From cheese symphony to rum rhapsody

I seem to have chosen which book to work on first.

Or perhaps it is that this one, I can start outlining now, and outlining is what I want to do. Even while I am continuing to read about NAGPRA and ferric sulfate compounds.

House cleaning continues. I have to get rid of a whole bunch of stuff, and that's time consuming if I don't just want to rent a skip. Been toting books to the local book hutches. Taking electronics to work because we have a robust e-waste recycling process (and some of it is scrap I'd previously rescued from that process in the first place, so...no foul?)

And still mending from surgery. But mended enough so I can go back to work. And take my car in to be worked on. And go to Chicago to watch them burn stuff (that's work-related too; a UL test).

***

Picked out a listening list. Several CD's worth of Martin Denny, Barry Gray, Lex Baxter, Don Ellis and Juan Carlos Esquivel. A little John Barry, too...but no Don Ho.

Converging Series

Proofs came in for Sometimes a Fox. Found one mistake already. Wrong tense...so tell me again how automated grammar-checkers are so great, huh?

Speaking of software, also purchased Affinity Photo. After I've given it a spin, I'll start the process of trying to get out from under my Adobe subscription. It isn't anything about the latest news, exactly. It is just that I was already unhappy and this is not only an excuse, but a time when better options are being offered.

Relapsed on Friday but I think I'm finally on the mend. I miss being a recently ex-soldier, with all the strength youth and stupidity. Did not expect to take this long to recover and I'm still weak.

So...good time to continue assembling, towards making a choice of what to write next. I'm simultaneously reading books on Venus and on Indigenous Archaeology. And thinking about a third book but that's not really the same kind of research problem.

There's no show-stoppers for Venus, not yet. I am still learning about the chemistry, and Venus is all about the chemistry. Unfortunately my best book is fifteen years old, and although we haven't been sending any landers lately, science still marches on.

Always been a problem with Venus, really. At the time of writing, those steamy jungles and those planet-wide oceans were defendable from current knowledge.

But this is a convergent thing. I'm more and more accepting, for the purposes of the book, of it being a very rare thing indeed to be bare-faced to the wind there. The main location is above the deck of the clouds so temperature and pressure not issues, and you aren't swimming in sulfuric acid, either (the Venusian clouds are actually quite thin, by cloud standards. They are opaque because they are so damned deep. That, and chemistry.)

The lack of a magnetic field has interesting trickle-downs. Also, more chemistry happens because of it. But anyhow; I'm not as concerned about cosmic rays because those things explode in upper atmosphere anyhow. Solar storms, on the other hand, is an open question. But since those don't happen all the time, that smells to me like plot.

That's what I mean about convergence.

And the UV? You can block that with whatever is holding the breathing air in. And if you are out on deck -- well, you are wearing those brass goggles anyhow, unless you really like getting mild acid in the eyes.

So the books may go on about this not being viable for colonization, but there's a real difference between Futurist paintings of people cavorting on carefully manicured green lawns, and the kind of conditions real human beings have lived and worked in. If the combination of ray burn and acid and all the rest means you get blind and scarred and your lungs rot by thirty -- hell, there's even some people today who would trade for that.

The more I can play with the real Venus, the better. That's an argument I've always made about historical fiction, and research in general. Sure, you can image fun stuff. But the real world has been imagining crazy shit for four billion years and it is likely to surprise you. Find the real thing first. See if story comes out of it. Plenty of time to argue later.

 

PunkPunk

What I really should be doing, now that the decks are cleared, is house-cleaning. And catching up at work. And finishing some music products.

Did a (too-long) walk today and that was tough enough. I'm under orders to refrain from heavy lifting anyhow. So scrubbing floors and carrying books and electronics to recycling not really on the things to do this week.

I'll be doing more than I currently expect if I can work two full days at work.

So it isn't the least appropriate use of time to Begin the Gather. I don't even know which book project I am likely to work on (I'm doing book projects rather than searching for something completely new because I've already got a target that I think will work.)

One of them is just an aesthetic deep dive. That would be fun. Pretty much, look at movies, games, images, fiction, cocktail recipes that all fit the retro vibe I'm looking at. The most active research part might be sitting down at a tiki bar or two.

Another is a visit-the-place dive, and I want to regain more health than I went into the operating room with if I'm going to be hiking around the American Southwest.

One is a really deep dive that has the disadvantage of being a whole lot of reading material away from being ready for. Someone has been asking a lot of annoying questions about the Sea Peoples on Quora lately, so it is back on my radar, but I'm not even up on what's been done on the Luwians, or how we better understand the Hittite Empire and their fall, much less whether we are firm on who the Sherden or Ekwesh are.

And then there's the Venus book.

When it comes to spreading the nets, first it goes wide. Then you focus in. Right now I'm starting to see just how wide it gets. Take "Solarpunk." That's art and philosophy movements, mostly -- like steampunk, they've retro-borrowed existing fiction as belonging (like Jules Verne being honorary steampunk), but there doesn't seem to be that much which is organic (ahem) to it.

It is described as being philosophically naive, a future-optimism with a DIY and egalitarian emphasis hearkening back to Whole Earth Catalog and that lot, with enough of a tech emphasis to remind me quite a bit of early Electronic Democracy evangelists.

But oh boy are there are lot of connections. Take just one...Afro-Futurism. Which I don't know what it is, even, except that apparently Wakanda is that way now. So there are a lot of weird paths you could explore just checking out if any of the concepts and ideas and, for that matter, tropes, are going to be of use in the kind of story I want to tell.

I haven't even distilled down to the elevator pitch yet. Um..."Waterworld in the Air." Yeah, that's not a bad take. Survivalism in rafts and boats. Some level of unsustainable practices, probably. Organizations in conflict with each other. A quest plotline.

Story-wise, it is all about The Swift, experimental airship, and its (of course!) motley crew representing every major socio-political body/trend so they can argue out themes. On an optimistic voyage of discovery that brings them to things that could threaten the whole world they know. 

But largely a string-of-incidents, Flash Gordon style, with oversized characters running into equally colorful new places and new dangerous situations. 

I stopped by the used bookstore on my walk but the only thing I picked up was a Paris mystery by a local author. Signed, too. So...there's that.

Adieu Paris

Every book, for years after I keep discovering things that I wish I'd known, or at least could have included. I'd hadn't remembered the other part of it, though; the first days, when I'm still surrounded by all those books, bookmarks, movies, links, images...none of which I am going to need again.

I kept them around through editing because that's when you have to go back and check spelling or a fact.

But now? Paris is done. 

And I haven't really gotten rolling on the next one. So there's no stack of open tabs and so forth waiting my attention. Oh, sure. I could finally finish watching Amélie. But that feels no more productive than playing games.

But that may be what happens. I'm not in the mental space yet for a new book, and to get there I need to make a clean break from Paris. So no Amélie, probably -- but no Oppenheimer, either (despite it just having come up on free rotation).

Besides, recovery from surgery is taking much longer than expected or hoped. Tried to make it in to work today. Couldn't even handle a walk around the block to get up strength. Tomorrow is Juneteenth and maybe I can at least get that done before I try to head back in.

Oh, yes. Despite having intended to hold back on the print version, I've gone and prepped both eBook and paperback and they are available for pre-sale now on Amazon, with release on the 1st of July.

Gremlins

I tried, I really tried to hire someone to do this part.

For the past several days I've been crawling through the manuscript, looking for every place where I've changed the capitalization or punctuation on a Belle Époque somewhere -- or worse yet, forgotten the stupid diacriticals. And checking things like whether opening and closing quotation marks are italicized properly.

French...is difficult. I don't know why so much of our modern machinery can't handle the stuff, but my various spell checkers and grammar checkers just have no sense about getting the spelling of French terms correct.

And then there's those choices...my grammar checker insisted that it is Art nouveau. Wikipedia prefers Art Nouveau and there is better source for this. This is why I laugh in the face of grammar pundits, worse, those cranky ones who leave a negative review because "they found a clear typo in the first chapter."

Dudes, why is there an MLA, an APA, Chicago, NYT? The fact that there is more than one house style in publishing should tell you that there isn't always one clearly right answer.

I did solve my formatting woes and I've finally got the chapter epigraphs sitting correctly. A lot of weird work-arounds to get it so the clue poems are set out correctly below the chapter heading, then the actual text begins with the zero-indent, three capitalized words format. With luck, given the changes Scrivener has made in Version 3, I can translate most of this to the pdf as well and not have to start from scratch.

At least I can sort of think clearly. I'm home recovering from surgery and the bleeding isn't anywhere near as annoying as the weakness. The main thing I'm short of is the attention to keep staring at text which has gotten far too familiar.

So maybe it is time to spruce up my factories and take pictures of them before Satisfactory 1.0 breaks them all. (Like most players, I intend to start a new world when 1.0 releases.)

There's a draft in here

I actually made it. The next Athena Fox novel, Sometimes a Fox, is in completed draft.

Came in just under at 73K. May or may not do the threatened "symphony of cheese" pass and add more detail to every meal she has in Paris. It isn't until the last chapters that she actually has the budget and time to sit down to something other than coffee and a croissant, though.

I'm up in six hours and going in for surgery. Here's hoping I get some strength back from it.

Weird to look back on what I started with and why. I was juggling a couple of ideas and the idea of an ersatz Dan Brown set in Paris looked like the easier one. I figured I knew enough about stupid historical conspiracy theories to spin something, especially as it was intended from the outset to be clearly a total fake (the actual tension and later action stemming from a few idiots who don't realize that it is a fake!)

I also figured; I've been in Paris, and I knew something about Impressionist art. I almost picked Montmartre out of a hat, even though I had been there, because I pretty much went there for the same silly reason; it was the only district I knew the name of because I'd done the musical Can-Can in high school!

That was the framework, right there. I picked 1900 because that was the International Exposition I ran across pictures of first -- the 1895 probably would have been more appropriate, as it turned out. Also turns out the Impressionists were sort of old hat by that point but that mattered less than it could have because it turned out I really didn't know that much about them anyhow!

And because one of the things I try to do in the Athena Fox stories is hit a few things that belong in the setting but are possibly less expected, instead of making a lot of stuff about the Eiffel tower or the Moulin Rouge, I chose practically at random to feature parkour and steampunk.

Which I also turned out to know less about than I thought. And they were harder to fit in.

As had happened with Drea in the very first book, the Chapter One guest, who was originally there just to give a neophyte tourist example to contrast the maturing Penny against, turned out far too useful as a guest lecturer, sounding board, and a way to turn narrative into dialogue more than would otherwise have been possible.

But jump back a bit. A strong theme is related to Paris Syndrome; the way Paris is so hard to grasp that everyone ends up forming their own (incomplete) idea of it. And so many of these ideas are found in media, and Penny has since I discovered in the first adventure that it worked far too well for her to have been a theatre kid, been reaching for popular media.

That meant two sequences in particular became extended explorations of a media franchise; Phantom, and Hunchback. Also something I hadn't expected, and that meant the steampunk, the Impressionists, and other things had to take even more of a back seat.

Does it work? Maybe.

I could easily call it rambling, unfocused, and self-indulgent. I could have trimmed more. I made the choice not to.

At best, maybe it might carry off a sort of kaleidoscope, an extended musing on how art and literature, architecture and history, illusion and memory bounce off each other. Bad Hugo, in other words. Maybe even bad Proust.

I am looking forward to the bare open spaces of the American Southwest.

But first to the sulfuric acid clouds of Venus...

Can I complete Blackdamp in eight months? There's a lot of world-building still to be done.

I also need to edit and format this monster. But at least the writing is done.

Deadline

I want finished draft by the 14th. That's not a lot of time. Especially not since we are rebuilding the shop (due to a convergence of various things, we have both pressure to put together a better working space, and money to throw at the project).

And cleaning house, which in some part became more timely with the shop rebuild.

Got most of the way through the draft of the Square Louise Michel scene. Wasn't quite working, took a look back, and part of the problem was all the way back at the climax and resolution. So re-writing that. And that will have trickle-on requiring editing of the Eglise Notre-Dame-du-Travail. And then I'll be back to the Square Louise Michel and after that there's only two scenes to go!

That's shy of complete edit and readying for publication. But at least the whole thing will be down on (virtual) paper.

Pity there's only one weekend left. I get all my best work done then but that's rarely more than a scene or maybe a scene and a half.

Starcrash

No, not that one.

I get most of my writing done on weekends. And house cleaning. And there are all those errands that have to be run then. And, yes, you can fit a futon in a Smart Fortwo.

The third try on the "priest" scene is finally working. I think. I had to rewrite the previous scene completely, and I've ended up adding a following scene as well. Going to the Parc Louis-Michel now (at the foot of that big flight of stairs up to Sacre-Coeur.)

But after all that productive work I had to unwind.

Whether it is my revamped computer or the optimization Bethesda promises they were doing somewhere between adding special hats and trying one again to force paid mods, the loading screens are shorter...until they aren't. When it is actually working right, it almost feels like actually flying off a planet and going somewhere. Well, aside from getting killed by Va'ruun while waiting for the controls to load in on my ship so I can put up the shields. And un-skippable dialog sections right in the middle of things that freeze the ship controls. Oh, and did I mention the same button for "answer a hail" is the one for getting out of your pilot couch and walking away?

But it sort of runs and I am sort of getting invested. Started on the UC quest (it is generally true that the Main Quest in a Bethesda game is the garbage one and the fun is in the faction quests). But after about thirty minutes of play the memory leaks get so bad the game locks up completely.

This ain't a "turn down the graphics to improve performance," boys.

Started a few outposts, fiddling around trying to actually get them to something functional. Here's a fun one; to get enough POWER to your nascent colonies so they can do anything, you need He3. Most of the places you extract it from are frozen worlds that takes two or three levels in Outpost Engineering skill before you can start an outpost there.

The Outpost Engineering skills are third-tier, meaning you have to put 8 points or more in science skills. Which, because of the two-track skill system is already a chore (you unlock a skill, then you have to qualify it by doing something; to go from Pilot Rank 2 to 3 you demonstrate your ability to handle a large complicated ship by...shooting holes in thirty or more other ships).

And you get one skill point per level. And if you don't put points in combat skills, you won't survive that long. So, practically speaking, you are at level 40 and well past mid-game before you can even START making properly self-sufficient colonies.

So I closed that and went back to Satisfactory.

Much, much more relaxing.

(I actually hate the swamp...it is gray and often misty and it is all weird fungi. But that's where I started my big aluminium production line and chose to make the all-electronics-parts factory as well.)