Won on the playing fields...

CC Alexander Williams

Huxley was at Eton.

I mean the character whose memoir sends Penny off to Paris on a sub-Dan Brown treasure hunt. I've been doing some pruning. You know; trim out some dead wood and open up things to allow air and light to circulate.

Which is to say; I decided the current draft of Sometimes a Fox is still a hard read. It is too unfocused, and yes part of the problem is not having a dynamic conflict at the heart of it. But it is also that it is too mosaic, too kaleidoscope, zigging and zagging like Matt Smith's Doctor at his worst.

I can't fix all of that, but Part II has many of the better scenes. And the reason is those are scenes that are focused mostly on one thing, and bring to bear mood and setting and a more direct narrative arc. The opening scene, for instance, is Penny goes for a morning run through the neighborhood of Montmartre.

And, oddly, the two big scenes at Pompidou. Sure, there's so much stuff about art history and techniques and politics, and an absolute ton of name-dropping of artists and works, but it is focused on a more-or-less singular subject and focused more-or-less on a point.

***

I was home sick, both feeling far too sick to go to work, and wanting to be careful because COVID is going around again and I had just run out of tests to confirm or deny. A bit of clear space to think again and I think I'm in a better space to finish the book now.

So started through from Page One, seeing where I could prune stuff out that wasn't advancing the thrust of that scene, and instead of leaving a hole, using the space to strengthen and re-iterate. Right down to the sentence level, recasting a sentence that was trying to say two different things, into two different sentences each of which was more focused.

And then I hit a bit where Penny remarks Jonathan Huxley is strewing his manuscript with the historical and classical allusions typical for a man of his time and education. "After all, he was a ___ graduate."

Oops. I'd thought about it. I'd done the research and I'd decided on a school. But...I'd been working on the book so long I forgot. And, no, I don't generally do character sheets so there was nowhere to look it up.

So that was a chunk of the evening. It mattered, because he'd described himself right on the title of his book; "A 'Tug' at the Laundry Boat."

It turned out to be one of those impossible search terms. I read multiple pages on slang and academic terms at Oxford and Cambridge and even poked around Canterbury. And turned up multiple descriptions of tug-of-war matches between various collegiate entities.

Finally I remembered I'd thought about sending him to one of the schools famed for turning out military men. And, yes...the King's Scholars at Eton get to wear a toga over their gowns. So they are known as Collegers, or colloquially, as 'tugs' -- spparently derived from the Latin Gens Togata.

And famed alumni from the King's Scholar list includes? Aldous Huxley.