Put on...the mask!

I don't remember what movie that was. 1950's horror movie about a cursed, well, mask. At certain points the audience was instructed to put on their 3D glasses and...

Sometimes a Fox is crawling along. I've been ridiculously sick basically since Christmas (tested positive AGAIN for COVID) and I'm lucky to get an hour or two of clear thinking before my brain goes out again...in a week.

Made progress on the next book, though. Watched several movies and read a new urban fantasy series cover to cover and messed around with a few games but being sick and feeling stupid isn't exactly the time you finally sit down with War and Peace.

Whatever I bumped off of, I finally accepted I wasn't actually against having my cast running around in oxygen masks. And there's some fun possibilities if you stick with the CO2 atmosphere.

The biggest reason not to tinker with Venus is that it becomes too easy. Once you've added "A wizard did it" to explain why the air is breathable now (or any number of other things), it becomes just a little bit too transparent how the world is being constructed to permit the story being told. It may not be a slippery slope but it looks like a slippery slope.

So, no magical lost Earth technology or remarkable feat of terraformation or anything. Instead I'm going to more-or-less use the real planet. Just bend it a little, like steampunk bends friction and tolerance and energy densities because I'm sorry, a charcoal fire and brass gears does not make you a good helicopter.

That decision bumped into discoveries I made doing a trial sketch of the opening scene. It is a sort of graduation exercise and...how many people are actually in this class? Um. I think this is going to be old-fashioned world-building, where I sit down and work out some general population numbers and basic economies so the places feel internally consistent.

Which means I probably won't finish that book this year, either.

Macramé

That's my new writing term.

So when you've got an A plot and a B plot (for a full-length novel, at least that, and probably a C and D as well) they mostly run on parallel tracks. It allows, among other things, for you to provide that action-reaction; when a major turn has happened in the A plot, we switch to the B plot to allow the reader to digest what has just happened before we throw the next A plot event at them.

Those threads cross, and depending on how on-the-nose you want to plot things, they may end up in a crisis or revelation point at the same time in some bring-together scene.

And of course you have the other threads; character arcs, world-building tasks, development of theme. All of those are also running, more or less parallel, and when possible with their big developments staggered so the reader can pay attention to the personal crisis or the unveiling of the Big Bad or the new information about a side character in (relative) isolation.

And then there are the macramé scenes. Those are the scenes when multiple threads converge and connect. Those can be the most satisfying when you finally get them to work. But that "finally" in there? Yeah, that's the problem. These scenes can also be a total pain.

Yeah, that's where the book is now.

I'm throwing out all of my old calendar marks. One year since starting, one year since the previous book...all of that is gone now. But...the story is set in April, and maybe, just maybe, I can have it finished by then.