Crime Novel and Museum Guide

My outline revisions now have Penny visiting two museums in Albuquerque before doing her hike into the desert. It harms the pacing, but it is the best way to set up stuff I want her to know for the stuff that happens in the end of Part II.

And I don't actually have to info dump. She can be showing learning "things" basically off-stage, with the scenes about...scene stuff.

I have this idea of her somehow experiencing Los Alamos in the 1940's via some of the exhibits. Bringing that more to life. It isn't exactly the core historical period but, really, the historical thing for this book is largely the nuclear age.

BTW, I write this on the 80th anniversary of the Trinity Test. 

I also, really really want to do a chase or fight scene around the rockets. It looks almost like a railyard out there, with these missiles on their sides lined up like detached strings of freight cars. I had thoughts while I was there of ducking in and out in one of those "chase through the railyard" scenes.

Only problem is, there's not anyone chasing Penny yet. There are at least two (possibly three) distinct things she does towards the end of Part II that changes that status and changes the game.

And I sort of want this to be real stakes. Not her imagination running away, not a confused Karen chasing after her because she thought Penny was a docent and is demanding she explain the Titan Missile Program to her bored kids. In the best of all possible worlds, this would be the fallout from some Good Samaritan act earlier.

I'm feeling a little better about the lack of side quests. I mean, I still don't have them, but she did do a few active things to earn clues, and wasn't just getting them handed to her. 

Anyhow.

I made another lovely trip to the ER. So understandable why I'm writing a bit slow. But it really does feel like I'm getting the hang of putting out a good 5K a week, and it is methods that can be expanded to more, perhaps significantly more.

Which is good, because I'm still having Shiny New Idea syndrome.

I still wish sometimes I was doing Actress Penny. Taking it even further; she actually did a bunch of movies of the sort of Asylum kind -- possibly mockbusters referencing more directly properties that I wouldn't be able to include in their original form.

So no skills in archaeology, or gunplay, or really much physical skill other than a rough-and-tumble physicality. But a skilled mimic with eidetic memory and original-Penny's gift of gab/CHAR 20 ability to convince other people. She'd be the kind of hero who could fake knowing guns well enough to bluff an enemy...but also able to somehow pull off firing the thing anyhow when things went sideways.

And the movies are a running gag, both for pop-cultural references that are entirely IP free, and as her version of the Junior Woodchuck Guidebook.

The more plausible/likely idea I had, though, is to take the idea of fiction becoming real, and two ordinary people getting forced by "the story" to take on roles of omni-disciplinary historian/linguist/archaeologist and companion good-at-everything-physical Action Girl archetype.

And make that the last chapter of the "Other Adventures of Athena Fox" idea I proposed earlier.