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.