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.