander Shepard." Strings -- especially violins -- when played solo can be harsh, strident. There's some funny acoustics going on having to do with smearing the peaks of the higher harmonics of that triangle waveform so when you mass strings in larger groups they take on a softer, shimmering sound.

Especially for tremolo. This was bow tremolo, and I'm glad I read up first. You use just a bit of bow near the tip and do up-and-down strokes very quickly. Use mostly the hand, and it is totally permissible to take your pinkie off but this is considered a good test of whether you have a proper bow grip; a big part of the motion comes from not the wrist but flexing the fingers sideways like a spider crawling across a table.

Tremolo can be done free but is usually done in a multiple of the beat. When you mass the strings, that rhythm is still there but each of the violins/takes will be slightly ahead in places, slightly behind in places, and it smears the attack transients to make a softer affect.

Even if I am playing up very high on that steel (actually, mine is aluminium-clad) A string.

And I can't help thinking that the triangular form of the string in that stick-slip Helmholtz vibration is responsible for the triangle wave and that distinct mix of harmonics that makes the violin sound recognizable.

***

In unrelated news, I discovered that there is a movie theater in Paris -- apparently, the only one in Europe, too -- that does a regular midnight showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. So that's one good thing I found in my latest Paris book (a book I found in a discard pile while walking to work).

In a tarheel state

I am finally getting something of a handle on one of the major characters in the Paris book; another tourist from America as it happens. As part of that I was looking up details on the North Carolina dialect.

Ran across this quiz and on impulse, took it.

Well, I guess more soaked in over my three years stationed over there than I thought. In any case, Amelia is from Raleigh, a cosmopolitan city in the tech central, the so-called Research Triangle. According to various sources the local dialects have faded sharply since I was there. (Not that there was ever a single North Carolina dialect. Besides being big enough to be diverse, the state occupies a strange space between East Coast, Midwest, Deep South, and Great Smokey Mountains. So there are at least three major dialectical areas, plus some rapidly-vanishing patois in the islands.)

Picasso at the Bateau-Lavoir

I was looking at air fare (affordable) and hotel (expensive) for Paris. But I don't really need to go to Paris for this book. Partly, there is that these books are a bit of a waste and I don't see spending even more money or time on them.

More to the point, it would give me too much of what I'm probably doing too much of already.

The first book in this series, I got caught into some sort of travel guide mode, where I felt I had to get everything accurate. Right down to when the sun rises on a particular day. Sure, I had some good luck; I was able to work things so the medieval street fair, Oktoberfest, and a nice storm could all happen more-or-less when I wanted them. I did have to cheat in that there was a demonstration but it wasn't quite the one I described.

Still, this was constricting. I really wanted (and still want) a Rhine-Castle episode but I couldn't justify the timing and the actual on-the-map Deutsche-Bahn routes taking my protagonist to any castles that had the right scenic elements.

That, and there was far too much of what train goes where sorts of things. Which I was okay with for what the story was; Penny on her first trip overseas, learning how to function and how to get around.

For the second book I backed off on staying locked in to absolute history. In the Athens book, even the corner burger joint was a real place but in London I backed off and had various no-name and fake businesses. I did keep mostly to the actual map and even to the seasons but I did move a few incidents in time to make them work better. I was also willing to invent a storm system for the climax.

The aim in the London book was less travel, less listing of places, and more actual plot beats going on. They were largely inconsequential plot beats but they were still there. I also had more happening in dialog, but this is largely a result of Penny being in social circumstances more, not riding trains around Europe.

For the third book I knew I was going to have problems with all the Japanese locations and cultural materials. I made a conscious attempt to just describe things, in the most universal terms I knew; instead of saying karesansui I'd say "dry garden" or, better yet, I'd actually describe what that meant; "large stones arranged amid carefully raked sand."

The downside is that this reinforced a method of finding out exactly what some real-world thing was, where it was, what it looked like, and then feeling forced to describe it in accuracy and in detail. I was finally starting to feel free to take more liberties, though, especially in the geography of the snow-country village of Shirakawa. 

I thought that the pressure to give the Japanese name for every item (and every location) was peculiar to that language. As I move into the fourth book and the Parisian setting, though, I've discovered how much experienced Paris hands will go French even when the English equivalent is there and perfectly serviceable.

Some of this is understandable. Place names and nicknames become things of themselves, not just their literal meaning. It is (or perhaps was; the current building is new) the bateau-lavoir even if Max Jacob had originally been quite direct in comparing it to one of the "laundry boats" on the Seine. Same for the Red Windmill or the Black Cat or the Agile Rabbit (besides, that translation loses the joke that Andre Gill painted the original sign; it was originally le Lapin á Gill.)

My intent for this book is to make it basically talking-over-coffee. Not a lot of plot -- Penny gets to take a break from more emotionally wrenching character arcs -- and the "mechanical" plot (the search for the Napoleon's Gold) is nonsense (and understood as such by the narrator, at least).

Not a lot of action, either. I was trying to go over the top in the Japan book and I thought I had the perfect excuse with Ichiro and his connections pulling strings to make Penny look as much as possible like a real-life Indiana Jones so she would be admitted into the confidence of a UFO cult. But aside from the ninja battles (very short battles, with high school amateurs) and the most insane climbing wall sine American Gladiator went off the air, it really didn't have as much as I expected.

The stories really ended up more genteel than I expected. Less Lara Croft, more Miss Marple. 

So my hope is that the reader will accept these relatively young and not deeply educated people meandering on about art and history and a little philosophy and struggling to make sense of their lives and relationships, and that I can resist trying to describe every Gothic ornamentation or Art Nouveau curlicue of a very decorative city.

And I'm going to continue the struggle of not putting any more French in there than is absolutely necessary. Still, with all that said, there is going to be a hell of a lot of name-dropping. Better, though, to call out Les Demoiselles d'Avignon than to try to describe the damned thing in any detail.

Fried Egg

 I had an early-morning work call today. When I came staggering back home after work I was still determined to actually do some writing. I need to make that change, and it feels as if I am getting closer and closer to it happening.

Actually managed to open the file and start into the re-writes I'd identified during the journey into work this morning. Best part about starting the day with a twenty-minute walk.

And produced absolute garbage. You can't do surgery with a shaking hand and you can't produce good prose when your mind keeps wandering off.

So I took a long break, and ate dinner. And, somehow, got enough back to where I could go in again, throw out all the crap I'd done in my first attempt, and actually put in some writing that was better than what was originally in those scenes.

Bit by bit I'm finding the "voice" for this particular book. The scenes are actually starting to work.

But even better, I'm starting to be able to do that kind of work faster. And more consistently.

Wretched Doggerel

I was smart enough to know I didn't want to show Huxley's memoirs on the page.

I have enough to do learning about Belle Epoque Paris. My brain is crawling with far too many names (far too many of which knew and interacted with each other), from indefatigable Louis-Michel to the aging Victor Hugo, the short-legged Toulouse-Lautrec or the bear-like Rodin, the feuding Garnier and Eiffel, the on-again-off-again Monet and Manet, Ritz and Bernhardt and...

But I am doing a Dan Brown pastiche here, and to do it properly I need to show the process of following the clues across Paris. Huxley didn't get to paint the clues into his own artworks, though (plus his is more of a scavenger hunt), and that makes this a rather more interesting exercise in the process of history; in how places change and how context matters.

So I actually have to write the clues. Huxley was a realist; he was landed gentry with a classical education (he served as an officer in the first world war -- and may have volunteered for the Second Boer War), and he was hanging around the literary elites, politicians, and bon vivants of the best of the fin de sicle. So he has no illusions of being a poet.

But like I said; he went to school at a time when Greek and Latin were on the menu, when a good understanding of the Classics was there. Plus he knows the popular culture -- some of which is today almost considered high-brow, like Hugo, but some of which has been completely forgotten. And he is hanging out in the salons swapping gossip about these fabulous (and, unfortunately for a writer who would like to finish this year well documented).

Do you know I have six different full-length films available to me on Prime (for free) about the lives of Rodin, Gaugin, Cezanne, and...I can't even remember all the rest.

Hell, I never even learned the rules of constructing proper couplets. As artless as Huxley may claim to be, and as tossed-off he considers his own efforts, these are coming out of an education that I can't match.

And that is before I add the layers of time and change. Is that building still standing? Conversely, does everyone now know what was the hot new gossip secret in 1902? Do you even have to visit the painting when you can find a really, really good reproduction on line? 

And of course the nature of this kind of hunt. It took me a couple weeks to zero in that this is basically "go to a place and look for clues to the next place." Which means you have to be in the right place before it becomes clear what it was you are supposed to be looking at.

Right now the only one I have is that from St. Pierre you "follow the saint" to where he was martyred. Which is about two hundred feet, that being the current location of Sacre-Coeur. From there, I'm thinking it is an Ozymandius reference that Penny catches but can't follow; the Exposition had been spread out in that direction but only the Petit and Grand Palais remain. That, and the Luxor Obelisk, which had been there for a while but originated with...Rameses II.

So Penny goes to check out the Egyptian collection at the Louvre. Because there are two more levels to this. One is that Huxley, after his brief clue, goes on to ramble about his exploits as a strapping young man in wild turn-of-the-century Paris. And Penny isn't the only person who is reading all of his remarks on the people and places and reading too much into a few chance mentions, like "The Mummy's Secret" or "Napoleon's Gold."

The other is that Penny understood Huxley's context very well. She knows he isn't leaving clues to a hidden treasure. He's leading his reader on a scavenger hunt to experience some of the Paris he loved. And she's doing the same thing; using his clues as an excuse to enjoy Paris herself (and take a little bit of video for her subscribers back home). 

So she'll take a mis-read clue as an excuse to go have some fun. And all of those options, too, have to be folded into those little bits of wretched doggerel I've been struggling to compose.

Overthinking

It is usually good to thing up. To take a step back and realize that instead of trying to solve the problem you are looking at, you should solve the problem that is causing that problem. 

I can't always do it. Last week I was making a tote for a piece of electronics and I got locked into designing it with the faceplate down. Someone had wondered aloud if it would be possible to cut a hole for the carrying handle and that got me onto the wrong track. I had it all the way up to an elaborate prototype with several blocks and a slot for the carrying handle when someone finally suggested I just flip the thing over instead.

So many times, there is that answer; "how do I fit all of these in one box?" "Well...why does it have to be a box?"

But I am not sure it is always a good approach to art.

I was just watching an article on Kingdom of the Sun. Deep in mythology, full character arcs, love story, everything. Epic. But they couldn't get it to work. Until, in a top-down shuffle that changed practically all the nameplates at the studio, it was suggested to toss all that and just push out a low-brow comedy from the few bits that were working.

The result was The Emperor's New Groove.

So I just got a developmental edit on The Fox Knows Many Things. I've known all along that what I really need is a re-write. But I've known it would be a big re-write. Worse, it means re-thinking the whole series. And as I contemplate how far I may have missed on the series, and how unfit I feel for the work of doing something different, I'm all the way up to wondering whether I should be writing at all.

The trouble is, there's no lid to this box. It keeps going up until I wonder if it wouldn't be better just to veg out in front of YouTube and go back to work Monday, trying to save enough so retirement isn't terrible.

I am reading two or three books simultaneously about the artists of the belle epoque and so many of them are driven to find the art beyond what they currently know -- and beyond what the Salon finds acceptable, the public wants to purchase, and even what their friends agree with. And, yes, not a few were chasing a dead end or a mirage.

Carl Sagan once said that to make an apple pie from scratch, you first must make the universe. I am stuck once again trying to write the next chapter for Sometimes a Fox but every sentence I contemplate immediately turns into questions about the meaning of life.

I'd work on the worldbuilding for The Tiki Stars but it is the same problem.

So...what's on YouTube?

Tough Crowd

Goodreads is known to be a tough crowd. They are waging a one-site fight against rating inflation, one sometimes thinks; extremely popular books rarely pass four stars over there.

I finally collected two new ratings. Yes, someone did actually pick up, then put down, The Fox Knows Many Things (no idea if they actually finished it). And Kindle Unlimited reports page reads on Fox and Hounds. 

3 stars.

And 2 stars.

Like I said...tough crowd.

The other black hole of the internet

I wish someone would start up an entry on my books on TVtropes.

Not that they would. They, to use the terminology of Wikipedia, "lack notoriety." And they list fanfiction, so that's a pretty low bar I'm missing.

If they did, though, I'd probably have to go there myself to add all the tropes I consciously included. I was reminded of that again when I took a glance after finally getting around to watching Skyfall and ran into the trope "Voice with an internet connection."

Aki is totally this during A Fox's Wedding, with quite a bit of the cyber-geek on the other end of the headset re Wade from Kim Possible, Barbara Gordon in her "Oracle" days, and of course Q during parts of Skyfall. Which also crosses over with "Mission Control," and even Aki realizes this as she not only starts doing the voice, she name-checks Solid Snake from the Metal Gear Solid games. And also unwittingly spoofs the reverb-laden voice over (TVTropes calls this the "Inner monologue") of the early ninja film The Octagon.

Plus there's a live shakuhachi soundtrack in the same scene with the echo, to accompany an actual ninja ("But why...y...y...y?") attack. Not sure what this is but Penny has a late "Theme Music Power-Up" (it isn't her theme, though) and "Freak Flag" from the musical version of Shrek is all but name-checked in what TVTropes calls a "Misfit Mobilization Moment." Basically, there are multiple "Suspiciously Apropos Music" moments used in "Diagetic Soundtrack" form; in Aki's big "Mission Control" scene, with Penny "Cleaned up Nicely" complete with "Pimped-Out Dress" at a really, really fancy social affair, the live band swings into "You know my name" -- the title theme to Casino Royale!

And this little exercise has taught me why I shouldn't and probably never would do the work of putting all that stuff in. Finding out what TVTropes is calling those tropes this week is too much work!

***

I had a minor breakthrough on the Paris book (Sometimes a Fox). I realized I kept stopping to go off and do something, anything else because I was afraid of it. I wasn't looking forward to all the work of getting the scenes right.

Since I recently re-read all three of my books I have a good sense of some of the things I really want to change, and one of them is meaningless specificity. In that ninja scene, I spent several words of description setting up exactly how the subway entrance, bridge, little park etc. all related to each other. 

Which had damn-all to do with the scene. I know, I know, I come out of theater and I like to visualize and that doesn't just mean blocking, that means knowing what the place looks like. But I am getting better at seeing what lands on the page and also of letting go. The reader will pick their own images. It is a fool's game to try to nail them down and make sure they understand the tiles are green and the signs are in German.

And that goes both ways. The theory of research (and planning) in writing is the iceberg; you need to know more than what the reader sees. But the more I am understanding what the reader can and should comprehend and retain, the more I understand how big the underwater part of the iceberg is.

And it is a lot smaller than what I've been making of it. Maybe, just maybe, I can push through and write the damned scenes while I am still excited about them and not spend so long worrying about getting it all right. (This isn't just a question of off-line research. This is about a lot of my process in trying to patch plot holes and address possible reader questions and make things seems to lead smoothly from one to another.)

So, yeah, I've been stepping back a bit this weekend and I am excited about some of the stuff I've got coming up. A very, very quick search showed me how appropriate La Defense is for learning some parkour, for instance.

I am still problem-solving on scene #2, though. For a lot of structural reasons I want to do it at the church of St. Pierre just adjacent to Sacre-Coeur (in Montmartre, that is) but I am doing absolutely terrible at coming up with the appropriate Dan Brown style clues she can discover by visiting the place.

Even if Huxley's plan is basically just a scavenger hunt. Clues in atrocious doggerel, probably. And no big secret at the end. But for this opening scene, it has to at least look like I am playing the game straight.