Three steps forward two steps back

Which sounds like a country dance. I'm sure there's a country music song (in fact, I think I've heard it).

I expanded the opening scene to around 600 words. Trying not to get too Pleistocene Diorama about it; only one mammal (other than human) is shown, and the only flora detailed is some ditch grass. One other megafauna is talked about via the third-person narrative POV, with just enough it can probably be recognized as our old friend Smilodon.

No Giant Sloths, sad to say. It was getting too crowded. They have to wait for the next scene.

I got to 1200 words before I decided to rethink a thing or two. I thought twice about giving David Bustos any lines, as he is a real person. A public figure, but still. Created an assistant for him...but at that point realized I was falling back into bad old habits.

So have Penny draw her own conclusions. The reader is going to figure out she's looking at the person in the previous scene even if what Penny grasps from looking at some footprints isn't very detailed. And this is the magic of this whole thing, anyhow; the mechanics of glimpsing the past through the specific evidence that is sitting there in the ground.

There will be plenty of idiot lectures later. I can't quite get all of them out. As much as possible I'm determined to have less information total, and to present as much as I can organically. This, despite this being a mystery format where largely the plot advances through interviews. (The big difference is something I intend to be trying; unlike the lecturer who dumps an info-dump on the narrator, a witness is hostile and information needs to be extracted.)

Next scene is just Penny going from motel to a burger joint and going "Well. Here I am, a college student from LA, in a small southwestern town." In re the focus and information-glut abatement, she's not quite going to be blank slate but I am not bringing her background with her. Especially, the POV won't shift; what is there is what she does now.

I am going to try very hard not to mention film classes with Mr. Rodriguez (and his unholy fascination with '80s movies). But she is going to make a crack about Footloose.

 

Foolish Hobgoblin

I have it but it is controllable.

Give me any containers "in assorted colors" and I will want so hard to put different things in different colors. Screws in the blue bins, nails in the red bins...oh, but then there's more nails than there are red bins, and there's no color for bolts...

I keep thinking of some theme to hold my book covers together. The point of a series is not to save work in concept creation (plot bunnies breed like bunnies). The point is to get readers liking one and trying another. Or trying one because if they end up liking it, they know there's more like it waiting.

So branding. A closed series has a certain advantage in that you can do the visual equivalent of a liet-motif.  Same for titles, for that matter. Blackdamp, Firedamp, and, err, Afterdamp (I refuse to name a book Stinkdamp.) And there's few enough, and they are all around the same core concepts, you can do a Forging of the Crown, Quest for the Crown and End of the Crown. And put the titular artifact on all three covers. But even then, you can do some sort of symbol and for three or four books you can get away with using the same one.

Maybe it is the discovery writing. As with those damned assorted colors, I keep trying to come up with some element I can play with across every cover in the series, tying them together visually and helping to forge a series identity.

And each time, each idea, I hit on the exception.

This has been true for pretty much every linking element I've thought of. Frontispiece maps was an idea I floated. So, sure...any one of various maps of London, from Bazalgette's sewers to modern South London to -- useful to help the reader follow the Big Crawl of the climax -- the route and work sites of the Northern Line Extension.

For the Kyoto book, the theme is expressed by that motion from outside to in, and the Transcendence HQ Penny works to infiltrate is in a literal bullseye shape, ring within ring. 

And even Paris, it might be amusing to pull up another old map. The Petite Ceinture. Or better yet, the layout of the Paris Exposition of 1900.

Then we get to Athens. Okay, this is getting harder and harder. A diagram of her boating fun across the Adriatic. Or a map of Odysseus' long journey home from the Trojan War.

And the New Mexico book? Sigh. Although, just maybe, a map of White Sands. But already, you are seeing how it doesn't really come together as a cohesive theme. Or add enough to the reading experience to make it worth putting in.

And, yes, I've already fallen away from the three-legged stool or whatever it was, of a specific time and place in history (The London Blitz, the belle epoque, the....err...Greek classical age? Sigh) A specific city (Athens, Paris, London....Kyoto and Tokyo...Alamogordo, Albuquerque and Roswell...Sigh.) And a specific archaeological concept (or an intersection between archaeology and the greater world; archaeological looting, NAGPRA, Ancient Astronaut mythology...)

Perhaps needless to say, covers fell down before I'd even finished the first one.

That was back when I wanted to make a more obvious spoof of the "Archaeological Thriller" (as the book trade seems to call them these day). These are usually short, portentous titles with a well-recognized historical figure or period and a titular artifact (according to one source, often a document...leading to so many names for these things that are more-obscure names for "thing with writing on it.")

Not that the latter is unknown in the actual historical world. We've learned so much from the Narmer Pallet for instance. And pseudo-archaeology caught on as well, which is why we have things like The Grave Creek Stone.

The first was really obvious. The Enceladus Calyx (which for most of the book is just one piece, which ended up getting called The Athena Sherd). And I could with a stretch identify the London book with the first Roman coin (I think it was a dupondius). And the Japan book....err, I can't put Kusanagi on the cover, because that's not just a reveal, it's a fake reveal (it turns out to be the Mirror of Amaterasu. Which, come to think, would make a cool title itself). With a stretch, though, I can stick a stone fox...that is to say, a kitsune such as adorn the Inari shrine in Kyoto...and that hits a lot of the thematic beats about Japanese mythology and shape-changers.

And we hit Paris. Okay, okay, we can do Paris with le Stryge. That's what I put as the scene divider anyhow. And it is a known symbol of Paris and strongly associated with Notre-Dame de Paris...but it also has damn-all to do with the belle époque.

Which leaves New Mexico. That would be, what? A picture of a nuclear warhead?

The latest inspiration to strike was architecture. I've got a revised cover concept for the first book which is just the Acropolis detached and drifting as a background element. I don't really like it as an approach, but say I push the travel aspect with the covers and identify the location. 

Emblematic architecture fails quickly. Plus, who wants to read a series of books about a bunch of old and increasingly obscure buildings? Athens -- Acropolis (or to be specific, the Parthenon). Paris...err, Eifel Tower is too on-the-nose. Notre-Dame and Sacre-Couer are a little too "every European city" for people not really, really familiar with the specific buildings.

This goes double for using the Palace of Westminster and the Elizabeth Tower. Okay, maybe Tower Bridge. Although I could see the London Eye...downside is Penny doesn't visit any of these places, and I can't exactly put the London Underground on the cover. I could put the Battersea Power Plant but then readers would think the book was about Pink Floyd.

I had to let seasons go early. Paris is Spring (it is literally April in Paris). Japan is the Christmas Season, but more thematically, the crux takes place in the snowy landscapes of Mount Haku. But there's only four seasons, so even if I go with London being rainy (because that's the stereotype) and New Mexico being sunny, I run out of distinct weather patterns before I run out of book ideas.

Plus, I'm kicking around at least one idea that takes place mostly indoors in a space museum. So what's the weather there -- hard vacuum?

Abstracting the idea of "visual motif associated with the setting" could do a torii gate for Japan, a desert with the sacred red sun (stolen from the Zia) of the New Mexico flag standing in for the sun. And, and...I really can't think of anything so direct for the other ones (and I don't even like those two). London during the Blitz, the typical visual of the barrage balloons...but that makes it look like a Historical. And the only Greek iconography everyone would recognize is a Corinthian Helmet, and, well, fuck the Spartans.

See how all these organizing principles end up having at least one glaring exception?

Anyhow...I have no ideas for the cover for the next book. And I'm already talking to the cover people to go order me a new cover.

Giant world-hopping techno-magic bunny

That train of thought moved so fast I can't remember now what station it pulled out of. Something about having an urban fantasy setting for a story (book or series).

Okay, I think I have where it started. Urban fantasies are often based on a real city. And I immediately balked at using, say, San Francisco, and having all the other locals complaining I got everything wrong. So...what about a real-seeming city?

Call it Blakeville. Where there's a huge and not-entirely-upright scientific research facility for our plot convenience. No, wait. This is supposed to be an urban fantasy. So how about this is where two worlds meet; there's the equivalent in a powerful coven or magic school or some-such to the hotbed of made science across town. So this is where the worlds of science and magic meet. 

A focus point, even. No, a tipping point. A place where it will be decided which way the world will go. And we see the alternatives. We visit the alternatives...so this isn't just one city, it is three cities in one; the world which took the technology path, the world that took the magical path. With many of the same people and organizations and even buildings (there's a lot of leakage between the dimensions in this spot!) but in ways appropriate to the dark industrial cyber-future or the ruled-by-the-fae, not-so-nice, fantasy world.

Anyhow.

In between trying to write the book I'm actually supposed to be writing, I've been looking up which POD people can do a pocketbook format (4.25" x 6.87" in the US). Been thinking about breaking out of Amazon and distributing through a couple of other options anyhow.

There's a terrible feature creep about all those thoughts, though. Because I think about doing another edit pass before I go to print, or maybe a big top-down edit with Developmental Editor and all, plus of course new cover designs (because it is always new cover designs). And when I look at all that, and my seemingly ever-shrinking me time, I realize once again that the smartest thing to do seems to be to finish the book I'm on.

After I recover from the brain fog of some kind of virus. Had to take another day off work (sigh). Couldn't focus so ended up playing a bunch of Pimp My Airship...I mean, Forever Skies. Which I tried out in Early Access and the 1.0 just dropped.

And in-game caught the one disease I didn't have the materials to craft a cure for. So was piloting my airship around the ruined Earth, crawling up and down rusted catwalks, searching for the one damned melon while fainting away every few minutes from the damned disease. That was fun. And for once, when I found the melons, they dropped seeds for me and I could add them to my garden for future need.

The in-game me found a cure before the out-of-game me recovered. Work today was...not much fun. And now I wrap it up staring at a blank page and trying to make even a little progress on the current novel.

The Early Murder

When Murderbot needs to withdraw from the world for a bit, it watches back episodes of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.

I've been re-reading Murderbot.

It isn't quite for the same reasons. I have everything I need to write the first four or five scenes of The Early Fox. I can't afford to let anything new in. I don't want to get sidetracked by new ideas or new directions, and my understanding of what I am about to do is just hazy enough that I could lose the thread if I delay longer.

Of course the week has been nothing but delays. Sick, so tired I can barely drag myself to work -- and hating being at work because I know it will only draw out the process; being there instead of getting the rest I need. I just haven't had enough clear thinking space for anything but my own versions of Sanctuary Moon.

Not to say there aren't things I still have questions about and will need to look up. But I've uploaded as much as I can into cache memory. I will wait until it actually comes up in-story to worry about how Lake Otero dried up or what the front gate of Holloman AFB looks like.

I've been poking at Clovis lately. Even though it is essentially settled that there were cultures before Clovis -- among other things, that greatest diagnostic artifact of all, the Clovis Point, is restricted to the Americas. It didn't evolve somewhere else and was brought here. Well, maybe Beringia, but Beringia has the tiny problem of being underwater now.

The problem is, while there is a Stemmed Point tradition that occurs in a few locations, either because we are seeing multiple waves of migration or because the current list of pre-Clovis sites is still too small, there's not really a defined culture to look at.

So I've been using Clovis as a way to try to understand what my White Sands Girl might have been up to. And alas, that's not a great help either, not for the kinds of details a story-teller wants. There is essentially nothing of organic materials left, aside from organic-origin -- mastodon bones and ivory.

The bones appear to have been butchered. That's pretty distinct. We know there were humans in the North where it is cold. So probably they were collecting animal hides to wear. Were they dressing them? Sewing them? Had they learned weaving?

Okay, there's a nice little bit of negative evidence; we don't have any pots. That's a distinction of many NA cultures anyhow, possibly cultural, possibly timing (pottery and neolithic revolution practically go together in other regions), possibly due to a lack of the right kinds of mud. But... we make adobe, and that goes back before historical records (I visited sites where Jornada Morgellon cultures were making adobe buildings). In an case, baskets were the thing, not pots. Which sucks, as pots are really, really wonderful for future archaeologists.

Okay, and we've got cave painting, and there's later evidence that cultures that paint walls also paint themselves. So it isn't a stretch to have a bit of red ochre...at least, I seem to recall hematite is in the area. Sigh. More things to look up.

Fortunately, those same rules of fiction that make me want to include details of diet and games and dress and behavior that we simply don't have, are the rules that allow me to leave out shit if it is too complicated to try to get it right.

The Pleistocene scene is written. 500 words. Still on the first page of what was called "I-70" in my notes (when I thought there was going to be a surprise closure of the interstate because of a missile test) and is now "Dune Drive." The missile test is off because I want to move those thematic beats to the scene where they enter Holloman AFB.

And this is the fun chapter for any book. The chapter when you find out how your characters are going to work on the page and how the themes play out and how you are choosing to tell it. Which is on top of first-chapter woes, where you are trying to entice the reader and get them up to speed with what's at stake, who the protagonist is, and some idea of the contract with the reader (aka what kind of ride they are in for.)

So every time I write a line of dialogue about, say. C14 dating, I have to stop and rethink whether that is what the reader wants and needs to know now, or if I am overburdening them. Especially since the dating is part of the controversy and I haven't entirely determined how I am presenting it to the reader.

I could really use more me time. Perhaps it is time to think about early retirement.

A mammoth mistake

 Columbian.

In my defense, there are sites in North America where both species are present. They interbred -- so much, some researchers argue they shouldn't be considered separate species at all.

And it isn't like I'm using the term in the scene. I'm not even calling that lone male a mammoth. She and the child are probably not getting names either, although I was tempted by some of the names given to mammoth specimens (the woolly mammoth is also over-represented in largely-intact specimens.)

I'm still on the fence whether the narrative will refer to ruppia, ditchgrass, or make up something like "lake-grass." As I said in the earlier entry, there's something off-putting about calling, say, a season "the time of the big snow" instead of a simple "winter."

Still "giant sloth" might yank the reader out of immersion just as badly.

These are problems that probably will only be for this excerpt. The later ones are mostly from times well documented enough so I can use proper names, and in any case are more established as being the product of an external modern-day story-teller.

(With the exception of Egtved, which hits the sweet spot of both being a complex culture and artifacts that are well documented, and enough holes in our understanding of who she was and what was going on to drive an entire Bell-Beaker migration through.)

I also read the full supplement to the 2021 paper and I'm a little more forgiving of it. Still, there's this sense that the authors want so very much to push past the opening of the gap between the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheet, as if that is necessary to fully break Clovis First.

I don't see it that way. We don't have a great reconstruction of when the path opened, and we have just enough bifaces from before we approach the typology of the Clovis Point that majority opinion in NA paleontology is that there were probably multiple waves and there were humans here before that specific culture could be identified as such.

But for the purposes of story, I can leave Bennet et al un-besmirched and accept as within plausibility the coastal route out of Beringia -- but contrast that with Solutrean. Which is a rank pile of garbage, sorry. The Solutrean Hypothesis opens up to NAGPRA and Kennewick Man, and ties back to the actual plot with MacDonald, who might actually be Mescalero. Or Acoma Pueblo, but they will probably be represented with my NAGPRA Coordinator character.

The timing is still funky. For all the attention to dates, getting at when the trench was cut, when the first c14 dating was done (there was a core sample sufficiently prior to 2019, at least) or even which horizon the White Sands Girl was (I'm squinting at their stupid diagram and best I can gather is it is TM-2. Which is close to the bottom, which begs the question -- how did they label the trackways before they'd dug down that far and had a total count? There's a reason Hisarlik is numbered from top down!

Well, there's a good four hours of "B-roll" video available via the National Park. Still, it moves faster and has more of a plot than Heroes, which is what I've been watching of late. 

Mammoth Chore

Learning what I can on the appearance and behavior of the woolly mammoth. On one hand this is easier than you'd think as they are better documented than practically any other pleistocene animal. Even cave painters liked them, making them the third-most favorite subject. And as creatures of the snowier landscapes, they've had the luck of getting frozen and preserved in rather amazing numbers. Name another prehistoric animal that we can tell you the exact color (rather, range of colors) of their fur.

The downside is that the popular references are interested in woolly mammoths in general, not in the specifics of what they looked like in the late pleistocene and down in the Americas. So far I gather they were smaller, quite a bit smaller. But otherwise?

Same for a lot of other references. Mammoth hunters, paleolithic material cultures? Easy to find. The same for North America?

And this is where I hit the other barrier. This is like when you have a technical question and take it to Stack Exchange, only to find out you've stumbled on a long-running internet flame war. Well, this is an archaeological war; people who have absolutely bought into pre-Clovis to the extent that they don't want to recognize any practical limit to the date range, and people who ask that the evidence be solid. Which the pro-pre-Clovis respond to by calling their reaction knee-jerk conservatism.

Well, call me a conservative. Not that I know this stuff, but even as an outsider -- and even as someone who is mostly looking at the popular science outlets ( who falling over each other to support pre-Clovis) -- the very behavior of the pre-Clovis evangelists are making me suspicious.

There's that strange focus on the relatively solid, like dating, and what sometimes feels like great dodges around questions like stratigraphy. There's the blithe "...and many more examples" -- Stengler is particularly bad at this and her name keeps showing up in my reading. Look, defend your own site and work, don't be leaning on "But Monte Verde is even older!" Yeah, and Monte Verde ain't unimpeachable either.

This -- and the way so much of this is an argument made to the onlookers, that is in glowing articles in the popular press that paint a much more detailed picture than even the most ardent supporters would agree is supported by evidence -- means I'm having a lot of trouble pulling up a good understanding of what the available archaeology can actually show for a hypothesized pre-Clovis site.

Well, the good. As far as I can tell, mammoth-bone shelters aren't a thing in that period in North America. The travois may be (and, sorry, this one...which is the same Bennet et al of the 2021 trackways paper, and the same site...feels like such a reach. Hell, I'd want someone a lot more experienced than me to rule out a tail-drag by a giant sloth!) And I have a name for typical lithics, even if that is from the Gault site in Texas.

(The 2023 paper, which I've not yet read in full, seems rather cranky about the lack of material culture noted even in the 2021 APN "A Life in Ruins" podcast. Summarized as; paleolithic cultures worked more with perishable materials so this mark in the mud we're calling a travois totally makes up for not finding any flakes!)

I still need to look at flora...I really want to slip the ruppia cirrhosa in there for the astute reader...and a couple other megafauna, and finish my mammoths, and nail down everything I can about clothing, baskets (possibly plaited, says one ref), any adornment. I did get to the supplementary of the 2021 Bennet et al paper, which has a brief but very useful bit of timing on when the trenches were dug, and on a re-read I managed to finally remember that the solo mammoth crossed that of the "adolescent, female, or both" trackway I'm basing my little scene on, between her trip out and her trip back.

The dispersion and frequency of the various tracks over the roughly 2,000 year span they seem to have identified (if nothing else, by pollen layers) suggest she was part of a gathering party and not on her own. Which is also worth considering.

But of lesser importance than nailing down some of the less than helpful timing of the original dig and deciding what I want Penny to see on her visit. Pretty sure I'm going straight through the park and skipping the Daisy Track for this part. For that I need to hit all the linked material from the national park's website -- I think there were some videos there that taken during the dig that were recently made public. And I bought a book at the park that may have a few things to say.

The next chapter will be lighter. That's a brief trip into town for a burger and ending her busy day at the Satellite motel right there on I-70. (And another research question; everyone calls their highways different. Is the "I-70" or the "70" or even "highway 70?")

For the chapter after that, I need to learn a bit about Holloman AFB. I'm still hoping to have completed draft in 4 mos with only light editing after that...but it's gonna be a push.

Daisy, Daisy

Watching clips of wooly mammoths on YouTube. There's one nicely-made CGI of the giant sloth, but it is by those same "walking with" folks that never saw a thinly-supported hypothesis they couldn't fixate on in order to make a more dramatic presentation.

Read the 2021 paper. It is sort of oddly focused and less detailed than I might expect in some key places. I can't help noticing how much it hammers on the radiological dating but skims so very lightly over how they can be sure how accurately they've restored the footprints themselves. I haven't gotten into the supplementary materials, though. Damn having a day job. Writing would be so much simpler if I could just figure out how to get by without food and shelter.

Re-listened to a podcast at the APN on the White Sands Footprints. Very useful. Their thoughts are right where mine went (after several weeks, for me, and in the course of a podcast, for them. That's why they have those degrees.) They strongly underlined the point of missing material culture as well. Which at the least gives me both things about archaeology to talk about, and a reason why the dig Penny is on takes place (they found what they thought was lithic scatter).

One of the guests also visited the White Sands dig somewhere before 2021. When they had started a trench but before they got the radiological data. One thing he noticed that I totally didn't expect to hear is that when they drove out to the site, they had to go through Holloman, and part of the road contained a "steel rail running down the middle."

The Daisy Track.

Out of use since the '70s or so, and the important bits were re-assembled at the museum in Alamogordo. But that's a cool thing and once again, this is totally the right spot to have my dig.

So I am making progress on the prologue scene. I'm feeling my way along on how to tell it. For instance, do I want to name the flora and fauna she encounters? Saying "smilodon" feels like it yanks you out of experiencing the story first-hand. Calling it by some made-up name feels too "Ug, the Caveman" talk. For right now I'm doing things like "The cats with the big teeth" and seeing how I feel about it.

I also want to be able to cut away to an omniscient POV later because I am going to name Lucy when her scene comes up. And at some point I'll show the man behind the curtain and reveal that basically Penny is the narrator for these sequences. Not this one, though. This one stays in tight third-person.

But since I have at the minimum White Sands, Lucy, Egtveld, Valentina, and someone on the jornado del muerto I need to be somewhat efficient about writing these things. As fun as the research is (and it has rekindled my excitement for writing) I'd rather not spend a year on this book, too.

By the sea, Mister Todd

There were a few things I didn't like. I especially didn't like changing the original White Sands excavation, because so far I've been doing an Indiana Jones of the Gaps; keeping well-recorded history where it is and putting the crazy stuff that Athena Fox encounters into the margins where things are less documented.

And there were some plotting issues showing up that I won't bore anyone with (well...not this time around!)

It wasn't until I was at brunch today, with my usual phone stand and folding keyboard, that I realized...

The footprints were left by a lake.

A lake is a great place to forage, to get water, and to hunt. Which is something the predators know as well, so you don't want to make your camp there. Besides, it gets too wet.

The original footprints were found in the White Sands National Monument in 2009. The story is set in 2019. The radiological dating was re-visited in 2020 and 2022 and is still controversial but never mind that for now.

I really want the concrete pad for some sort of engine test to be out there. Near Holloman AFB. Away from the national park. And I want a full-on excavation. And I want a reason for MacDonald to have wished to be buried there.

So let's look for a settlement! Let's do archaeological terrain analysis and figure out where the White Sands Girl might have been going with that kid when she did her one mile out-and-back along the edge of Lake Otero. Which since the dates are still controversial, and archaeological funding is thin on the ground...err, playa...and that terrain analysis puts us squarely outside the park and into the bombing range, means I can absolutely have a bare-bones, controversy-racked terror for Penny's first professional state-side dig.

Without the slightest disparagement (or changing of the facts) of the original archaeology.

The entire VP-8 scene fell into place as well. This is why she has a black-and-white photograph, why she hopes to get something from it, and why the output of the image analyzer is actually useful to her. (And, in keeping with my new dictum of "clues change the game," what she finds is not what she was looking for.)

It does leave me with her having to get back into the military reservation after the dig is closed. But, actually...

And more pieces fell into place. The excavation has been stopped but they can still pack up their stuff. Which didn't get decided for a week so she had time to wander around Alamogordo and hang out with Lon while he is still alive. And that means she can go off the reservation...err, into the reservation...while she is doing clean-up. It does leave me the problem of getting to Roswell without a car...

And so it goes.

Well, that was quick

Sat down and wrote most of the prologue.

It doesn't work. It doesn't work so much, I'm cutting the prologue entirely.

The idea was to have Athena Fox, within the framework of the lecture Penny records at intervals and which I'm been using as the prologue in several of the books, get angry about the Mound Builder Myth. This would allow me to context some of the background of the various waves of colonization that have passed across the Americas, talk a bit about the history and still-ongoing racial tensions, and even touch on the connections to Ancient Astronaut beliefs.

I mean, I do have a whole Roswell sequence in this book.

But it is too much. No matter how much I tried not to say much of anything, the whole point is making an info-dump and it would be better not to do that. I can better work in this stuff much closer to when it matters in the story.

I can also demonstrate it. Show not tell. 

Plus it gives Penny too much background meaning there's less excuse for her to be learning stuff later on, and let the reader learn it along with her. And I made a point at the end of the last book that she's putting the fedora down for a little and I wanted to keep this one far from her past and her Athena Fox identity. Pushing that stuff into the background until she just becomes that slightly quirky cozy mystery lead with a few secrets and a surprising aptitude for survival.

The Paris book really got out of hand with talking about her previous adventures.

So that means my first chapter is the White Sands girl instead. So still weird -- third person one-off, almost the "Reluctant Conquistador" opening. With the main story beginning 23,000 years later.

Yeah, that's a leap even for Kubrick.

And that almost made me stop and hit my research right now. The downside to working from a light outline; you've got to do more planning as you start each new scene.

It almost made me stop because I needed to write that chapter before I could finally get to my protagonist. Then I realized why. I am strangely parsimonious with description (the reason there ends up being so much is that I describe so many things). The thought was in my head that I couldn't go and write the scene when Penny first looks out on the playa, because I wouldn't know what had or had not already been described in the chapter before.

And normally this would be so. When I get back to the Tiki book, the first scene at the bar (which was also a flashforward scene, but I've dropped that idea) was also going to do grunt work in describing the place. And this is perhaps not how I should be doing things. Maybe I should deal with going through a description more often, keeping it in the reader's mind instead of expecting them to remember. Maybe they will feel less overwhelmed.

(Seriously...I agonize over this stuff so much because I don't have reviewers, editors, commenters or beta readers. Too shy for the last, too impatient -- and broke -- for the second...and so on and so forth. Am I saying too much? Too little? Not clear? Too obvious? Too dramatic? Too understated? I don't know and I don't have a really good idea about how to know.)

Anyhow, not actually a problem for this one. In fact, duplication is probably something I should aim for here. Because it may be the same place, but it certainly isn't the same landscape. It isn't lush, but it is green and it is a lakeside. Lake Otrero, which dries up and is the source of that white gypsum sand 23,000 years later.

And, damn. Now I'm wishing I could do a match cut.

My, how big your eyes are

Finally got that ophthalmology appointment. Everything worked out. I'd timed it almost perfectly from work, those silly sunshade inserts were enough to navigate (with difficulty) the freeway towards home. Which took me past work so I stopped, clocked back in, made up the lost hour the appointment had taken and by the time I left the sun was no longer painful.

Oh, and everything looked good. That last impatient and uncommunicative "doctor" had left me the impression that I had glaucoma. Well, turns out not so. No glaucoma, no cataracts to worry about. So now I can get some new lenses (sigh...more money).

I feel younger than I have felt in a while.

The New Mexico novel is finally in outlining. The gaps are bigger than I thought. But I had a useful thought this morning. Okay; I woke up, (after a very strange dream in which my brother and best friend had gone Edo-punk; instead of dressing up in top hats, they were dressing as Japanese feudal lords for daywear, taking an afternoon stroll in hakama and swords while composing haiku to each other)...anyhow, I woke up with yet another new bit of dialogue in my head.

And realized that the important thing wasn't that Penny not be able to talk to anyone for this desert solitaire. But that she feels like she doesn't have anyone to talk to. As long as I get some good solo sequences out of her (and she's got enough driving back-and-forth between Alamogordo, Albuquerque and Roswell to achieve that, easy), I can still have her do enough necessary dialogue to, well...

...indulge too much in all that lovely background world-building. Sigh. Well, if any reader has made it this far into the series, they already know what to expect.

Hell, they might even like it. There's a small counter-revolution going on over in BookTube right now, with some readers and authors expressing that, just maybe, not everybody wants a short book with nothing but dialogue (and probably fist fights...it's hard to tell). Also threads on Reddit and conversations on Quora and of course several of the blogs I follow...this is in the air.

Speaking of which.

It strikes me that the Murderbot Diaries play with another expectation. I already talked about the way it uses a quirk of English to largely take gender out of the question. We have pronouns, and "it" is equally weighted as "he" and "she"; it is making a judgement (and "they" just stands out, although for different reasons.)

But Murderbot is told in First Person. And it doesn't care about gender, not its own, not anyone else's.

Thing I realized today is that in most books, when we have a bunch of characters to keep track of, we tag them by description and manner. He's the short, excitable one. She's the moody blonde. It helps in our inner filing systems.

I am thinking this because I have trouble keeping track of the human cast. And that's because they don't get these tags. Many readers, however, apparently do find these characters easy to remember, clear and distinct. And I think that is because they are looking at social cues, and remembering them via the relationships they have.

That's how my female relatives talk. Every conversation has a "June, who is Cecily's mom, who is one of Sally's friends. June was at Sarah's wedding, you probably saw her there."

All of that is there, just not highlighted. Because SecUnit professes not to be interested. SecUnit is an untrustworthy narrator. It enjoys and seems to take actual comfort in Sanctuary Moon, a sort of future-equivalent-of a telenovela.

So we aren't getting in an obvious way the stuff we usually think is necessary to track our casts. But, at least for some readers, the information is still there.

Well. Pretty soon we'll be able to watch Sanctuary Moon ourselves.

An Oblique Approach

One more piece fell in place. This has reached the critical mass stage, where each thing I add to my known scene list bounces off the other pieces that are already there and spits out new scenes. I've pretty much figured out where MacDonald got injured, how Penny learns he was at Los Alamos, why she got sent to the WIPP and even where she learned about the Atlas F site outside of Roswell.

And it's something I'd already heard of. I realized it as I was reading up on incidents (I wanted a criticality incident but didn't like any of the options) -- this was a story I knew from a while ago.

Turns out going organic is not the right choice when you are using the stuff in a drum of nuclear waste.

(And a pity...I came so close to using this 2011 Los Alamos near-incident, but it was only a near incident and I feel I am taking enough liberties with history as it is):

In the meanwhile, been re-reading the Belisarius series by Flint and Drake. An interesting two-mind experience this time around. I've also been archive-binging at Bret Devereux's blog (he's a historian of the ancient world), and he's reinforcing what I've managed to pick up over the last few years about not just history, but the methods of history.

It strikes me that Flint is trusting his sources a bit much (at least he doesn't trust Procopius!) And, no, I haven't read Procopius. Or Tac. Ger 2.1, if I am getting the abbreviated APA right, or any of the other books Bret is referencing. Or that Flint probably consulted.

In any case, I feel like I am understanding not just places he diverged from history, but the story-telling reasons why he diverged from history. But there's some bigger picture stuff there. Not quite Spartan Myth, but more than a little of what Bret calls "The Fremen Mirage." The Belisarius series is jam-packed with hardy noble desert warriors and effete civilized men (usually in opposition).

But it's still a fun read, and does make me wish (as it did the first time) that I knew the history but more importantly the area (much of the series takes place in India) better than I do.

Oh, and today's Six Degress? In his three-post "Fremen Mirage" essay Bret shares a link to the Lindsay Ellis video about a certain "missing Persian" in adaptations of The Phantom of the Opera. Which I found last year, watched, and it helped shape a major sequence in my Paris book.

Now I just have to figure out how to keep the focus on the New Mexico landscape and Penny's "Desert Solitaire" without dragging the story too much into getting chased by mystery gunmen and tomb-raiding the steel-lined underground tunnels of Cold War missile tech.

Plotting against us in their islands

 

I don't remember plotting taking so long. Well, I didn't really plot the last book. Sometimes a Fox was a treasure hunt with only the barest thread of any other plot in it. I probably spent the most of the pre-writing plot time making up the riddle-clues.

And the previous A Fox's Wedding was mostly James Bond plotting. It was a caper novel built on the idea of "have this actress do action stunts until a cult leader thinks she's Indiana Jones," and that gave me a lot of leeway to come up with a spot in Japan I wanted to do a scene in, then come up with an excuse to be there.

The current book, The Early Fox, I'm trying to be much more deliberate with plot. I'm trying to not have incidents but actually have logical advancements in the story. In fact, I'm almost upset that I now have four places I really want to put in the story even if I have to warp the plot around to make them happen.

One thing I have, though, is the advantage of iterative plot. It is like iterative research, and for a book like this (which taps both history and real-world geography) these are closely associated. I don't have to solve all my plot problems now; I just have know they are NP-complete. That is, that they are roughly equally solvable and finding those solutions can happen in polynomial time. And that's enough strained math analogies for one blog post.

I am glad I am this certain. I just ran into another young writer agonizing about plotting, and I can both remember and anticipate spinning wheels for days and weeks if I worry now, for instance, about what it is my "angry activist" character asks of Penny that sends her down to the WIPP at the southeastern corner of the state.

In short, this is the point in plotting where I can just write, "Penny does something cunning here" in the knowledge that when I get to that point, the story may have changed enough that I don't need her to be.

Or that, by then, I will have thought of something that's cunning enough.

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.)