Skip to my Louvre

The Conversation from Hell in now back in draft. And this weekend I plugged on through (against the trials and tribulations of new medications) to revise 1,300 words of Penny walking from the metro entrance to I.M. Pei's Inverter Pyramid in the Louvre Carousel.

Speaking of which. I am flipping back and fourth between French and English spelling in my notes, and in the text. Sometimes it is the Eiffel Tower, sometimes le Tour Eiffel.

(As a tower, it is "le." As "The Iron Lady" -- a frequent nickname -- it is "la." Aren't gendered languages fun?)

I'd probably use the French terms more often but Speech-to-Text throws fits at French. Or maybe it is just my French. Lately, with my exploding sinuses, it is throwing fits at everything, but it is still a good way to take notes on the fly. The scenes I just finished re-writing were not in speech-to-text. Or on the phone. I needed the real-estate of the mini and the two monitors connected to it for all the stuff I had to shuffle around or consult.

(Actually, whether I am getting faster at typing or what, I rarely cut-and-paste the material I am re-using. I drag over the bit of scene that has a new home, but then I re-type it, adjusting it to fit in with the flow of the current scene. For today's work, I could not find where I stuck the notes on religious buildings around Montmartre, but it made more sense for the scene to fly past that. But, oddly, I finally turned up something today that explained why there is still a martyrium in the area, after all the revolutions and gypsum mining and so on. It ain't the original.)

I am hopeful but rather less than sanguine that I might have a draft finished by April. Which would put it five years after the time the story takes place. And I don't know (and have stopped wanting to know) since I started.

I still need to revise the Egyptian Room scene, significantly. The Charles de Gaulle shouldn't take much editing; a big thing I've been doing is moving some "beats" around to give character and theme development better arcs, and there is some stuff in there that may need to be moved. And then I'll finally be in the parkour scene at La Defense where I left off for this last round of revisions.

I have dreams that the next Athena Fox story will take a different direction and, possibly, be easier. One problem I've had with this one is there isn't enough plot, and the plot beats unfold far too frequently in a "studying this artwork and knowing a weird detail about an Impressionist painter..." way. The Desert one should be able to have a lot more plot beats that are someone saying something incriminating or someone shooting bullets through a door. Hell, it may be the first story I write that has a proper Body Drop!

I won't need a Murder Wall to work that plot out, though. I will be doing a world book for Blackdamp, though. I finally realized that when I did a test draft of Alice's first scene (the first scene in the book) and I didn't know how many people there were in her class. So I'm going to ballpark the population figures and economies so I have some general grasp of things like, is there a whole street of goldworkers (or whatever appropriate cottage industry) or is there only enough work for one weird guy that does the stuff in his whatever-the-steampunk city-has equivalent of his garage.

And learn about Venus. Bought my first book already. I'm hoping I don't have to learn too much chemistry -- time consuming stuff, that -- but I am very afraid it will be far too important...

That book is looking to take a lot longer than April Next to write...