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.