Fox and goose

Spent a chunk of the weekend wrestling with mostly that class of problem. Now I'm outlined to the end. I know; I was outlined before. Now I have more detail.

For me, it isn't figuring out why there's a bomb on the train. Or how the heroes figure out that there is a bomb on the train. It is all about controlling when they find out. That's the part that annoys me and feels like it takes a lot more time than it should.

That's because the why is rooted in the scene in which that clue is dropped, and the ordering of the scenes is at the mercy of geography, time, and all the other plot threads that led to them finding the briefcase full of blasting caps. Like, the briefcase was dropped by the Crooked Man during the chase scene, but that means he was heading away from the station, so how did he end up back on the train?

Multi-value problems. 

Weirdly, this wraps all the way back to one of the basics. Having a bat-computer moment, "I just realized there's a bomb on the train!" is telling. You want the moment that information arrives to be dramatic, and that is practically synonymous with showing it.

Which is to say, it is the central business of a scene. Which makes the scenes inseparable from the clues, which means you have to figure out how to do them in the one order that doesn't end up with a fat chicken and an even fatter fox.

My concentration wasn't up for that for most of the last few days so I made progress on the new cover/series rebrand. I'd roughed out a logo but I didn't quite have the patience for dragging vectors around. And the font I used ("Adventure") isn't licensed for commercial use.

Took a chance on a guy in Fiverr who did not quite share enough English with me to make communication fluid, but seemed familiar with the style I wanted. Nobody in this business makes sketches anymore. The worst are the cover designers. They give you a finished cover and besides the limited number of revisions they allow, you feel bad about asking them to cut into a finished artwork.

That is because of the pipeline, which is heavily asset-based, and I understand. There's nothing wrong about having a cover that looks like other covers in the same genre. It makes it easier for the reader to find the book, and it give the reader a certain trust that they are buying the kind of book they wanted to be buying.

It can lead to asset over-use, though.

My Fiverrr guy was showing me full-color graphics. So, fine, maybe he liked sketching with paint tools. The order was explicitly for vector graphics, though. Was he going to turn this more cartoony paint into proper vectors at the last step?

Turned out, that was the finished art. The vectors were him throwing blobby paint sketch into auto-convert, making one of those impossible-to-edit vector "bit clouds."

So I'm doing the vectors after all. Sigh. Well, half the reason I hired an outsider is because I'm at best a craftsman and I wanted the imagination of an artist. And I liked his ideas. But that's left me even less eager to hire other people.

Because you are up against efficiency. They don't want to do your ideas; they want to do the idea that can be done with stock assets, quick-and-dirty "convert to vector," and more and more, AI. And on the way to talking you into picking that instead (via making a really glossy final version they hope you will be attracted to enough to go with despite reservations), talk you up into Facebook banner and animated logo and an AI image of a hand holding your book.

I already dropped a hundred on a cover I don't want to use. I may just have to go back to doing my own.