Capital idea

I'm a good ways into the love locks scene, with one last big chapter to go to the end of Part II. Boy, has this one been a slog!

I also decided that I will send this to an editor after all. I'm not going to sell enough copies to pay for that, and I haven't the patience (see above!) to do developmental edits, but I want a line editor to go through the thing because I just can't deal with capitalization and, even more, italics.

Within the context of what I am doing some of these are arbitrary choices. As a for-instance, I am in this book italicizing sentences in French. As per the trend, if the entire sentence is in French the quotes are also italicized, otherwise, not.

But should I italicize names? Everyone knows the Louvre, so that probably shouldn't be. Something like the Ile de la Cité is actually a descriptive phrase as well as a name. As is anything that is a Rue or a Pont; should it be the Pont des Arts, because "pont" is the French word for bridge? It seems to make sense; that it would be the Eiffel Tower or le Tour Eiffel depending. But then is it properly Notre Dame, since that just means "Sacred Heart?" Or is it better that the familiar English Notre Dame isn't in italics, but Notre Dame de Paris when it is given in full form?

There's a bit early on when the character Bastien is speaking franglish; he is mixing actual French with English and English roots given French grammar (apparently that's a thing). So...which parts of that mess should be in italics?

Oh, and French capitalization rules are different, too. Of course.

I can at least get the French words correct by hiring a French reader. As painful an experience as that is likely to be. But the thought of trying to figure out consistency in such cases as whether I should italicize or quote or both something like, "You say 'bonjour' when you enter a place of business..."

In the Japan novel, my rather odd rule of thumb was that only proper Japanese got italics. If someone mentioned "sushi," that was just treated as an English word imported from Japanese. Even much of Aki's weaboo speak didn't get graced with italics, along with Penny's mixed attempts at it. Only a complete grammatical/idiomatic sentence from her got the full italics.

But all the little details of even if it should be the Eiffel Tower or the Eiffel tower are just too much for me to mess with. Sure I can look them up. But there's something on almost every page, and I'd just as soon to pay someone to worry about that. And fix the places where the italics or the intricacies of punctuation around quotations escape me.

I would very much love to somehow push through this one, and find some way to kick a few more out the door on a much shorter schedule.

(And, yes, the Love Locks scene is on the Pont des Arts. Largely because that's the bridge people think of if they've heard of love locks at all. And even though it is clear of them now, finding an excuse to stick some up anyhow is easier than going into the history of which bridges still have them...)

***

I've been reading a series about a very Mary-Sue character -- it is intentional on the writer's part, but only partially works -- and that's been giving me thoughts about larger-than-life characters. The Greeks didn't have the hangups we do, in that their heroes were larger, stronger, and probably related to a god, and that was just fine.

The first superheroes were also very much of a "faster better stronger" mold -- one of the innovations of Marvel was heroes that had problems and hang-ups and weaknesses, with perpetually broke hang-dog Peter Parker being the poster boy. And now we have come to where we often dislike the really skilled characters -- and when we get them, we demand that those skills have some logical reason for being.

One of the things critics express about the "Sue" characters is the opinion that they haven't earned their powers. But I can't help thinking that there is a hidden gender bias in there. The same swipe of a pen gives a character a black belt, a physics degree, six years in the Marines...but the readers question it more often when that character is female (doesn't help, of course, that the standard is usually hot, young female -- that is, not of the age and size and battered appearance that really should go with those years of getting those skills shown on the paperwork. Yet, this qualification is often waived for the men as well...)

A lot of what went into Penny was reaction on my part. I didn't want the standard female protagonist package, with or without the "strong" appended. So no handy martial arts background or surprisingly young doctorate degree, but she also isn't a shy loner, she gets along fine with cheerleaders, and her hair isn't perfect after a week in a cave.

Yet she is becoming a hero. Sure, an "ordinary man" hero, but in a semi-realistic universe (and trope-aware enough herself) to recognize that you stop being ordinary by the third Holy Grail you manage to dig up. So far, I've held back in that her superhuman ability is her almost autistic focus on whatever history the plot requires her to be knowledgable about.

(She's also able to pull of physical stunts that a self-described "ex dancer and climber of plastic rocks" shouldn't be able to pull off. And has stubborn endurance which is also way off the bell curve. But those are part of the standard "ordinary man" exception where one ticking atom bomb is enough to let thirty-something computer salesman who sometimes plays a bit of pick-up basketball somehow come up with the strength, determination, and sheer luck to beat up a renegade Green Beret.)

The main magic skill I've given her is language. She has an instinct that she isn't in control of. Which basically, at least up to this book, is given her the seasoned-world-traveller characteristic of being able to speak a little of whatever the local language is, without me having to defend her actually learning the damned thing. She's just a very finely tuned parrot; speaking the correct idiomatic phrase to get her through an interaction (with nearly flawless pronunciation), even as she has no idea what it is she said.

And none of that makes my job of how to treat language any easier.