Two Monitors

 

The twin monitor setup is finally doing something for me. I have the basic structure of Sometimes a Fox nailed down now, and even more importantly, figured out how I am telling the story. I dropped Drea almost completely out of the picture, for instance, meaning the only out-of-chronology material of the main narrative is Penny's flashbacks on her first night in Paris.

Jonathan Huxley still has his memoirs, of course, and today I heavily expanded the Bateau-Lavoir scene. I am even more strongly tempted to watch a couple of documentaries on Picasso, especially the young Picasso, in addition to at least something on Rodin (something other than a whole bunch of short subjects on the Gates of Hell, which I have watched.)

In any case, I had the text open on one monitor, and two different mind maps open on the other as I flipped back and forth nailing down more of the mid-scale structure. There was a lot more of that to be planned than I thought there was -- and there's still more to go. Heck, I haven't entirely decided on the chapters to finish up the part I'm writing on now!

But I've been diving back and forth anyhow, mostly taking out big chunks of text (something I'm going to pay for later, as I try to make up my page count) and progressively cleaning up after the various surgeries. It more-or-less is contiguous manuscript up to the Pompidou and the 22K mark now.

That is to say, I'm back up to where I was four months ago. And barely a third of the way through a novel I started well over a year ago.

***

At least I've had some mild success with my "quick Jollof rice" recipe. Tomato paste does not work in the rice cooker; tomato sauce or, even better, petite diced tomatoes. Funny, how all the recipes I turn to most often these days are a crazy mixture of spices. I can't help thinking jollof rice came together as a "throw everything spicy you have into the pot because otherwise it isn't hot enough." But the recipes generally call for chillies, garlic, ginger, pepper, and curry. Plus butter, oil, onion, bell pepper, tomato, beef stock, beef boullion...

Call in the Librarian

I've been watching a television series, also a set of direct-to-cable movies, which are basically another variation on the Warehouse 13 scheme. I think they miss a bet, though. The titular warehouse was filled with artifacts that had been associated with historical figures or events and had absorbed really, really specific magical properties generally relating to the Trivial Pursuit synopsis of the thing. Like, a life preserver off the Titanic causes icebergs to appear sort of thing.

In the case of the New York Metropolitan Library, the artifacts are rather more generic, and largely have whatever powers would make the plot work. In fact, "make magic sparks that cause things to blow up" might cover at least half of them.

Excalibur, for instance, flies around and has a personality. Not exactly what you'd think of a sword most known for being stuck in a stone (and I know, I know, but the show oddly has some justification; as much as it is one of those nerd cred things to know that the Sword in the Stone is another, un-named sword, Mallory collected -- and used -- both versions.)

On the other hand, the surrounding material is hyper-detailed. Whereas Warehouse 13 gave the lead to two ex-cops, leaving one side character to do all the babbling about inscriptions in Babylonian, The Librarian has the book-guy as the lead. "The Librarians" (the television series) ups this by having three as stars. Aside from the one ex-cop bodyguard type, there isn't a Watson in the place.

But I noticed something there. Most of the details are side details and don't matter (and generally don't get explained to the cop, either). Those are the dense geekery about art, literature, and history. The stuff that actually plays in the plot is much, much more simplified, often in fact wrong, and is spelled out carefully so the audience can follow along.

It is subtly enough done I don't think you notice it most of the time. Somehow, though, the show signals when it is just "look, they are talking smart again" and when it is "here's the big clue."

Another thing that makes this possible is that the protagonists are always ahead of the viewer. You aren't expected to have guessed before they did. Not most of the time. So that also means the show really doesn't have to explain all this stuff to the viewer. They can just take it on trust.

Apropos of that, the matter of scripts for Star Trek, the Next Generation came up on a forum I am on. It is pretty well known that the writers were never asked to come up with the technobabble. They'd just write; "Geordie techs the tech and saves the Enterprise." The showrunners would fill in the appropriate "reverse the polarity on the main deflector array" or whatever themselves.

***

I've been plowing through the Paris book. Almost up to the chapter I left off on. But there are several places where I haven't closed up the incisions yet. I just moved one of Huxley's excerpts from where it was throwing off the pacing of the Parkour sequence, stuck it in the middle of the steampunk cabaret scene, and that means I need to pretty much rewrite it. Which I was going to do anyhow; it is going to be longer, and I'm taking the camera inside the "laundry boat" this time.

I have a half-dozen books on Paris which I've read, but I can't remember nearly enough. I was crawling along, nearly stalled out, for so long on this book I've forgotten far too much. That, and the sources I had for the really detailed depictions of the lives of the artists are rather rambling. No way to flip to the exact page and refresh my memory.

With luck that won't happen again, though. Most of the big research left I hope to do just as I hit the scenes in question. There's another book excerpt at Rodin's studio. There's a visit to the Van Gogh Experience. And to finish out Part II, a midnight break-in to the Paris Opera House (the old one, which is now, oddly, just ballet.)

And there's a bit more on the Gates of Hell, and on Herge and Tintin, the Pompidou center...I've already essentially written those scenes, though, so with luck I won't need to do anything beyond a few quick checks.

Plume Fever

Solved another issue with Sometimes a Fox. An entire chapter cut now. It was throwing off the pacing and getting in the way of the flow. So just a simple job to take a few snippets from that chapter and paste them on to a revised opening of the next chapter...

Monday we were cleaning up after a fire at work. Even the respirator I was wearing wasn't quite enough; picked up a headache...went to bed early.

Tuesday hard labor moving all the water-damaged crap. Fully recovered, though; felt great. Worked late to make up any time card shortage I might have picked up over Monday's fun. Took a long shower and the quick recipe I tried turned out not quick and writing time didn't happen then, either.

More heavy lifting Wednesday. That and not getting enough sleep Tuesday night and...you guessed it; another early night.

Thursday was a family thing.

So here it is Friday, and I've done shit for writing all week. Welcome to my world.

***

I am strongly committed that the next project after Sometimes a Fox will be Blackdamp; the stand-alone steampunk fantasy. The Athena Fox series isn't selling. I still like the character concept. Could do a million stories with someone who sits right between naive everyman and experienced hero, beginning student and trained archaeologist, experienced traveller and neophyte.

Only three ideas have gotten to the "yeah, I want to write that" stage. And unfortunately they all have issues.

First is White Sands. She needs to be a legit archaeologist again, so that should be the next book. And it is a good opportunity to get into some detail about what a working dig looks like. The archaeological subject might seem to be the ancient peopling of the Americas -- pre-Clovis stuff -- which comes with a bit of controversy these days (and not just the Solutrean nonsense).

But, really, the archaeological lesson on this one needs to be NAGPRA. And that means I need native voices, because it is their story and they need to be there. Which is a lot of work to try to research it and be respectful and get it right.

(And, oddly, it falls into the Regency trap. That is; it is dangerous to write Regency era because there are so many very, very experienced fans. Well, since Tony Hillerman the "native American detective" has become a significant genre with multiple authors working in it. So again you risk running into an audience who really, really knows this stuff and will catch any shoddy research.)

(I've talked about this in regards to things like writing military SF; many sub-genres are basically part of a dialog. Writers have grown up reading the stuff and reacted to it with their own works. And fans and critics are also part of that conversation. So a new writer trying to break into MilSF had better read a bunch of the stuff first. Because there are well-established tropes, minefields, flame wars, shibboleths; all the aspects of a long, sometimes-heated discussion that's been going on well before you entered the room.)

Apropos of that; it is still a little nebulous, but I want her to be doing some museum restoration/preservation stuff involving relics of the Space Age. And the other direction this could spin off to is futurism, particularly the "lost futures" utopian visions of the L5 Society, undersea colonies, all that jazz. Which basically makes the archaeological lesson about museums; about preservation but also about how you present to the public, balancing between getting history right, and tarting things up to get tickets sold.

And speaking of preservation: the major risk of doing the other big preservation story is it starts to make Penny specialize in a very narrow band of relatively modern history. In this case, warbirds. So the problem of living history; as argued by warbird collectors and restorers (as with vintage cars and firearms) they exist to be flown; sitting in a museum with engine removed is like a bad taxidermy job instead of a proper zoo. But flying them means, well, they crash.

But the other half of the fun is to delve into W.W.II re-creation activities, dress-up and dancing to swing music and some military history.

And a bit of flying, which is the main stumbling block. It wouldn't be fair not to have a bit about flying but I don't want to research it and I don't want the stewardess to be flying the plane (although there is the idea of an experimental jetpack, code-named Icarus before Penny could show up and tell them what a bad idea that name is...)

But that actually isn't one of the three. The last one of that particular list, is archaeological tourism. In Central America. And ends up with Penny having to cross the Darien Gap... 

Bad Logic

I couldn't take the way the backlight kept going out on the Logitech...often not coming back even if I picked up the keyboard in both hands and waved it.

I mean, I understand the engineering choices. They wanted to have one of the few light-up wireless keyboards. But that's so power-hungry they had to design it to dim the lights at every opportunity. And they presumably won't change it because then they'd get bad reviews for short battery life (because people are morons).

So I opened it up. Identifying the backlight was simple; one clear JST connector that couldn't be anything else. Tried 5V (USB on it). No go. Measured the terminal, and -- again because of that battery-saving software -- the meter kept jumping around but it looked like as much as forty volts. Tried twelve, still nothing. Fine. Tore down further so I could look at the actual lights.

And then my respect for the engineers went up because this was clearly an electroluminescent display. Which certainly explained the weird power readings!

Snipped the connector and wired it to an EL inverter I picked up on eBay. Got a little warm but ran fine. Put the keyboard back together...and I'd damaged the eyebrow connector. Superglue did not work; it got into the pins and it was a real mess cleaning it up. Finally got it all back by cutting the connector shorter, scraping the exposed traces, jamming a shaved scrap of credit card in to hold the cable down.

All but the "a" and "3." Which isn't enough to be a whole leg of the matrix meaning I damaged a trace taking the keyboard apart to look at that light panel.

But there's just barely enough there to test...and it turns out that weird delay I noticed is absolutely there. So this thing is basically shit to begin with, because who can type on a keyboard that has a slight delay?

I wrote a three-star review but Amazon removed it.

Logistics, Mark II

The first StableDiffusion repaint/upscale experiments were largely a failure. The main thing I learned is that when the AI is turned up high enough to fix bad join lines and painted-in hair, it also messes up seams and does that awful pareidolia stuff it does, deciding that a button is a rose or that a belt buckle is a circuit board. And messing the hell out of seams because it doesn't get the whole "straight lines" thing.

Another discovery is that, for better or worse, the particular repaint recipe I did on the stock image set I've been basing Penny on has become "her" face for me. I can easily improve the face via AI, as in it looks smoother and more professional. But it also stops being her. And since faces are so subtle, this happens at even lower settings than the ones that start messing up seams and buttons.

So I'm going to have to do this in a much more controlled way. Masking, ControlNet mapping, alpha channel comping back into PhotoShop. Not basically going to be "press the button to make the art look smoother, and while you are at it, add a little more back light."

***

Meanwhile my "Roads must roll" playthrough in Satisfactory really isn't. Trains are a more efficient solution. Basically, the map is just too damned big! Even putting aside the time spend building the roads in the first place, driving feels like it is starting to approach real-world commuting times. 

And my fancy combination road with underslung conveyor belts is a pain to hook up. Although that's another thing rumored in Update 8; that blueprints will snap connections. Right now, it involves crawling under the road building conveyor belts and running power, and that's just annoying.

Again, the map is too big. Out in the Dune Desert, resource nodes are close enough together it makes sense to haul a dozen remote mining camps worth of raw ore into a trunk conveyor belt to a centralized factory. But I've just started into Aluminium production and -- quite intentionally from the game designers -- the necessary resources are never found in easy conveyor belt distance from each other. Which is why my previous play, I had a weird loop train line to move silica here and coal there and aluminium ingots there. 

Which I had to follow up with smart splitters feeding into item dumps, because otherwise I'd get a silica backup that would end up with a cargo train that was supposed to be carrying ingots dumping that into the manufacturing site, instead...

***

Picked up a Logitech MX (half the reason being, I needed an excuse to take the Smart out on the highway). Okay keyboard but...grey on black so when the keyboard light is off you can't see the keys, and that light is sensor-controlled and the sensor was programmed by an absolute idiot.

Seriously, Logitech could have released a software/firmware patch. But no; they refuse to fix it. So it is time to crack the case and see what I can hack.

Logistics

Trying to get to that cover art. I wanted to get things set up so PhotoShop and StableDiffusion would be on the same machine for ease of workflow. But the M2 doesn't have the GPU to run StableDiffusion well, and the PC doesn't have the dual monitors. And neither my Wacom tablet nor my folders of source material are migrated yet.

Pity file sharing is such a pain. Even between Macs; Apple sort of makes it inviting, but what they mean is, "it is so easy to promiscuously share contact lists, shopping habits, PayPal login and passwords on all your computers. And oh yes, all your files will be on our cloud server."

Maybe it isn't that bad, but "make a photo album on Apple that all your devices share" is easy. "Put this photo from the iPhone where PhotoShop on the M2 can paint it, and where StableDiffusion on the PC can use it for ControlNet tests"...yeah, that's not as straight-forward.

Oh, ControlNet is sort of working. I was able to generate a depth map. I should have brought that into PhotoShop and used it as an alpha channel. What did I say about needing to move files back and forth between those two applications? (And maybe a few more, if I am going to rework my book covers).

Yeah, and for a break from all that I'm still hanging out on Planet "Massage 22B-whatever" trying to get my infrastructure there organized. I had the idea that a massive road with pipelines and conveyor belts sharing the right-of-way would be an efficient way to work. Well, not the way I'd implemented it. So as soon as the next goalpost is unlocked I'm taking down half the road network and rebuilding it into something a little less ugly.

At least my car is finally through smog. I was not enjoying walking to work in the rain while they were working on it.

Getting a Clue

Over brunch today at my favorite cafe I finally wrote the "Gate of Hell" clue.

I've been struggling with how to deal with this for well over a month. It felt good. Of course the clue itself isn't great writing, and it is a worse clue (although that was a design goal).

Like I said earlier, this one is to give insight into Jonathan Huxley's personality and inner conflicts. It is to talk about the unfinished masterwork of Rodin. It is to be a springboard for all sorts of dialog hooks, and also function as a false clue/red herring to send the gang to the Van Gogh "living" exhibit (the animated video wall thing that's been going around for a while). 

Possibly going to the symphony again (on May the Fourth, of course) pushed me towards tracking down "Four Preludes..." a poem by (as it turns out) Carl Sandburg, published in 1922, and described by Micheal Tilson-Thomas (who set it to music) as "A honky-tonk Ozymandias."

There's a bit of Ozymandias in the mix as well. Hux uses it as a clue for the Paris Expo, which he knew would be torn down, and he managed to remember that another obelisk from Rameses II (the actual guy behind Shelley's poem) was in the center of Paris. In fact, right where the fancy entrance gate was.

Meanwhile my mechanic needs a clue. Brought the smarty in with a bad secondary air injection pump. Told them I'd be needing a new one. "We'll take a look." Held the car all weekend before opening the hood and then delightedly "informing" me that I needed a new pump. Which they then, four days later, finally ordered.

I suggested they might want to replace the valves while they were at it. Nope. They closed the car up without even inspecting the rest of the system. It failed again. Brought it back. And this time it has been over a week and somehow they still haven't managed to find a valve that I can see clearly is at the major Merc parts houses (and on eBay, natch.)

So I'm a little wiped out from a lot of extra walking, with a bit of rain thrown in, and a late-night concert, and doing some required (online) training that kept me so late at work they locked all the doors on me. Which is why, instead of finishing the next clue (the Opera Garnier clue) I'm going to go back to Massage-2(A-B)b and Zen out trying to make my growing network of mines and factories and roads a little more manageable.

I also told my current book-cover artist to hold off doing anything until I'd had a chance to try a repaint of the stock art myself. I like their concept, but I'm very consciously doing the "Clark Savage needs a new shirt" thing where Athena is always on the cover in a variation of her gender-swapped Indiana Jones outfit, regardless of whether she'd be wearing anything like it inside.

But that's another large can there; I want to integrate Stable Diffusion into my workflow, which means the best approach is probably to go do some tweaks I've been planning on the previous three covers first, and...