Starry starry night

Now finally to the garden party chapter. About 2.4k so far and looks to hit about 5k before it is all over, putting me at estimated low 70's for the book.

I did sort of diagram it.

The weekend was also a perhaps unnecessary computer upgrade. The gaming computer had a 256GB as the C: drive, another terabyte HD holding the various downloaded Steam games, and another terabyte of spinning rust I couldn't remove because somehow it had gotten flagged as necessary to boot.

Starfield ran poorly on that system. According to one gent, the way it handles assets in multiple fragmented files -- the result of trying to accomplish Todd's "Sixteen times the detail" on a game engine that wasn't built around large optimized files -- played very badly with trying to read the game off anything that wasn't both solid state and in the primary C: slot.

But mostly it was just a little annoying having files all over the place and the remains of the old broken drive still stuffed in there because the computer wouldn't boot without it. So dropped a couple bucks on a 2TB SSD and did a clean install of Windows on it, then started plugging drives back in to haul files off them.

That's the thing; sure, you can DL the game off Steam again, but games for recreation is more about impulse. "Hey, I should finish up Dead Space 2 some time." Impulse and 50+GB downloads (Cyberpunk 2077) is not a good combination.

Oh, and turns out the Steam cloud bollixed a bunch of saves but fortunately I was able to haul them off the old boot drive, too.

Satisfactory runs smoother and I can finally show off my booster hyperloop transit system. So that's nice. I also couldn't get my AUTOMATIC1111 install working again, which is probably overall a good thing. Forbidden West will probably run with decent graphics -- once the price on Steam comes down.

And Starfield? "Graphics card does not meet minimum specs." What, you mean the card I was playing on before the OS reinstall? The posted specs are a 1060. I'm running a 3070 with maxed VRAM!

There are threads going back to 2023 about this bug. As usual for such things, it is all magic incantations. One person updated drivers, one entered some funny numbers into the init, one swapped an audio cable, one chanted at it in High Enochian. Nobody seems to actually know what the underlying issue is.

Here's an underlying issue; how could a major studio release a AAA game they were hoping would be their next flagship game for a ten-year run when modders got interested in it...and have such poor error handling and useless error messages?

I've had startup issues with games before. They last for like eight minutes as the game recognizes I don't have DirectX 12 or whatever, auto-connects to Microsoft, installs the necessary thing, then gets on with business. Or maybe I get into drivers and tweaking because it runs fine, but I think the graphics could be prettier with tweaked settings.

I could try some re-installs and patches. Or junk the game. The thing I'd love to do is ask for a refund but that's not available.

So I finished the evening solving puzzles around Hogwarts.

Got the 22H2 Windows update completed -- which required, apparently, pulling the plug on my microphone otherwise it crashed at 47% -- and now Starfield runs. I can crank up the graphics and it looks half-way decent. But the stalling is still there, even if I'm just standing still. 

So I popped Cyberpunk 2077 up and cranked the settings to about 90% and at just under 30 fps it runs just fine for a fight scene and a car chase through Night City....and it looks GORGEOUS.

Believe

Okay, not entirely bad. When I synched files on Saturday I'd just started the "Belloq" scene. Wrote the first draft that day. Did a complete rewrite of it today and now it is starting to look like a scene.

I don't have hard numbers on how many writers rewrite as they go. Some day it is a terrible idea. More have no problem with it but don't do it. I think it does require a certain level of understanding and confidence so you don't get bogged down in Oscar Wilde'ing your commas instead of finishing the whole draft.

After three books in the series, though, I have pretty good confidence in where I'm going to end up and what is going to stay through the final revision. So I can afford to rewrite a scene now, with the ending still 10,000 words away.

On the other hand, that's all for a thousand-word scene. Sure, I also revised the much shorter scene preceding it, and got a start at the following scene, and did several rounds of revisions tightening up the Apaches scene.

I had Penny doing a little sword play to show off but cut that to focus on this being parkour. That scene is now firmly part of a strong sub-thread of this book; Penny finally starting to trust her instincts. She's been telling herself her "stunts" are wild leaps of faith and she just keeps getting lucky, but of course she is more skilled than she's willing to admit. In the parkour scene is the first place where she gets a glimpse that she's actually been doing rational analysis of her skills and the odds each time. Well, most times. Other times it is just scream and leap. She'd make a good Kzinti.

These are two back-to-back scenes (all taking place at the same cafe table) that are turning out to be much harder than I had thought. On paper they looked simple. Unfortunately a lot of the big character arcs are in play here and that means I'm trying again and again to find just the right approach for them.

Today I got lucky. The breakfast place was jammed and while I waited for my food to arrive I got the "you and I are much alike" conversation rewritten and made good progress on the scene where Penny actually tells someone what she has been up to.

I sure hope the big Steampunk Garden Party won't be a nightmare. I almost feel like I should chart that one out but I'm just gonna try to wing it. At the current rate of progress, I'm over a month out on finishing the book.

Started filling out the KDP data. I do have to pick a firm date, though, if I want to upload that new cover. Because then it will be on pre-sale.

Saline Solution

I'm pouring electrolyte drinks down my throat. Pouring more saline rinse up my nose. Yesterday I spent in the emergency room getting two bags of Ringers through an IV.

My collapse may have been dehydration (having nasty sinus congestion/cold doesn't help any. Nor does existing SVT). Was probably coming my way since Friday, as the big UL inspection was a bit of a wash, too. We didn't flunk. We didn't get enough units built for the test. So we have to reschedule for a second visit by the inspector and that's gonna cost us 3,400 dollar more. Ouch.

Wasn't for lack of trying on my part. But I barely ate or drank that day, and was so zonked on Sunday I never even got around to eating breakfast or lunch. 

In any case I'm willing to try to experiment of better hydration (yeah; the chemistry panel they pulled out of the vein before they started pouring water in there had me in the yellow zone on three different electrolytes). So I'm pushing water, and also hitting fruit juice of various sorts. And this powdered electrolyte/salt stuff that, whoosh.

Oddly enough, not a lot of writing done. 

***

But it does turn out Hogwarts Legacy has replay value...

Belloq

It loomed large in my notes:

But the actual scene went fast. So fast, I finished and got through the first part of the "You and I are much alike" scene.

Which I'm refactoring. This is the art of shaping a proper climax. I'm constantly making little adjustments to bring the various pressures and themes and so forth so they reach their crests at the appropriate moments. Which means in this case I keep adjusting how Penny perceives her "rival" in the Parisian treasure hunt. Especially as this is the penultimate scene with him; the next scene he gets is the climax at Notre Dame des Paris.

(I just found out the creators of "Emily in Paris" meant for the title to be pronounced in the French fashion. So it rhymes. No, it doesn't make it any better.)

Almost at that climax. After "You and I" -- which is three different meetings lumped into a single chapter -- there's the Steampunk Garden Party with the Mummy's Kiss, then the final Proustian Loop as Penny walks to Notre Dame (the "New Mombasa" flashback). And then the epic climb of Notre Dame and the confrontation on the roof.

I suspect, actually, the climb won't be that epic. The architecture isn't that complicated, not that way. And yes, I climbed it in Assassins' Creed : Unity. Bought the game just for that. Besides, in the current day of the story, the scaffolding is still there.

***

Speaking of...

Took a day off to rest and recover and finished Hogwarts Legacy. Bit grindy to get to the end. You can't finish the school term until you are level 34, which in that game pretty much makes you a monster. Even if you skipped learned all three Unforgivable Curses. 

You don't actually level up from combat. Not really. You do it from challenges (and you get a lot more by collecting notebook pages or running errands for people you befriend in your travels). Combat is already a fairly nice rock-paper-scissors plus combos and can get very fast moving. A bit difficult without a controller, as you really need to be able to fire off at least three different spells, use protego, use dodge roll, and to be really effective, use some Ancient Magic too. And, yeah, more than once I was reaching for "2" to fire off a simple leviosa and instead hit the "G" for Ancient Magic Finishing Move.

The combos always work. But the fastest level advancing is if you do the suggested combo that is popping up on your display. So there's three wolves coming at you, you are trying to remember which finger is on confringo, and then you've got to read the tiny text that just came on telling you that for the next 30 seconds, you can complete a Challenge by using depulso on a wolf at exactly the right moment of his charge.

Which isn't even in one of your assigned spell slots, so go into menu, assign it, come back out, re-orient to where that wolf is, figure out if you need to dodge-roll his buddy first, and...

So it can take a bit of work leveling via combat.

And...there's not much of a payoff. When you finally hit 34 and get to take your OWLS, there's a cutscene of you and the other students sitting for your exams. No totals, no score, nothing. Not even (I am told via the message boards) anything if you get 100% completion. Then there's another cutscene where your House wins the cup for that academic year because there's always a 100-point Golden Snitch-type award for being the hero.

The only thing that seems to change is that the people who run out to congratulate you are from your house.

Yeah, not quite as much fun as, say, Horizon Zero Dawn, in which the people joining you for the final fight against the baddies include half the people you chose to help in side-quests (OR the Frozen Wilds DLC!) and all of them have dialogue, too.

The credits take thirty minutes to run. First time I have seen credits that display the entire text of the software license for each font used in the game...

I am not the iambic pentameter

I finally found a properly detailed map of la Petite Ceinture ca 1900. Yes, it does pass right across the northern part of Parc des Buttes Chaumont. But it doesn't go anywhere near the market of Les Halles so the clue is wrong.

Said clue is also 12 syllables per line. Which shouldn't bother me, since it utterly fails at holding the iamb anyhow.

Oddly, the following was sent in on the company-wide maintenance request form:

The leftmost bathroom has a leaky sink which leaves small puddles on the floor below

Dammit. Okay, the guy that sent it in as a musician, but still, I'm sure it was totally unconscious.

Oh, and la REcyclerie is a good choice for a bit of walkable rail and, in fact, the longest remaining tunnel on the old belt railway extends south from Buttes Chaumont (even if the park itself is a twenty minute walk from where I'm starting the scene.)

But...the Paris Catacombs are way down in the 14th arrondisement. The same place I tracked the other tunnel down leads me to believe that the famous mouse-hole being used by cataphiles for their illegal entry is right by Parc Montsouris. 

Ah, well. I have an easy fix for the scene...this is another mouse-hole, leading to something exciting to the urban explorers but not to her. She can still describe the catacombs if she wants to. Les Halles...I'm just gonna have to ignore. I have too many completed scenes already that I'd have to edit, and I'm trying to write now, not rewrite!

***

I know that's not iambic, more of a dactyl. Still wonderful especially for being unintentional.

***

I just this moment found out the correct term for those mouse holes. The cataphiles call them “châtières”

Tow not Shell

So I'm finally up to the "Apaches" sequence. Two key sequences left, maybe a dozen scenes, and I'll finally be done with this book.

Image Ophelia Holt

Up there is part of La Petite Ceinture, the "small belt" railway that circled Paris carrying freight from more-or-less the late 1850s (when several different independently operated rail lines were joined into a full loop) to the early 1950s, and passengers mostly at the turn of the century, from the 1880s and falling off rapidly after 1908 when the Metro began to take over.

The lines fell into that cursed gap where the city didn't own it and the railways weren't willing to give it up, meaning they were left largely abandoned until quite recently. The last decade has been the major sprucing up and repurposing of portions of the right-of-way (a brief small sections are still in active use by the RER) as city parks.

And then there's La Recyclerie. A sort of communal garden and recycling center and restaurant collected together in and around an old train station in Clignancourt. That's their terrace, above. It's very Whole Earth Catalog, Green Revolution, shabby-chic.

Really, all I needed was a place for my protagonist to be led down to the trackway, where she will see a bit of the old route, go into one of the tunnels, be shown (and decide against) the mouse-hole into one of the illegal sections of the Paris Catacombs, then on the way out be threatened by some street punks and finally (after failing through the rest of the book) get a parkour trick right while running away from them.

But. There's a bit of character stuff with the Carolina Girl, Amelia. Who turns out to be studying mechanical engineering at UNC (go to hell, Duke!) and around the climax of the book provides a bit of a Q Branch for Penny (mostly getting her in worse trouble than she would have on her own). I toyed with staging a visit to a hackerspace since these were some ideas about the communities of modern Paris I wanted to show.

Well, this isn't really it, but I can efficiently hit those notes with La Recyclerie. So that's why I chose to enter the tracks here (It is also...and this was not easy research!...close to the tunnel sections I think I want. Plus also passes through the corner of Parc des Buttes Chaumont, where the next big sequence is happening.

Image Lombana CC BY-SA 3.0

And it is a fun place all by itself and that's part of what I'm trying to do with this particular travel-oriented series; to find a few places that are less frequently mentioned and give the reader the experience of learning about them.

***

More and more, though, the process of writing is distressing me. I would like to think it is just a problem of first-person POV, but I think that just makes it more obvious.

We talk about "Show not tell." But ultimately everything is a "tell." It is all words on paper. With the possible exception of 3rd person omniscient, it is all filtered through the POV of a narrator, a character of the story (if not always in the story), who is telling you.

That's why I say first person just makes it more obvious. 

"There's a rocket ship on fire," the space-port guard pointed up.

I looked up into the sky. There was a rocket ship on fire.

Okay, unfair; this is all description. And "show not tell" is just as much about going to primary sources; instead of "it was cold" you write "he shivered." Which is still telling a thing, but it isn't telling "the" thing. So it is more of a direct experience. Even in the above, the absence of the filter of someone telling the narrator the thing makes the telling (by that same narrator) more immediate.

But here's the thing; in my current scene, I want to get across what I just said above about La Recyclerie. So...I can show the chickens, and the vegetable garden, heck, I could show kitchen slop being fed to the chickens. But there still needs to be a conclusion. Especially coming through the lens of a narrator who looked at this stuff for a reason. We don't just write every footstep and doorknob; we put in the details that are there to make a point. My protagonist "saw" this stuff -- mentioned it in the narrative -- because she is putting together the picture. And since we're getting her internal monolog and her learning and growth is part of the experience the book is delivering, we get to see her figuring out what it means.

So it inevitably follows that no matter how much I Show the chickens, at some point the narrative is going to Tell what they mean. 

I can leave some stuff out. I can set it up so the audience picks it up but my narrator never mentions it explicitly. I consider the latter part of the untrustworthy narrator routine, where the reader is intended to grasp something counter to what the narrator seems to be wanting to say. One specific thing I recall leaving out in the last chapter or two was the real nature of the meat market at the Foyer de la Danse. It just wasn't necessary for the story to go into the gory details.

Or, for that matter, that the "little bullfighter" is Picasso. 

Somehow, though, more and more it is starting to feel like nothing but empty words. Descriptions of things, shadows of things on the wall of the cave, not things themselves. Even in third person, even in a created environment (aka the settings of the upcoming steampunk book) where I can be much more selective about what I chose to show.

Just adding to the list of reasons I have trouble going back to the page. Even if I am writing up such a storm right now I actually have some real hope I might be finished by the end of the month.