The Skyrim's the Limit

Thing about Skyrim is they keep re-issuing it. I had a mod stack that made the towns look like something from a JRPG; colorful and foliage and flowers everywhere, like an Olive Garden with extra zazz.

I've been tinkering with a mod stack for Anniversary and I'm pretty happy with it now. It is just different enough to make exploring interesting, colorful enough to be fun and to make me happy wandering around, but little things like being able to recognize the alchemical herbs I collect are still there.

And you see why I spend hours just wandering around the place. Especially on a cold, rainy day when I have (finally!) some time off from work.

That's Enhanced Lights and FX, but with Vivid Weathers definitive edition replacing the weather slot, Noble Skyrim Mod (texture overhaul) with Skyrim Floral Overhaul replacing the trees and foliage, JK's Skyrim making light alterations to towns and villages, plus a few odd things like 4K Markarth Textures, an expanded Farm Animals, and a mod or two that increases the mesh density on "clutter" and other small objects.

It's actually a fairly short mod stack. Arrowsmith so I can make my own arrows, Become a Bard so I can play the in-game instruments (flute, lute, and drum), Alternate Start (no more Helgen -- and no dragons if I don't want them), Better World Map, Weightless Ingredients (a real help for an Alchemist build), and an NPC re-model I'm playing with; it looks a little cartoony at times and at some point I want to go with an NPC texture improver but I'm enjoying discovering some of the more interesting choices. Never would have imagined Ancano as a biishonen!

And it looks like Eeks Beautiful Whiterun is compatible with SE now. With that and JK's 2020 texture pack, I could get the pretty fantasy world look. Swap in Summer Edition of the Skyrim Floral Overhaul and it would be a fine setting for another Bard run; fast travel disabled, Frostfire and Camping mods, sticking to the cities and playing for supper in the taverns.

NaNoWriWee

Obviously I wasn't going to finish a novel this week. Finally a week off from work. I haven't had more than four days in a row this year, and most of those were because of being sick. So I really, really needed the rest.

I was making progress on the latest revision. Then had a jumble of thoughts come together and realized a solution to the problems I was having with Amelia's character, and it also solves a lot of other problems I was having.

But, oops, means those scenes are wrong again. Back again for yet another re-write.

Some writers claim to be merely recording. The few that have talked about it, they are tapping the same power that leads to confabulated memories. I'm pretty sure I do this, and this may be why there is a processing time. When I make a change to the world, it takes a day or two for me to start "remembering" the way things are now. When I do, I am practically dictating the scene from memory.

Well, sort of. What I have in my head is a gestalt of how the situation plays out within a small set of variations. I can tweak things, try out different options in the way the people in it act and react, and that model continues to fill in the sense of the reality of it that makes it easier for me to write it. The worst part for me is when I'm writing something I don't believe in yet. Whether because I haven't researched it enough or I'm not seeing it or I realize it wouldn't actually work in any real world.

But mostly because not enough time has passed for it to settle in. It is isn't all black box time, start the timer and wait for the ping. Because when the engine is chewing on the memory I'm created, I'm still bouncing off new connections and new inspirations. So I get bits of dialogue and insights into characters and additional details that will all make the scene better.

When I'm finally ready to write it. 

***

And given how Sometimes a Fox has been going, I'll be happy if I can just finish Chapter One by the end of this week off!

Quadratic Wizards

Spent the weekend doing family things. And playing Skyrim. Had an idea; there's this great mine you can own, Winstadt Mine I think it is called. First you have to clear out some really tough bandits. Thing of it is, the bandits in mines tend to be digging for ore and not paying attention. So I figured I could sneak in a little ways, "quietly" mine some iron ore (yeah, yeah, the weirdness of being able to use a pick-axe on stone and nobody comes looking) and use that to buff up my Smithing skill. Build myself some armor and a decent weapon, penetrate a little deeper into the mine where the ores are to make better metal, lather, rinse, repeat.

Plus I've got a mod that makes running a smelter count towards Smithing skill. Well, it worked. A little too easily, actually. Then I did the handwork to expand the mine, eventually crafting nice weapons to sell back in town. Very zen-like, a lot of swinging a pick-axe and staring at the forge, and that's the perfect thing for being inside on a cold rainy day trying to relax from a really long year.

Well, once the mine is up and running with a full staff of miners, guards, cook, bard, your own fisherman and even a brewer, money starts rolling in. I've been wandering around Skyrim now, buying up every bit of property I can. (Unfortunately only Hjarken Farm also earns money. But it also has the only grain mill I have yet discovered that lets you make flour from the wheat you grow.)

Also, finally, maxed out on Smithing and Enchanting, with Alchemy almost there. But you know what? The best armor you can build in the game still doesn't make it safe to go hand-to-hand with the really bad stuff. And hand weapons don't do enough damage, either. Skyrim very much falls into the Quadratic Wizard problem. Somewhere around level 30-40 you can do more damage with magic than you can with any "honest" weapon.

So you need to buff up magical skills -- alchemy, enchanting, destruction magic or something -- in order to buff your weapons enough to be competitive. Or go Stealth Archer. Stealth Archer takes off at around level 5 (when your Stealth skill gets high enough to pull it off and you have enough health to survive it if they do find you.) It has a slump around 20-30 because it doesn't, again, do enough damage. But with magic in the mix...enchanted items of plus stealth, potions of sneaking, and the same for arrow damage, and it is powerful out to end game.

I did Meridia's Beacon just for the hell of it (and a half-decent sword) and decided I was a Bane of the Undead. Joined the Dawnguard and totally trashed Harkon. Poor guy was flying around the room in cloud-of-bats form trying to hide long enough to regenerate. I never touched Auriel's Bow. Just kept blasting him with Sunfire.

One of my "cheats" now is that Garlic Bread is just as good as a Cure Disease potion for curing the Vampiric taint, and the ingredients are easier to find. That is, if you own a farm. That and owning a meadery and a farm means carrot juice -- which gives night vision -- is a nice option for dark dungeons.

(Oddly, one of the changes of the Anniversary Edition seems to have made all the underground spaces really bright. There is no need for torches, lanterns, magelight, or any of that. Much less night vision.)

After I was chatting with Serana and she decided to go get herself cured. So now she's back as my companion, in human form, and I don't have to listen to Sophia natter on anymore.

I definitely leveled a bit too far. The second dragon I met was an Ancient Dragon. That's the toughest one in the base game. Gonna make it difficult if I decide to finish the "main" quest line.

***

And had some success with jolloff rice. Got the base note of the flavor happening, finally. Simmered tomato sauce with a mixture of powdered garlic, oregano, finely chopped habanero peppers and meat stock until it got that smokey flavor, then cooked two cups of rice in that plus a bit of water.

Also got the heat right. Unfortunately. Chopped yellow onion, peeled garlic, simmered them in English butter, mixed in diced bell pepper and crushed tomatoes and...seven habanero chilis. Was a bit much.

It was good, though.

***

Added a couple more mods to my stack. One of them gives Serana more dialogue, recorded with a new actress who sounds similar enough to the original to be acceptable. So now she's as talkative as Sophia. Trust the mods, though; none of the base game companions interact with NPCs (they do in Fallout 4, but not at lot). Serana now initiates conversations with other NPCs, and they reply. Could have floored me when out of the blue Serana introduced herself to Jarl Balgruf and asked him about Nazeem. And the Jarl told her exactly what he thought of the twerp!

I'm in the middle of a familiar spell-sword deficit. See, at some point the best way to increase your weapon damage is to increase the additional damage they do via flaming and so forth. Which are affected by your base level at Destruction magic. So you end up running around taking horrible chances using your less-powerful spells just so you can level up that skill and make your good weapons work better.

X-ray Yankee Zebra

I just added X-ray to all my Kindle books. Not that it does much. X-ray is an inline annotation system Amazon was pushing, but when I went through my Kindle collection, I only found one author had turned it on. From within a Kindle reader or equivalent software you can generally call up dictionary, Wikipedia, and maybe a few other things besides.

Which is why I spent a few evenings at it. I figure, if they can just click to find the Wikipedia entry on "Athens," if I am going to serve the reader who clicks, it needs to be an experience they won't get by side-swiping to the Wikipedia answer.

There's no clear cut-off point so I stopped when I felt like stopping. It will only show up on new sales, anyhow, unless I talk them into a "push." What few sales there are. I put A Fox's Wedding on free giveaway last weekend and moved five (5) copies.

Also found a few more errors. But that always happens. Unfortunately, the X-ray console won't tell you where in the book it found a mis-spelled name. Or anything it found. It does its best algorithmic attempt to locate nouns and that means when it says "Hey, there's a character named Bob that needs an entry" if there really is or it got confused by "Bob's your uncle" or "bob for apples."

Nor will it allow you to split or sort -- not good news if you have more than one Steve, and it is kind of a big point in the first book that there is more than one entity going around with the name Athena!

***

Finally back to work on Sometimes a Fox and even started watching Amelie. Realized, though...I'm really not that into Paris. Maybe that's why this one is such a slog.

***

A relative wanted to see what Doctor Who was all about. I didn't have DVDs I'd recommend (they don't do streaming). Ended up purchasing -- they were really, really cheap! -- complete collections for the 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th doctors. Minus one or two Christmas Specials and Children at Need episodes. The bad boy, the pretty boy, the young boy with old eyes, and the old boy with attack eyebrows. But not Jodi. She hasn't quite finished, and there isn't a cheap box set for her.

Suit Squeeze

Woke up with that bad case of impostor syndrome that makes writing impossible. Watched videos about diving accidents all morning (and read more about the atmosphere of Venus) until that went away.

Besides feeling generally incompetent to write a story, I also feel I am totally outside even a pretense of expertise for writing about and from the point of view of a young woman in today's world. I'm barely in this world of ours; my ignorance about real lives is nearly total.

And then I realized where I am on the MICE. 

Every book opens with an Athena Fox video. Which while it may be introducing elements and themes, always touches on the core conflict of her character. And this is an internal conflict as well as an external one. These stories are, in short, all about this character and her evolution. They start with a character conflict, and that is the last thing touched on in the epilogue. For all the history and location and action in them, these are Character stories.

Unfortunately, the current story has a lot of external text and non-chronological time. I'm tempted to dump all that and go with something that's going to be easier to understand. If I don't do that, I need to find some way of making the pieces clearer.

This isn't epistolary (for some reason, I've been answering a lot of questions about epistolary texts over at Quora recently.) Not quite, anyhow; there are excerpts from a book published in the early '20s, as well as of course the doggerel clues:

Follow the path of a ribbon of steel, 

south to cool waters and Elysian Fields. 

Around the feet of Ozymandias, 

nothing remains but a Tiny Palace.

Two other elements are told out of strictly chronological sequence. Three, if you count the prologue (the pattern of all the Athena Fox stories is to have a prologue that is an excerpt from her show. In A Fox's Wedding, the show was recorded at the Asian Arts Museum of San Francisco and ended with her tackling a would-be robber -- an incident that kicks off the story to come. In the current story, she is opening gifts for her "Cabinet of Curiosities" that forms set-dressing for her history lectures, and this presents the book at the center of the plot.

In any case, through the story she is remembering a conversation (or several conversations) she had with the friend who manages her show; these are exploring a growing conflict she is having between the fictionalization of history and her desire to be an honest academic.

The other is all flashback to her first night in Paris, a night which went sideways when she got locked out of her hotel. Both of these are revisited to reveal new information and look at them from new angles.

(I did manage to resist having a story-within a story out of the steampunk comic book one of the artists they are hanging out with is writing. Although I won't say there might not be some character role-play going on during the garden party in the third part of the book.)

Anyhow, if I keep all of these, I need to do something to make them less confusing.

I sort of like the idea of having everything that isn't in the narrative present have the same appearance on the page. Like the prologue; it is clearly labeled as a prologue, it is in third person (third-person camera, in fact) and in italics as well.

I've decided the best way to treat the clues is to move them to the top of each chapter as an epigraph. Probably in italics, too. When I have to repeat the material within the body text (that is, if someone is describing, explaining, or otherwise repeating it in the process of solving it) I will always have it being spoken, or paraphrased, or both. This should make the dialogue and narration feel more natural and conversational and not have the stumbling-block of big chunks of italicized text -- in stanzas, too -- in the middle of everything.

My best idea for the excerpts from Huxley's memoir are to set those out with white space and, again, italics. Since I am electronically publishing I don't think I can count on having control of font or typesetting; Kindle is going to reflow text.

That leaves the "long night" and the Drea conversations. On the former, I am split. I really, really want to be able to do this as full scenes. But that runs counter to the conceit I've tried so hard to establish of these stories taking place in the "nearly now"; with narrator sharing the surprise of the character and neither knowing whether they are going to make it through okay.

White space might work. But without the italics to take them distinctly out of sequence, I'm still depending on the subtle change from past to past-perfect to orient the reader. And the other thing I'm trying to do is to get into the moment within these scenes; telling them in past-perfect with the "framing story" of the surrounding narrative makes them emotionally distant.

And white space without scene markers seems weird. So make them scenes. And whatever works for the first night won't, I think, work for the Drea conversations.

Sigh. An unproductive weekend, and this is the kind of stuff I can't do on the iPhone over coffee break at work. At least I finally came up with a version of Huxley's first clue that I actually like...

Aruino Image Dump

People have been asking about Arduino lately, so I made this post just so I could find some of my old pictures more easily.

 

Flying

The revised outline for Sometimes a Fox is starting to come together. I'm even getting excited about it again. It was a chance listening to that Hans Zimmer again that got me thinking in the right directions.

So...the search has to matter to Penny. Even if it is just some turn-of-the-century scavenger hunt (as she called it in the last draft), she feels she has an obligation to see it through. To understand what Jonathan Huxley was trying to say, about his world, his time.

The second scene. Starting bigger, with Sacré-Cœur itself and the vistas of Paris. Cutting Penny's lecture/recording session. She's not being a calm, collected performer, reciting what she already knows. She's being the explorer, the discoverer. And she's being Penny, excited and active and happy and physically running about the top of Montmartre finding clues.

And the Louvre scene -- well, I still have some problems with it, but I'm going to make the choice to push that Chevalier de Sangreal moment even further. To have her come up through the courtyard, building the impetus and impact right up to the pyramid.

And also really take the time to talk a bit about religion in Paris. And her own choices in how she wants to present this on her show; the "real history or sensationalism" which is how she sees it at the start of the story (the big arc in this one is her moving to a more...complicated...view.)

***

And research and brainstorming on Blackdamp. Yes, that is still a file folder name. I don't think it belongs on the cover of the final book! Turns out TVtropes, of all things, had a very nice page on airships and how they work in the real world. As well as the usual many, many examples of their use in fiction.

Atomic Rocket, on the other hand, turns out to have greatly expanded the world-building and even the fantasy world-building materials. There is an exceptionally long page (and on Atomic Rocket, pages can get long indeed) on developing fictional histories, constructed in terms of various more-or-less (sometimes rather less) accurate ways of modeling history -- from Toynbee to Hari Seldon, as it were.

So...coinage in Traveller, Gingery machines, the Clock of the Long Now, and that's just a couple items from one out of some hundred sections of that one page.

I may be reading for a while.

But the ideas are coming very quickly. This one long since passed the critical mass phase, the snowball growth point, where each bit that is in the notes file spawns more and more ideas.

And as usual, cold weather and work saps my strength and focus. By the time I get home, it is all I can do to get some food and run the heat until I can crawl into bed without shivering.

Blackdamp

 

In my head, that's the working title now. Pity it would never work for a novel.  Blackdamp just sounds icky and depressing. What are you going to read next, Warmspit ?

(Don't give the YA authors any ideas.)

So the mainspring of the plot right now seems to be the voyage of the Swift. But the more I thought about the Savant society, the more that episode turned into a perfect bit of Dark Academia. I still don't quite have the right character to explore Not-London in the same depth, though. Need someone who can go properly Oliver Twist about the place.

I'm toying with the idea of a Designated Protagonist who is charming, good-looking, lucky...but we are telling the story from the point of view of one of his supporting characters, specifically the gadgeteer. Because I've also really wanted to read -- or write -- a story where a hacker type gets to engineer the shit out of the problem. 

If it is going to be airships all the time, I also need to think about airship combat. My thoughts at the moment is this resembles modern fighter combat in a few ways; if you can see it, you can take it down (kind of hard to armor a dirigible). If the guys who are closer to steam age are still using cannon, they have to close a lot closer. The diesel guys could have missiles, and that puts the onus on anti-missiles, active defenses, shooting first, and best of all, not being anywhere near the shooting in the first place.

(That, and not taking a big bag of hydrogen into a battle).

But my thoughts there are still pretty vague. One has to have a certain balance, a certain dual-mind approach; let one mind come up with what is actually reasonable and sensible and don't let the mind that is worrying how to write plots around it interfere with the process too soon. Eventually, one nudges tech and other world building to whichever of multiple near-equal options has the best story-telling opportunities. But try not to do this prematurely.

***

Sometimes a Fox is in tatters. I am basically tossing most of my scene and chapter plan, and about half the previously written scenes are getting scrapped for parts.

A lot of work that takes a ton of concentration and can't really be done off-line. I need all the screen real estate I can to try to re-arrange the pieces into something that will work. I really am trying to pare this one down. The problem is always figuring out what you can put in if you don't want to talk about art, history, describe the settings, or have a lot of action.

I still don't get how so many people manage to get a hundred thousand words out of riding tireless horses through largely un-described terrain, and hitting thing with swords at intervals. But then, apparently a common approach to writing is to write lean, expand in the edit.

I can't do it. I have too many ideas to fit before I've even finished the outline.

I opened the General Notes file for the novel over brunch. I was hoping I could clarify where I'm trying to go with the themes and relationships and the general plot.

That file is 50,000 words long.