Love's Labors

I had a picture of Sacré-Coeur on my desktop as reminder. This breakfast I noticed tiny white blobs. Yeah; there are love locks on those fences, now. I found a tourist photograph dated "four years ago" so it is contemporary with the events of Sometimes a Fox.

It is also the 150th anniversary of the birth of Colette. She's in the news right now.

And speaking of contemporary; I'm finally out of Chapter 1, but I haven't quite figured how I am handling the out-of-chronology sections of the book. The style I chose to write this series in is First Person "Immediate" Past, and something I'm calling "unconscious narrator."

The latter is not that uncommon. We've moved on from First Person accounts that are dressed in a framing story, whether a diary or a, "My word, Major, how ever did you survive?" Instead we are just listening in to the inner monologue of the narrator as they go about their day.

It is a form that constrains some of the usual ways of managing information. Whereas in other forms of narration you can drop in an explanation of when Alice and Bob were classmates back in high school, or how Phlogiston Theory works, or what exactly Eve purchased at the hardware store the previous day, in this kind of unconscious narration you need to create an excuse for this sudden woolgathering.

That's fine, I have some comfort with working those tricks and where I can push it. But there's this sequence of Penny alone and cold on her first night in Paris that I want to have the same immediacy as the main text. For structural reasons, though, it can't be told chronologically with that main text.

I have to try a few versions and see how I like them. First off; set it off in its own scene, tell it in simple past, but bracket it lightly with past perfect -- with, that is, a sort of framing story that makes explicit that she is casting her mind back into the past.

Other than that, I was able to save most of Chapter 2. Light editing; I moved the clues from the steps of Sacré-Coeur to the (un-named in the narrative) breakfast place I was going to when I was staying in Montmartre myself, and reworked the Ozymandias stuff.

I'll see how much I can save of the old Abbesses/Louvre scene, though, as I construct my new Chapter 3 "Chevaliers de Sangral" riff.

***

Speaking of Dan Brown...

I was browsing on Amazon and although I still don't have a name for the kind of book where a historical mystery (usually a dangerous artifact or a lost treasure) is adventured after in a contemporary (and usually globe-trotting) setting.

But the covers and titles are very recognizable. As much as I like the "Fox" titles, and the current covers, they brand it as somewhere in the Mystery Cozy zone, with the not-uncommon quirky 20-or-30-something female protagonist.

"Artifact" titles are only a subset, I see by reading lots of titles. The better template is pairing a historical identifier with something ominous.

"The historical period and/or figure that has lots of thrillers written about them already (of) portentous warnings of fire flood and death to come."

And I wanted to try to make it work. I've got big recognizable history things. And I've got adventure. The thing I haven't got, though, is the kind of world-changing secrets that drive a thriller plot. Penny isn't digging up a vase that summons the Greek Furies. (That's one "R," please.)

I did try. I tinkered. Came up with The Athenian Legacy but it sounded like it would be a sprawling family saga about Greek shipping tycoons or something. Secrets of the Blitz is either a talking-heads BBC documentary, or a how-to book about American Football.

Kusanagi has graced the cover of more than one book, and for once Penny is actually searching, and finding, a named artifact. Unfortunately she actually finds the Mirror, not the Sword (spoilers!) and most of the story is...well, it goes in some other directions. There are ancient astronauts, but that's the beliefs of a weird cult and the story doesn't go too far into what they think is going on.

So that was a loss.

Buffalo buffalo Italian buffalo buffalo buffalo...

They still haven't gotten that good English butter back in the store (although I did pick up a jar of Colman's). So on impulse picked up some Italian-made buffalo butter.

The jollof rice is coming along. Got some tips from a Ghanese fellow at work.  Finished a project at work that's been taking far too long, too:

Fairly simple bench, but wired for three different voltages with various quick-disconnects for them. That took a while.

And I'm finally done with Chapter One on Sometimes a Fox.

Downtown

Cold and alone in the ice-fields of Hoth, at least I’ve got my ride — tauntaun!

He might be ugly but you know what they say; he smells much worse inside — tauntaun!

(With apologies to Petulia Clark).

One of the things I say when I’m answering questions about writing is that structure repeats. Think of the prototype paragraph so beloved for class essays; opening statement, exploration, recapitulation and conclusion.

Well, it is only a guideline (insert pirate here) and one breaks up the structure, but that basic idea is seen in not just the paragraph, but the sentence, and in the novel itself.

Or in the chapter. I’ve been pushing very hard this week and somehow managing to get a little bit of writing done every day and I am finally down to the final scene of the first chapter.

Where I need to sum up what was presented and what was learned; basically, (since this is that all-important opening chapter), driving home what that chapter had to say about what the reader can expect from the book.

Brief mentions, in other words, of the main elements at play; the excitement of the treasure hunt (and the form it will take), the delights of Paris (both as the romanticized tourist destination and as the real city), the art of history (understanding that the past is a different country, and they write differently there.)

And briefly on Penny finally growing into her own as an experienced traveler, who still makes plenty of mistakes, and more than half expects another adventure (she’s right).

Of course, when I looked at the new formatting, with the epistolary fragment from Huxley set out in its own block surrounded by white space, it felt too short.

So last night was experimenting with what more he could say without giving away too much too early. And without straining my still-poor understanding of just what Montmartre looked like in 1900.

Catch 2

I have trouble sitting down and writing because it turns into something I’m “supposed” to do. So there’s pressure, and it starts to feel too much like work.

So I try to get a little writing done at work. That didn’t work any better; at work, I’m “not” supposed to do it and that makes it too hard to concentrate.

Still in Chapter One. Or it might be Chapter Two; I write in Scenes, and I make the final decision where chapter breaks fall while I’m getting ready to compile.

But I got through the scene outside the Basilica of Sacre-Coeur. And I got through the scene at the Eglise de Saint-Pierre du Montmartre. And I’ve started the scene back outside Sacre-Coeur, on the wide steps leading all the way down the butte to the Parc Louise-Michel.

All I have now is for her to puzzle a bit over the next clue, read a bit of Huxley’s book, and start to realize just how much she struggles with trying to understand the context within which he is writing.

I’m re-formatting so the clues from Huxley’s book are presented as epigrams for my own chapter headings, and the full-length quotes from the body of his text are set out either in italics or, if Kindle supports it, a different font.

The next chapter will (probably) be the first flashback scene and I still haven’t decided how to handle those.

Yeah, yeah, I’m writing a dual-time novel with Proustian loop-the-loops. Oddly, though, it really is the most sensible way to tell this.

I did originally mean to take this full Tomb Raider, with sword fights on top of airplanes and so on, but I’m relatively happy to have what is more a light adventure-mystery with travel and history elements.

I’ve been reading a new series on Kindle. Young and somewhat naive academic travels to some picaresque location and runs into a historical mystery. The big difference is this writer has accepted you need to bend history a little. In this case, alchemy is real. The writer is a trained historian, though, and his stuff about Newton and the Great Fire and all certainly convince me. And the second book, which I’ve begun, begins with the final days of the Sun King (and, yes, in that book his protagonist gets to be fish-out-of-water in Paris and, one presumes, at least a little Versailles.)

So at least one other person thinks that a little history and a little fun with location (a big confrontation in the first book takes place under the dome of St Paul’s, and there’s some derring-do around the London Eye.) And do it without filling the place with bad stereotypes and history with alien magic and crystal skulls.

Anyhow. Sometimes a Fox is largely the recovery phase (in that scheme of action-recovery alternation of scenes) for the previous book, a relaxed time where Penny can reflect on what she has learned and how she has changed since she first boarded that flight to Athens.

This, wrapped in an exploration of how we understand history, with her struggles to be the proper academic historian she thinks she should be, the playfulness of the steampunk crowd, and the potentially harmful excesses the treasure hunt gets into.

Wrapped, of course, in a treasure hunt across Paris.

I don’t need all of this in the first chapters, but this is where I have to lay out for the audience that we are doing a treasure hunt, what it will look like, and excite them with it. And show them Penny finally growing into the mature and experienced traveler she was going to be. And seed the idea that there are other conflicts in play; the potential abuses of the treasure hunt, the difficulties in understanding writings from an earlier age, her mixed feelings about the adventures she seems fated to have, etc.

Which is why I’m several weeks and the sixth revision in on these dratted opening chapters.

Once I’ve got this story open, it should relax. I should be able to save a big chunk of my existing work, too, and I’ll be close to the 40% mark within a week or two.

Slow Motion

Progress in the Steampunk book. The working title is still Blackdamp, largely because it would look good on a cover, being short and having lots of good places for a nice steam-fantasy font to go a little crazy.

That, and it inspires me for some Dickens/Joan Aiken hardship and poverty in the bad parts of my floating cloud London-analog. Although I'm still not sure what character works best for this, but a chap with the working name of Steerpike (yes, conceptually stolen from Ghormengast) is growing on me.

But I do need to clear Sometimes a Fox from my work list. I am still in Chapter One, and I am fighting my way paragraph by paragraph through it.

I think, once I've gotten through the business of getting the story set up properly and rolling in the right direction, I should be able to tweak much of the existing prose and shove my way through at a much brisker pace. But this is such a tough set-up.

I understand why Hollywood changes so much in history and in other source materials. Hollywood has a finely oiled machine cranking out story beats. A hundred departments are expecting a story beat of a certain kind of shape and form that they can then do the things they do with music and costumes and cinematography and all that.

I so very much get it. The first chapters are character. I need to set up certain character moments and lay certain expectations out and the map is getting in the way. The map, and history, and, well, reality. My task would be so much easier if I could plant the thing I need her to see or interact with or talk about right when the character path needs a specific thing to be seen or interacted with or talked about.

But, no, the statue of Saint Denis is at the Paroisse, and the line to get into the basilica of Notre-Dame leads around to the left, and so on and so forth. I can cheat some things; I can make her somehow fail to react to the view of Paris from the steps and pick that up only from the observation area a short way down the hill.

But I can't change the history. That is a difficulty throughout this series but it is really a problem here. Sorry, no Society Of Secret Secrets went around building obscure clues into every monument of Paris. Or, even more presciently, mostly the ones that are big tourist attractions in 2019. (And somehow, none of these clues got bombed out, plastered over, or otherwise lost in the history of several wars and massive reshaping of the Paris landscape).

But that's just the job. What is making this slow is the brain. I'm under the weather and the weather is overwhelming everyone. My state is underwater and I'm cold, wet, have a cold, and working too hard at my regular job. I get home and I can't even read what I've written.

Three times in the last few days I wrote a new version of the steps of Notre-Dame sequence (a half-dozen paragraphs) and every single time I forgot completely one of the reasons it needed to be re-written in the first place.

Lydia, oh Lydia...

It reminds me of the old days of organizing every patch in your synth library...by the time you'd finished playing around, trying out patches, moving things, labelling and organizing things...you weren't interested in composing anything.

Well, spent the weekend expanding the mod stack for Skyrim. The winning combination for Whiterun turned out to be The Autumn of Whiterun, with Realistic Aspen trees and the A Noble Skyrim texture pack, and I think that was it; "Autumn" adds a few minor tweaks to the layout of Whiterun, but nothing as crazy as JK's Whiterun, or the Dawn of Skyrim series of hold capitol remakes.

Outside, the scenery is largely Traverse the Uvenwald, which redoes all the trees and much minor vegetation to both be thicker but also to be more distinct in each location, although the grass and flowers (and some of the meshes and textures) are coming out of Skyrim Floral Overhaul. Enhanced Landscapes is adding a bunch of new details and general hole-fixing, itself driving Skyland Landscape Texture Overhaul and Skyrim 3D Rocks. And Nordic Snow is holding it all together. Really. That Nordic Snow has a huge impact on the look, seeing as all it replaces is the texture maps for...snow.

(There's a lot of snow in Skyrim.)

Enhanced Lighting and FX gets the basic look and sky, with the weather coming in from Vivid Weathers, with a little mod called Wet and Cold adding all those lovely little details of how rain gets things wet, and Blowing in the Wind is making sure that things, well, you know. I'd tinkered with two other weather mods and another lighting mod before this and I'm still torn, but sometimes you have to go by age and support, because for every two mods, there's probably a patch out there written to let them play nice together.

This is why load order is so much fun. Get things stacked up so Skyland replaces the rocks and snow then Nordic Snow replaces Skyland's snow...

So that got Whiterun and the countryside. Farmhouses and Farm Towns, in combination with Noble Skyrim, made a lot of the stand-alone structures, little farms and mining camps, prettier. I went and did most of the Great Cities upgrades to the towns, as those add a lot of unique character to places like Dragon Bridge and Rorikstead. And all sorts of file conflicts until I got Karthwasten working properly without breaking something else! Oh, and Farmhouse Inns, which isn't quite the hay bales you'd think from the name but does a unique re-design of the inns of the major holds, each one distinct and different in interesting ways.

Plus Farm Animals and Co., which adds so many different animals, all of them appropriate to the city; the sea-side Solitude has gulls, there are doves and peacocks, and the farms have, well, farm animals. And I am annoyed. The Hearthfire DLC lets you build a coop and pasture and own cow and some chickens, but there's only one mod -- made by an unpaid amateur, of course, because Bethesda isn't that competent -- that lets you get milk and eggs.

But Whiterun gave me an idea. Give a couple of other places a really good identity. Well, Solitude was actually wonderful with the Great City of Solitude mod. I wanted a very upscale and nice-looking Bard's College but the one I really wanted required off-site tools that weren't working right, so instead a simpler JK's version. Which with the Noble textures looks elegant enough.

Frankly HD Markarth (with the additional Expansion) was all Markarth really needed. It was spectacular. And since that package of textures enhances pretty much every Dwemer ruin on the map...

(Picture from the mod-maker.)

The fallen Winterhold is amazing with the Great City of Winterhold mod, but it was time to make the Magic College of Winterhold look really different. Tried four different mods, didn't care for two and the third was done around SkyUI which in turn is based on SSE which is of course not fully supported in Anniversary yet...

Ah, but College of Winterhold Upgraded plays nicely with Chantry College of Winterhold, using the textures of the Snow Elves chantry in the Dawnguard DLC. Gave it a very interesting flavor. Plus Magic College Music and now it is getting a bit of Dark Academia, a bit of Magic School. Unfortunately. the make-over of the existing students was, again, a stack of off-site resources and those resources threatened to break things. So it won't quite be the perfect cast...

Except there is a face remake mod that I think I can run without all that craziness that makes them prettier and more memorable (aka, good cast members for the Dark Academia fantasy story). Plus a couple mods that expands on the various College quests and adds some proper magic teaching. 

Not my picture, but that is the mesh-and-texture combination I am using. A well-tested and popular one, it seems.

I did finally find some skin texture packs that didn't require going the whole CBBE route (which I did with Fallout 4, pretty much of necessity). And some small upgrades to clothing textures and jewelry meshes and some high-poly hair with better maps, too. So the people don't look quite so bad. Skyrim may be using the same engine as Fallout 4, but it is earlier and more primitive. It takes a whole bunch of third-party stuff to try to hack decent expressions and otherwise make faces look human.

Look at it this way; the engine only supports six shadow-casting lights at the same time. Six! That means if you have lanterns in a city, the guards can't carry torches without everything flickering on and off.

So you may wonder: is this the Skyrim Walking Simulator now, or is there actually gameplay involved? Well, yes. There are a few play-oriented mods in the stack. Top of the Companions list is Serana Extended Dialogue. Although Sophia, Recorder, and Inigo are waiting in the wings (all of them fully-voiced with their own AIs).

I've a mine, a farm, and a foundry plus a buildable player home to play with. Which does mean I could and have spent hours without going into a single dungeon or pulling a sword (except for the frequent wolves). Archery Tweaks to make it possible to aim bows properly, and Ars Mettalica to let me forge my own arrows (and stop running out of the good ones). Sun Magic, which is frankly slightly overbalanced when it comes to Undead, but for a Champion of Meridia. Member of the Dawnguard, and Wielder of Dawnbreaker, it seemed appropriate.

Cutting Room Floor and the Unofficial Skyrim Patch, but that's a given. HD music and some additional tracks but we are straying into quality experience again. Also Immersive Citizens, Immersive Conversations, Improved Relationship Conversations which all make NPCs sound, and act, a little more human. They talk to each other instead of just waiting for the Dragonborn to come by so they can recite their canned speech, and they even go indoors when it rains! (Or when dragons.)

But, really, I don't need mods to make play easier. That's what console mode is for. Or to add quests since there is a million of them, especially in Anniversary which piles in half the Creation Club material (Bethesda's failed attempt to run a paid mods service).

Or just wander around exploring the landscape.