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.