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.