I am a jelly donut

For a moment I thought I had made a break-through. For two days I struggled with the (fortunately mild) symptoms of COVID. Then I started to get some use out of my enforced isolation. Cranked through clean-up on the first two scenes of Part III of the Paris book and put over a thousand words down on the next.

And oops. It wasn't quite working. This is the process, though. Revision is usually necessary. Many writers begin by getting the whole thing down in an extremely rough draft, and once the whole shape is there on the page they can start whittling and adjusting and finding the real story that's in that rough mass.

Others try to hurry the process by working out as much basic structure as they can in outline. But they still end up with revisions. And then, occupying both spaces, the revise-as-you-go crowd has confidence in their grasp of what the overall shape will be (like the outliners) but is willing to cut now, tightening up the draft now rather than writing more chapters that will just end up on the floor.

A couple of days of struggling and something like thirty attempts to write just one simple conversation. Which I finally got this morning. And the final version was too short to be a full scene but with my understanding of the total structure I moved some stuff that needed to happen soon enough already and I put down almost a thousand words of brand-new scene.

In one morning.

The people who are actually writing for a living claim to crank out 2,000 words a day. Which is how they can get up to four books a year. That's leaving about a month for revisions, which doesn't strike me as plausible when those same people are claiming fifteen revisions and three rounds of beta readers. Basically, the number of words falling off the keyboard in any span of time isn't a good guide to how much book has gotten done.

I'm happy enough with scenes as a metric. I have cut scenes in the past. Moved them, created new ones, heavily revised them. But my draft, when finished, is the third or fourth draft and that's basically the book there. It isn't going to get a lot bigger or smaller and it isn't going to change radically.

Oh, yeah. And I needed a bit of "business" in the scene I just finished so I had Penny eat a millefeulle. That's my genius bonus for that scene. All along, she's been complaining about just how much this adventure keeps coming back to Napoleon. Guess what that particular pastry is called in America?

I also, sadly, could afford no more than a sentence on Loie Fuller. There are just so many amazing people, with such deep stories, in Paris in that period! Innovative dancer, inventor, lesbian -- her list of friends and admirers alone could fill a paragraph (start with Toulouse-Lautrec and end with Marie Curie!)

I knew Part III was going to be a bit unfocused but that's the struggle I am having. It was that damned chevaliers de sangreal scene that got me, once again. I rescued chunks of material from two different scenes in previous drafts, heavily revised and rewrote...and then decided this was the wrong place in the narrative to go on about the role of the Church in the history of Paris.

When I finally got straight what I was going to try to do, I'd realized I had to change half the previous scene and come up with a new conversation -- the one that took thirty drafts -- and now I've got to come up with something to fill the Carrousel du Louvre scene now that Catholic Conspiracies are (mostly) off the table again.

Oh, and the whole scene in the Paris Metro is getting booted downstream to the introduction to the parkour scene at La Defense. So at least I may get some use out of that material. 

I did, during this time of basically outline-as-you-go (or revising the outline, since I am not entirely without one) look at everything I could about the Sully Wing at the Louvre and put together a rough idea of how that scene is going to unfold. Oh, and I read the entire thing from top to bottom to see how it flowed.

Monday, I arrive back at work where six massive panels are waiting for a high-priority, high-profile rush job we only barely have time to finish on deadline. And my engineers phoned (emailed) wanting three more of their units built as well. I totally predicted this. I knew both these projects were going to arrive together and at the last minute.

I hadn't predicted that I'd be climbing out of five days wrestling with a bug. Next week is going to be...interesting.

NaNoCovWri

After all these years, finally had a positive antigen test. So off work for a couple of days. Maybe I can get some writing done?

Bring back those lazy crazy hazy days of Sumer

It might have worked better if Penny knew nothing about history.

I was trying to create a character who could believably pull off a lot of the Archaeologist Adventurer stunts; climb, jump, identify artifacts, read ancient manuscripts, navigate in Tokyo or Paris, Texas). So it made sense to have her know something about history, because that is the big intellectual one (the physical stuff...one can often hand-wave).

And I did the series in first person so she could explain what it was she was seeing without having to have a Boswell follow her around (I ended up creating a character for almost every book that she can talk to, anyhow). And it may have been a mistake. It means I set things up perfectly for the narrative to constantly geek out about history, filling every page with stuff that the reader might struggle with, or even decide is getting in the way of the story.

It might have worked better in third person. Intellectual characters sometimes work better that way. Instead of getting first-hand all this very detailed science, you are just getting the magic at the end, when the hero confidently declares the inscription is in Sumerian, or the light is from a pulsar, or the cabbie is actually a left-handed draftsman who bets on the horses.

Or I could have taken the history from her. Made her an outsider to the world she was walking into, learning the history and archaeology or whatever along with the reader. 

(Which I tried to do; I made a point of having the plot-important history delivered to her so the reader can get it, and can also see her learning it. And yes, I made it a running gag that whatever her knowledge of history, she'd inevitably focused on the wrong things and the plot-important stuff was as unknown to her as it was to the reader.)

It is tempting to think I could have just gone with her as an actor. As pretending the Indiana Jones thing without having any of the skills. But when I started writing, I hadn't realized how much I was going to lean on her acting background. Hell, when I started, she was a film student. The idea that she had spent a while not just in classes but on the stage, much less that she might identify as a theater bum...

The other drawback of the actor thing is she already is inclined to quote plays and sing songs from musicals at any excuse. Perhaps fortunately, copyright doesn't allow that to happen!

But, alas, I had set out to write stories specifically set in places I'd been, and involving history I was interested in, so no matter where I had gone with my protagonist or my narrator, I was going to end up with what some of my critics have been calling "too much stuff" in it.

***

Started another "Archaeological Thriller" on Kindle. Atlantis again (sigh). But it opened with Solon in Thais meeting an Egyptian priest who is (just barely!) believable as being there at the time.

But this was of course the Diego Salvatore the reluctant conquistador chapter; the guy who is in the story just to show the MacGuffin to the reader then get killed. When the story proper opens...they are doing a pretty convincing job of underwater archaeology, with amphorae, Minoan trade ware, and ox-hide ingots right there!

Worth noting that I pay a lot of attention to background building and info dumps and stuff like that in every book I read for pleasure. I am always trying to calibrate, making sure that when I write I know if I am doing less (as if!) or more (likely!) than published books. But it is quite difficult to actually judge this stuff and I am still not sure.

I ended up sort of simultaneously reading that, watching the not-very-good The Hunters, and playing part of Uncharted. And sure a lot of stuff is made that doesn't worry about getting history right. And it seems many of the audience don't care. But the book was on the NYT best-seller list (and Uncharted seemed to be doing decently on Hindu mythology and Indian history) so once again I'm led to believe that even something as out there as Atlantis is an easier sell if the author first gains the reader's confidence that they know their history.

Plus there's an element of fun in it. I've mentioned that more than one author of a neolithic story has had what is clearly the Amesbury Archer show up. In the Atlantis book I've been talking about, Fayum portraits and the Phaistos Disk show up and I'm not going to complain that the former are out-of-period. Because this is a shared in-joke, the author showing that they know the material that they are taking liberties with, and the reader sharing in knowing the thing, too.

***

I'm in low-confidence mode right now. Just finishing up the big "girl talk" bit I planned (Penny and the side character confidante of this book, Amelia, letting down their hair.) Which since Amelia is the Carolina Girl is me trotting out stereotypes of the South to go with the stereotypes of the French. And, yes, the only critique I've gotten so far on the book has been a comment that one of Huxley's lines sounded like the worst mock-period twee English garbage.

Yeah. I can't say I've ever gotten useful critiques. The only critical comments have been "That's shite," not a specific on what was wrong or a suggestion of what to do differently. Well, okay. There was one suggestion that I should provide a list of all the historical characters at the back of the book. That just struck me as a pointless exercise. If you didn't know who Miyamoto Mushashi is, how does it help to have his name listed a second time in an index you have to flip the pages to get to?

***

And I've given up on Starfield. It was mildly amusing in a Zen sort of way at times. There are days when grinding is all your mind can handle. I slowly came to appreciate the world they are trying to build. It just isn't carried out very well. They didn't hit the beats hard enough, and they didn't follow through.

Compare Horizon Zero Dawn. There isn't a story-game segregation, or a world-game segregation. Everything from the UI and menu design to the quest design to the combat design works within the world presented. Contrast with say my favorite whipping-girl, Tomb Raider 2013, in which your scared college student avatar flails away useless with a crappy bow during the cut scene, then you take over and proceed to murderize everyone with and ice axe then desecrate a few W.W.II corpses for the loot while you are at it.

Starfield takes those gaps and fills the experience with them. Todd Howard has been going on (and now he has apparently ChatGPT replying to Steam reviews for him) about how space is supposed to be lonely and some planets are bare.

As if. Pick a remote moon in the far reaches of the map. Land on a completely random location; this is in fact a procedurally generated unique bit of landscape. Three hundred feet away from your landing site is a struggling mining outpost, an abandoned mine, and a pirate base swarming with two hundred well-equipped pirates, and more ships flying in as you watch.

Every single time. (Oh, and it is the same base at that, copy-pasted right down to that one dead body with a flailing leg thanks to a terrain intersection).

Sixteen times the detail? Sixteen times the clutter. I will admit that the terrain out in those "empty" worlds can be very realistic. About Mass Effect: Andromeda realistic, though. Not Unreal Engine realistic. By comparison, Horizon Zero Dawn is a little more obviously computer generated.

But...HZD looks gorgeous. Those pixels are well-spent. And let us not even talk about the Starfield NPCs -- their graphical realism is about Fallout 4 level, but with some exceptions, their design is worse. There is the usual crop of idiots going around saying the problem is Starfield is "woke" so all their people are ethnic and ugly.

Um...the first people you meet in HZD are elderly, and Aloy the ginger is about the whitest person in the game. But oh my god those are some gorgeous people. In all their variety.

That, and they are fully animated. One assumes that Bethesda's excuse is that full RPG means too many lines for hand-animation (which is what Andromeda claimed for why so many people had tired faces). But over there, we've got Baldur's Gate 3 saying "Oh yeah? Hold my beer!"

The best I can figure is that they went like Andromeda did and wasted all their years of development trying to get full proceedural generation working. Then over the last six months of crunch tossed together a few hand-built locations and quests. And it feels like it. There's not even a full DLC of designed material in the game, and all of it looks rushed.

And I went back and replayed both main story and DLC for Horizon Zero Dawn.