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.