Yes, that was actually said by someone. Ran into that "theory" at the APN (Archaeology Podcast Network), which I finally remembered to add back to my podcast feed.
I don't think I can pivot the Athena Fox stories. They've gone four volumes and given how slow I work, I'm not about to rewrite all of those from scratch. And, oddly, several of the comments I've gotten say that pivoting into more of an adventure/thriller direction is not what those commenters would want. A friend -- an American ex-pat I visited in Paris -- didn't know what to make of what she called the "James Bond" stuff in the last book. Good thing I didn't try her on the Japan one!
The books want to be mystery books spliced with travel books. They'd be better if they were less dense, and if I did rewrite from scratch, I'd make changes to my protagonist and her background to take it away from going quite so in-depth in culture and history.
Which would also be plausible with a bad idea I had just today.
The latest 'cast of Writing Excuses talked about opening a story with a thriller. Not necessarily a body drop; more like a Call to Action. I have known for a while, talked about on Quora, and made a conscious chose to start my first book with stakes. Only there weren't really stakes; Penny started the book with a goal, but the obstacle wasn't immediately obvious.
The other aspect that podcast got into is that this opening thing is usually a shaking of the status quo. It isn't "Here we are in a YA dystopia, things suck, we should do something about it." It is more like, "Here we are in a YA dystopia and oops -- the secret police are banging on the door." Meaning, we have joined the story at that moment where the characters literally can not go on as they have been.
Thing is, even starting with a body drop (as the New Mexico book will) is hardly the same as having the clear and present danger of a destructive force just uncovered and our heroes the only people in place to stop it. That is really so very much easier with fake history. Not just fake, but a particular kind of fake, where ancient aliens or items of power or a pharaoh's curse or whatever are, well, real.
Which I was loathe to do, which is why the Paris book never gets higher than the stakes of an idiot would-be treasure-hunter about to take a crowbar to one of the grotesques on Notre-Dame de Paris.
The bad idea is...what if they are real now?
As in, history is taught in that world the way it is taught in ours, and as with ours, it is largely correct. But something happened. A mad wizard did it (or in SF circles, Alien Space Bats). Now both versions are correct. Imhotep stacked a bunch of mastaba to invent pyramids. And Grey aliens beamed down to awe the puny humans with the ability to stack a bunch of rocks.
This way, we don't have to insult working historians. And our protagonists can declare their astonishment without looking like idiots who never noticed the actual suit of armor worn by King Arthur is on display in the White Tower.
But two big problems. One is on me. Not just that it is too easy to have the protagonists snark about how stupid the idea seems, but that it is very, very hard not to get dragged into all kinds of related story tropes.
There's a fun little two-book series by Seanan McGuire (Indexing) where fairy-tales are coming true in the real world. Warts and all; these are the Grimm versions indeed. But her hand-wave is like Sir Pterry's "Narrativium," where Story (as Seanan puts it) is an almost conscious and alive force that really wants the fairy tale to happen and to play out properly. So all the trophic elements happen -- weaponized by both the good guys and the bad guys, even.
Having a mystery thing happen and now Atlantis was real and divers can reach it is far too much temptation for a writer like me to have protagonists and others start reading the Evil Overlord list and weaponizing being genre-aware.
https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0763.html
The other is...
The really well-known pseudo-history and magical artifact and lost city stuff is, well, usually not good story. There's no internal consistency. Arthur above; even Mallory, combing every single Arthurian epic he could get his hands on and combining them into a coherent whole, was only somewhat successful at it.
As with conspiracy theories in general, the point is never about how Atlantis actually works and how it was hidden -- it is about how "mainstream science" are all poo-poo heads. The most common stuff is along the von Danieken ilk where it is a bunch of "you can't explain this!" thrown at a wall in hopes some will stick. There's no consistent through-line, no single underlying theory.
(The Apollo Program deniers and the Creationists are so very much like this.)
Sometimes you do get a good story. If you are talking about the modern and specifically against-the-mainstream creations, the full phantasmagorical story of the land of Mu, for instance, has all the right cast of characters and geography and deep history and all of that.
As do older myths and legends, as inconsistent as they are.
There's pretty much shit-all for a well constructed story of how everybody managed to mislay a continent the size of Asia.
Which suggests to me that the "suddenly all the myths are true" isn't a good way to construct a fictional universe that one can have adventures in. I think you need a spoof explanation for why many myths may have a basis in truth. Like the Stargate universe does.
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