New Minds for Old

Had an impulse, sharpened a pencil and tried to brush up my drawing skills. It didn't go well. But it does seem to have jogged my mind; I came back to the current novel and, oh boy.

So back to revisions. Maybe. I'm clear enough on what I'm going to be changing I could probably go a few more chapters first. My strategy on edit-as-you-go is I stop and go back only when I can't hold in my head all the ways the story is going to be different by the time the text hits where the fresh words are going to go.

The big change is complexity. I'm still tempted to completely re-jigger the chronology and open with "Mombasa Nights." There is probably too much going on in the novel anyhow, but at the moment my biggest concern is how much of it front-loads into the first chapters (that, of course, is why they've been so tough to write).

The driving McGuffin is the Dan Brown-ish treasure hunt, guided by an old book; a hunt for the secret which morphs into a hunt to stop the other group from making a mess of Paris with their methods.

I wanted Penny to recover a bit from the last couple of books so the character arc is more of a victory lap; Penny accepting that she has now grown into the experienced traveler. And admitting that she now has a taste for adventure. The character Amelia acts mostly as a mirror, the neophyte tourist through whom Penny understands how she herself has changed.

That's why my first scene isn't "Rain," it is Penny sitting perfectly poised at a sidewalk cafe and meeting Amelia there.

Later, I'm going to introduce Steampunk and parkour and there is this whole sub-plot thing about a group of artists and the "Steampunk Superhero" world one of them is creating. Which opens into all sorts of strange corners with the rapid changes in society brought on by technology, the hotbed of artistic development in the belle epoque, the shadows of war that form part of the fin d' sicle, class warfare, revolutionary history of Paris, comic books, Fantomas and the Penny Dreadfuls...

But that stuff, I can hold back on. The thing I decided early on is I wanted to have a Proustian revisiting going on. The first is a conversation Penny has about her career; she keeps bringing it up in her memory through the length of the book, each time seeing it in a slightly new light and bringing new information to the table. Another is what exactly she was doing wandering the streets of Paris in the middle of the night.

The revisions I need to do in the first chapters is to knock this back further, doing less dips into the past and revealing less, but even more importantly, keeping the idea of the treasure hunt front and center and putting excitement and fun in it. The reader should believe in this treasure hunt and Penny should, too. The cracks will show just a little bit later (I'm knocking stuff downstream, mostly).

But yet! Going entirely counter to the above; counter to the idea of keeping the treasure hunt simple and the past in the form of simple clues that can be solved, Paris as the perfect tourist spot (and not getting too much into the character of Montmartre, even), I have pretty much come around to the idea of the "Hux-Cam."

That is; regardless of how much of his actual words will appear on the page, I want Penny frequently turning to Major Huxley's book and showing what it was that he would have been seeing in turn-of-the-century Paris.

So I've got a hell of a lot of work ahead of me. Makes me want to take a break with something simple. Like drawing.