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.