Space Mice

Almost up to the end of Part III in revisions on the third book. I don't see a lot of changes through most of the final part. There's a tweak to the "Guns and Monet" sequence. A few dialogue bits with Ichiro and maybe get slightly better beats with his relationship.

Then the nadir and turn-around, with a whole bunch of changes. At least I'm almost done folding in the corrected Japanese language, although I am tempted to hire the same translator to go back through the entire book (I'd forgotten just how many throwaway lines in Japanese there are peppered about.)

Then back to the fourth book and I have little hope now of getting that finished before the year is out. Even with Christmas Vacation (more like Christmas Mandatory Time Off which draws from saved vacation hours).

Had an entirely new sick so at least it was, well, new. Thought I was over it, was back at work, suddenly my skull started hurting. Not like a headache, like my whole scalp was in pain. Weird. I wrapped my head in a road blanket, turned on the noisy space heater, and eventually lay down on the floor of my little shop waiting for the pain to go away.

After about four hours I was feeling well enough to get up and drive home. And was in bed most of the weekend.

Anyhow. Had a thought about the space opera I've been tinkering with. And that is that I don't actually know what the M.I.C.E. is on this one. Is it about the setting? The characters? The action?

I've been re-reading the "Lost Engineer" series and I'm sort of liking it more this time around. Either that, or I'm still so brain-fogged I'm not noticing the problems. At least this time I know what I am getting; that it is weirdly short and also rushed, packing roughly the same material as a one-hour TV episode into a "book" which is a bare 20,000 words or so. No scene divisions, so the action lurches strangely from place to place instead of letting you know when "the argument in the corridor" is over and we are now "on the bridge in the middle of combat." Seriously, I think locations and cast changes in the middle of paragraphs sometimes.

There's also very little look and feel. I can get by without physical descriptions (they are overrated) but almost nobody in the cast comes across as a strong personality. In book three the protagonist is being shunned by the rest of the engineering section, led by her suspicious and surly supervisor...but that had to be explained after it was all over. Heck, I didn't even realize this "Commander Adams" guy was in her chain of command!

And got pulled into yet another of the "I read reddit posts out loud" channels, this one on TTRPGs and some of the interpersonal conflict that happens. And still archive-binging on Eureka. Both of these are giving me different lenses on writing. Eureka, for instance, typically has about four strings to each bow...err, episode. The main plot, a B plot, some season-arc stuff, and a theme they are trying to work.

Like, one episode will be about the Science Experiment Gone Critical of the week, the on-again off-again romances are cooking in the background and the Big Bad of the season is spotted lurking around one scene, there's a B Plot about Fargo doing something Fargo...and something about the importance of communication in a relationship.

Sometimes this is plot important. Zoey thinking about running away makes her the perfect person to talk down an armed drone (it makes sense in context. Well, it makes sense in Eureka -- a point the series makes more than once!) Most of the time it is there as a metaphor or a different reading of the crazy technological problem they are having that week. But what I especially notice is that they always try, but it doesn't always work.

So this is like reading fanfic. Or reading this "engineer" story; watching another writer try and sometimes fail is a way of learning more about how things work yourself.

We are the sultans

 Latest bunny.

Sprawling fractious largely-dystopian setting with strong Steampunk elements, veering in the direction of real science but only so far.

Catastrophe strikes the Solar System and the only survivors are suspended above the clouds of Venus. Roll the clock forward a few centuries and stir scarcity into the mix and you have an entire ramshackle 19th-century tech level society barely holding on, fishing into the depths to eke out a bare subsistence of useful materials.

Among the hand-waves; breathable atmosphere. 50 miles or so up on the real Venus, the atmosphere is better described as "won't kill you instantly and horribly." Too much CO2, too little oxygen, and a wee small problem of sulfuric acid et al.

Also, no 19th-century diving suit is going to get you on to the surface. Postulate some sort of metal-sequestering Air Whales that can be hunted out where the water -- clouds -- are deep. And maybe some other air-dwellers that can be hunted for meat, fur, feathers, whatever. Have to add rain that you can actually drink and at this point the chemistry of Venus has gone completely fantasy but never you mind.

More to the point is a certain lack of originality. Sure, it is colorful and you could do a comic book or AAA game amid the warring civilizations and hard-scrabble colonies and intrepid explorers and archaeologists of lost technology and of course Heartless Air Pirates.

But it has all been done, more or less. From Bespin to Sultans of the Air to elements of Bioshock and even a little Sluggy Freelance (the "Oceans Unmoving" arc). 

Which is why it goes in the box of free plot bunnies.

Earning Coupons

 I've got the material back from the Japanese translator. We had a good back-and-forth conversation. She was wonderful; understood the literary purpose intended in having a certain phrase there and was willing to bend on idiomatic phrasing when that suited story needs better. But also deeply informed on idiom, especially regarding culture. "Oh, older people say Honto ni, younger people say Daijobou." Including Kansai-ben, Yakuza slang, etc.

Anyhow.

Plugging through, getting her corrections in (some of which propagate, meaning changes to multiple following scenes), doing various minor repairs...and trying to get my "earning the plot coupons" plotting in there.

So especially the first part of the book, taking Penny even further from following the rails because the plot says she should, and giving her not just reasons, but actual goals she is pursuing, and plot-important information she is earning by completing them.

I'm finally, after two weeks of it, closing in on the end of Part I. I hope the rest of the book is easier. I do have some fairly severe re-work happening around the climax, so that may take a bit.

But the scene I've been struggling with for over a week now turned out to be an almost complete rewrite. I've finally managed to sketch in something I always intended for that sequence but wasn't able to carry off in the previous draft.

Penny is at the replica Edo-era film set in the west of Kyoto, in gorgeous period costume, and has realized a mysterious man is following her. So for a brief sequence this becomes the chase scene through exotic locale, with very careful word choices to make it seem for the moment that she actually is an Edo-era character in the streets of that city.

Anyhow, I hope it goes faster. I've all but given up getting the Paris book out before the new year -- especially since I may actually hire a proofreader this time, in addition to I think I need professional help with the French language (there is very, very little of it in the Paris book. I've learned that lesson. But half of what there is, is the slangy, street-smart Bastien with his exremely idiomatic speech patterns. The less of it I have to actually quote, the better!)

And then perhaps I can write something new. Maybe a good space opera.

It’s a Mystery

 I was reworking the Centre Pompidou scene and trying to decide what I really wanted to share about Hergé and his Tintin albums. That, and pulling excerpts for my Japanese translator to proof/revise from the last book, and a few hours of Horizon Zero Dawn, and I realized I’d missed something big.

I have the elements; I talked about this when I was advancing the concept of “James Bond Plotting.” Go to a place, find a clue, have an adventure. That’s in the books.

But I keep thinking there’s not enough action/conflict obstacles in the books. The current book particularly bugs me because there is a puzzle that acts like the mainstay to the plot; go to scenic Paris location, puzzle out the clue that is there, lather, rinse, repeat. I’m fumbling around thinking I need more conflict going on — in all my books — and that is probably true.

But then I look at all the struggles Penny goes through; her multi-chapter infiltration and sneaking around the Transcendence HQ in A Fox’s Wedding, her epic underground exploration in Fox and Hounds. The current book — Sometimes a Fox — is a bit the “breather episode,” intentionally spending a lot of time sitting around in cafés talking about art so I am okay if there is less conflict and struggle. But there is still the contest with the rival group, and of course the challenge right from Page One to unravel the clues in Major Huxley’s memoirs.

So here is the trick I missed: The parts aren’t connected.

This is another of those Life v. Art things. Take as an example the (infamous?) gondola chase from Moonraker.

Bond learned at Drax’s factory in California of mysterious glass vials being made in Venice. He goes there, is chased down a canal, infiltrates a lab and finds shipping labels for Rio, and throws a guy out of St. Mark’s. The clues are a thin lead, but that’s not what’s important here. The point is that he “earned” these clues via the fisticuffs and hover-gondola escapades.

The gunmen came out of nowhere. There was no reason for them to attack at that moment and they weren’t physically between him and the clue. But they were temporally between his arrival in Exotic Location de jour and finding the next clue, and they were emotionally placed — using that tension-relax structure, the fast-scene, slow-scene system — to make finding the clue a payoff for the effort of defeating them.

The reboot Tomb Raider series makes this very obvious. Lara would climb and sometimes shoot to get to a remote location, pick up the next plot coupon there, then get an arena battle on her way out. Struggle to get to the clue, fight to survive and bring it home. Which is why it takes her hours of climbing cliffs and navigating spike traps to get there, but the moment she has the artifact in her hands, the bad guys rappel in through the roof!

Anyhow, basically this is the Mystery plot structure. Whether it is framed more as a thriller, a whodunnit, a travel adventure, even a scientific enquiry, the structure of struggle-clue, struggle-clue is what drives it.

I’ve hit it a few times. But missed it as many. In The Fox Knows Many Things, Penny’s entire flight from Germany is just conflict without resolution. She learns something about herself in the epic swim — it advances the B plot — but she doesn’t learn anything about the mystery.

When she confronts Satz and has a fistfight in a ruin (more like a flailing slap fight), she earns his admission about the role of Outis and the Athena Sherd. So that’s doing it right.

In Fox and Hounds, during the Battersea infiltration she finds out Cephrin was the shooter — but that happens about half-way through, meaning there’s no payoff to the final push to the White Room. When she sword-fights with Guy at the Globe, he makes a damaging admission — but I whiffed that one, too, because she doesn’t acknowledge what she has learned until half-way into the next scene.

In A Fox’s Wedding I hit it right with almost everything in the second half of the book (I seem to, generally, do better with the second half of books!) The epic climbing wall completes with Deacon inviting her to what she keeps calling the “Embassy Ball” — the final step of the Tokyo part of her infiltration of his organization. The charity event was a little whiffed but I recap in the following “downtime” scene that they’ve gained enough plot coupons to advance to the next stage of the game.

Question is, though; now that I recognize this structure, can I apply it properly to Sometimes a Fox? The first chapter at Sacre-Couer has been bugging me constantly and I was never quite happy with it to begin with. Now, finally, I think I see why.

Because to switch to a different model, it isn’t about the clue itself. The clue can be fun, but especially in an Indiana Jones sort of thing, after finally getting to the place where the clue is, he studies a faded inscription and announces, “It says here Gilgamesh traveled to Ugarit, so we need to go to Syria to find the Golden Bull.”

That is; figuring out the clue is just a thing the protagonist does. The tension-release is all in the things that get in the way of getting to the clue (or getting back out alive.)

As much as I had fun with Huxley’s doggerel, that isn’t the accomplishment. Figuring them out is never something that feels earned — not the way some physical or emotional obstacle would. Hell, I seemed to realize this subconsciously; when given, A sinister turn, a whiff of grapeshot, sombre Triumph of writer and poet, Penny immediately says “Turn left on the Champs-Ellyses.”

(Incidentally, I’ve been reading up on the software Atticus and otherwise trying to find formatting options to see if I can set Huxley’s words out in something other than italics. The last book, Linnet’s diary was always read aloud, or described in dialogue/narration. This book, I have complete excerpts and I want a formatting that better suits a more epistolary form.)

And I am doing clean-up work on A Fox’s Wedding this week — why I hired my Japanese translator to check my work. I have been concerned about the slow beginning on that one, and maybe, just maybe, it is worth trying to figure out how I can put more of that structure of struggle-clue, tension-release into it.