Going deeper

 

When I first hit the research, I was struck by the idea of Nuclear New Mexico. They have everything but the power plants there; a uranium mine-to-waste disposal facility vertical slice through the entire nuclear industry.

The plants are elsewhere, and the nuclear testing moved to Nevada. But you can still follow the whole story with visits to the right sites in New Mexico.

I was holding back from sending Penny through that because I really want on this one to be plot-focused. Background and context will always be there, and some two-headed red herring are appropriate, but I do want to move away from lectures whenever possible. I realized this morning on my walk to work that there's a thing I've been doing where Penny has an insight based on what she has learned, but a good part of what she had learned was off-screen so she has to do a quick info-dump for the reader.

That realization was in the context of the White Sands Footprints and how they might help Penny move out of the Desert Solitaire she's gotten into on this adventure. A motion I might not want, in the larger scheme of things; being on her own is a good place to take her, and saving the reader from her increasingly complicated history (that stuff came to a head in the Paris novel) is even better.

I also want her outside, under the sun, in the arid-if-not-desert. I want any ruins she urban-explores to be on the surface and showing the wear and tear of those conditions. Which is a pity, because I just ran across this:

Atlas F missile silo in New Mexico, from a visit by urban explorers.

It is always a balance, plotting-wise, between using what is local, and using what is appropriately thematic. One of the extremes is what I've called "James Bond Plotting," where you decide on a particular thing like the London Eye or Carnival in Rio and you arrange the plot to make a visit.

I'm falling in that direction because I can't resist including the Shroud museum in Alamogordo. Not for the Shroud (they don't have it there), but for the VP8 Image Analyzer they do have there.

Being as it is an analog computer, it is deliciously retro-tech but also basically useless for anything I might find an excuse for Penny to use it for. That vaunted processing can be beat with a free ap for her phone. But thinking about it gave me a bigger integration of Lon to her investigations and more investment from her when he is killed, so...

(The downside is having to get into the Shroud and pseudoscience and especially Biblical Archaeology, which I've been saving for a story where I give her an excavation to run and her own field techs working for her...but for a sponsor that is really, really hoping to verify an Ark or something.)

Ooh, and I just realized a plot advancement that could happen with a visit to the WIPP. I mean, she can't even get through the fence, and there's nothing for her to learn there, but she absolutely could become aware of picking up a tail. Meaning she now knows that whatever Lon discovered that got him killed is after her now. (She's not...entirely wrong.)

Phillip Marlowe, Country Music, and the legacy of Michael Morgan

I admit it, I bounce around. I thought I was further along in thematic development until I saw a though-provoking concert last night. (Forgiveness, Marc Bamuthi Joseph and Daniel Bernard Roumain.)

The past couple of days I've been exploring the idea of adding more action, especially stuff that plays with that conceit of Indiana Jones exploits happening in a more-or-less realistic modern world. I have moved the idea forward of Penny finding the concrete bed and a few other bits of the dismantled test site where Freeman was doing the project -- possibly even where MacDonald got injured.

Now I think that's not the direction I should be going.

I was talking about Raymond Chandler style mysteries, where the small mystery opens up into a world of corruption. And this is the mode to address the things that excite me about this book. Not unlikely underground bases or contrived shootouts in ghost towns (I'll save that for the Cleopatra book, anyhow).

Nuclear colonialism. Conspiracy theories as reaction to the essential helplessness of the ordinary person against the military-industrial complex. Duty, honor, and the feeling of belonging to something bigger.

And somewhere deep in there is an image that was already very much in the story. The woman walking across the sand with the child in her arms. That's the White Sands footprints (the woman was probably a teen, the child was walking some of the time, on her hip at other times, and there was some sort of probably loose family group involved. Unlike Lucy, who basically got separated, fell out of a tree and died.)

Yeah, it's that old Terry Pratchett gimmick that I keep trying to get working. Since I started this story -- before I even thought of including Lucy and the Egtveld Girl et al -- I knew it was going to end with Penny walking the Jornada del Muerto towards the Trinity Test Site.

So you climb up three feet and slip back two. I lost the idea of filling some chapters with running around in the desert or with fast cars or who knows what. I gained the first two clues-that-change-the-story-direction moments, from when Penny first asks what this body is doing in her archaeological excavation and tries to get sense out of the NAGPRA contact point for the dig, to when the dig is closed and she's far from White Sands, in a car heading towards Roswell for what will also turn out to be the wrong answers.

Now I just need another four or five hit points and I can make a proper scene plan.

Radiation Leak

I was making progress, really I was. I clarified some structural issues, thinking about B plots and supporting characters and phases.

And at brunch today (recovering from a sick and needed one more day off work to get my strength back) I scribbled the wrong note and it all started going sideways.

The core idea is still nuclear secrets. Set in the White Sands basin, the arid southern New Mexico. And the plot that starts the plot rolling -- the body drop, if you will -- is rooted in the long conflict over ownership of the area, between the nuclear establishment and civilians, between ranchers and the take-over of desert and "The Hill" (Los Alamos) by the military back in the '40s, between Spanish and the new nation and the Pueblo, between the Apache and everyone else.

But I can't leave uranium out. That's part and parcel of the whole story. Not just Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project. Navajo uranium miners, the Trinity "Downwinders," remaining contamination and poorly-closed mines, the current highly-contested Waste Isolation Plant project in the lower corner of the state.

And more-or-less simultaneous (that's what note-taking can get like, especially with pauses for that bacon omelet and hash browns with red salsa) I was realizing I needed more "stuff" for my current plan of a through-line "A" plot and B plots (more like C plots) that act like self-contained fetch quests with their own mini-arcs, and that there was so much more fun stuff I can do.

I've got moving parts already in this machine. Jackson and Sanchez -- I think he's CID, now, but he could be almost anything that has an unusual degree of freedom within the military machine. Penny's midnight dig, and the thought of her doing an ill-advised desert hike (which came very strongly to me as I was...doing an ill-advised desert hike).

Can she breach the perimeter more than once? Encounter Jackson and Sanchez much earlier (which at the very least establishes him as a suspect for the unknown gunman). Find the dismantled pad of the thing Freeman was working on with MacDonald?

And should I expand Freeman's small but nice house in Alamogordo to a small but nice spread north of White Sands, close to the road to Stallion Gate (or at least, within a long hike of the Trinity Site?) And maybe MacDonald continued to work for him as a ranch hand? I may have to give up putting him on a horse...that was only a fun thing and I can make the emotional point if he's riding a vintage Indian into the desert -- just as long as Penny can be stupid enough to think she can follow him on foot.

(Come to think, there were a couple of lovely Packards at the nuke museum. Built like tanks, those things were.)

And if I'm moving around geography, what about using the actual Owl Bar and Cafe (which is in San Antonio?) Yes, I absolutely saw the thing as I was driving through. Wish I'd stopped but at the time I didn't realize it was the original.

Oh, yeah. And that stuff about not having a B plot? I make it a point not to be trapped by the "Next Time..." things I write in the back of the previous book, but I did promise "Angry activists." I really do want to send Penny in the direction of the WIP, and get her suspicious of some company that's somewhat smaller than Sandia -- small enough she can have a confrontation with an evasive suit-and-tie sort.

And I just realized this might be coming out of remnants left by my current archive-binge at Mythcreants. The Phillip Marlowe archetype, disdainful of authority and far too inclined to talk back. Not really Penny's thing (she's sort of naturally polite, or at least kind) but I could see her going there.

And that all means I've got more work to do to pull this plot together. The important parts, that is. The emotional through-line, the themes, the way each clue is clearly delivered and changes the big picture in interesting ways. The other stuff -- I can always come up with an excuse to have a guy come through the door with a gun.

Geography

I was going to sit down and study the maps. I was sort of hoping to find a couple of good maps that laid out all the data in one place. Well, I seem to have picked up enough of the geology, geography, history and social geography to at least nail down the basics so I can work on my plot.

Having the ground truth helps so much. I've seen the playa and the transition zones into the dune field and I've driven the distances between Alamogordo and Albuquerque.

The geology works. Basically, the playa is another face of the same chemistry that created the dunes. Well, that keeps creating them, as they are an ongoing and evolving feature. Water leaches gypsum from the surrounding mountains, which forms briny lakes. Those evaporate forming selenite crystals, which are broken up by weathering until they are fine enough to be carried by the wind, forming the dunes.

That same fine gypsum sand reforms a crust when wetted and allowed to dry again. That's why trails through the local hills look like the Park Service was out there pouring concrete to stabilize them. It does the same thing in the playa, which change humidity seasonally (catching rains, then drying -- there's no outlet -- through the warmer months). Meaning there's churn, but whatever is brought closer to the surface is at least temporarily protected with a natural plaster jacket.

All of this White Sands geology (there's a lot more of it than gypsum sands!) is roughly contiguous with the ancient Lake Otero. There was a lush grasslands setting there around the Paleolithic. Mammoths and giant sloths and humans were living hunting et al along the lake edge and left tracks in the mud that, when conditions were right, were preserved.

So this is the right landscape. Outside the dunes but still within where the fine gypsum sand blows, where it is arid and alkali cool desert (elevation too; 1,000 feet or more). The water table is very close to the surface, as it happens (the sands proper go very deep; thirty feet at least).

Geographically it works for me. The playa are very close to the national monument but rather than the archeologists going down Dune Drive every morning, it makes more sense for them to get an escort from and through Holloman AFB. And it makes sense to have them at Alamogordo (Las Cruces would also be convenient, but while this is conveniently big city and a university town besides -- second largest town in New Mexico -- I like the vibe of Penny trying to deal with the small-town feel of Alamogordo.)

But in New Mexico space, Albuquerque or Roswell really aren't that far away. Psychically, the nuclear community has always transcended strictly physical mapping and the right people at Alamogordo can still feel like they are part and parcel with Los Alamos.

For ethno-history... I can make it work. It might even work better. There's the old pots-not-people problem but there's enough genetic data -- and the archaeological cultures are different enough -- that it does seem very likely that the pre-Clovis "Footprints" culture, the Archaic and paleoindian cultures like the Jornada Mogollon, and late-comers like the Apache, are really movements of people.

Put aside any thoughts of the "mysterious lost Anasazi," though. There's more than one reason why the modern name is "Ancestral Pueblo." Of course "Pueblo" is as much a blanket term as, say, Iroquois. Only in this case the facile name given by early Spanish explorers reveals something deep about the cultures of the Southwest. The same maize cultivation and arid landscape, the same adobe construction, and it is not entirely surprising similar rituals appear. And useful technologies spread. And the pueblo cultures are exogamous as well as traders in materials and ideas.

So while it matters that there are multiple language groups, and tribal distinctions within those language groups, it is also not incorrect to include Tewa Pueblo, Ancestral Pueblo, Hopi, and Dineh within some "pueblo" super-group. And, yes, some do claim continuity with the 1,500 - 1,000 BCE Jornada Mogollon (itself a super-culture designation).

Okay. Archaeological culture? A collection of distinctive artifacts frequently found in proximity and bounded by time and space. Pots not people. It just means that there's enough of this style of pottery and these particular ways of laying out a pit dwelling that can be identified as "kinda mostly like this through this stretch of territory over this period of time." It doesn't mean (though far too many take it to imply) that this is a "race" or some other distinctive identity cultural political and genetic.

And it works for me if "MacDonald" comes from family that lost their ranch when The Hill (Los Alamos) was eminent-domained out from under them, but came over the decades of living (and nuclear testing) in the White Sands area to identify strongly enough with that land he formed his own bonds with it. And if in his mind he associates his Tewa Pueblo with the Archaic cultures of the Southwest, or his own family with the Luchero family (yes, the source of the name Lake Luchero) who also lost their land to the government in 1940, that's his business.

And once again, it becomes Penny's business to fathom MacDonald's internal geography and find her way to the secret he was buried with.

Itinerary

Flew into Albuquerque, stayed two nights in a motel along Central (old route 66) and took the free ART bus everywhere.

Ate at Weck's (a chain diner), a small neighborhood breakfast place, lunch at the Pueblo Kitchen adjoining the IPCC.  Lots of green chilis. Museum of Nuclear Science (so many bombs...and multiple aircraft and missiles and one sail parked outside). Took a quick stroll through Old Town and the Plaza on the way to the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center.

Rented a car the last morning and drove to the Tijeras Pueblo Archaeological Site, then on to Roswell. UFO Museum, and lunch at the flying-saucer McDonald's. Continued to Alamogordo.

Two nights at a B&B in Alamogordo. White Sands national park with two educational trails and a long hike. Ate at a burger joint near the go-kart track and that was enough for one day. Next day visited the National Space Museum then headed to the Three Rivers Petroglyph site and did the walk there. Took one last detour up to Stallion Gate over the three-hour drive back to the car rental. Got into Albuquerque Sun Port almost an hour ahead of drop-dead and was at the gate in plenty of time. Then had a delayed flight in Phoenix and ended up well past midnight anyhow.

The Time of Sands

I did my trip. A lot of moving parts, but almost all of it worked. The places where it slipped were mostly with the airlines, who have learned it isn't profitable to keep a proper fleet running so are constantly having to delay and reschedule flights -- and acting surprised at the results. And several of the museums had closed the exhibits I was interested in, without bothering to tell anyone they'd done so (in defense of the one that had a Goddard exhibit, they got flooded out and lost more than that).

Some of the things I wanted to find turned out to be not really there to find. Like a live music scene in Alamogordo. A strange town, that. I'm not sure one could get a grasp of it without living there for a while.

But I got so far down through my stretch goals I got on the plane with only regrets that I hadn't been able to find a New Mexican coffee anywhere (it's apparently made with chocolate and red chili.) I couldn't do the Trinity site, but I drove into the reservation all the way down to Stallion Gate before turning around. Hit three archaeological sites and a Pueblo cultural center, three museums, and took the risk of the surprisingly challenging (black diamond trail markers were a big hint) Alkali Flats hike through the gypsum dunes.

But Alamogordo? Look, I sort of pulled it out of a hat. I hadn't done nearly enough work on the geology and prehistory to place my fictional dig site, and I was guessing this was the best town both for my archaeologists to be staying at, and for story purposes. Turns out the former is basically plausible. The latter is...unsure. The people and situations I had in my head may not fit the town I saw. Hard to tell. It is a hard town to get a grip on.

I passed through other alternatives. There are a number of almost-not-there towns spread around the area, ones too tiny to even have a gas station. And from here, with a map and some basic reading, I could see Albuquerque or Truth or Consequences but I had no grasp of New Mexico space. People drive there. A lot. Distances are compressed when there is straight roads with little to stop for and posted speed limits of up to 75. I personally was hitting 85 for stretches so long I learned how to use cruise control. The kind of stretch of highway where Siri says, "Turn left, then continue straight for the next 186 miles."

So Tularosa is on -- more of a melting-pot feel than Alamogordo, with an "old town" to rival Albuquerque, more hispanic/nuevomexicano presence, really more of a Taos flavor. Or Cloudcroft, which is ski lodge meets western revival town with more than a bit of that Boulder vibe. Or even Albuquerque, the closest thing to big city New Mexico has, for all that it is far short of proper skyscrapers.

Still, Alamogordo will probably work. With some adjustment on my part.

I also really need to hit the geology, and the history of human presence from the footprints to Jornada Morgellon to Apache. (Pueblo peoples -- Dineh included -- are basically more north. Oops.) Because in this book, the plot totally hinges around the dig, what is there and why it is there.

Right now that feels like a lot of work, and not really that exciting. I'm happy to have the endurance back to be able to handle seven-plus miles of hiking on challenging trails plus driving all day (at fairly scary speeds -- but I only slid once.) The series is never going to take off even if I did pick up two sales by putting the last book up for free for a couple of days as a promotion.

Replacing Physics with Geometry: Subnautica Below Zero

Coming back to the Subnautica series after playing a variety of other games -- particularly Satisfactory, but there are some common elements of the gameplay loops in Horizon Zero Dawn as well -- I have a different understanding of why the second game got a poor reception.

It really is a different game. There are several things that change it from a long and largely free-form experience into one that is more scripted, with clearer goals and more pressure. There are other decisions that take away from the existential loneliness that characterized the previous game. Largely, this is the current AAA growth path, where games are being shaped to deliver an easier game that can be finished more quickly.

And then pad out the run time with collectibles. But that's another discussion.

For Below Zero, the changes do not begin with the map, but that map is a good route to understanding the huge changes in philosophy.

 Above is the Subnautica map. Below is, well, Below Zero. But this comparison is misleading in two ways; first, only the blue areas are actually ocean. The brown land areas are significantly path-biased, to where it is more like travelling down a corridor from one small point of interest to another.

Second, the Subnautica map is underlaid by two other areas that are both larger than the ocean areas of the Below Zero map; the Brine River, and the even deeper Lava. The Below Zero map condenses its deeper levels into largely isolated pockets; post holes instead of trenches.

Lots of people have complained in reviews about the Sea Truck, how slow it moves, how nimble it isn't. But that's just a symptom. In Subnautica, the vast size of the map meant that keeping track of where you were, and traveling to where you wanted to go, was epic. That was what gave the game challenge. Getting about, moving materials about, trying to keep track of where useful resources (or even your own bases!) were.

And this was also sparse, open, with the dangerous depths being particularly huge and dark. This was a lonely world, where the forlorn bits of broken escape pods were tiny and lost. Out of sight, also, was the threat of larger creatures. Only when exploring inside a wreck did the game become claustrophobic. Instead it offered thalassophobia.

Below Zero gives most of the game that claustrophobia. They don't have a faster submarine not because the map is too small, but because that's not how they are using the map. Instead of having a wide-open unmapped space, you have tiny confusing twisting warrens.

You can't see where you are going, the sea truck barely fits at all (and is constantly breaking down from being pounded against kelp and coral), and big parts of the game involve turning tight circles in a space only a hundred meters across trying to find the one spot where you can wriggle behind a frond and find the next part of the passage.

And if you do it without the sub or prawn suit, your oxygen meter is ticking down all the time.

Even on land, hypothermia is coming on you as fast as oxygen depletes underwater. No lonely contemplation of the vastness of the sea and your own insignificance; this has become a twitch game where more often than not you are desperately trying to figure out a twisty path before you die.

Oh, yeah. And lonely? Between Al-lan (the alien in your head) and the voiced protagonist, this is no longer lonely. And there's a plot, and a distinct goal, and everything but waypoints. So instead of being alone to figure out the meaning of your new life under the sea, you are up against the clock with a job to do.

Even depth is downplayed. In Subnautica, depth is a challenge and a constant threat. You are always pressing the limits of your various submarines, listening to that hull creak and knowing you are down too deep to safely swim back to the surface if it fails. And you have to push these depths in order to find the rare materials that allow you to go one step deeper. Again, it is physics that is the challenge.

In Below Zero it is about threading narrow confusing passages and the sense of depth is barely there at all. If you can figure out the navigation, you can in fact swim to most of the locations, even down in the deepest part of the Red Crystal cave (well...it helps to build a couple of bases along the way!)

The Reapers, also, were distant roars echoing through the vast darkness. Out there somewhere. In the confined spaces of Below Zero there is no mystery. The damned thing is right there in your face. You aren't blind, wondering what is out there (the thalassophobia again). You are hiding under a bit of rock with the damned thing overhead. And that actually makes them less scary.

Another limiting factor many games reach for is inventory. One is always confronted with needs that are greater than the space. In Satisfactory many of the tech advances increase your inventory (until Satisfactory 1.0, which by inventing quantum storage removes the question entirely). In Horizon Zero Dawn you increase the size of your bags through crafting -- making for various lengthy hunts after rare bits of fur and string.

Below Zero leaves the sweet spot far behind as it places riches beyond measure in places that are hard to get to. And not just requiring a long trip to shuttle back and forth; in a warren that you will get inevitably lost in, and possibly die from lack of oxygen or food or water. In the former case, you can still ferry materials if you are willing to put up with a little boredom. Put the sub in gear and go listen to the radio or drink coffee or something. In the later, you face so much frustration you decide you'd rather do without.

At least this issue can be solved. I finally modded my copy of the game for double to triple the size of all containers (yes, you get more inventory with the various vehicles...which are even smaller boxes than your personal inventory!)

***

So what could be done with the game? Really, nothing much. They had a better story which for whatever reason they decided against. This makes the two plots disconnected; you can actually finish the game while completely ignoring the original storyline. 

The pressure of having a clear goal also creates a disconnect with the exploration and crafting. The original Subnautica fell perhaps a little too much on the other side of this; the story was so unimportant to you that, really, you stumbled into bits of it while exploring to find ways to improve your increasingly elaborate base.

Below Zero misses this balance. I literally was just trying to find materials for my prawn suit when I accidentally stumbled on the last of Al-An's blueprints and was offered the final segment of the game to play.

Below Zero can still be played off the clock, not paying attention to the story and just hanging out in the water doing a bit of light crafting. But, you know? The cramped confines of that tiny map (and the increased density of predators) means there's fewer great spaces to build a sprawling base in. And gathering the resources is more of a challenge and a frustration.

Perhaps the third game will regain its proper fluid balance.

Not Actually Archaeology

The BBC had a short-lived show called Bonekickers. It also hosts a long collection of comments/reviews by BBC subscribers. Most of them were not happy.

I have come to realize that all these shows and franchises; Indiana Jones, Tomb Raider, Relic Hunter, The Librarian and The Librarians, National History -- and a whole lot of book series as well -- are really offering history. Calling their heroes archaeologists, historians, iconologist/symbologists or even librarians is misleading because these stories are in no way about these academic disciplines.

These characters are instead guides, viewpoints, story tools; doorways to enter a plot that engages with history (and, more often than not, its artifacts).

So I'm with those BBC reviewers who commented they didn't expect to see good field practice going on. They had come for the fun of exploring history. The trowel is just a slightly more real-world version of a TARDIS. Just as whatever wacky interpretations Dan Brown's characters want to make about Renaissance art are merely an excuse to delve into that history.

There is reason why any show with a budget will dramatize a few minutes in that past time. In books of a certain kind, this is the "Diego Velasquez the Reluctant Conquistador" prologue, where we are briefly on the Yucatan Peninsula in 1525 before our POV character dies in the jungle, leaving only some tantalizing clue for our modern-day cast.

The thing of it is...

H.G. Wells has a quote about getting the audience to accept one impossible thing then getting on with the story. The readers and watchers are willing to accept our unlikely heroes and their terrible working methods as the premise that makes the story possible.

But what I seem to be finding more and more is people, who go on to dislike whatever franchise it is, for making such a muck of the history they promised. That's the follow-up, that's the part where Wells said you need to play fair.

And to be fair, much of this churn may be because the interwebs are crawling with amateur historians and amateur historians (especially military historians) rate high on the crank-o-meter.

History, though. Real history is messy. I understand the urge towards simplifying, cleaning up. I am willing to argue that most academic presentations of history are forced to simplify, clean up, and make unsupported leaps in order to make the material more comprehensible. Every historian has their own lens, their own spin (which is why the good ones are using so many citations; that way, you can at least check to see if what they have decided to tell you about a certain source is what you, personally, think of that source when you read it.)

It gets worse when you are trying to dramatize. I'm trying to write as true to the real world as I can, myself, but I am selecting, curating, committing huge sins of omission, and sometimes outright changing something to make for a better story. I scaled up Notre Dame de Paris by about 25% -- unless you want to assume my protagonist stands five-foot-two with boots on, some of her climbing stunts just don't work on the real building.

For most writers, visual media or no, the real world isn't as spectacular or as convenient as they'd like. That lovely castle ruin in Germany is at least decently big, but it is dressed in wire fencing, fronted by ticket booth and snack stands, and crawling with tourists. Any convenient secret passage will have been discovered long ago by the cleaning crew (if not the restorers!) and any lovely gold crown you find down there is going to interest Customs and a whole batch of other people very much.

Besides, of course, not glowing. Hell, if you find an ancient sword, you are lucky if you can even recognize it was a sword. You aren't going to be swinging it over your head any time soon. Not unless you like rust in your hair.

So does it help that the professional practices of our heroes might get a free pass? I mean, even without having them being under the pressure of a zombie apocalypse? Or without there being actual, you know, world destroying magic buried under that step pyramid in the Yucatan.

Yeah, I think we can all accept that our heroes might not have time for the camel-hair brushes, just like the heroes of another franchise can't always make time to rouse a judge and get a warrant signed.

But the thing of it is...I don't think the free pass lasts for garbage history. Even secret world, conspiracy, alternate history has to play by the rules. Wells' dictum is still there. The presence and nature of zombies is free, and Cleopatra XVIII Philpator's real reason to ally with Marc Anthony (to fight off the zombies, of course!) can be whatever the writer needs and the reader is fine with that.

But Alexandria had better be correct (and the Romans had better be wearing the correct armor!)

453

 

The DMV paperwork is still going through. And residential parking permit and transfer of insurance, sigh.

What with the insurance payout, this is working out as basically a $2,000 paint job. Except this is a later model with the improved double-clutch and suspension and it was a delight on the highway. I do miss the sunroof and under-seat subwoofer and, especially, those flappy paddles.

But it is still a A.M.T., even if they call it something different with this model number.

Baghdad by the Bay

I've ridden subways (and trains and streetcars, depending) in DC and LA, Chicago and Boston, London, Paris, Berlin, Kyoto, and Tokyo.

BART sucks. Sure, the venerable "T" is more visibly (and audibly!) decrepit. Parts of those tunnels could have inspired H.P. Lovecraft. LA's system is indifferently labeled, Paris is confusing, Tokyo wins for crowds (I've been in Tokyo Station at 5:00 PM on a weekday. Epic.) And Berlin's splice of three or four different entities is simply baroque.

But BART is just poorly maintained, poorly managed, and serves most of the Bay Area poorly. It is a sad excuse of a star for the metro system of a major metropolis.

***

The new improved "one-pot jollof" recipe:

Basmati rice (rinsed)

Muir Glen petite diced tomatoes

Contadina tomato sauce

Olive oil

just a little bit of water

Los Roast New Mexico green chiles (hot)

Savory Choice beef broth concentrate

Beef bullion

ground black pepper, garlic salt, parsley, thyme

Combine in rice cooker, stir occasionally, add water only if necessary.

***

Had second thoughts on my itinerary and went back to change a flight date. I am not fond of how Expedia handles multi-part trips now. It keeps defaulting back to trying to put your hotels for the length of the stay at the first place you stop at, and also having you fly out of the same city you flew into. Took a bit of work, some time on chat, and two different browsers.

And as it turned out, it hadn't captured my second hotel reservation at all. So I got that all straightened out and it is going to be a busier, shorter, but alas slightly more expensive trip. I went for a half-decent hotel for Alamogordo. I don't really need to do research in order to capture the kind of scummy Motel 6 accommodations they put archaeological field techs up in. 

This is my first non-work-related flight in almost six years. I'm not going to make it just another kind of work. I'm going to take some me time.

***

Partial bibliography for The Early Fox:

The Mound Builder Myth, Jason Colavito. A book on the history of an old and very racist conspiracy theory and why it fit in so well with Manifest Destiny and was quoted by bloody bloody Andrew Jackson.

Tewa Worlds, Samuel Duwe. An archaeological history of some of the Pueblo peoples of the American southwest.

Restricted Data, Alex Wellerstein. The history of nuclear secrecy, from the birth during the days when an atomic bomb was first contemplated by leading physicists, to the present day.

The Garnsey Spring Campsite, William J. Parry and John D. Speth. A technical report of a late prehistoric site in southeastern New Mexico.

The First Americans, J.M. Adovasio with Jake Page. A paleontological and archaeological investigation with an emphasis on indigenous voices.

Indigenizing Archaeology, ed. Emily C. Van Alst and Carlton Shield Chief Gover. A collection of essays.

Nuclear Neuvo Mexico, Myrriah Gomez. A wonderfully angry book on nuclear colonialism by a native neuvomexicana. 

Range Wars, Ryan H. Edginton. Basically, a history of the fight over who controls the land of White Sands, with a focus on environmental impact.

Downwind, Sarah Alizabeth Fox. The impact of uranium mining, processing, and the storage of nuclear waste on the peoples of the southwest, with a focus on oral histories.

Defusing Armageddon, Jeffrey T. Richelson. A history of NEST, largely in the form of stories and anecdotes.

I haven't read all of them. I don't even intend to purchase all of them. But these are the books that made it at least as far as sample chapter downloads to my (sigh) Kindle.

One step closer to oblivion

I still don't see the point in writing more books that nobody will read.

I bought plane tickets anyhow, but if you take the "research" aspect out, I'm paying a $k to stay in a Motel 6 in the middle of nowhere. I'm not really looking forward to the trip (I'm looking forward less to flying, what with all the essential personnel getting fired).

And my car was totaled. The joys of street parking. I go to bed with a well-maintained car that I actually enjoyed driving, and wake up having nothing but paperwork to sign.

The only reason I even get out of bed is I can't force myself to sleep any longer.

A Clue

 

(Ariadne not included)

So I've been saying that adventures advance via action, mysteries advance via clues. That's obviously simplistic -- if for no other reason than that the term "Mystery-adventure" exists.

What I'm starting to think, though, is that in most mysteries, clues go beyond being pieces of a puzzle.

Imagine the stock setup of the office over the neon sign. The detective is just reaching for the scotch when the dame walks in. Missing husband, she says. So, it could unfold that he looks for clues to where the husband is, collects those clues one by one, and finds the husband.

That is sort of how the classic Agatha Christie setup is supposed to work. We know what happened, and all we need to know is who did it. We find out, we end the story. It can be as simple as ruling out the left-handers and those with a good alibi until there's only one logical suspect. Calling everyone together in the drawing room for the denouement optional.

What is more usual is that something changes with each clue. That the story advances in some way beyond the collection of plot coupons.

The detective discovers the husband was involved with the mob? The scope just got bigger. Detective discovers husband is a widower and the dead wife looked nothing like the dame who hired him? The question has changed. Detective finds a dead body? The stakes have changed, from missing husband to murder.

In each of these, it is exciting because the story itself is evolving.

A string of clues can lead to a change of location, but you can change location without the excuse of clues. Change is good, but if all that happens is you've moved from Chicago to Cincinnati, at some point the reader will experience it as motion for the sake of motion. Not motion that progresses the story.

And there's one other exciting thing that can happen because of clues. And that's a change to the world. Spenser loved it when thugs would show up to beat him up; it meant that he was shaking the right trees. When the FBI sweeps in to take over the investigation you know the efforts of the protagonist have amounted to something -- and the story has moved to a definite new stage.

(Seriously, the best part of Spenser, For Hire.)

The problem I've got in how I've been telling the Athena Fox stories is that the clues are accretional. They aren't usually distinct things ("he's really left-handed!") but an emotional understanding that comes out of a gestalt of a culture and place.

Perhaps what bothers me is they feel too internal. Penny makes a realization that clarifies for her, personally, what is going on and what is at stake. It doesn't change the direction the outer story is moving. It doesn't change what anyone else does. She rarely gets a chance for a j'accuse. I've never managed to put her in a full-on Appleseed moment when she has to decide whether to shoot or not shoot based on everything she has learned up to that point.

Really, the way I've plotted the things, by the time she gets to the decision point there's only one obvious choice to make.

In any case, the fuzzy logic nature of the things and the process removes it from something the reader can have an illusion of solving with her. In a classic Perry Mason, all the facts are laid out for the viewer. They can solve the case themselves -- well, except for getting the witness to break down on the stand.

The other pole is what TVtropes calls "Bat Logic," where the chain of reasoning is shown but makes no sense. In that version, the fun is watching the detective work, not in trying to anticipate their findings yourself. Doctor Who and The Librarians also work within this space. In the case of the latter, supposedly this is real science and real art history but for the most part the science is just as rubber as Doctor Who, or Eureka, or Captain Planet.

(For all the Jacob Stone antics, I couldn't find a screenshot of the Librarians studying art.)

Oddly enough, for all the rubber science in Doctor Who, it comes closest to playing by the rules. Every now and then, there's a biggie for which all the information was clearly presented to the viewer as well (and, usually, to the Companion who ends up solving it).

So that's two things to keep in mind for a mystery. Two things with a nearly inverse relationship; for a puzzle-solving, Ellery Queen Magazine style locked-room, transparency of the detection process is strongly wanted but a change to the status quo is not.

For mysteries that are part of an adventure or thriller, transparency can be waived, but the story is flatter and less interesting if the process of finding the clues doesn't cause the story to advance in other important ways.

Clues shouldn't just come after a fight or chase scene. They should inspire one.

Rock, Paper, Introvert

I've been re-watching The Librarians. At the end of the two-parter opening, there's a brief conversation between the members of this new group that has formed and will go on to have adventures together through the rest of the series.

Stone has been hiding his light under a bushel, too loyal to his mine-worker family to go somewhere where his intellectual talents can be appreciated. When in any sort of unfamiliar or stressful situation he reverts to a blunt midwestern behavior, accent and all.

John Larroquette's character dismissively calls him a cowboy. John is unhappy about all these people invading what was his private workshop anyhow; he has the familiar role and arc of the team grump who gradually and grudgingly becomes their mentor. But he's still falling for Stone's act.

Stone doesn't trust Cassandra. She put the world in danger when offered a cure for her fatal brain tumor. She turned down the cure offered by Flynn (the original Librarian) in order to heal him instead. Everyone else is willing to forgive her, putting Stone at odds with them.

Nobody trusts Ezekiel. Who is fine with that, and openly tells them he's only working with them because it gives him more chances to steal even better stuff. But he's already admitted that he isn't happy in being a thief -- but since he is very good at it, he's going to use it and be proud of it.

Some of Ezekiel's story, only Eve knows. Eve is willing to keep those secrets hidden, and believes all of them have potential. They all know in turn that she is their guardian but they don't otherwise know anything about her.

This isn't a straight-forward map of A and B have a conflict, C and D have a conflict. This is A had a problem with B who has a relationship with C who is in conflict with D who has a conflict with A. And these alliances and mistrusts will shift through at least the early parts of the series.

Yeah. That's how you do it.

The Archaeologist Who Came In From the Cold

This has been an interesting and seemingly useful journey through genre structures. I have pretty much decided I am going to pivot, but it will be a soft pivot; walking back on a few things, changing the emphasis in a few places. Mostly having to do with character, as the ones having to do with story are going to take...more work like this.

I had been thinking that the London book didn't quite work as a mystery, but then I scanned the set-up scenes in the Japan book (there's a specific "refusal of the call" in that one) and I realized I'd missed a genre variation.

I was thinking Murder, She Wrote; where there is a body drop in the opening and the thing unfolds as a fairly straight-forward task of figuring out who did it. There's a different model, however.

It starts with a simple phone call. In London, this is Graham, who after a bit of a go-around explains someone might be stealing Roman coins from the dig Penny is working. It expands, with mysterious warnings, a shooting at the cemetery, more and more people of interest are added to the list and it is starting to look like a much deeper nest of conspiracies and secrets.

And in a way Penny was right. Although she finally confronts only one man, he was working with Penny's own boss and there was a tiny cover-up. But this wasn't nearly as big as the cover-up, and the secret, of Wentworth's Zero Room -- and that is where that final confrontation with Guy occurs.

I could apply this structure to the Japan book, with some stretching. It doesn't work at all for the Paris book but this itself is useful; it says that I may have been blending genres all along. Paris was designed as a treasure hunt, with the usual beats of that story template. And Japan is really...a caper.

The beats of the Japan book, in many places, I took quite consciously from the movie You Only Live Twice. Bond goes to a sumo match, Penny goes to the kabuki. She meets her Tiger Tanaka a little later, and up until that point had little idea what she had been sent to Japan for; just that it seemed to be a job and there might be more to it than it looked. Deacon/Blofeld is introduced fairly early. She and the local authority (in this case, a member of the Imperial Household Agency) plan their infiltration of his compound. She is discovered...and the ninja cavalry come rappelling down through the skylight.

I don't exactly make it a secret, either. She all but names the movie in the "scars" scene at the Park Hyatt Tokyo (yes...the Lost in Translation hotel).

And whether it is a chase, a mystery, a caper, or whatever, I need some kind of structure for the New Mexico book. I can see it working as another Rockford style mystery (the type goes back a lot earlier than him...I'd call Marlowe the archetype). She starts to look into the body found during the archaeological dig (in her shovel pit...and it isn't entirely coincidence), and it looks very much like conspiracy and indeed turns out to be one. Just not the first one she suspected. Or the second.

The advice about plotting a mystery is exactly like the advice about plotting a thriller. There are few totally cerebral cases, not in today's genre fiction. I still have what I already knew; Penny needs some skin in the game.

I'm working on this now. There are hooks already there in the setup. It was her dig. Worse, the people running the dig might blame her, meaning her career is in jeopardy. More so, I've got a sub-plot that brings Lon into the picture, and this can be thrown into Penny's basket with a false accusation against her (and leaving a very, very small conspiracy for her to uncover on the way to the big one).

I might have to kill off Lon early, though. Because that's when things turn around and Penny goes all-out.

***

Oh, and what was that about character pivot? What I've picked up is that the plot unfolds the same and believability remains the same whether your hero is an everyman or an adventurer. And neither impinges on what I call the "Christmas Jones" skills -- unless those skills are specific to the investigating or to the rough-and-tumble; trained forensics specialist, sharpshooter, martial artist, etc. 

I'm going to back off her confidence. And the apparent competence. I like the physical exuberance but heading towards making her competent in parkour and climbing buildings and rough-and-tumble and maybe some very basic martial arts was not the direction to go. The grim round of workouts and training is boring me too. It was a thing for the Japan novel, because that was part of the joke. But she's not an athlete, she's a genki girl.

I want to keep that physical exuberance and the way she throws herself into things, but making her either good at it or, even, conscious of how good she is wasn't working for me. The chase scenes in the Paris book left me a little cold. But I could see this coming in the Japan book; The yakuza chase and fight worked for me. The climbing wall less so, and the fight with Kaori...no.

A couple things I am keeping. She is still scared when she gets in a dangerous situation, but she doesn't freeze up. She also has just enough perspective (Amelia's job in the Paris book was to finally hammer this point home to her) that when she does pull off something badass, she can admit it. And enjoy it.

And as for all those hard-won skills from the previous books, like picking locks and riding snowmobiles? Not quite back to ground zero. Almost as good as "I've never done this!" is "I think I remember where the gas pedal is!" So it plays out like she is picking it up quick or really lucky (the standard everyman excuse) but she does have her "junior woodchuck" hand-wave of "Yeah, I rode one once in Japan..."

Which remark she will make. So I'm not counting on the reader remembering, and I'm not showing her carrying around a knapsack full of skills. I'm just using a slightly different justification. (Basically, it's the "I used to bullseye womp rats" justification).

As for structure? I do want to keep the pressure up, even if it isn't tension or a ticking clock. Just that she will alway have something to lose by not continuing. But I also like her better when she has a positive reason to approach something. In Japan she actually cried before agreeing to investigate Deacon. But then, she was carrying a lot of extra baggage at that moment. World's fastest recovery from PTSD (just add buddhist shrine, mountain priest...and yakuza.)

The motor-mouth stuff I can tone down and her focus improve, now that I think of it. She's earned a little maturity.

And I want clearer plots. Perhaps I should say I want external plots.

I've been leaning on conflicts that are internal, or even more often, thematic, and relying on those to carry the story arc. I've been borrowing resonance from them when the external conflict seems to fall short of proper tension and resolution. Penny's trip into the tunnels would have meant a lot less without Linnet's journey in 1941. I am risking this again in the New Mexico book if the ideas of peoples and migrations and human history don't actually have anything to do with either the mystery she is solving or how she approaches it or the solution.

Well, sort of. I call it a "Prachetism" when there's something that through most of the novel seemed like a thematic motif, but it becomes oddly important (through some sort of magical theory-of-contagion thing) to the resolution.

I like doing that. But I should first see that my external plot is strong enough to stand on its own.

There ain't no second chance against the thing with forty eyes

The prototypical Indiana Jones story sits comfortably towards the Thriller end of the Action-Adventure form. Raiders is almost top-to-bottom a hunt for and a chase after the biblical McGuffin. The tension is there from the beginning.

I should note I'm using "Thriller" here as a term for a certain story structure. As a genre, it ranges from intimate and claustrophobic portraits of psychological disintegration to explosive non-stop action. So leave aside the implications of creeping horror, gothic decay, festering family secrets and bad endings. Or terse conversations in techno-babble as submarines clash under the Arctic ice, for that matter.

Anyhow.

You can construct that same kind of Raiders plot around a stash of gold, or anything else worth killing over. But the size of the stakes are in inverse proportion to how close you adhere to reality; the really world-shattering stakes are easier when the thing has magical properties.

Clarke's Third Law-compliant, or not.

Not to say it can't be done. A surprising choice in the "third" Tomb Raider movie (the one based on the 2013 reboot) is that the world-threatening thing in Queen Himiko's tomb is the still-viable pathogen in her corpse.

Another one that doesn't -- quite -- reach for magic is Greg Benford's Artifact, with the globe-level threat something the physicist-author describes as "quarks on the human scale." However, even though this is found on an archaeological dig in the tomb of King Theseus and gave rise to the Minotaur myth, the puzzle-solving part is done in a high-energy physics laboratory.

Which leads to a basic observation; it is better to think of these not as archaeological adventures, but as the adventures of an archaeologist. We're back in Dick Francis territory. And where it may be reasonable for a jockey to get involved in a murder mystery happening at the horse races, having the final chase just happen to be on horseback puts us on the slippery slope towards Gymkata.

But I need to make a distinction between "Archaeologist" (a real-world job description) and "Archaeologist-Adventurer"; a character archetype that appears in certain works.

An archaeologist is a Dick Francis character. It is Christmas Jones or Gordon Freeman; it is an everyman hero who has that branch of anthropology in their CV. 

However, the skillset of an Adventure Archaeologist are those of an Adventurer. Flying planes and fisticuffs; all the stuff that will be the actual bulk of the story, and the stuff that for all practical purposes is what really progresses the plot. Both Everyman and Adventurer go through the same events but the flavor is different.

And that might be as useful a distinction as that between Mystery and Thriller. I'm going to call these the Adventure and the Thriller poles. The Adventure protagonist is trained for the job and plunges in, with some degree of confidence. The Thriller protagonist is pushed by the plot. They may squeak through, they may rise to the occasion. They usually take a few lumps and they may even fail.

Both have their moments of power fantasy. The Adventurer is a fantasy of being powerful (and usually fighting threats that are scaled appropriately). The Everyman is a fantasy that you, too, might do as well in the situations those protagonists face. It is considered a character easier for the audience to inhabit.

And that's why it felt so off for Penny to be collecting those skills for herself. It is always a little awkward, trying to level up the hero a bit, or even let them glow up, like Chuck finally becoming a trained spy able to hold his own with Sarah and Adam.

I got myself into a weird corner where I wanted to go more real but couldn't justify Penny surviving. 

Not with the situations she would be "realistically" running into. Doing a mostly off-screen Training Montage and making her now able to hold her own in a fist fight felt...wrong. 

I compromised by throwing her in the driver's seat of as many hot vehicles as I could come up with, plus giving her a handful of ninja throwing stars, lock picks, anything I could let her train up on. In short, justifying every one of these skills and showing the work she put in, so she never looked like some kind of Mary-Rey-Palpatine-Sue. 

But the emotional truth of a Thriller plot is that the hero survives regardless of their level of skill. Often the thriller will lampshade this. In the sequel to Preston and Child's Relic, the protagonist gets told to step aside for a much more competent squad of Navy SEALS. Who promptly get killed, leaving him alone to save the day anyhow. In Die Hard II, the professionals who take over the airport terrorism problem are, actually, part of that same problem -- and now McClane has to fight them, too.

Same principle as what TVTropes calls "Conservation of Ninjitsu." Or, as the unusually astute castle guards note in Guards! Guards! the fact that there's many of you and one of him means it might be a good idea for you to think twice. (They were wrong in this instance, but right in general principle. The Discworld runs on narrativium.)

So there's a reason I kept trying to push her emotions, thinking I was putting tension back in. Why I worked to back her down from where her climbing skills progressed to where she could be properly terrified climbing Notre-Dame de Paris, not traipsing along the parapet like she was Simon Nogueira.

The central conceit of the series is that Penny is an Everyman who keeps being thrown into situations that belong to an Adventurer. It it just a better story, I think, if she continues to muddle through. It was a mistake trying to train her up.

It also feels better to me, more in line with what appears to be the strengths of the concept, when Penny saves herself with a skill but it isn't the skill that you'd expect. Shooting back at the bad guys, not so good. Using a bronze-age sling to good effect, though... (She didn't do that one; Graham did. But point made.)

It should also be clear that "real" and "fiction" don't track in any way to the difference between the Joe Schlub and the ex Green Beret. Both are character archetypes that diverge from reality. 

That strong emphasis I was building in of "things don't work that way" (archaeology, history, but also fisticuffs) is there for the plot and for the joke. The world is conveniently real when it is inconvenient for the hero (and vice-versa). At most, you can say some things are more fictional than others. A famed globe-trotting adventurer who speaks seven languages is supposed to be recognized in-universe as a ludicrous fiction. A cold, scared, self-described "ex-dancer" who takes out a fully-grown yakuza in a fist fight is just...really lucky.

***

So what else does Thriller do that should work, and possibly has worked, for this series?

I've touched before on the aspect of control. The thriller is largely the villain (or events) in the driver's seat. The Action end of the pool has the hero making active choices; picking the fight, pushing after the villain.

I played with this in the Athens book. In Penny's mind, she is running scared and she only escapes several attempts on her life through sheer luck. But in the mind of Outis, she is the dogged pursuer, batting aside every attempt he makes to stop her and getting closer with every day. 

Mystery takes it one step further, where, aside from the bad guy escaping, the Detective is firmly in control through the whole thing.

You could also say that the Action hero wins and the Thriller protagonist survives. They scrape by, taking damage and sometimes even failing in the end. 

But this is old territory. What else does Thriller do?

Says one list; a clear thread, high stakes, twists (and also dynamic characters, memorable locations, and action).

I began this whole discussion with how Penny seems to have too little skin in the game (which isn't exactly what they are talking about with a clear thread, but I think it connects). I also mourn how many of the plots are slow starters, and how so many end up feeling unclear. The Mystery improves on that as well as there is a mystery that needs to be solved. It may open up the stakes into a larger mystery (often does) but there's something that is keeping the protagonist engaged from the start.

As several resources have pointed out, it has to matter. A rule sometimes broken; Holmes takes on cases for the intellectual challenge and would be depressed if he never found the solution. Travis, on the other hand, as much as he professes to be doing it to pay for his own peculiar retirement ("on the installation plan," he calls it) is almost always personally involved. Sometimes dangerously so.

The detective falls for the dame far too often. But even Sam Spade had a partner to avenge.

Perhaps, given the confusion between more action-based works where the heroes have to break into a heavily-guarded facility or stop a madman with a bomb, and the on-the-run style, where the hero has to not get caught and/or killed, it is best to think of there being a clear vector. Which way it points is unimportant.

Possibly the most dangerous thing to do is remove it. I did that in the Athens book; after the bombing, Penny thinks she is off the case. I repeated this almost exactly in the London book, and I actually gave a false ending in the Paris book where the treasure hunt appears to be over. (Not only that, she turned away from the treasure hunt a full third of the book before that.)

That vector doesn't need a face. It does make for a stronger thriller if there is an actual villain. The writer's resources don't talk pro or con on that, but they do have much to say about how soon you need your villain to show up.

Stakes comes with the territory of it being personal. I'm plotting the New Mexico book right now and I had Penny choosing to try to find out more about the body because, well, she'd personally dug it up. But her only skin in that game is the dig was shut down because of it and her former employers are not happy with her. It doesn't become truly personal for her until someone she knows is killed.

The London book squeaked by, I think, because of an alchemical connection* formed between Linnet (the diary-writer) and present-day Penny. She needs to find the end of Linnet's story because it in a way has become her story.

*(Borrowing the phrase from a review of Turandot.)

As I said above, this urgency, and this clear direction, can be there regardless of the outward form. They can both be there in a Romance (and the stakes as well, says he writing this draft on Valentine's Day).

I do find it interesting that deep and complex characters are getting mentioned as part of Thrillers. I suspect they are talking more about the psychological thrillers, because you don't need a complicated back story and deep hang-ups to flee from a crop-duster. Mystery and the kind of thriller where twelve people are trapped in a lonely mansion and start dropping one by one are ones where figuring out motives and navigating the tangled landscape of potential allies or betrayers can take up a big chunk of the story.

I find it troubling that location is also singled out. Perhaps Thriller isn't the safe-haven from the dreaded info-dump that I thought it was.

You call this archaeology?

 So I have determined that the forms of "Mystery" and "Thriller" can be analyzed to see what elements work for the series I am currently writing. And that the series appears to fall somewhere between the two. Assume, then, that I chose to emphasize the Mystery. What are the strengths and weaknesses of that form?

You certainly can't say that a mystery is incompatible with action or tension. There is a mystery element in the most action-filled adventure. Usually. On the flip side, even the cerebral Holmes sometimes needed to ask if Watson had brought along his trusty service revolver.

Thing of it is, when James Bond finds a clue, it really isn't a main line of the story. His tales proceed from the logic of action. Clues are just the mechanism of plot to get him from one action set-piece to another. He wins because he survives getting shot or blown up, not because he deduces it was the Duchess in the dark with her dirk.

(As illustration, do you know how hard it was to find a picture of James Bond looking for a clue?)

Basically, mystery and Action (our current stand-in for the somewhat different idea of the Thriller) are different streams. They don't really intersect. The action may or may not connect to the solution, but the process of solving the mystery is that process of sorting the clues into order. Not how the clues were obtained.

A lot like that disjunct between how the story in a game advances (through choices made in dialogue) versus how the larger part of the game is played (combat, exploration, crafting).

The main intersect in the thriller is that there is usually an external tension, with or without ticking clock. In a murder mystery, the murderer might get away. In a thriller, the murderer will kill again if not stopped. Action is implicit in the premise, basically, because the stakes are always mortal.

I would point out that the thriller goes hand-in-hand with violence, because you need the stakes, and the stakes need to be personalized in some way in order to engage the reader's empathy, and good story-telling rarely lets the hero slide through without taking a few hits so you've basically walked yourself into the hard steel-lined door of having your hero getting get hurt at some point. Which means the action -- the violence -- is happening up-close and personal.

But that seems trivial. Better to, for the moment, think of violence as a sort of slider that can be run up and down regardless of where a story sits on the mystery v. thriller arc.

Concentrate on action. On the idea of the action driving the plot. Well, what else is an archaeologist-adventurer? It is practically the name on the tin. They have adventures. Now, they might go around punching people, or they might be climbing rocks, but they are doing physical adventure. Meaning there's an element of physical danger.

Which points the big arrow at the end goal being physical. That is, that the end goal should be stopping the zombie uprising, not finding the mummy of Pharaoh Senebkay. Again, the difference between not letting the bad guy escape, and not letting the bad guy kill again.

Okay, not saying the Tomb Raider franchise always got that one right. In the first of the reboot trilogy, she saves...herself. Okay, she's trying to save her fellow crew members as well. She's only partially successful. In the second game, she stops a zombie army from destroying a village. That's decent. In the third, she stops a guy from getting superpowers he can use to give his people a better life. Um...yay us?

***

Archaeologist-Adventurer seems pretty incompatible with Mystery, though. It is funny, because the process of archaeology is a lot more like the process of mystery. But -- and this is true for Adventure as well -- real archaeology is pretty much orthogonal to what drives the plot. It might be an excuse to get into a plot, and I've treasured the moments where I've managed to have Penny use archaeology as part of her solution, but really it is more of a character trait. Black hair, likes dance, archaeologist.

It reminds me far too much of all those cozy mysteries (Dick Francis may have started it in modern fiction) of the amateur detective who, for the purposes of the story, is a detective. For the purposes of character, though, they have a thing. They know horses, they collect orchids. It rarely intersects the plot and when it does, it can seem...forced.

So it seems worth asking if the methods of archaeology and the questions of archaeology are compatible with the process and the result wanted in a mystery. Obviously, you'd hardly call it a mystery if your protagonist scrapes dirt with a trowel for twenty-three chapters, and by chapter twenty-four is willing to write in their site record that this is probably an Athebascan burial mound from about 800 CE.

In the stories I've written so far, Penny rarely digs anything up herself. She is more like an academic researcher, going through existing collections to draw conclusions from the material there. And she does, even of most of the book is taking place outside the lab (aka out in the real world having conversations and, yes, sometimes getting chased by yakuza).

And the questions I have her dealing with as the core and most important questions are anthropological. Which in the States archaeology falls under as a sub-discipline. Sure, Penny may recognize a name, or a jacket, or some other traditional Mystery clue, but she knows the importance of it because she has put it in an anthropological context. 

(The Paris book is interesting here; she has four big contextual realizations. But only two of them come out of the anthropological context the story has been focused on; what the last poem refers to, and why there might be a secret in a cemetery in Montmartre. The other two are a much shallower sociological context and, strangely, are the ones she almost loses her life over.)

But in the end, she could be an anthropologist or a historian or, for that matter, a travel writer or a novelist or a social worker and still bring the same skillset to bear in piecing together all the little cultural traits with the hints she's gotten and realizing who Ichiro is really working for and who he is protecting, or that Linnet's "Captain" had a stash of guns hidden under the Nine Elms station.

But not a beekeeper. That wouldn't have helped.

(To get a bit more technical, in Indiana Jones or similar situations, the heroes use the clue to tell them where to dig the hole. The actual digging is putting a shovel to what the ancient inscription said or where the light beam from the intricate mechanism fell on the first day of the year. In actual field work, digging the hole is the thing and the clues come out of not even what is dug up but the context that can only be discovered by that careful and technical excavation.)

Which brings me back around to the intersect the stories were partly written to address; between fictional archaeology and the real thing. Real archaeology may be a "find some fish for Aquaman to talk to" in a mystery, but it falls even more outside the thriller. It matters to the actual engines of the story (that is, climbing skyscrapers and punching bad guys) the way it matters that Denise Richard's character is a nuclear physicist.

Is, however, an archaeologist-adventurer incompatible with mystery? Can Lara Croft do the Miss Marple? It does seem a waste of what that character brings to the table. If Nero Wolfe was a circus strong-man, you'd think his cases would have a little less talking and a little more Santos Superman about them.

(And, yes, there is a whole sub-genre of Luchadores being cops, priests, superheroes...)

Since there really isn't an established genre of "Tomb Raider solves crimes in her spare time" it doesn't really feel like an avenue worth pursuing.

***

Put that aside as inconclusive. What am I writing a story for, irrespective of what my protagonist might call herself? As I said in the last entry, I seem to have moved towards Regional Mystery. Mystery split fairly early on into the detached cerebral puzzle -- locked rooms and the like -- the more action-oriented and hard-boiled stuff (and see above for where that sits on the "mystery v." axis) and lastly, mysteries that use the mystery as frame for character and social commentary. Led perhaps by the "knight in tarnished armor" himself. A phrase used by both Robert Parker and John D. McDonald, with the former specifically crafted to explore ideas of the previous work.

And although Sam Spade had SF and Spenser explores him some Boston, it is Travis McGee who shows focus on the place where the stories are happening. (Not to say Chandler didn't do so as well for an equally sun-drenched LA).

Mark the next era with Tony Hillerman, where the setting is a character in itself, and perhaps more importantly, readers are coming to the books for the setting as much as for the story. The mystery de jour is almost an excuse to hang out in Four Corners with the diné. 

Is this sort of celebration of place compatible with the thriller? Writers from E.R.B. to Alistair MacClean were giving a strong sense of place within a plot that was pure action-adventure. The thing I think this misses is that in Hillerman we are, again, anthropological. We get deep into culture and language and religion. We get into a place at the bones of economy and history. It isn't "Here's Prague, isn't it spooky with all the old buildings and the fog."

There's an almost science-fiction element to it, because of course it is a scientific interest. Maybe there's a reason the stock detective character is a wryly cynical observer, standing just slightly outside (rather than fully outside, an intellect vast and cool and unsympathetic).

And I think that sort of perspective, and that attention to detail, is firmly on the Mystery side. If for no other reason than that there are only so many words to go around and every word that's being used to describe the history of the Eiffel Tower is a word that can't be in a crazy parkour scramble to get away from some street thugs.

And yes, I have two chase sequences in the Paris book that are largely for the incongruity of doing the tourist-view of Notre-Dame de Paris in the middle of a foot chase, or the same in Gallerie Vivienne.

Which I guess answers one question. Tony Hillerman is facing the same thing, which is how to tie all of that setting back to plot. He is using that same sense of context to understand the clues, a context that can only be grasped by the reader through leading them through the same landscapes and showing them the same cultural ways. John Begay wouldn't have left his truck and walked because you don't leave the truck, not here in this desert landscape.

I was so conscious of doing this in the Paris book, that it is embedded in Huxley's book and clues as well. Meta-textually, she is going through the same experience with his fictional book, as we are with the book that contains it.

This is a ride I want to craft. Is it the ride the reader wants to take? Can I do it better? What parts of what I've been doing are making me unhappy, and what parts of it are making my readers unhappy?

I can't help coming back to the idea that this is too much license for me to indulge, and this is why I've got readers (well, family -- nobody else seems to want to comment) about getting lost in Japanese history or Bazalgette's sewer system. That I'd be more focused if I had more pressure on my protagonist, giving them only enough space between blows to glimpse the front of the Pantheon, but not enough time to mention Baron Haussmann.

Obviously a mystery can pass as lightly as a thriller over all of these too-tasty details. I mentioned reading an urban fantasy set in Paris (written by a German now living in New Zealand) and even though the character has a day job at the Pantheon I can't even say for sure if there are stairs. Much less any other detail of the physical building.

On the other hand, her protagonist also meets and has commentary on a dozen different famous people who are buried there. Complete with a hundred-year-strong, page-long argument about philosophy (something so far outside my area of interest I couldn't name you the characters involved even with having just read the book).

In any case, I lack any good metric of what "too much stuff" means. So finding an approach that isn't using that "stuff" as an underlying plot (or at least closely plot-adjacent) mechanism might be something I need to do.

What if I advance the mystery on a different set of clues? What if the clues are things like a clock broken at exactly 10:43 or a left-handed shooter; things that aren't dependent on the story being set in Anchorage, Alaska? Where I can absolutely chose to show or not to show language or food or religion because they are only there for color?

I don't like it. There's nothing fun about using Mystery elements that have been there since a certain Belgian first groomed his mustaches. And since nothing ties them to the setting, might as well set the mystery in a white room. And on the flip side, since none of it matters, there's no reason to care where the mystery is set, either. And, really, this doesn't even work for thrillers. As much as there are so many stock settings, the docks, the late-night warehouse, the crowded precinct station, the seedy boxing ring, the thriller lives for the set-pieces that are absolutely regional. Tied to some specific element of some specific place.

But is this contextual? I would argue that it is. Bond's famous Thames boat chase looks cool, but it gets resonance through recognizing the London landmarks in it. In a book, you at least have to name-drop if you are going to get that thrill. 

I felt there was more to it, though. The exercise I did in the Paris book was that two locations in particular are tied to some of the mythology that surrounds them; she tails the treasure-hunter gang through the Paris Opera House while ruminating on The Phantom of the Opera and what that story has meant to people including one future historian (herself). And of course The Hunchback of Notre-Dame for Notre-Dame de Paris. 

To the point where there are in-jokes; Penny hisses under her breath "So it is to be war, then, war between us both" (a paraphrase from the musical) in the former, and comments Captain Phoebus won't catch her if she falls from the latter (a detail which only appears in the Disney movie).

So already we can see the slippery slope. Assuming "too much information" is the problem I think it is. The problem might actually be one of lack of urgency, lack of tension, lack of a clear goal and a clear victory...and for all of that, I need to look at the series as a thriller.

Next essay.