Part II is complete. I'm aiming for a shorter book this time so I have as little as 20K to go before the end game. That's 2-3 set-piece scenes, a couple of long drives, another desert wander if I can do it and a bunch of conversations. For what was planned as a novel with mostly silences I'm ending up with a hell of a lot of conversations.
Have decided to eschew continuing the outline, and just see how the story unfolds. Maybe I should plan more. I am really, really looking forward to switching gears to a couple of SF novels where I can ration the world-building. This series is largely about showing off a region and a culture and there's an additional constraint that the real world isn't tidy. I can't have a single planet, war, piece of tech that sums up a theme or idea I'm trying to put across. Instead I just have to deal with the mess of nineteen different tribes in New Mexico alone. Even when you go back to the Ancestral Pueblo (who we used to call Anasazi) they aren't the only or dominant culture in the area.
So I got Freeman singing some blues and a song that might be too on the nose. And I felt obligated to at least mention the Mound Builder Myth -- it is part of the themes I'm developing but I can't spare pages to go into it properly. And I really need Jackson and Sanchez back for another scene before the ending so I'm dreaming of a sequence now where they get in the way of a truck that's trying to run her off the road, a la Silkwood.
The only episode I've got at all planned out is I'm gonna go to Cloudcroft. That's gonna be the big fix of western history, Indian Wars, treasure hunters standing in for prospectors, and a group I'm calling the Asshole Apache in my notes (that's how the NAGPRA rep at White Sands referred to them). Another bunch of retired guys in a bar, but instead of playing the blues (and old protest songs) they are talking up past exploits and plotting how to get at the Victorio Peak treasure.
The whole thing might be too on-the-nose to feel right. Too much easy stereotype there. But they've been living in my head long enough the scenes and settings and conversations have all grown around them and at this point all I have to do is write them down.
Oh, and do some research on Cloudcroft, Lozen (and the Apache generally), plus I've found some good stuff on the early days of Los Alamos. (The Netflix series is...a Netflix series. Too much history is changed because the story they wanted to tell is sex and suspicion under the tensions of building the first atomic bomb.)
And listen to some more of that Delta Blues.
My opinion of the moment is that AI was pretty much the inevitable next step in what was already happening in publishing. And in the pop music industry, for that matter. Amazon Kindle is the literary equivalent of streaming music services, and when you build a business model on quantity, the pinch point is how much you pay for processed creative product.
People have been exploring that with low-content books and short books. They'd already reached a point where writers going into the eBook market couldn't afford editing or boutique cover services. In fact, the pressures of that algorithm running the firehose of "more books but cheaper, please" means even spending longer than four months to write the damned things is a luxury unaffordable for the self-published writer.
I am writing faster. I feel I've finally made a breakthrough where it really is starting to come easier. But, as with so many things, I seem to have arrived too late. I fixed some of my outstanding health issues maybe four months too late to jump on a new position I really, really wanted (and I'm still dealing with the fallout from that). I put money in the stock market just before one of the big crashes. Joined the Maker Movement and a hackerspace when that was imploding under the weight of commercialism. Doctorow had only the corner of it; enshittification is happening everywhere (and has been happening for a long time, will always happen).
The landscape of fiction is changing so rapidly I don't even recognize it now.
Of course, here I am writing a travel adventure series where we finally crawled out of COVID to hit world-wide revolt against the growing problems of mass tourism (something I did indeed write about in my first book, with the horrendous problems suffered by Venice). And as of this month it has become increasingly difficult to Fly While American. We've managed to piss off so much of the world that even (unfairly) pretending to be Canadian doesn't return travel to where it was even ten years ago.
Hell, I had story lines planned both in Moscow and in Tel Aviv. Not really stories you want to be trying to tell at the moment. Everything is changing so rapidly. I struggled enough dealing with the ubiquity of GPS and translation software and Google (although, oddly, that enshittification is actually helping there. It has reached the point where "I'll just Google up this obscure historical fact that will solve the mystery" is no longer the panacea for the problems faced by an Archaeologist-Adventurer.)
Oh, yeah, and my latest mass-produced cover is so...meh...I don't even have the heart to get back to 101 Covers and see if it can be rescued. I'm close to just writing off that hundred bucks and doing something different.
Not AI, though. I'm not desperate. Or stupid.
(We didn't need a university-level study -- there's at least two I've read on pdf -- to show this idea that the original training data is so finely ground it would be impossible to return the original images from it. Well...poke around enough, and I'm pretty sure you could identify that artist's signature that the AI put in there without even being asked for it!)
