A thing I tell a lot of new writers is that when a problem seems unsolvable, try to think out of the box. You have to recognize you are in a box first. You also have to figure out where the sides of the box are. That's why stating the problem as unambiguously as possible is such a good trick; it makes the constraints you are unconsciously applying more obvious.
This wasn't quite what happened with my nuclear MacGuffin. It was more like I wandered across the unstated boundary without even realizing it.
It's right there in the name. Hitchcock made the name deliberate to underline that it doesn't actually matter what the MacGuffin is. And I had already decided that the punch line to Penny's brush with nuclear secrecy is to accept that in the end, she never does find out what the secret was.
(Something I also had her do in the Paris book. I hope it isn't going to become a trend.)
The thing it took me a week to see is that not only don't I have to show what is in the box, the plot works if there was nothing in the box to begin with!
So this is how I construct it now:
MacDonald had the MacGuffin. John Freeman thought he might have taken it literally to the grave with him. When word got out about the Russian SLAM project, Freeman went back to White Sands. When Penny does her illegal midnight stratigraphy, she finds that MacDonald's grave has been dug twice (not counting the archaeological excavation, or the mess the Coroner's Office made of the site. This is a dig that will take all her skills as an archaeologist).
When the coroner got a good look at MacDonald's bones is when the NEST team was triggered. (NAGPRA was already on site, in the form of the Indian rights activist, because they were already on call. So they'd show for human remains even if Penny hadn't recognized what turned out to be a Tewa burial ritual.)
(I haven't decided whether it is a plutonium alloy Macdonald was machining -- that stuff is pretty tightly controlled -- but he was working early Los Alamos style where some of the workers weren't even informed about the hazards of the materials they were handling, and as a result his body was contaminated.)
The NEST team might not have been entirely serious. They were also on site at White Sands, and they took theexcuse for a training exercise. Hence the straight-from-the-movies fallout in full team strength, white vans and hazmat suits. In any case, their talk of a possible Source helped cement the existence of a MacGuffin in certain people's minds.
Lon Davis published a picture of MacDonald's body that he shouldn't have been able to get. That caused a search of his trailer by "parties unknown" (because I'm trying to avoid some spoilers here in my blog!) and led to the "Lon Gunman" (as he calls himself online) being taken out by a lone gunman. Which looks suspiciously like the kind of Black Ops hit Lon wrote about in his work as a conspiracy theorist.
He's not really an aliens guy but Penny goes to Roswell to find him because why would I pass up a chance to do Roswell?
And now there are at least two people looking for the MacGuffin/The Source and Penny breaks the law again to search Lon's trailer, and so does his killer, leading to another must-have scene that was in my list as she fights back with Lon's SOF Magazine collection of ninja throwing stars and the like.
Then the long desert chase. Which is my "trying to do Sir Pterry" resolution of a ongoing thematic thread about early human migration, persistence hunting, and...things. More sidebar stories, just like the last book, but these are in Third Person Omniscient. Lucy, Egtved Girl, a Spanish settler on the Jornado del Muerto, etc. The archaeological excavation, after all, is around footprints of putative pre-Clovis humans. Or rather pre-pre-Clovis humans, pre Beringia even.
In any case, this chase fetches up at Trinity site. Which is why I was trying to put together a vacation to New Mexico on the one open day of 2024.
So. The ball got rolling because this is how nuclear secrecy, scientific secrets, works. When people know a thing is possible then they start noticing all the clues that are out there in the open literature. MacDonald's radiation injuries by themselves weren't enough (they are unfortunately common), but between the location of the grave and Lon's efforts and Penny's efforts in stirring the pot enough people are turning over rocks that the engineering breakthroughs of a secret project from the Star Wars days (Reagan, not a galaxy far, far away) risks being uncovered by Unfriendly Powers.
(And I haven't even mentioned the military intelligence guy, a very smart captain who made sure to have a good working relationship with the E4 Mafia).
Secrecy and paranoia got Lon killed. The phantom Source just accelerated things...but more than that, it fulfills the Doylist function of getting people running around being tailed by menacing pickup trucks (everything is menacing when you are driving a Smart Fortwo as Penny will be), sneaking around military reservations, and getting shot at. The plot works even if the box is empty.
This was one of those snowball days where that understanding of how the MacGuffin worked led me to understand a lot more about MacDonald, and also about John Freeman. Retired physicist and itinerant musician, with his buddy "silent partner" Al, he dropped in to the Alamogordo blues and rockabilly scene and sat in for the bass player for the existing "Ray Cats," who is having back problems and needs to sit out most of their sets. Which also gives Penny someone to talk to when the band isn't playing too loudly.
(Since they owe more than a little to The Unreal Band, they frequently are.)
So what is, as of the moment, still on the table, or probably on the table?
The Solutrean Hypothesis and the Mound Builder Conspiracy, plus Indigenous Archaeology and Tewa mythology. Which is a through-line up to the current-day neuvomexicanos, Los Alamos, and to why MacDonald was buried on military land. So it is actually plot-important.
There's a very cool mural on what is called in some circles Nuclear Colonialism that I would like to move to Alamagordo so Penny can see it.
UFOs are probably off the table. I can't miss Roswell, but all the really fun stuff is in Nevada anyhow. Same goes for Fallout/Nuclear Armageddon. I do want to touch on the idea of the Anthropocene and even the pessimistic last couple of variables in the Drake Equation, but I can't indulge in any Mad Max LARPing on this one. Goodsprings is in Nevada, too, for your Fallout New Vegas fix.
And same for westerns and ghost towns and...I just came up with another story, didn't I? Especially if I can work the Lost City of Cecil B. DeMille into it. Though what Roy Rogers, the Wasteland Wanderer, and Cleopatra VII Philopator have to do with each other...
And Kerr-McGee? I would like some Industrial in my military-industrial complex, but this red herring is looking pretty smelly at this point. It is quite clear MacDonald got exposed while working on a weapons-related program, not due to the poor management of uranium mining and refinement in the area.
I would really like to get a visit to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, though. This hooking back to that Fermi problem et al. And it isn't like MacDonald has a CV I have to stick to (not even his name is set in concrete, much less buried in a stable containment facility).
That stuff will have to wait for the chapter plan. But at this point I've narrowed focus enough to where I can do directed research towards the elements I'm fairly sure will feature in the story.
