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...