Nitrous

Down to the last few scenes in the post-revisions grammar check of A Fox's Wedding. I go back and forth on how many times I'll let the software argue me into putting commas in.

I suppose I should do a check for italics consistency but that is a thorny problem. It was probably a mistake italicizing Japanese in this book. The only consistent solutions are either to never italicize it (which leaves weirdness like Penny's alea iacta est at the top of the adventure), or to always italicize it.

The latter is a choice I have seen other authors make. It means that ninja and sushi get italicized as well, which is a bit weird. On the gripping hand, there's a sort-of-reasoning that "ninja" and "sushi" are being used -- and pronounced -- correctly, thus in this Japanese context they are properly italicized.

But as a footnote (ran out of hands), there are at least two characters who are using Japanese wrong. Aki is an American fangirl of the type that throws bad Japanese into her speech, and Penny is...Penny. She's throwing around "ganbatte!" at every excuse until someone finally explains she's using the wrong verb form.

***

I found time to review all the finished chapters of the Paris book (Sometimes a Fox). It isn't working. I am beginning to think this concept, at least how I put it together, can't work.

I am making one big change, though. Huxley's cryptic couplet clues, I'm going to set out as epigraphs. Not all chapters are about solving one of Huxley's puzzles, though, so I may not always be able to do this. In places I can quote from Huxley's text instead; that might work.

What I don't know is how to do this within my current software...and be able to see it while I am writing. Because this is really something I want to see what it looks like on the page before I go for it.

And that's another problem; I think Amazon KDP, after years of pushing us all to submit only as MOBI, now wants submissions in ePub. So I have to re-do all my work there, too.

***

And Venus ran into an interesting problem. Nitrogen. There are ways to hand-wave that there is enough oxygen above the cloud layer for humans to breathe. But there's only 4-5% nitrogen, according to the latest probe data. The rest is CO2. 

The entire chemistry of the situation, and the greenhouse gas effect that creates the Venus we know and love, is all about that CO2. Anything that would put a ton of nitrogen in the upper atmosphere would 1) destabilize all that chemistry until Venus looked very different, and 2) if you could do that, why wouldn't you fix the surface while you were at it?

The fun with playing with Venus is playing with Venus as we know it; the sulphuric acid clouds, the 200 MPH winds, the molten-lead temperatures down on the surface.

It's a lot like the alternate history problem; people really want to make some deep-time change so the American Revolution is actually a border conflict between the Colonies and the Iroquois Confederation-- except that we still get Washington, Jefferson, and Ben Franklin.

There is one slim out, however. Apparently there is a as-yet-unexplained chemistry gradient in the real Venusian atmosphere. Nitrogen is almost absent at the surface, and the proportions increase as you climb into the upper atmosphere, being possibly most concentrated at the magic 50km level.

Just, like, not seventy percent.