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.