How do you solve a problem like Amelia?

I got a little further on Sometimes a Fox before I had to stop for another from-the-top edit. With luck, though, this one will be less aggressive.

It was the character of Amelia that finally set it off. And you know what was the last straw? Olive trees.

Specifically, there was a triptych of prints of an olive grove we got back from one client at work and there was a new client interested in them. Except we were missing one. It finally came in a box with a return address from Epic Games (!) but my boss wasn't sure that was actually an olive tree. "I'm not a horticulturalist," he said.

The thought crossed my mind that my protagonist, Penny, should be able to recognize olive trees. Them being the Gift of Athena and all (and her spending time in Greece). In fact, she does, in the Japan adventure. But that train of thought was just leaving the station, and pretty soon it had the character Amelia from the latest book making a remark and...

That's when I decided I really needed to try again with her character.

I don't mind the banter. Really, I don't. I think I've been doing too much of it. I find it easy to write, but I don't know if my readers (all three of them) enjoy it as much as I do. Still, I'm willing to let this book go and try to fix it in the next one.

It is the idiot lectures.

They aren't really idiot lectures, in that much of what Amelia is info-dumping isn't essential to the story. It is what the story is about in the larger terms, of course; we're in Paris, experiencing Art, so we need to talk about it some.

But that's only one side of it. I don't like characters who seem to be only in the book so they can deliver exposition. I also don't like that Penny is spending most of the book waiting for clues to drop in her lap. She's basically just absorbing everything.

Sure, there should be some clues in this Paris treasure hunt she can't solve by brute force, and needs that off-the-wall inspiration, that weird chance happening that allows them to break through.

But I have whole sequences in which Penny has absolutely no idea how to proceed, and is just absorbing random Art and Paris stuff until a bible quote, a Degas sculpture and a colorful swear from Captain Haddock finally hands her the thread.

I want the conversations about art. But it has already been in my notes -- and I've started to apply it -- that these scenes are more about two characters talking about art then it is the substance of their conversation; it is the personalities, the emotional beats, the delights of sharing a cafe au lait in the mezzanine of a great art museum with a friend.

***

Anyhow, I gave her a jeans jacket. Amelia has been in a sundress since pretty much the first draft of her first scene, but it felt less and less in character. She is a neophyte tourist, and she is charming and soft-spoken, but the slightly granola-girl look isn't it.

She's a Carolina Girl. She's a proud Tarheel. And from -- a point later in the book -- from the tech capital, the very urban Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill "Triangle" area. So, sure, the Steel Magnolias thing is still there, but she's not playing shy and sweet and hiding her steel under that. She's the wholesome, friendly, girl-next-door -- with steel under that. With that country self-sufficiency and confidence.

Because none of this is about that character in abstraction, that character in some other book. It is about how she plays with the themes of the tourist experience, Paris Syndrome, Penny's way of doing a "deep dive" into the cultures she visits, etc.

And her need to define herself. She's accepted -- in Japan -- that she is a hero. Still and always a reluctant hero, but she has accepted that this happens to her and she is up for the challenge. But she doesn't know just what this means, especially in a real world that doesn't respect genre and fictional depictions of how things are supposed to go.

Which is really the point of Nathan Frost. He's the rival treasure hunter, only he is stuck in the real world. Adventure isn't happening for him because it really isn't that easy (if it was, a lot more people would be trying it). He's found the rare book with clues to lost gold but no, there's no gold at the end of that search.

***

Taking Amelia away from being the guest lecturer changes how Penny is approaching things. And, yes, as part of this edit pass I'm having her be more focused, less willing to just passively absorb facts and more worried about who stole the book, who this Nathan person is, and of course, what the next clue means.

I wonder if I'll have the book finished by the end of THIS year.