Love's Labored Locks

 I am finally over the hump and writing away. Still not a lot of words down on paper. 16,000 words into Sometimes a Fox but that's up to a quarter of the (shorter than usual) target length.

Things are going smoother and mostly faster. Mostly because these are longer scenes by nature. I've done all the really difficult scene-setting work so now I can relax a little with longer, more contemplative scenes. Or indulgent action scenes. Today I completed the draft of the Shakespeare and Company/Bouquinistes scene, at least up to where the Parkour guy takes off with Huxley's book.

But that's also the part that is going to cause slow-downs here and there. The next scene is the first Parkour scene. My method these days is to research enough to know that a plot sequence is going to work. Then when I actually hit the scenes in question, open up the books to get the details right. I think this is a smarter method; I don't have so many notes to try to wade through, or broken links, or things I ran into in the research and wanted to use but can't track down again when it comes time to write the scene.

So this slowdown is parkour. The next scene is at the steampunk cabaret show. Then a scene at the Pompidou. I'm faking it on that one; I'm doing the Herge exhibit that was there back when I visited Paris, and borrowing the "En l'an 2000" illustrations from the Bibliotech for an exhibit that never existed in the real world.

I was also tempted to change the locks. See, the "love locks" that began to infest Paris starting around 2008 were a particular problem at the Pont des Arts. This is a small pedestrian bridge built by Napoleon, then rebuilt after a collapse a few decades ago to be a nearly precise duplicate. And it had these exposed railings that people began to hang padlocks on as an expression of eternal love or something.

Forty five tons of the things. Eventually a railing collapsed and the city put its foot down. In 2014 they stuck up a bunch of plywood, and by 2018 (I have video evidence) sheets of glass prevent more locks from being added anywhere but a couple of the lamp posts.

And it is so tempting to just slide the clock a little and pretend the locks are still there as of the period of my story.