Sort of. I had a draft that was a decent little scene, with a young priest who was modern and ecumenical and easy to talk to. But as much as all my notes are saying Penny isn't blaming herself for the fire, I think it is a stronger scene if this is more about her confronting her guilt.
Even if the larger point across these last scenes is her fully accepting that she won't always win and she won't always do the right thing, and what she is doing might not always look like archaeology, but it is a role she is peculiarly suited for.
Thing is, the two "church" scenes are also the scenes where there is a touch of the ineffable. Where things happen which can't quite get nailed down rationally. She and I believe in a rational universe and my rule for this series is "probably." But that doesn't mean there aren't frontiers and gray areas where the explanation isn't immediately obvious. And I've made a conscious choice to have that happen in each book.
So I'm putting that draft aside and trying again, with Penny in a lot more of a funk, and the priest a lot more mysterious and oblique.
Not helped by STILL being sick. Walking now...but can't even walk very far yet. Actual recovery is illusive.
I was just throwing a few notes about Eglise Notre-Dame-du-Travail (the "worker's church" in the 14th arrondissement) into the Scrivener folder so I could work on a scene over brunch. Comments and pictures drawn from Atlas Obscura, Parisian Fields, Sophie's blog, Wikipedia...
The thought crossed my head that I should at least jot down where I read something. Instead of just throwing a bookmark into the rather stuffed folder I have for this novel. Yeah; I was just looking back through those, too. There is a lot of stuff I've been looking up!
I got into several websites about architecture while I was working on the Notre-Dame de Paris chapter. Mostly regarding the gargoyles. Read more of Victor Hugo and a rather long sample (fortunately free, as the book itself is fourteen bucks for Kindle alone) from a very fascinating book about them.
And then there was trying to research one tiny important detail. Can you get to the roof from the high end of one of the flying buttresses?
It wasn't until after I'd written the scene that I got a detailed look of exactly how that bit of architecture is shaped -- in the context of a video shot by two guys who were in the process of climbing up it. Ah, the algorithm will be the death of me. No search was turning up what I needed. But the second or third time I watched a Simon Nogueira video showing off his building-climbing skills, the YouTube algo decided it was going to randomly flash these other guys at me.
I hate the algorithm. It is a lot like writing AI prompts. Ooh, here's a search result showing a picture of this obscure hand tool I've been looking for! Ah, but there's a cat in the picture as well. If I click it, I know which element is going to be weighted higher in the algorithm...
So, anyhow, there's four sequences left to the end of the book. I'm coming in slightly higher than estimated; the climax went 5K and I'm sitting at 70K now, with maybe 5K to finish off. And as much as I tried to decompress, this is still a very dense book, too.
Another trip to the ER. This time I was feeling stable enough to risk going by Uber. It hit me Sunday night and I was feeling so sick I didn't dare close my eyes. Waited it out until dawn, called the Kaiser advice nurse, and could have saved myself the call because it is never "take two aspirin and your regular doc will call you back in 2-3 weeks."
After the ER released me I was finally, fitfully, able to sleep. For seventeen hours. Which also made this morning's breakfast the first food I'd had in 36.
Still feel horrible. Doctors are out of ideas. I am not sure how many more times I can go through this before I just give up.
Oddly, though, I managed to crawl through a draft of the first Notre-Dame de Paris scene. Up to the moment Penny fires the steampunk grappling gun. The current plan is for her to end up on the tower of one of the flying buttresses, creep up the drain, not be able to reach the edge of the roof but instead take a leap of faith to the scaffold around the spire, navigate a bit of that scaffolding at the transept and admire Viollet-le-Duc's face on one of the saints surrounding it, then teeter her way along the very peak of the lead roof (probably made easier by the stuff the contractors had set up for their work restoring the roof) to the gallery of chimeras. And, yes, my latest book (The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame) finally gave me firm data on the location of le Stryge (left buttress, north tower) and the date on which he was installed.
(I wanted to know because I wanted to know what you can see from that corner. Good spot to look towards Sacre-Couer. And the Louvre, although that is a bit hard to pick out. Damn Haussmann and his rank upon rank of far-too-similar buildings!
I've been reading the Victor Hugo, and at least in the translation I'm reading he certainly does mention fabulous creatures in stone, even comparing Quasimodo to one such as he parkours his way around the rooftops (that was not just a Disney invention). But those were removed during the French Revolution; one of the acts of turning the place into a Temple of Reason was, even, replacing the actual gargoyles (water spouts) with "rational" (and, it turned out, not quite as functional) lead pipes. So Hugo never saw them. Viollet never saw them, and had only scanty record of them. Alas, it remains unclear who the precise designer was of le Stryge...but perhaps if I read the entire book I'll learn if he was a Victorian romantic invention, or (since Viollet was very much a student of the real Gothic historical architecture) had some basis in actual 15th-century beastiaries.
And, yes, this does play a part in the book. When Penny confronts the treasure hunters, she first has to convince them that Napoleon could have had no part in that particular bit of stonework, clue or no clue.
But this isn't going to be like the Opera Garnier chapter, which wove elements of Phantom of the Opera in its many, many versions. Hunchback plays second fiddle to what Hugo was really writing about (and why he hated giving Quasimodo star billing on the English-language title of his book). Architecture. "This will be the death of that." Restoration and preservation and medievalism and neo-gothic romanticism and the loss of human connection to modern buildings (as Hugo, and many others, saw it). And the impact of tourism and the way people are still trying to come to grips with Paris, both the modern city and the historical. Which includes the snares that led Nathan to where he is, and why Penny has to argue eloquently to, well, keep from being tossed off the top of the building along with le Stryge.
(Just as Amelie's mom is passing below, no doubt.....)
Of course you do. That's Le Stryge. The most famous "gargoyle" on Notre-Dame de Paris. He's even in my book case (my father bought this one in Paris when he was there):
And he's all over the game model of Notre-Dame that appears in Assassin's Creed: Unity.
I transferred the game to my new Steam install from the back-up folder. Clicked through a dozen screens, filled out the new password request for Ubisoft's I-don't-know-why-it-is-even-there "connect" service, and finally got the game running. Which opened several episodes back before I had free run of Paris, and the save game system is probably the most useless, ill-conceived, and impossible to navigate one blessing any game I know.
So nothing to it but play through several highly annoying stealth sections around the Palace of Versailles until I could finally get back to the Ile de la Cité and climb the cathedral again.
And there he is. Le Stryge. On every single corner of both bell towers. On the real Notre-Dame (well, up until the fire, and presumably being restored to their rightful places soon if not already) he is just one of a whole menagerie of grotesques. In our universe, he was placed there under the orders of Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc -- in fact, he was the one to popularize chimères in ecclesiastic architecture -- and he in turn was inspired by Victor Hugo, and....do you get the sense that he shouldn't even be near Notre-Dame during the early days of the French Revolution?
Yes, the designers of the game knew that. There's a nifty nod, even; one of the saints surrounding the lower part of the spire (the predecessor of which was a tottering wooden thing that didn't last past 1792) is facing inwards. That would be Viollet-le-Duc himself, or at least his face on an Apostle.
At this point I was pleasantly surprised that the bells were actually coming from the bell towers, instead of issuing from some other location.
So it perhaps isn't, even after all that, the best reference. I've been looking at a lot of video because the stalwarts of Google Maps and web searches are only turning up post-fire images. And it is really, really hard to get anything that shows what the plausibly-navigable parts of the roof look like. I did get lucky enough to find a parkour video but since he was very much doing this illegally he had to take some quick shots then go home.
It is however the best thing I have to block out the scene. After all, many a stage director has made do with tape on the floor. I have a scheme that's just crazy enough to fit what I am trying to do with this book and the series; that due to poor aim with the grapple gun she ends up on one of the flying buttresses and has to crawl along the rain gutter. And then cap that off with walking along the peak of the lead roof from near the transept to where Le Stryge awaits.
Who was in the book already, at least in spirit; I asked a Fiverrrrrr artist for ideas and she really wanted to draw him...
(He is being used as the scene divider, the *** between scenes).
"New Mombasa" sequence finished. Now finally into the climax of the book. And I'm gonna need to boot up Assassin's Creed Unity. When I was first plotting this, Google Maps was pulling up the pre-fire Notre Dame de Paris, and it was easy to find pictures from early 2019 with all the scaffolding from the roof work. Now, all my searches are pulling up post-fire -- and mostly about with the rebuild nearly finished.
I either pulled samples or took bookmarks of a few editorial-use-only from Shutterstock back then, so I should still have those. It isn't going to be an epic climb anyhow. There's really not much you can do without either being up on a nice pedestrian walkway already, or clinging to a bit of building you can't climb up from.
The epic is going to be in the emotional description. For which I hardly need to know what the building looks like at all.
First attempt at the "New Mombasa" chapter didn't work.
This is the last of what I am calling the "Proustian loops." I hadn't used flashbacks in this series before, and I'd rather not use them at all (well, really, use them ever...) but it seemed appropriate for this book, with the emphasis on memory and the way that one's impressions of Paris are always changing. The memoir -- the split time for this book -- is set in 1900 but it was written following the First World War, so it is consciously looking back with the understanding that those days were in the fin ds siecle, the tail of what had been the belle epoque.
(Like a lot of historical periods, the name and the understanding of the thing encapsulated in the name happens after it is all over. Even the Egyptian dynasties didn't start counting the things until at least five kings in.)
So what I'm doing here is revisiting a key moment in her Paris trip, but each time looking at it differently and drawing new conclusions about it. The last one, Penny put the lamp shade on by complaining she hadn't even gotten a madeleine out of it. This final one, I want her to be aware and in control, guiding the memory and consciously using it to understand better.
There are chapter epigrams which have a brief quote set out and attributed. Then there are the book passages, fully epistolary, framed with something like "I opened the book and read..." and placed out with white space and italic font.
And there are the inevitable fill-in bits. I find those annoying in 1POV. The first person narrator so much wants to present as that illusion of consciousness; the narration doesn't stop until they sleep. Doing the back-fill when you need to skip over something to compress time, and open on something new in media res can't help but feel awkward.
At least the cafe scenes -- I made the choice to have almost a running gag of the main cast always finding each other at this one cafe in the Place du Tertre -- I have the crutch of dialogue. "So what did you do this morning?"
And then the memories, which until this one were always framed; "I remembered that night..." and the first paragraph or so is in past perfect, until I can slip into "having" the experience (and a return to simple past) instead of recalling it. And then a wake-up after.
So this last one I was trying out a walking memory, where Penny could compare what she is seeing now with what she saw then. But it didn't work for me. The next try, I will let her choose the slip and go into simple past tense, but duck "back out" once or twice to her seeing the world around her in the present.
But I haven't quite worked out how I'm going to work her commentary, as she realizes what these memories are trying to tell her.
I did, however, open up some maps. The template for this is my own walk, but I started in the Marais and I did get somewhere around the Seine but I'm really not sure where I went. I do know the area around the Pompidou center seemed really familiar when I came back there later.
Penny is starting in Montmartre, near Abbesses station, then heading almost due South but cutting over (probably) before she hits the Louvre. And I was looking at the same map for where she is when she started this memory. Google Maps did actually cough up crepe stands when asked but I had to switch to street view to confirm they were actual stands, and not full-up restaurants with chairs and awnings.
I also shot off a sample paragraph for the French proofreader I am trying to hire.
I finished the monster 6.4 k-word chapter. At least close enough. Made a couple light editing passes but even though several story threads finish there I don't feel like I have to keep tinkering with this one to make the beats properly clear.
On to the "New Mombasa" chapter (a short one) then the big final chapter of the main story. Everything after that is epilogue and wrapping up. (It's going to be a long descending action because there's a visit to the Jules Verne Cafe, a cemetery atop the butte of Montmartre, and the "Workman's Church" of Notre Dame du Travail.)
I've got my cover, I've got my interior graphics -- Scrivener is still being an ass about properly formatting chapter epigraphs -- and I've started reaching out to French translators. So this book may finally be out of my COVID-length hair. Soon.
But doing a quick bit of reading up on night-time Paris. This is another scene that the essential is drawn from personal experience, but there are different beats Penny needs to get out of it. Oh, reminds me. I need to rip "Rain" (from Halo 3: ODST) so I can listen to it without annoying ads every thirty seconds. I have three computers on the desk now, as it is the old laptop I installed the ripper on and it isn't worth messing around with trying to get it onto the M2.
What time the trains stop running. What neighborhoods you can find the crepe stalls at. (Not the Marais. And that was an annoying search. Even on Duck Duck Go it was two pages of "what are the best crepes to buy?" before anyone even mentioned those ubiquitous examples of Parisian street food.)
One of the few good things about working this slow is that I already have most of the climax worked out.
(I think I may make a point of hitting the Sunday "rush" every time. That cafe almost always has seats anyhow. But having to wait another twenty minutes for food gets even more writing done.)
I've been thinking about narrative and I think there is one more axis that needs to be folded in. There is narrative distance. There is narrative perspective. And there is narrative awareness.
The last is only a choice with 1POV. In first-person perspective, you can draw a bit of a line; near one end, the narrator who is aware of telling a story (with a listener to that story an implicit corollary), at the other, the story is a window onto a stream of consciousness.
The chatty, this could be a conversation between you the reader and the narrator, mode seems to be the most common way of doing 1POV. It is very convenient to the writer. This kind of narrator can recognize when something needs more explanation:
"It was clearly the accretion disk of a black hole. I'd studied astrophysics for six years at Cornell; so believe me when I tell you that."
Out past that point the line continues, from "Dear Diary" and other direct acknowledgements of the assumed readers, out to at least what I call the "Commander McBragg" mode. Aka "Good heavens, Commander! What did you do?" The Laundry stories by Charles Stross flirt with this end of the line; first revealing in Bob's direct words that this is an account he was required to write so that when the tentacled horrors finally got him, his replacement would have better warning, then later revealing more obliquely that "Bob" is probably not his real name, and that he can't exactly be trusted to produce an unbiased narrative. His ex, M'hari, comes across much, much differently when viewed from different viewpoint characters later in the series.
On the other end, backing off a little from pure stream of consciousness is the mind that is conscious of the thought process. A mind that is in fact processing what is happening, and to some extent watching itself react. It could be that the innermost end of the line corresponds to the deepest of deep immersion in 3POV; the narration that knows the protagonist much better than they know themselves. The stream-of-consciousness is unfiltered Id, not just the thoughts but all the emotions, all the unconscious associations, all the stuff happening under the rationalizations.
The more aware 1POV narrator is the one who is capable of lying to herself, and thus to the reader.
And there's a reason why this end of the 1POV "awareness" scale is more often found in present tense. The direct access to the inner voice just feels right with present tense. There's no temporal grace to think about what happened and what it means and how the narrator wants to react to it. They can only react, fully in the moment.
It may even be that the awareness of the narrator tracks closely with the temporal distance from events. That "standard YA narrator" is experiencing it all first-hand and for the first time. The "Dear Diary" already explicitly presents that the narrator is looking back on what has already happened. They are left completely free to use formations such as, "Had I known then..."
The "Commander McBragg" takes the longest temporal step of all, since it usually takes place within a framing story that makes not just the events of any particular chapter, but the conclusion of the entire adventure already known before the first words of the narration begin.
When you get closer to the instant, it becomes increasingly important to control time. Anything that didn't happen just now is something that had to have happened earlier, and that has to be made clear. There is a reason why 1POV narratives tend to turn into minute-by-minute recounting. And why it is such a good match for the detective story, where this is basically what they do; walk around, talk to people, get beat up by hoods; every meal, every cab ride accounted for in the text.
When you make a jump in time or an elision you the writer need to orient the reader. Maybe, sometimes, you can just start on a train. Most of the time some explanation is necessary, and that information is either some current observation or choice, or a jump backwards into past perfect to show that choice or that information more directly.
"The wheels clacked under me as we entered the long winding jungfrau tunnel. I had boarded the train at ten thirty this morning in Grindelwald, and..."
The closer you get to the narrative moment, both in time and in the ability of the narrator to reflect on it before putting it into words, the more you may have to explain why this sudden dash into event that are not happening before the narrator's eyes. Going back to the first example, why are they thinking about their university career now? (Not to mention, who are they explaining this to, considering the narrator was presumably themselves present for that education!)
I finally got AUTOMATIC1111 running again on the new SSD/clean OS install. And that may not have been a good thing.
Somehow, something stuck an older version of Python on there and I just could not get Path or whatever the AUTOMATIC1111 package was using to find the proper 3.10 version (the only one that is fully compatible with current AUTOMATIC1111). Which also seems to have changed some elements in the GUI since the last time I installed it but it is mostly to the good (I can't figure out where it hid the "rebuild faces" checkbox but that didn't always work well.
A stroll through Civtai to see what was new was...informative. As with all things that have been around longer than six months, Stable Diffusion has fractured into competing standards. There are multiple base models now with varying degrees of compatibilities. And as always, all the cool LoRas only work with the very latest Checkpoint, which is generally some weird niche thing you wouldn't want otherwise.
So there's that. The other thing is sort of a blow to the idea that with the millions of source images fractured into mathematical descriptions of pixel relationships, SD isn't really "copying" things. Well, the vast majority of the LoRas (think of them as being tiny checkpoint-like files that are over-trained -- often by using new prompts which weren't in the original training data -- to narrowly focus their response to prompts) are aimed at replicating specific media characters and specific actual people.
A relatively small number of the offerings are along the line of artistic styles (there's two out there that try to capture the look of the illustration of the Voynich Manuscript), general aesthetics (diesel punk) or concepts that the AI otherwise finds very hard to do (like worms-eye camera).
And, yes, there are more and more tools to try to fix the things AI still gets very wrong.
This does make it less accessible -- besides the wrestling-with-python thing -- because with more and more complex options and more interactions to keep track of it is becoming more of a learning curve. And also with the rapid changes, it takes more attention and more time for the would-be user.
Commercialization is sneaking in, although at least at Civtai it is mostly people posting only the "lite" LoRo and linking the full one on their Patreon. And from the other side, too; for all the effort and time it is significantly less production time and certainly less studying time than more traditional art, meaning it is less valued (and that's before you get to the flaws of AI; the weird errors and the Uncanny Valley of it) so people are working at finding venues where they can dump tons and tons of AI art for whatever small return they can get out of it.
And also. The small reference pools and the over-training of the typical LoRa means they have even more of the prompt side effect. Such as, if you ask for Steve Jobs the Apple logo will usually show up; because most of the training material was taken off presentations or advertisements. The LoRa get strange emergent behavior. Sometimes you can identify the exact image that is weighing heavily on these supposed random algorithms. Other times you get weirdness; one LoRa creator admitted that for some reason when used at higher values the Diesel Punk LoRa will tend to add a turtle somewhere.
Sounds like the attempts at level creation by AI. Asked for a police station, the AI level designer made sure to put donuts on all the tables.
But anyhow. I got engrossed. I lost track of time and forgot to eat or drink, and with that and a nasty bug (possibly stomach flu) I got dehydrated so bad I had to go to the ER.
Sure, we make fun of cutscenes. Especially the un-skippable ones that you end up having to watch multiple times.
But as I've got Starfield to sort-of running, enough to where I can actually somewhat immerse in the game (bad mechanics, and a ridiculous number of loading screens continue to get in the way), I am thinking about why the universe feels so dead and the lore isn't there.
It is tempting to lump on Creation Engine but I think this may be a design choice. The latest Starfield beta allows turning off the dialogue camera. That means you don't have to stay locked into looking at the talking head.
But this still isn't an character-animated dialogue. Which is time-consuming; one of the reasons Mass Effect Andromeda got meme'd is that they ran out of time and money for full animation and had to auto-animate (and use canned poses) for a little too much of the dialogue.
There are a few camera shots in Starfield. The best is the take-off and landing -- which are un-skippable and play every time, but they at least give you a sense of actually, well, taking off and landing that the game otherwise wouldn't provide. Because otherwise it is all fast travel.
I went for the UC/Vanguard faction missions this time, ignoring as much as I could of the main quest. And that thread gives you early on the backstory to a universe of war, now in a temporary and fragile peace.
Poorly. Really poorly. These are two-color posters with a voice talking over them. I went through the entire museum-worth of displays and at the end of it I still couldn't tell you who the Varuun are and how many times the UC and the Freestar Collective fought.
This game could really use some cinematics. Not necessarily to explain the back story. But to get you in the mood, to set the stage. About an hour in to Mass Effect there's a sort of fly-by to The Citadel, a hub location for most of the game and a key place in the plot that will unfold. And it really builds it up and gives you an idea of how this universe works.
Thing is, you can do this without having to move the camera. The Half-Life series proved master in establishing key ideas without even taking over the camera; just letting natural cues direct the player's eyes. For that matter, Fallout 4 manages to set the stage and give you a real feel for this new world by letting you interact with the before-bomb world, letting you see one of the bombs, then letting you discover the ruins of the place you saw only minutes ago (from your point of view, both character and player).
And in that same Creation Engine, Skyrim briefly takes command of the camera to show off the dragon that kicks off the plot proper.
So let's separate spectacle from the ability to show, not tell. Spectacle is something Starfield could have used. It feels too small. It rarely feels like you are actually in space. Sure, you are actually in a series of small disconnected rooms that you have to fast-travel between, but so is Hogwart's Castle, or many, many other game worlds. They just do a better job of establishing that idea of a bigger whole before they sit you down to play only tiny bits of it at a time.
Starfield starts you in a mine. You zap through fast-travel -- aka blank loading screens -- and the best vista you get is what you can see from the ground of the city of New Atlantis. Compare this to, say, almost anything. The incredible opening cutscene of Horizon Zero Dawn. The chase scene in Cyberpunk 2077 that introduces you to Night City.
So, no spectacle. But they also blew it on the show don't tell. Mostly. Pretty much everything you learn about the world of Starfield is told to you. Sometimes off terminals, just as often delivered as an info-dump by an Animatronic American President of a Bethesda unprompted dialogue. "We are called the Freestar Collective, we had a war, the war was terrible."
Seriously. You could SEE a ship with the emblem or patches. Meet people hurt in the war. That sort of thing. Which you do, but when it has already been delivered this badly...
Even if you break a whole bunch of rules -- and Mass Effect is far from a recent game, either -- it can set the look and feel of the game, explain key elements of the universe and back story, and get your emotions in gear for what will follow.
Sure, it is traditional to start one of the Elder Scrolls game in jail. But Starfield starts you in a cave and, sorry, that box of scraps is just not enough.
Worth pointing out, in both of those opening cinematics, that they use your customized character. Who is fully voiced, also unlike Starfield. Shepard has a variety of possible backstories and, yes, Anderson and Udina will refer to them while debating whether he or she is the person they want. So these are not just showing you the world of the game; they are showing you "you" in the world of the game.
Starfield, probably because you are not a voiced protagonist, backlides from Fallout 4, which were usually shot-reverse-shot so you would generally see your character's face when they were speaking. Since there's no recorded dialogue for Starfield, you only get the one shot; staring at the NPC. I struggle to think of where in the game you actually see your own character's face, except perhaps the extremely long third-person animation when you get up from the pilot's couch after a "flight."
