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.