Frybread

I'm calling it the "frybread" scene now. They are making Tewa Tacos. I did some more reading up and watched a couple videos so if it felt like I wanted to do some kind of "sounds of cooking came from the kitchen" I'd have some idea of what was going on there.

Well, now I do.

I'd taken a sick day but just before the grocery store closed I woke up with a need to actually cook something. Ran out and threw the basics for Indonesian hot rice in the basket. And then said what the hell and added a bag of flour and a box of baking soda.

No recipe, no measurements, just memories of what I'd seen on YouTube and mild experience with dough in the past (making pasta from scratch. I'm glad I did it, feels nice to know how, don't really want to do it again).

And the frybread came out...okay. Could have been fluffier, and crisper, but it was tasty. 

The other bit of research that cropped up during this scene is I wanted to show family and relationships. The opening there came by accident; I opened the scene with Helen Naranjo on the couch and wrote in another woman just to open the door for Penny. So now I've got three people and there's a chance to do genealogy stuff I've watched my own family do. The "You remember Sarah, don't you? She's the sister of the mother of that friend of my daughter's from school. Well she just moved in with Peter, a man from Boston who goes to the same poetry readings as my friend Lana."

For many Native American nations, this is clan stuff. The whole "Born to Bright Water Clan, born from Beaver Clan." Except. Turns out the clan names (and associated things) are considered private in Tewa culture. They are not shared with outsiders.

My research method failed on this whole sequence. I'd read about a third of The Tewa World (there's actually two books by that name) but by the time I did the scene where Mary talks a little about it, I'd forgotten practically everything. And because of other story reasons, my Tewa character ends up spending most of that conversation talking about Dine mythology instead!

(And, yes, there was a hole in the narrative that Mutton Man fit into perfectly. So I did get to use him after all.)

And apropos of nothing, I'm oddly attracted to San Antonio for the next Athena Fox story. No idea of a plot. I just like the history, and their extensive underground world. 

Anyhow, even with adding this "sister of the mother of the friend of the" stuff, I'm within a half-dozen paragraphs of finishing the Rez sequence. This is the tipping point; the book accelerates from here, and for various reasons both internal to the text and having to do with my working methods, it should go much faster after this.

There's a lot of stuff to go, though. A "Glowing Sea" sequence as Penny pokes through an illegal dump site with a borrowed Geiger counter in one hand, the "Duel" sequence on the highway that ends with Penny being very glad she got collision coverage on her rental, a visit to the War Zone -- sorry, "International District" -- of Albuquerque, the descent into the pit and a few bad moments at the very bottom of an old Atlas-F silo, a confrontation with a bully at a 50's diner that goes strange, a trip to the Waste Isolation Plant Prototype, a doped-out conversation about nuke cats and the heat death of the universe, another "Hello Clarise" scene, a confrontation with the senior archaeologists and digging up a grave for the third time, a confrontation with a mysterious assailant in the trailer of a dead conspiracy nut with a convenient weapon-lined wall of everything the aspiring mall ninja would want, and then the long long trek through White Sands on foot after a horse that probably does have a name, dreaming of Lozen and Etgveld Girl and even Lucy...

Finishing with a little rock-meets-laser as Penny shows what she's learned about knapping flint at the very base of the Trinity monument. And the final scene with Jackson and Sanchez, when at least they explain what part of the Air Force they work for. Although I don't think Jackson will ever explain what inspired him to buy a hummer.