I know you are busy saving the world, but...

Side quests. 

It's a mechanism seen in so many games because it achieves the goals of lengthening play, letting the player put their stamp on their character through choices outside of the main campaign, and with chances to personalize (and improve) their gear, and of course to explore the world and the lore.

Like James Bond Plotting, it seems like a natural fit for novels as well.

Really, most of a plot is this already. There's two major forms going on; first is actually plot-related, but takes form as various odd errands that seem to be necessary just to get the clue or the part for the magic demon-defeating weapon or whatever. Second is stuff that builds character, builds world. The biggest difference is that even in games with a Reputation or Morality meter, non-game stories can build all sorts of important character growth into these side stories.

I had already intended the plot for The Early Fox to be heavily on having to do a thing for a person to get the thing to give to some other person so they would tell Penny the next clue. But now I'm thinking about the second kind.

C plots.

But it might just be that I manage to get a chest cold and spent a week out of work with a nasty cough and no energy and no brain. I'm slowly coming back to the book, and staring at my plot wondering what the hell it was that I was thinking -- something that must have felt so clear then I didn't put it in my notes, but now that fever has burned out more of the remaining brain cells, can't remember now.

But I got a lot of HZD done. And watching another Let's Play.

Aloy -- gets a lot of side quests. By Forbidden West she's got not just main quests, quests which grant weapons or armor, and collectibles, the new upgrade system requires so many specialized parts those become a quest form in and of themselves.

At least it has broken slightly with the "go here and kill everything you see" of Skyrim. Instead, it is "go here and shoot these specific parts off some of these machines." Which makes combat a lot more complicated and strategic as you are trying to balance getting all that useful loot against, well, surviving the encounter as well.

Aloy even lampshades this at least once in dialogue. "I get it; you want me to go there, shoot some machines, bring you back some parts."

At least the game has more excuse for the quests which are doing errands for random people. As opposed to people walking up to the full kitted-out assassin in black armor and a really bad reputation and asking him if he'd mind making a run down to the chemist for some sticking plaster.

Aloy, on the other hand, has a huge reputation for helping people. As of the start of Forbidden West she is the Savior of Meridian and Anointed of the Nora (she hates both titles. And don't bow, either. The Anointed doesn't like it). Plus Seeker, Thrush of the Lodge, and Chieftain of the Werak.

Well before the second game is over, she's also Savior of Plainsong, Champion of the Tenakt, and Ancestor Reborn. Take the last just as one example; the Quen worship the Legacy of the Ancestors, those figures of mostly-lost history who showed the way for their tribe to grow and prosper. Aloy is one of them returned in flesh. Yeah, maybe not exactly the person you'd turn to to pick up your laundry, but absolutely a person to do the impossible and save some lives doing it.

All of the titles above are basically titles of "wandering do-gooder." Seriously, though, she could be getting a lot of "help us out" quests just with her Focus alone.

Which does happen more than a little in the first game, as people come to her as "the Nora who can see the unseen." Yeah, welcome to being the only person after the apocalypse with a fully functional Google Glass.

Also one of the greatest diagetic excuses for a HUD that I know of -- because even as there are some clever ones out there, going back to at least Half-Life where the HEV suit contains the display unit that shows you that game data, the Focus is also a key part of the story. Not just a tool, but the way discovery of the Focus changes Aloy's life, and also as it turned out changed Sylens' as well and led to the awakening of HADES (and thus the plot), and of course quite a lot of plot-related "who has a focus, who can listen in to another focus" stuff.

By about an hour into the game, Aloy has the only gliding wing (sure, Gruda had one, but she killed him...and took it), and also (unusually for any tech left within eyeball range of the Oseram) the only grappling hook.

So they really should be coming to her all the time with "Hey, my cat got stuck in a tree. Could you grapple gun your way up there and glide back down with it? Only take you a moment."

But, no. They'd rather ask her to beat up a few machines.

The dangers of au vis

Au vis openings are always tempting.  It is nice to have something that makes a good hook, especially over a transition; a linking element, a match cut, even a Gilligan cut.

The problem comes when you need to backfill. And it starts with the backfill being almost necessarily in past perfect tense.

I have a new rule. "Any part of a story in past perfect should either be long enough to allow it to be dropped into simple past, or so short the question never comes up."

That is, either it should be a brief recap, or it should be a full flashback. Because what falls between ends up taking things that should be in a proper scene; that is, should be dramatized with full five-senses writing, and turning them into explanation instead. Basically, unless you work to fix this problem, the recap ends up being all telling, no showing.

I had two of them in the Roswell sequence. I had a hook opening with her driving a pickup truck, and I had a fake-out opening for the Roswell museum scene.

And I didn't even realize this was a problem. It wasn't like I had anything I needed to say about Roswell other than the way that one sketchy incident is heavily leveraged as the big tourist draw. Practically the town identity.

No, the problem is that I'm not letting the reader enjoy the experience of visiting the place. I don't need to give more information about the town. I need to have Penny experience it in real time, not in a rushed recap (rushed because otherwise I'd be either stuck in past perfect so long it would get uncomfortable, or I'd have to do the "slip" in and out of full flashback mode.

The driving is actually worse. There's a bunch of character beats here. Really, that's one of the three things the drive is doing; scene-setting, a little philosophical conceit, and a chance for Penny to do some stuff in character.

That was my big accomplishment of today. Realizing I needed to toss two more chapters and rewrite those.

(The real project today was looking over the outline and trying to figure out what actual scenes that make it into an actual novel. It probably needs more stuff happening. But not exactly plot. Maybe C plots; maybe some fetch quests.)

The Other Guys

I've been archive-binging at Mythcreants again (they have a lot of archive).  

Had a scary realization; I don't have a supporting cast.

Okay, this is understandable. For the New Mexico adventure, I'm consciously not letting Penny have anyone she can talk freely to -- partly to get a whole "Desert Solitudes" thing going (and concentrate on descriptions instead of dialog), but also to try to head off the damned info-dumps.

Even if both Dylan and now Luke keep angling for more screen time, so much so I'm already making jokes about love triangles.

And the original model was largely Tomb Raider, who in the first go-round pretty much only had Werner Von Croy as a returning character. The Legend trilogy gave her a support team, but they only barely appeared in game play (and were sharply reduced in number during Underworld).

Not to mention returning adversary Natla.

Setting a precedent for the Survivor trilogy, which admittedly started so grimdark it made sense most of the cast didn't make it to the end of the first game. Not sure why they kept Jonah but lost Sam. Probably too lemony for EA (that bridal carry after the big battle...ho-yay!)

Anyhow, what is scary is that not only have I never noticed before that I didn't give Penny a solid supporting cast -- I mean fully fleshed-out characters with their own arcs, not people who sometimes pick up the phone -- I don't even know how I could write these people.

This is when I'm four scenes into Part II and my not-really-an-outline is telling me I'm short of material. In fact, it feels like there's not enough story for the story, period.

Add that to the ongoing stuff at work, and...all I want to do is turn out the lights, put on headphones, and play Horizon Zero Dawn. I might not even leave the Sacred Lands.

The Name of the Cow

I got there. And before the weekend was out I pushed through almost 4K past where I'd stopped for rewrites, completing the "aftermath" scene that follows the body drop, and beginning Penny's sojourn down Blue Highways. In a rented Toyota Tacoma, though, not on a motorbike wearing a helmet painted with an American flag.

 I'm probably going to reconstruct that opener several times before I call it close enough. But I'm pushing on to Roswell. Again the difficulties of this approach are killing me; I don't want to go deep into conspiracy theories and I really want to avoid getting into any detail about Ancient Alien stuff. If for no other reason, than it inevitably drags in Penny's historical knowledge -- and her history with similar conspiracies.

And I'm trying for, not quite blank slate, and certainly not a reboot, but not having quite so much baggage.

And McDonald got his real name. That was always a placeholder, even if I was starting to take it seriously. But I like the idea of a very ordinary hispano name that leads many of the people Penny is interacting with to think of him as just a random old guy on public support, who died without accomplishment or legacy.

Which is also what motivates Mary Cartwright (who is also hispano, with strong links to Santa Clara Pueblo, but doesn't get a revealing name. So I guess she's taking over the "yes, intermarriage is a thing" point from MacDonald).

Juan Baca.

No, not "baka"

Or "bacta"

But one of the family names of original Spanish settlers which are still extremely common in New Mexico. So a direct link to idea of heritage and identity...all the way back to who exactly was walking along that ancient Lake Otero (and when!)

Sometimes still spelled "Vaca," shortened from "de Vaca," and, yes, probably has a direct connection to that famous explorer of the southwest, Cabeza de Vaca himself.

A Secret Test of Character

I got most of the draft re-written. If I push through tonight, I might be back up where I left off and be free to spend the weekend seeing how many chapters of the next part of the book I can push out.

The beats are better. Clearer, at least. Tom Bell is still turning ally too quickly, and Julian Bleekman isn't getting enough love, even when I gave him a whole scene to use. Also, pushing Dylan out just caused Luke to take over his slot as good-looking, sympathetic friend. At this point it would take far too little to tip it over into a full YA Love Triangle. And Miguel and Jesus can't for the life of them get any screen time.

But then, I only had 8K to work with. So I'm not entirely unhappy with all that.

No, the problem is, I've realized I don't like Penny.

I don't mean as a person. I don't entirely mean the difficulty of writing her. I mean that she may not be a good character to hang a book on. Or a good character at all, but that's part of the problem; I can't say if she is believable or nuanced because she seems so very unfocused to me.

She wasn't, after all, designed.

Penny is the result of multiple unplanned, on-the-fly decisions made to allow the plot of the first book to work. And others that were meant to aim her at where I had originally intended to go; to evolve quickly into a fairly typical confident, wise-cracking hero.

Instead I got a motormouth neurotic, bouncing between overconfidence and ruthlessly tearing herself down; both born of an extreme lack of confidence. And yet I keep writing her into situations where she needs to be brave one moment and paralyzed the next, physically competent but without the applicable training, deeply informed on nuances of history and culture yet with huge and surprising gaps in her understanding of even the basics.

I set out, in the current book, to roll back a few things I didn't like. A big one was getting rid of all the lectures and a necessary corollary was to make her less educated in the subjects at hand (because when you've got a motor-mouthed First Person protagonist, if they know anything about a subject, they are bound to blurt it out.)

I wanted to put her back in danger and make it relatable, which meant downplaying her history of (unlikely) successes and her hard-won skills.

But I don't like what I'm getting. She's sounding, well, childish. She's so out of her depth she feels like the damsel character the real hero will be rescuing when he shows up.

And as usual when Penny plays things close to the chest, it is hard showing the reader what is actually going behind that plucky cheerful more-than-a-little-ditzy mask.

And yet this is still closer to where I want to be. The Tomb Raider-archetype 200-casualty firefight in the streets of Cairo got dumped pretty much as soon as I tried to actually write anything like that. Like it or not, I need that world where a ten-minute training montage doesn't give you the ability to beat up ninja warriors, where snarky dialogue filled with pop-culture references doesn't impress the bad guys, where the minions have names and few problems can be solved by punching them in the face.

And yet, and yet, a book where these pleasures are still represented, even in mutated form. Where there still are those beats of adventure and heroism and wish-fulfillment. 

So I don't really know where I need Penny to be, much less how I would go about getting her there now that there are so many books already down. On the latter, however, I will say I am flirting more than a little with the idea of making a three or four book "America" cycle, part Jessica Fletcher, part Bill Bixby, as Penny wanders the blue highways being an amateur sleuth in various strange parts of rural Americana.

Need to see a woman about a mammoth

Worked out the plan, got back into it. One useful day of writing before the weekend ended. Wanted to push forward but decided to do the rewrites first.

The revised Dune Drive sequence went quick. And then there was a line about the mammoth footprints and I wanted Doctor Bell to mention how long they'd been finding trackways at White Sands. I know I saw that somewhere. There's even an amusing story about the first Harlan's Ground Sloth tracks; the discoverer thought he had discovered Bigfoot!

So I did a quick top-level search. And of course, there is damn-all from that angle on the animal trackways, because everyone wants to post and repost off the three or four releases by Bennet's team on the human footprints.

But...I hit multiple reposts and re-telling's of his first publicity release.

So The Early Fox opens with a Pleistocene sketch. Rather pastoral, because that worked for the book. Later, Penny gets a look at what are inferred to be the footprints of the woman and child (and mammoth).

And here's the problem. As of these early, pre 2021 paper findings, the child was around three years old and a bit of a weight to carry, especially on slick mud. And while there are other children who jumped in puddles (specifically, in the water pooled in the footprint of a Harlan's Sloth in one set of prints elsewhere) this one was only on his or her feet while the girl/teenager/young woman/smaller man put her down to switch arms.

And she was booking. Moving at a pace that, especially at her height and stride, would be close to a run.

Add this to the fact that essentially all of the other trackways (and this includes the majority of the animals as well) are traveling in groups. And to the oddity that she apparently sets out with the child and returns hours or days later without it...

There's a story here, and it might be a dramatic one. This is the trackway that crossed a mammoth both ways; it stepped on her footprints, and on the way back she stepped on its footprints. And actually; there was a Harlan's Sloth as well, though she may not have noticed it. It noticed her, or perhaps just her footprints, and got up on its hind legs to look for danger before turning around and going somewhere else instead.

Oh, yeah, and this was early and thus may not be deep. The first reports were before the radiocarbon tests and put a bracket of 15K to 10K BP on them; from the known opening of the ice passage to the extinction of the mammoth in NA.

So should I rewrite that, too? This is one of those cases in which the rewrites cascade; the scene I'm working on now is the one where Penny looks at her tracks.

The downside to going dramatic with the material is that it sets up an unanswered tension. She might be running from something. She is alone, which is unusual, she is in a hell of a hurry, and she returns without the child. That's questions the reader is going to have and the trackways -- and the rest of the novel -- never do explain what is going on or what happened to her.

But...there is another perspective. This took commentary from one of those many reposts I mentioned. To us, this is a strange and threatening land. Cold, wet, those massive looming glaciers (not terribly close to Lake Otero, at least), and truly insane megafauna. Even if the twelve-foot tall Harlan's Sloth with the eight inch long digging claws is a shy herbivore, and the mammoth is a herd beast (for all that is good and bad about that!) we've got dire wolves, sabre tooths, and lions; basically all your apex predator dreams, only three times the size (as Penny puts it, the Pleistocene is like Texas; everything is bigger there).

But that's the world she knows. That's the world she grew up in. It may be dangerous to her, but that freak-out level of "surrounded by giant monsters" may not be her world picture. I glanced over the existing draft, and yes I can increase the weight of the child and the speed of the girl and all of that but still keep the general flavor of the scene. Urgent, possibly important, certainly dangerous, but not this major thriller Clan of the Cave Bear set-piece of Pleistocene adventure.

Unscheduled Rapid Disassembly

Maybe that wasn't the solution. I wrote fast, but I was breaking things. I hit the story beats I wanted, but awkwardly. This story could be told better.

I actually know how. Dylan was the root of most of the problems; he was too nice, too chatty, and he made it too easy to slip into the "a friend tells Penny stuff" mode. And I wanted to do so much more with Doctors Bleekman and Bell. And there were some smaller problems, like I didn't give time for the "useless wasteland we use to test bombs at" to develop, or explain what the hell this dig was about and what was at stake.

I hadn't defined how Penny feels about the military because I was trying not to describe them all (and reveal the holes in my research.) I also didn't have a good read on where she should be emotionally with finding a body.

And in my effort to reset her to more of a blank slate without all that messy history, and to show not tell and leave more space for the reader to come with their own impression, I've ended up making her, well, dumb. And that's going to remain a problem.

(And I am still intensely uncomfortable with the way I can pretty much pick an emotion I want for her to react with, and make it work. Means either she is one flighty girl, or means her character is way too undefined and a bad character.)

Anyhow. I can see how to use Bleekman and Bell, and involve the "Duke Boys," as Penny started calling the two Field Technicians who aren't Dylan. And places to take Dylan that make him a better character. To make the idiot lectures much more confrontational and to have a lot more emotional underpinning going on.

I already discovered that in the earlier draft. Tom Bell was being patronizing, but protective, and even as she disliked the first Penny also valued the second. I can put her not just in conflict with him but in conflict with her own instincts and internal conflict is always the good stuff.

But.

These aren't bandaid fixes. These aren't things I can do by moving around descriptions and changing a few names. This is top-to-tail re-write.

So...all that "progress," and what I have to show for it is 12,000 words of shit.

I think I'm gonna turn off the lights and go play computer games for the rest of the weekend.

Doctor, doctor.

I got to the body drop!

10,000 words down. It feels great. Maybe I've finally broken the pattern. I finally started pulling out the portable keyboard over lunch at work and somehow that's kept me in the zone long enough to get writing done on a work night as well. If I can keep up 5,000 words a week, I'll be done in under four months!

Well, I've got the first draft of the body drop chapter. The first part wasn't so bad. The second part, NEST sweeps in as well. It was meant to be a fustercluck and it is on the page, too. I'd already established that my Project Leads were stickler about titles, and then I added another stickler to the NEST team. Too many people to keep straight, and far too many of those people were insisting on "Doctor."

Another thing that is hitting me is my light outlining. I had to actually come up with a reason for the NEST team to come in -- even if it was just a training exercise -- and that meant some hurried reading on neutron activation and helium-3 detectors and such fun stuff. I basically had to commit to a certain decay chain to make things work. 240 Pu to 241 Pu via neutron capture (please imagine the proper superscript), 241 Pu decay to 241 Am, 241 Am plus beryllium to form a neutron source that NEST could detect from a helicopter.

And I planted the idea that the neutron activation (of things like the man's metal belt buckle) is too strong to be accounted for by the tiny amount of Americium they found in his medicine pouch.

(That "medicine pouch" is also a jump ahead, and one of those weird compromises of actual research. See, while there are huge difference between the different tribes regarding ritual practices, one thing that is generally true is that burial practices come under the category of "never to be shared with outsiders." In fact, one of the standard books on Tewa Pueblo beliefs has been chastised for sharing certain rituals. Even though the author was himself tribal.)

(So I'm three steps removed from being able to show something accurate. I don't know, personally. If I did know, I would be morally obligated not to share it. And if it was right, I shouldn't portray my Tewa character as identifying them as correct! This puts me in a strange place where I am borrowing things from other descriptions. That is, descriptions which are probably wrong, but which my readers could well tell me that I am wrong because I am using them differently from how they heard them!)

(So I have Penny and others calling a thing a "medicine pouch" even though Penny, at least, knows this is probably wrong. And my Tewa character bluntly saying "I can't tell you." Sigh.)

Oh, yeah. And the same game is going on with the "source." Right now, my version of it is there was weapon's grade plutonium and some beryllium alloy involved in the "thing" that Freeman and MacDonald were working with. And the NEST guys know very well that all three (that is, counting the well-known Americium-241 decay product) are characteristic of nuclear weapons. So they aren't willing to say, and like my Tewa gal, trying to be careful about saying that they can't say!

Which is a big theme of the story anyhow.

Which also hooks in some rather frustrating ways to the rest of my story-telling. I'm trying to cut back on the idiot lectures. The worst of them were coming from Penny, though, so I've actually had to make her more of an idiot. So there's a lot of stuff going on and some of it is being expressed in technical language and...I feel like I'm ending up in that same place I didn't want to be, with the reader feeling lost.

I've tried to cut down as much as possible all the stuff about archaeological dating and Bering Strait crossings and Paleoindian stone tools and...well, there's a hell of a lot of stuff going on in these opening chapters. Not because I need it to tell the story that will occupy the bulk of the novel. Because Penny only gets to enjoy herself at her first real stateside dig for a very small number of days -- and pages -- and after that it is off driving dark desert highways towards Roswell with country music playing on the radio in her rented truck and a giant black hummer on her tail.

Oh, yeah, and just to make things even more fun, I'm setting up her consciously putting aside the pop-culture references. Which means, sigh, I have to show her doing a lot of that. In the first 8,000 words. Before the body drop.

I have, however, made some progress at decompressing. Some progress at showing not telling. And some progress at shifting this book towards description-heavy instead of dialogue-heavy like the last one.

Once I clear the room of all these opening-sequence-only characters.

In the redraft of the scene, I decided to move anybody getting checked out for radiation to later (if at all). So instead of finding something and going "uh, oh," the NEST nerds are finding something and going "Ooh, this is weird. Can we take it home?"

At some entirely random point it felt like a thing to have Penny yell at the NEST team. As such things often go, that propagated out until that's a key to how she gets the answers she's after from the guy at the New Mexico WIP (that is, the all new, all-shiny, this-one-will-work-better version of Yucca Mountain.)

Another follow-on is that dropped all the technical details from the conversation. Finding out that there was plutonium involved (assuming that's what I end up going with) won't happen until much later in the story.

I still have yet to decide if MacDonald actually had anything on him. And when Freeman went back to re-dig the grave. At the moment, my best timeline for that matter is he lost contact with MacDonald after the Star Wars days, and didn't learn about his death until somewhere around the Los Alamos problems of 2011 that caused a number of physicists to quit.

I just hope I can stay ahead of my writing hand. This is too good a sprint to lose by having to go back and do more plotting.

Perils of Research

I've been writing up a storm. Hit 5,000 words this weekend. And that was with gutting several scenes and doing them differently.

But I'm writing well in front of my outline and I've hit a point where I can't discovery-writing my way out of it. I actually have to do a little planning.

The first draft of the current scene was a conversation. Okay, it was about the personalities of the two lead archaeologists on the dig (which is inappropriate for that time and place -- save it for the bar after work). And about Pre-Clovis.

But the problem was -- it was a discussion. Once again, I've got someone lecturing at Penny.

In re-writes my "Penny looks at footprints and makes her own conclusions" worked great. And I stopped and rewrote/padded out the start of the dig for more scene-setting and for more of a focus on the physical part of digging, and less on laying out a unit. That's for different reasons.

Clovis, though. This is why I end up having lectures, because there are so few good ways to get the info out. The best thing to do is, of course, not having the info there at all. And, yeah, since basically all the paleoindian stuff in this one is just background and theme, I don't have to get it in there in time for the climax. Penny's mental Bat-Computer can spit out the whodunnit without needing to know the arguments for and against the Coastal Route.

Of course, right here when she is actually digging on a potential pre-Clovis site, would be the time to do this stuff. It matters to her at this moment. And if I've done my job right, I've intrigued the reader. That's the other thing about that info stuff; you want to be dropping questions on the reader, letting them worry about them for a while, and answering them -- after you've given them two or three new ones to chew on.

Again, if I've set things up right, the reader is wondering what the deal is with Doctor Bell. And is wondering why two of the diggers are name-dropping something called the "Gault Assemblage." And wondering what the big deal is about something being Pre-Clovis. I'm not sure I want to kick that can 50,000 words down the road, to the point where Penny returns to Alamogordo to close the chase.

Anyhow, Clovis. Here's today's brilliant idea; demonstrate it through knapping. That was on my original short list anyhow, that I wanted her to do it. That does put a slight delay on things, though, because that means I really need to find the time to get my box of rocks and my antler out and learn a bit of that stuff myself. I've finally figured out where to do it so nobody is stepping on bits of broken glass (out by the garbage cans. No bare feet there, and the gravel will grind it fine over time.)

I of course have no idea what character to do this with. What questions, what relationships have I built up to the point where this is meaningful? Dylan has his own arc and I'm cutting him out of the picture as soon as I can manage it. Doctors Bell and Bleekman have theirs...I already jumped the gun on Bell, showing that while he may be a dinosaur, he's aware of it and willing to try and do better. Which was within a fifty words of Penny realizing there was anything he needed to do better.

(There was just the perfect dialogue opening. Such is writing.)

So I stopped to look at my largely empty mind-mapper doc for this book. And watch some of Dark Wind, the AMC-Whatever series based on Tony Hillerman's Navajo mysteries. Which is all in Northern New Mexico but I've known that for a while.

Whatever else happens in that lunch-time conversation (I may just cut it entirely), there's an Air Force check-up from Holloman during it. So just to make it quicker work when I got there, I looked up what kind of civilian-origin truck it would be, and what colors it would be painted.

Tried to look up. Frustrating. According to sources, there are so many options from Strata Blue to OG to NATO camo to Desert camo to that cute blue Air MP paint job. And a few options in vehicles, too.

Penny isn't even a car person. This thing is gonna do six words of description at the very outside. Could be, when I get to the one sentence, it will be "A truck drove up." I am kinda hoping for "A Chevy pickup painted dark blue" but here's the catch; it could be anything. But anyone who had been stationed at Holloman in 2019 would know exactly what it would have been.

As errors in research goes, it is something probably no reader will ever catch. But it bothers me. Yeah, it bothers me. There's a reason I've been shying away from outright historical fiction.

(Says the guy who is intending to write four more vignettes; Egtved Girl, the Pueblo Revolt, Valentina pissing on a tire...and of course Lucy.

(The reason I agonize over this damn truck is that Penny is slowly realizing the depth and extent of the military-industrial complex in New Mexico, especially around the Tularosa Basin. Which is significant setting as she will be sneaking in and out of the White Sands military reservation. And significant to the underlying plot as well.)

(I am trying to time this stuff out, but my first plan -- to drive through some fancy well-guarded gate in the prior scene -- fell apart when I got a good look at the actual entrance at the civvie-facing and largely residential end of the base. Stallion Gate, from what I could see from my parking spot and what I could remember without taking pictures, was a lot more impressive.)

Cover Girl

No, really, it has been a productive writing time of late. Finally talked myself into trying the iPhone-and-keyboard brunch during the workweek (that is, in the break room at work) and it, um, works.

But not as much as this morning, where instead of being early to work I hammered out 3/5 of the next scene in one intense session. Pity I can't keep that pace up; the next two scenes are going to take detours to refresh on some research material.

And all of that has damn-all to do with covers. I want to start that cover order, really I do, even if it is too early to do it. But that group really likes me to tell them what to put on the cover (we don't pay them enough to read the actual book). And I still have no good ideas.

So I wanted to revisit that hybrid cover concept. Like putting the Zuni sacred symbol in the New Mexico sky. Maybe not good branding because it looks too Hillerman but anyhow. Opens up splices like that. I had an Impressionist sky over a Paris rooftop view for the last and I could take something like that further. I mean, hell, there's a riff off the sequence from Kurosawa's Dreams in that same book, with Penny trailing the bad guys through animated Van Gogh fields.

I can't do a simple combination for the London book without it looking steampunk, but could do a slash-rip with one side being London Eye all lit up, Shard and all, the other being a black-and-white of barrage balloons and searchlights during the Blitz. Which makes it look more like a time-travel story than a dual-time narrative, but what can you do.

And it founders on Athens because while there is an absolute natural of a giant floating Greek helmet as the main visual element (presumably this one has the human element as foreground) I refuse to do a Corinthian helm. And furthermore, Laconia delenda est!

More useful at this moment, though, if creating a LOT more difficulties, is that the "Fox" titles are absolutely mystery cozy. Which these sort of are, even though they fall closer to Archaeological Thriller. Just a dialed-down action level (but the LA expat I met in Paris told me she hadn't expected all the James Bond stuff in the Paris book. Her words, not mine! And that's probably the lowest action level of all of them. Nobody even shoots at her in that book.)

The fresh take here is to go and do those Artifact titles, but do them properly. They don't have to be portentous and they shouldn't be silly or too obscure (a little hard not be somewhat obscure. History is like that.)

This tells the reader this is archaeological thriller just from the title alone. And it gives some idea about the cultural focus, so a reader who might not otherwise look but does want to read about turn-of-the-century Paris might be tempted.

So go with The Mirror of Amaterasu. And can also go with The Athena Sherd. Or Shard. Or just sidestep that whole issue and call it a "Fragment" or something. (Potsherd works, too.)

And, yeah, I know, too many books don't offer that immediacy of artifact. Not one that sounds interesting and that actually fits in the plot. We're not putting a Roman coin on the cover, either. In the title in this case but you know what I mean. The Blitz Diary makes it sound like it is a Blitz diary. That is, straight historical fiction, not the adventures of a student archeologist in modern London. Similar could be said for, oh, The Notre-Dame Gargoyle. Not to mention it isn't a gargoyle -- but that's another hill for another day's dying.

Okay, okay, The Zero Room is sort of intriguing. It doesn't really nail down history or location -- except for someone who already knows it. The problem is that this, like the Mirror, is giving away plot. These are unusual Archaeological Thrillers. The heroes don't set out to find the titular artifact. The nature of the thing is actually a big plot reveal. Zero Room might be obscure enough (but that also makes it less useful) but Mirror of Amaterasu will be staring the reader in the face probably before Penny even realizes the cult has one of the Three Treasures. (And no, not a washing machine.)

And New Mexico, the "history" is not a simple and distinct period. Okay...there's a bunch of stuff about pre-Clovis, generically Neolithic. And kind of a big point (ahem) that pre-Clovis is striking for being pre-Clovis. That is, for not having the Clovis Point. There's not a diagnostic artifact (in the transition period there's a Stemmed Point tradition, but you dial the way-back machine to the White Sands Footprints, and there's nary an artifact to be found.)

(Okay, the buzz is going around now about a possible travois. I buy it, sure I do. But some drag marks in the sand isn't enough to make me bronze that one. And there's not a nice culture name going with it. It's just generically "Pre-Clovis." Which is basically labeled by site anyhow. So people will talk about Monte Verde or the Gault Assemblage, but there's no equivalent to Bell-Beaker People.)

And the other half of the not-really-a-dual-time narrative is...a nuclear weapon. That artifact and that doesn't-have-a-name culture don't go together outside of Ancient Astronaut writings.

Still, unless you know the references (most won't) the current title choice is "Fox does something." I'm at the point where I'm having to source the quote in the epigram. "...said Napoleon." Pity changing titles is basically new book, new ISBN...and a completely fresh lack of reviews.

***

And "The Thing of Thing" just came back to me. I think I lost that insight because it fell apart like all the others. But this was capturing a concept about the story that wasn't necessarily an artifact. "The Mirror of Amaterasu" is quite literal -- the Yata no Kagami does appear in the story -- but it also sounds like and can be read as conceptual. That is, of a way of looking at Japan, of the way Japan looks at its own past. At what turns out to be a key character arc moment as Penny re-enacts the moment when the goddess looked at her own reflection and was, essentially, reborn.

"The Relic" or "The Secret of Montmartre" works, and picks up the thread of belle epoque because while Montmartre is still damned well there, it is strongly tied to that period. And it and that period is strongly tied to the artists like the Impressionists. Which isn't just the title being accurate to the book, it is offering a contract to the reader. "Want to read about the Paris Impressionists and get a little archaeological mystery with it?" Um... "Treasure of Montmartre" also works. Well enough for this exercise, at least.

The Blitz, as I mentioned, is more key to the London story than is the tube. So it is absolutely " The thing of the Blitz." Or "...London Blitz."

And oh yeah. Remembered it now. "The Face of Athena" or "The Legacy of Athena" for the Athens book. In this case, the dual meaning is both the sherd and the almost-lost early Attic pottery workshop, but Penny being inspired (manipulated) by Athena...ambiguously, both the goddess and the character she created.

The Athens book always has the problem of looking like a Percy Jackson wannabe. So there's that problem. If the title seems to be making the same promise that Greek gods are going to play an active role in the text...