Waffle Kickers

(I used to work a ballet-school production of Nutcracker every winter. Through preshow and intermission pairs of mice -- that is, younger ballerinas of the company -- would walk the aisles crying out "Raffle tickets!")

So I was logging some chapter planning notes in the Scappple file -- that's the mind-mapper software I use to make outlines in.

(This set is less organized than the last. I didn't manage to come up with a color-and-border scheme to properly identify the various elements I am trying to track.)

I wanted to put down place-marks for a few things I thought I might be adding. A scene in one of the passages/galleria, for instance. And a scene at Parc des Buttes-Chaumont.

I'd just seen a short BBC piece on Paris -- a guided tour by an actual native Parisian, accent and all -- and she mentioned the park in passing. And something sounded familiar about it and I looked it up and, yes; that was the same place I'd run into while reading about the extensive quarrying around Paris (work that goes back to Roman times), out of which comes among other things the current-day Catacombs.

I opened a Wikipedia article to check the spelling (which I don't usually bother with in my notes) and noticed they have a guingette there. Which the character Amelia would really enjoy. Which might make an even more interesting scene if I could get Girard, one of the love triangle with Amelia, out there. But how? But of course; have the whole steampunk cabaret come out there for a photo shoot. Which would also be the excuse to get Penny her contractual cosplay episode for the book.

Will I do the scene this way? Maybe not. Maybe it doesn't advance the plot in the way I need it advanced. Maybe it clashes with the tone I'm after in the place in the book where it would have to fall. But it is a nice example of the snowball method in the way a few tiny bits will sort of grow and gather more into themselves like a snowball rolling down a hill.

By Lombana - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22954595

A Bunny is Born

In many places the question "where do you get your ideas?" comes up.

The standard Golden Age answer was "There's a post-office box in Poughkeepsie." The real answer is, of course, not quite what the young writer wants to hear.

In any case, I ran into something this morning that I'd use the next time I needed an example. Randall Munroe, in his weekly webcomic XKCD, did a strip where he made a grid of several disciplines (physics, chemistry, etc.) and several prefixes (theoretical, astro, etc.) and then did a Google Scholar search to count for titles.

"Marine Biology" turned up 945,000 papers. No surprise there. "Marine Psychology" was less well-represented with a mere 35 papers and "Marine Dentistry" picked up only one.

The search phrase "High-energy Theology" returned zero hits.

A writer would see that as an opening. That's the real place ideas come from; the spark might have been drifting around in the air around you, but the real trick is the eye to latch on to it, and the skill to develop it into something you can make a story around.

Re-Iteration

I love iterative design.

When I did my Retro Raygun I started from sketches, moved to massing studies and cut-outs, then to mock-up, then CAD design. And I've long been fond of the idea of solving writing problems as early as possible in the text, through index cards, diagramming, spreadsheets, outlines, and so on.

Even among non-outliners the Snowflake method is discussed; this is when you start with the bare idea and fractally explore it, breaking each bit into smaller and smaller bits until it fills sufficient story space to be a novel.

Pardon me while I drop the rant again. No, I don't research everything I can about Paris and then stop, go to the outline and try to cram it all in. That is almost completely orthogonal to my process. Or rather, how I intend my process to work, and there's where it gets weird.

The Paris book was totally the wrong book for fractal writing.

The core of the book, what is going on below everything else, is a demonstration of Eternal Paris. That undefinable but unmistakable, that, if you will forgive me, je ne sais quoi that so many artists have struggled to capture. The idea, that is, that through wars and revolutions and modernization Paris still remains, somehow, Paris.

So it isn't really a Dan Brown. There's no deadly secret hidden by a cabal of poorly-trained cryptographers with a Riddler-like propensity for blazoning their clues on public monuments. There is a scavenger hunt in a book created by a tired survivor of the Great War who wants his reader to see Paris as he had, the Paris of the fabulous belle époque. 

And that's my purpose, too, but at another remove; the idea of history as something other than a dry academic subject for the ivory tower, but something to be engaged with actively by ordinary people. Experienced and celebrated even if they muck up the details a bit. For all of Nathan Snow's building-climbing, lock-breaking, monument-defacing antics, he is taking his own joy in history. As is Penny, following on his heels and trying to reign in his excesses.

So the clues and the unfolding isn't the bones of the book. It is the working-out of the theme of the book. I'm not finding the best place to hide the next link to Mary's sepulcher, I'm looking for a place that says something about the time and people I'm trying to bring to life.

I'm right now working on a conversation where the hidden fact is that there is no way Jonathan Huxley's last bit of doggerel meant "go to Les Invalides and visit Napoleon's Tomb." Because Hux is all about the artists of Montmartre and the world they inhabited (the clue, in fact, points towards Hotel Biron where Rodin had a studio).

Sure, there are several things I already knew I wanted in the book. But could I really have nailed them all down early in the outlining then built the plot around them? To me a plot is always a multi-body problem, only solvable by running it step by step and seeing where it goes. The interaction of the unveiling of several mysteries, the development of several characters, the underlying character arc and thematic arc, all intersect in ways that just aren't clear until I try them on the page.

I do write iteratively. It is just, for this book the iteration involves writing the whole damned scene, then tossing it out and trying something different in its place.

Historical Focus

Was looking over my research this morning and realized I could be telling almost the same story if I left history out of the picture. But it would be simpler, probably easier on the reader, and on me.

When you look at the template Adventure Archaeologist story, the history is only barely there. I just watched the Sandra Bullock sort-of-remake of Romancing the Stone, that is, Temple of Gold. Which did one odd thing; it leaned in a couple times about how doing good academic work was important and the protagonist should be allowed to take pride in it. Everyone else in the movie treats it as some boring hobby she has and she should just concentrate on writing the romance stuff -- even the bad guy (a wonderful Daniel Radcliffe) just treats her as a living version of Google Translate; "I don't care about the ancient culture, just tell me where they hid the gold."

But the movie doesn't. Maybe it is an artifact of camera POV (with few exceptions Sandra is the focus character) but the movie seems to act -- for just those few moments -- like everyone else is in the wrong. I mean, sure, it is still a character bit. It matters because it matters to the protagonist. But it is cool that this is considered of equal weight to how good she looks in a purple jumpsuit.

But for all of that, I can't tell you if that was actually a real culture. Because that's true for probably half the stories, even more so when they are part of a continuing series (like the Tia Carrere-led Relic Hunter); the historical element is either completely obscure or a jumble of a couple of different real-world elements.

The other half of the time, it is going to be the pop-history version of the Holy 13. You are going to see a lot less of Seti II and a lot more of Cleopatra VII Philopater. It's the establishing-shot version of history; we're in Paris? Oh, look -- Le Tour Eiffel. Classical Rome? Ave Caesar!

Which is a really long-winded way of getting around to, that in most fiction of this sort, the concentration is on the globe-trotting and the gunfights and the treasure/threat. Briefly, the Designated Academic or some convenient other plot exposition fountain will say something like, "King Axelrod the Seventh fought the Danes with the aid of a Sword of Light. We've been unable to find more about that artifact but we believed it was buried with him under Glastonbury Tor."

If you are lucky you can zero in on the country...and century.

I've already got my various exposition machines (narration, dialogue, demonstration...) working at delivering the contemporary world. I consider that the package I'm trying to deliver; for whatever place that book is set in, show off a few things unique to that place and culture. A few things the reader may not have heard of, and a few things they might not have heard about things they already know.

I'm tooling up for the Palais Garnier scene that closes Part II right now. So there is going to be a bit about Phantom but also a few things about the building that you at least need to take the tour to get.

And that's...enough. I don't need to deliver a chunk of history as well. For the Paris book, I think it works. This one is a long musing on the experience of history; how play is necessary, through popular history, fiction, and historical recreation, because that educates and also helps in exploring history, even as it can distort history as well. The metaphor here is the historical treasure hunt through why the two different parties (Penny, and Nathan) chose to do it and what they get out of it, and what the consequences might be both to them and to the actual monuments they are climbing around.

This is a book where I already have Penny replaying memories of incidents and conversations from before the book started, each time looking at them from a new angle, Rashomon style. So it totally works for her to both travel contemporary Paris and to glimpse the 1900's version through the lens of Huxley's memoirs.

Although if I was starting from scratch today, I'd have found ways to have a lot less Napoleon. That is my version of the "greatest hits"; Hux is consciously doing what I'm talking about, using what Penny calls his "scavenger hunt" through clues scattered across Paris to remember the Paris from before the Great War, the Paris of his youth. Nathan has decided the real purpose of the clues is Napoleon's Gold (Penny; "Which gold? There's about a dozen conspiracy theories about Napoleon and hidden gold.")

But I'm thinking this more and more as I think about some of the other books I want to do. I am really thinking the desert one and that might not have a convenient specific chunk of history that can be explored compactly. Also was thinking early space program, but that one is really about retro-history itself; about the specific kind of future that was being imagined in things like the Syd Mead illustrations for American Steel (or whatever that company was) and the paintings commissioned by the L5 Society and so on. And also thinking warbirds in the context of living history versus preservation, and that is probably a lot of WWII stuff but...

And yeah. I already know I would have had an easier write if I had chosen fake history to begin with. Not just because it is less research. And not just because it plots easier; finding a reason to have life-or-death struggles over identification of some Ancestral Pueblo pottery is a lot harder than having that struggle over the Glowing Scepter of Alien Power buried in a booby-trapped pyramid.

But because dealing with the history is just one more thing to try to fold into the already uncomfortable amount of, well, exposition.

(I do have to say; if the Kindle Unlimited numbers can be parsed that way, nobody who gave up on the first book did so over the chapter-long discussion of the Dorian Invasion. They bailed a full chapter earlier, roughly when Penny goes for lunch with the French couple she met on the Acropolis.)

Gilets Jaunes

I am going cold turkey on Quora. It was taking too much of my writing time, and beginning to be too emotionally involving. Like the XKCD (there's always an XKCD) I shouldn't waste my passion worrying about "someone (being) wrong on the internet."

Still reading about French slang and trying to figure out a good way of crossing the divide here. I am writing for an English-speaking and presumed monoglot reader. I am writing with a protagonist who is traveling across the world but -- unlike her alter-ego, which she points out in this book -- doesn't speak all those languages.

So first there's the coincidence of running into convenient English speakers whenever the plot needs them. Worse; I am using these people to give info-dumps, so there is a real pressure to have them speaking clearly and efficiently. 

On top of that, I construct dialogue from the logic of the conversation. I don't have a good method to work outwards from the ways a particular speaker may engage, which means I too often end up with everyone sounding identical. There's only so much you can do coming back through during the editing pass and changing a few verbs around.

I still feel there is this association too many of us make that broken English = inferior mentality. Too many years of being basically told that by teachers; if you didn't speak right, you were a failure and needed to study harder. Reality is that broken English is probably the most common language in the world.

The new lingua franca, although that doesn't piss the French Academy off as much as their local people speaking it.

But it gets worse. The language that my protagonist is most likely to run into is patois, street speak, which is a slangy mix of multiple languages and new coinages. It is youth speak, meaning full of tribal identifiers and ways to detect outsiders, and thus also changing rapidly.

And it is also a sort of jazz; spoken by people with a good general grasp of the grammar of at least two languages, allowing them to creatively remix. So hard for an outsider to pick up. Even harder for the reader -- who isn't going to be living there being exposed to it constantly.

I should know. I'm still having a hell of a time understanding half the people in The Expanse.

So, yeah, it does get done in major media. But it still sticks in my craw to do broken English with random French words in it.

And, yes, I'm reading about the protests as well. During searches for discussions of Franglais found a blog that covers the period my book is set in.

But I'm trying not to get too much into that stuff. There is plenty of protests and all that Les Mis stuff in the historical period I'm trying to emphasize.

And a lot more of contemporary Paris I'm wanting to continue to show off, too:

(Finally finished the bouquinistes sequence. Starts at Shakespeare and Company, moves to these outdoor booksellers, becomes a parkour chase across the Île de le Cité, and then I had a whole sequence suddenly jumble together as she gets a gyro at one of those little places that are practically everywhere, and flirts a bit with a sephardic jew whose family came over from Algeria in the '60s. 

And there was another Hux-cam, in which Huxley's memoir talks about the Catalan community near the top of the Butte of Montmartre, and he meets up with Picasso outside the Bateau-Lavoir and meets Maurice Utrillo and Suzanne Valadon -- but these are all genius bonuses, as he doesn't name a single one of them (not even the building).

But now I'm working on the first scene of the Steampunk Cabaret...

Belta lang im mogut

Funny how ideas bounce off one.

I was having a sort of weirdly selected writer's block. I couldn't bring myself to be interested in characters other than the ones I am already using (despite the fact that the current book is far from finished and I've still got a bunch of characters I'll be happy to add to it.)

Dropped a couple bucks on an artist I've worked with before (at Fiverrrr), seeing if my new idea for covers was going to work. I think I've successfully determined it won't, so that was money well spent. But even though it won't work for the book I have, one of his paintings made me want to write the book it would work for.

So I'm over that block and can consider other work again.

In the other recent bit of bouncing ideas, I'm slowed down considerably by not being comfortable with two of the characters I have in the current book. And that's bad, because there really aren't a lot of main characters.

Amelia is Penny's main confidante and foil in this one. Which is a pattern I need to start breaking soon, what with Aki in the last book, and (although only barely) Drea in the first. Hell, I went with First Person, even knowing the problems that POV has, because I figured Penny would be on her own for big chunks of the story and that was one way to avoid dead air.

Then there are the "bohemians" (Penny thinks about them in that way but has never explicitly named them). The angry young artist Bastien has most of the screen time, with Célestine only in a couple of scenes and Girard in perhaps a few more. Girard is the other member of an intentionally La Boheme love triangle with Amelia and Bastien. Célestine is the lead singer of a stage act that most of that small circle of artists are involved in.

And Nathan Snow and his gang. The parkour nut Jaques has been met and named and Penny will continue to have a little friendly contest with him, but the rest of the gang will barely get names.

Of course you could probably count Huxley, since it is his memoir Penny is following around Paris. He is at least somewhat developed as a character and has a small character arc.

So. The two things I need to do to try to get a better approach to Amelia is to finally get around to watching Amelié (it was going to be Amelia's favorite movie. It might turn out not to work.) And listen to a bunch of talk in a North Carolina accent. It really has been too long since I was in the tarheel state.

For Bastien? My bright idea right now is for him to be more street. Using Franglish slang, quite consciously -- it is a bit of an act. And boy is that some weird roads. I don't even know where to look to find good examples of Parisians speaking street English. Most of that is more about sharing a mixed collection of languages with other people in the same street culture.

It is said that there are more speakers of English as a second language among non-native French speakers than there are those who grew up speaking predominantly English. So it is the lingua franca, the pidgin, the patois -- as one person put it in a forum recently, more people speak broken English than any other language on Earth.

So it doesn't really work to include the typical youth culture language tricks within an address to outsider native-English speakers. For instance; verlan. That's entirely French, but is the intentional reversal of some words for the effect. It also isn't just any word, but words that are common verlangs.

Another bit is including English in a conversation in French. And as part of this, French grammar is attached to the English. So "to talk" might be rendered as the hybrid verb "talker." A little easier to work into an English sentence than verlang, at least.

And then there is Paris and street slang; words and phrases that aren't common in polite French. But this is a bit of the Funny Foreigner problem once again. The random substitution of what are usually commonly-understood words just to remind the reader that the speaker is French. You understand, oui?

But it is an idea. And I got it because while I was stuck feeling unable to write any more about two characters that weren't working....I watched a bunch of The Expanse. 

Not my forte

 I was just gifted a keyboard. I have a nice controller keyboard at home but now I have one at work and it was out there on the work table and all...

My new sustain pedal. Works pretty well, actually. And I'm re-learning how to play piano. Not that I was ever that good, but re-learning the pieces I'd written, now, after having spent time with other instruments and analyzing other music, has made me newly aware of just how terrible my understanding of harmony is.