In a cavern in a canyon...

...excavating for bitcoins?

I'm not really where I want to be as a writer to tackle the New Orleans story. But more to the point, I've got this weird attraction towards the idea of sending Bill Bixby///Penny to Colorado or Montana or something, find a low-population bit of near-wilderness and put a massive super-advanced tech center for her to get in trouble in.

So, like, that new Google AI center, only located in an old coal mine. Or something else suitably techno-thriller epically over-scaled and real-world commercially implausible.

I can find a remote mountain or a salt mine or something else sufficiently crazy. I can invent a biotech firm or a nanotech lab or some other appropriately dangerous and dystopian technology.

What I'm having trouble with, is tying it to the conceits of the Athena Fox series. Which are that there is a subject of history somewhere in the mix (preferable a narrow or easy-to-define band in time and/or space). That there is an archaeological issue to raise, like archaeological ethics or the problem with field schools. And that at some point it goes Tomb Raider, in that there is some perfectly sensible reason why Penny finds herself crawling down booby-trapped tunnels or fighting with ninja.

For the Bill Bixby stories, she doesn't need a good excuse to be there. There's no dig involved. She got off the Greyhound somewhere in middle America. Or got a phone call.

Yeah, like I'm in a good place to be plotting a new book. I'm having shiny new "I'd rather be writing anything but this" syndrome. Actually, I feel okay about The Early Fox. It went different than I expected, but it looks like I'm hitting the beats I hoped to hit.

I'm enjoying writing it, it is just a lot of work and I'm having trouble coming up with the sheer concentrated brainpower to deal with the stuff that's outlined.

The Atlas-F silo won't be bad, I can stumble through the next Freeman conversations, the long chase down the Jornada de Muerto has complexities but it isn't anything I haven't done before.

No, but going to the rez is challenging. Not looking forward to tackling that. Worse, I decided I need to send her to the War Zone (to contact an urban explorer who can tell her about Lon's errand at the Atlas-F silo outside of Roswell). Which almost certainly includes cops, and that means the deputy sheriff at Alamogordo is firmly pencilled in now. 

And I still have to go back and do the nuke museum scene. The museum is fine. The "Los Alamos Wife" bit is going to take a little more. Probably not watching a full season of Manhattan. Fortunately, the museum has free online videos that are somewhat more...historical.