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...