Uranium Fever

Part I of Sometimes a Fox is finally in draft. There's a bit of highlighter and other mark-up but not enough to keep me from pressing on to Part II.

The heavy lifting is largely done. Actually, that is also the way I've chosen to tell this particular story. The major ideas get introduced in the early chapters, but then the narrative re-visits them, expanding on and finding different way to interpret them. So I've got all the basic structure and I know more-or-less how this story is getting told. And I've done the tougher parts of the research, if for no other reason than that I really can't make major changes from this point out, no matter what my new research discovers.

Tried an experiment today; dashed off most of a new scene over brunch at a local place, not worrying overmuch about getting the specifics right. After all, I was away at a café working on a smart phone and checking references is a lot tougher.

But, sigh, I do need the map before I can finish it.

***

I'm far enough here I'm shopping for a cover artist. Tough to find. The process I ended up with on the last covers was more-or-less that I'd generate the basic idea and I'd do the detail work of repainting the stock photography. That's a bit of labor and it is hard to pay a cover artist to take that part on; as usual there is that tension between art and economics and most of the artists I've worked with had long since learned how to suppress any artistic instincts that led towards an increased workload.

This gets so structured, so five-and-dime it isn't unusual for them to have set charges for how many figures, how many stock photographs, that sort of thing. And the rest of the process is also that regulated; THEY will come up with the design, you get exactly three rounds of revisions, and you get as part of the fee a 3d rendering of a fake book. Why, I don't know. I keep telling them not to bother but...

***

And as much as I want to write something different, and soon, I have also settled on what will be Penny's next adventure:

Penny is finally on a dig again; in New Mexico, looking for what might be the oldest evidence for human habitation in the Americas.

Or it might be aliens, or so a persistent group of conspiracy theorists believe. Plus the dig is at White Sands, under the watchful eye of the Air Force. 

Things were already complicated before their dig uncovered human bones. Now an old conspiracy is about to be uncovered and more than one silent killer haunts the dig. There’s a new light in the desert and the burning sands of the Jornada del Muerto are waiting for a new victim…

***

And, yeah, I'm coming up on needing another break to recharge soon. I've been rather tempted lately to play a bit with the concepts of settlements and do a Fallout 4 run that is all about a shell-shocked pre-war survivor struggling to gather together refugees and fortify an old gas station against the Raiders that infest the Commonwealth.

(Actually, I'd be doing Red Rocket, but that's the idea...)