Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote...

I'm a quarter of the way to my desired word count for the day. Now just waiting for the work day to be over so I can get back to it.

As always, the times I can't write -- due to being busy, or due to feeling blocked -- are the times I get the most ideas.

So here's the latest plot bunny of the first days of summer. The Athena Fox Chronicles.

I thought of this before when KDP had this great idea about serialized fiction. Which didn't work out. And I've been working this past couple of weeks to push the social media marketing.

Turns out KDP has turned off the feature that let you put a preview widget on your blog. Still works on Facebook, though, so perhaps I'll finally get around to sprucing up my Facebook page.

Explored options for what is sometimes called Pocket Book (a trademark which has gone generic now), or Mass Market Paperback; the 4.25" x 7" format that fit into those wire racks you still see at airports (if nowhere else). Since I was a little kid reading science fiction I wanted to see my name on one of those covers. The larger Trade Paperback just doesn't feel "real" in the same way.

IngramSpark has that as a trim option. Probably not worth it just yet but if I do manage to get The Tiki Stars finished I'll bring that out in that format first. Just for the effect.

Anyhow, thought about posting excerpts on FaceBook and whatever else works. This blog gets about 250 hits a page so even if those mostly human, not bots, it isn't going to do much for my sales. And pretty much nobody sees the author's webpage I set up. I do need to spruce up my Amazon Author page at some point, though.

And thinking about excerpts reminded me of the thought of doing a set of shorter stories. Which, since the serial outlets turned out not to work that well, would be packaged in a single omnibus.

Originally the thought was to do some of the germs that didn't feel like they'd expand into a full novel.

But the better thought could be that these are explicitly presented as written by Penny, back when she was putting out scripts for that college video she did.

Which is to say, license to grab on to all the crazy fun that comes with letting go of strict historical realism. Or realism, generally. And the sop to my conscious is the framing story where older-and-wiser Penny apologizes for her college-age self and lists a few of the more egregious errors.

But write them as straight-up serious adventure stories.

Honestly, I posted today because I thought I'd jot down a few ideas and I didn't feel like opening the Scrivener series home file to do it. But right now nothing is jumping out. I'd like it to be a mix of oldies-but-goodies, and bizarre stuff that might be hot in the news but in any case not as many people have heard of.

And take the chance to put Athena Fox (because this would be that character fully realized, not a student cosplaying her), into places and situations I don't think I could do a proper job on in any realistic story. Like crashed flying saucers at the South Pole, or undersea cities, or.... well, why not do some period pieces too, while I'm at it?

But since none of those ideas are coming to mind right at the moment, I'll go ahead and start a new Scrivener home file and...try not to dilute my excitement by writing too much down now.

***

And I've got the first one. "The Stone Tape." Someone invents a "psychometric amplifier" -- riffing off Tom Swift's "Electronic Retroscope" as well as Nigel Keane's scripted BBC production and similar ideas used in the same author's Quatermass, specifically "Quatermass and the Pit." And the particularly invasive haunting in what is considered the worst X-Files episode filmed (the "Face on Mars" one).

Which underlines that the problem with both casual writing and well-trodden paths is you end up with trite and often-done ideas. But still sounds like a fun situation to build an adventure around. The focus could be on the psychic activity itself, the haunting so to speak, or on historical mysteries unveiled in the process. Or in the excuse to unleash a particular past on the present day -- perhaps a psychically resurrected Pharaoh? Or...just to both get to play with Victorian London and the Penny Dreadfuls, but to bring back something a little more obscure, Spring-Heel Jack!

Zombie Invasion

...and of course I wake up wanting to work on The Tiki Stars (and not the book I'm supposed to be finishing, or the one I just decided to edit).

Should not have listened to all that Les Baxter while trying to wake up (still trying to kick that energy thing that hit two weeks ago).

I was just thinking about how I am free to be less detailed in the descriptions on this one, painting a much more Impressionistic picture with quick strokes. And an entire opening scene sprang into my mind. One that touches on the world-building and the way I intend to present that world to the reader, the character of my protagonist (rough-and-tumble with a heart of gold, in this example), and lays groundwork for character and story arcs to come.

Trouble is, when I feel like this, it is usually just before I fail utterly to get more than three words written. Then take really ill.

At this point, I'm struggling enough with work I might need to retire early to get any writing done. Plus, I'm really missing theatre. If I could find some contract design work I think I'd rather like that.

Anyhow. Turns out I did start an edit on The Fox Knows Many Things, even if with what I know -- and what I think -- now, those notes would only get in the way. It really is the kind of work I do quickly, though. As opposed to charting my way into new territory: The Early Fox has just reached the edge of the clearing where I'm not revising old scenes but instead hacking into the jungle of completely new scenes.

My biggest plan right now is to explore an alternate to writing over brunch. Not because eggs cost so much these days, but because there's a natural slump when I leave the bottomless coffee cup behind (and start digesting), and it too-often lasts the rest of the day. At least when it comes to following up on the progress of the morning.

Maybe a Scottish breakfast (oatmeal) makes more sense. Ah, but I'm really wanting that big breakfast right now...

***

I hate being right. I still haven't kicked that thing and it's been three weeks now.

The Scottish Experiment was a failure. I ate at home, and...I didn't write. Not until far too late in the evening, when I somehow got it together to get through the Roswell sequence.

Did have one of those nice moments of discovery writing. For pretty much no reason (well, I'd included a mention of the Gort diorama in the description of the place), when time came to describe Random Museum Dude I decided to make him a ringer for Michael Rennie.

And then when I maneuvered them in front of the space exploration exhibit to name-drop the Drake Equation, I was able to work that into a little payoff. Well, probably only a payoff for those who remember the film, but still...

Anyhow that's 1,800 words in the can, and now on to a chapter I've been calling The Railroad, as the Lon Gunman runs Penny around Alamogordo playing with dead drops before he finally deigns to meet with her in person.

The Fox Knows Fewer Things

I've been putting together a cover order at 100 Covers. But not for the upcoming book. I thought I'd try re-staging the first one and possibly get some attention on the series.

And for some reason the book is very clear in my head at the moment. Okay, might have been I needed to look up her description of her parents for a conversation I was working on for The Early Fox. And I ended up reading straight through from that conversation to the end.

But for whatever reason, I feel like I could edit and it wouldn't even be that hard. Because I'm not thinking about trying to fix everything. I'm just thinking of sanding down a few really high spots.

There's seven I can think of right off the top. That I've been thinking of for a while. One of them that's important for reasons other than there being too much damned stuff.

The lecture on the Acropolis. I was still learning how to write this damned thing, and I was using her having a lot to say as a way to pace the scene and space out other description. I don't need that much padding or space or length. I can happily get to Spooky's dialog faster.

The conversation with the French couple. Alexander and Diogenes is too fun to skip but the whole sequence is too long.

The history discussion at Ariadne's store. It always dragged. Plus, the motivations are wacky and I know enough better know I could clean that up.

Penny's delve into some darker corners of the internet. I've made enough of a point about racist idiots; I don't need to underline them or straw-man them. There's entirely too much in both of these scenes about defending the plot, as well.

The talk with Vash at Oktoberfest. No, it isn't too long. It just kinda sucks and I should be able to write a tighter version.

The lecture about the Hermes of Athens. Just too long and too rambling.

The museum. I love the whole vibe of the scene with Penny running around looking at pots and flirting with Marcos, but she doesn't have to strawman the Dorian Invasion quite so hard. And there's more history here than is really needed. 

And for once, not a lecture; the spinnaker bit in the voyage of the Wanderer. Again I put it in for pacing reasons, but the pacing doesn't actually require it.

And there's quite a bit of trimming and clean-up I can do as well. Funny thing is; I don't expect to lose that many words. If it takes a thousand off I'd be surprised -- and since a lot more of that is in tightening up, I can easily make up that much and more by decompressing some dialog. I can even trade dialog and actual "business" for some of the place descriptions that go on too long.

Did I get that guitarist on the steps of the Acropolis? Because if he isn't there, I could happily add him in now. 

Epic Quest

Finally moving forward again with The Early Fox. Yes, I'm re-using some concepts and snippets of description, but still basically I hacked out almost a thousand words today on the Part II opening.

(And still not really happy with explicit "Parts." I might end up using the "vignettes from the past" as dividers instead. Or I might end up cutting those, leaving only the "White Sands girl" prologue and having the rest of the book in simple first-person, past tense, chronologically linear narrative.)

Which was also one of the big reasons to rewrite the "Pickup truck" and "Roswell" chapters so thoroughly. My first draft used au vis openings and that meant a whole bunch of back-filling in awkward past perfect.

That revised opening sequence, though, is finally taking proper shape on the page. There's a certain feel I'm trying to achieve with it.

Yeah, I've mentioned just how amazing the Horizon Zero Dawn series is at organic world-building, where your understanding of the world and the back story, the nature of the quest and the stakes evolve in parallel with Aloy's own understanding. Even on a second or third playthrough, you feel this opening up as the game takes you through these huge changes of perspective; from the Proving, where Aloy's world expands radically from being an outcast of the Nora to learning there are other tribes, history and politics in her land -- and some of those other forces have just taken an active interest in her, to when she enters Carja Lands, especially Meridian, and both enters a new nation and new (desert) biome, but also becomes an active part of political events there.

And it just keeps on, with the final revelation that you are trying to stop a techno-god from eating the world happening extremely late in the game.

Forbidden West has less of this, although the moment the Zeniths enter is a startling game-changer. It remains, however, a slow burn game. That opening title there is at least an hour of game-play in.

And notice how gentle it is. Three minutes, with a song to boot. Not a cramped cinematic of explosions and fisticuffs and world-ending stakes -- although these are very much there, from the start of the game. This is almost elegiac, and no accident, as her ride takes her through the territories of the previous game one more time before you move on to a new setting.

The other reason for why it unfolds this way is the story isn't just about Aloy trying to save the world. It is about her accepting the help of others, even if some of them will die on the way. Through the game, she stops being the one person who can save the world and begins to share her knowledge and skills.

Not really directions I'm going with my own opening cinematic. There is a thread I'm carrying through the book, the image of a woman carrying her child as she journeys to a new world, but for various reason The Early Fox is about cutting Penny off from chatty companions and letting her experience a desert solitude. So my Part II opening is about the lure and the loneliness of the open road.

Oh, and this is Penny's story. Penny without an existing role or expectation to fall back on. Which means, very possibly, the name "Athena Fox" will never be spoken within this book.

One more question for the cover creator.

Pronoun Trouble

 

I'm at least four months out on The Early Fox but am already thinking covers. Kindlepreneur is doing a thing with 100 Covers. 100 Covers wants examples of similar books on their order form. So back to Amazon -- PublishRocket does this now, but I am not in the headspace to figure out how that part works -- to find "similar genre."

There are more books showing up in my searches that take smaller liberties with history -- that don't require aliens or magic as part of their "Archaeological Thrillers." I still can only think of maybe one series so far, though, where the action is more towards Cozy Mystery and less wild shoot-outs and exploding helicopters.

But that got me thinking again about rewrite, relaunch, restaging...and POV. Because there are problems with doing this sort of thing in First Person, and advantages to Third. 

I originally picked First because the plot for that book had her mostly alone without anyone else to talk to, and because I really wanted her to talk about history. As of the current book I am working so hard at backing off on all the internal chatter even she has noticed it. First is also an easier POV to lie in. It seems paradoxical, but Third Immersive (the standard approach) is almost forced to reveal things about itself that a First Person POV can chose not to talk about.

The advantage to Third that got me thinking about this now is that so many of these other thrillers are more thrilling. More action. And it isn't as easy to look heroic and badass from inside. That bit of narrative distance of Third makes it easier.

In the case of the basic conceit of the stories, that protagonist Penny is often called and confused with "Athena Fox," First actually confers one huge advantage. And that is that they don't usually talk about themselves in the Third Person.

In the Japan books, my protagonist can be dealing with her complicated feelings about becoming the mask, as various people address her by her name or as "Athena Fox" -- but she remains the same person within her own head, as she is always "I" there.

The same thing with The Murderbot Diaries; the name "Murderbot" is rarely used. In fact, while the protagonist will at various points answer to "SecUnit" or "Rin" (a thin-as-paper disguise of an "augmented human" who works as a security consultant), it is usually "I" within its own head. The same way it isn't gendered, or even explicitly non-gendered (aka "it") -- again, simply "I."

(A problem immediately faced by the AppleTV show, as there is a male actor under the helmet.)

The other difference is in background information. A First Person POV can dump background but at the risk of attracting attention to the artificiality of the narrative. When a First says something like; "I was educated at the Sorbonne" it immediately implies that they are aware of the reader. That they are in fact narrating their experience. "Dammit, six years at the Sorbonne had not prepared me for this!" instead maintains that fragile fourth wall, keeping the reader from having to think about why they seem to be able to hear this person's thoughts.

This isn't hard-and-fast; the mirror scene alone demonstrates that you can't do everything in Third. But you can get away with more before you break that fourth wall.

To me, though, this is much like the secrets issue above; First is handy for when you want to keep secrets, but it is lousy when you want the reader to understand who they are and what they are thinking, because they just might not want to talk about it. And if they appear obligated to talk about it, it immediately distances from riding along in their skull while they have the experience, to being told about this great experience sometime after the fact.

Detail Diatribe

I'm up to where I stopped on The Early Fox. I've been trying all week to do a top-to-tail read. I kept having to stop for something, and by the time I got back I'd lost the flow.

I've been fighting off the weakness thing that comes over me on a regular basis. Didn't take any time off to rest this time. Meant it stretched on longer.

Today, finally, I read the whole thing. Reading as a reader would (or at least trying to). What are their questions, what might they misunderstand? Always important, but critical in the early chapters where you are lying out where we are, who our characters are, what they are up to, and why we should care. The last being, well, the plot. What is at stake; is the plot of the book I see, the handle toward my hand?

Okay, almost all the way back. I have the last scene to straighten out still. It works, but I changed a bunch in the last rewrite (kicked several plot beats down the road). I was struggling anyhow to get this pressure relief thing going, where Penny is basically in trouble at her job and she sort of turns that around to get sent out on an investigation.

Those beats still aren't quite happening. But my brain isn't there after a long so I'm heading to bed.

I no longer have confidence in writing. In anything I'm writing, in anything I will write. I passed my peak; I'm still learning new things, but I'm less and less able to apply them efficiently.

Detail is still part of it. I got sort of walked into a level of detail on this series. Now it is an expectation. And it is the process that is slowing me down. Not exactly the research (although I always want more time than I have), but what having all that to handle does to my writing sessions. It sort of infects everything, meaning I have more plot beats and character nuances and other things going on. Which I all have to juggle.

There's a place here and there, especially on the latest book (because I planned to do exactly that) where most of the distractions are pared away. Her first walk into the desert, I also kicked the beat of realizing the desert is a flourishing ecosystem until I do the bigger walk out to the test bed.

A sequence I am looking forward to, mostly because that has the first scene with Jackson and Sanchez.

The desert stroll I did is now pared down to Penny taking a walk and slowly kicking the impression other people gave her of White Sands as this bombed-out military wasteland. That's it.

I also realized today, in the read-through, that I don't have to dread the archaeology research. It is basically done. The detailed description of Penny working her first dig...that's written. Her late-night attempt to nail down the chronology of the thrice-dug grave is mostly going over the same ground.

Like I said, I don't believe in any of this. But I enjoy the process. Even if almost nobody is going to read it (and absolutely nobody is going to comment), I am still looking forward to the -- call it a technical challenge -- of writing some of those scenes.

Writing. As much as I still have a stack of research I already started and feel obligated to finish (reading a history of nuclear weapon secrecy right now), and as much as I know there's things ahead I will have to learn more about before I write those specific scenes, I am at the moment a lot more interested in writing the scenes themselves.

If only it were faster. I'm boiling over on ideas for the next book already. It is taking so damned long to write the current one!

AI Conundrum

At some point I'm going to finish another book. At that point, I'll need editing, cover art, possibly interior graphics. I am rethinking the latter slightly and may use a different layout for the next "Fox" books, but anyhow.

How can I tell that I'm not getting AI back?

Okay, already there was a big problem with editors and art and similar labor-intensive book services, and that was vendors geared towards providing a product. Their business model is not based on them understanding the needs of your book, but instead doing something of sufficient quality that you will pay them for it.

Can you get SEO advice from someone who actually knows the SF field? Can you get editing from someone who understands the peculiarities of historical fiction?

I pushed a little with my cover and interior artists; instead of sending them a reference image, I'd describe it in art-student terms; "...like a Toulouse-Lautrec cabaret poster."

On places like Reedsy and Fiverrrrrr, you don't even know if you are talking to the artist, or if you don't share a language and they are shoving your order into Google Translate. That makes revisions awkward, and rarely productive, as well.

Well, AI has made this distinctly worse. Even if there is a human hand holding the pen, you know that the person handling orders at the Art "R" Us you are contracting with just fed whatever you said into ChatGPT and asked it to spit out whatever it is they could do in an afternoon with a stock image site.

Not only do they not know anything about theory, history, or tradition of art, they've a business model that makes it so these things do not matter. They can get a result that gets them paid. Bottom line.

Which by the by over just the years since I published the last book have been so overrun with AI generated "stock" they barely even bother to identify it anymore. All of their efforts are to cash in by offering their own AI implementation for your needs.

Well, actually, most of them are going out of business. It has become much more difficult to get the typical stock that was used in so many book covers over the last few decades.

But there is still a moral and possible a legal ground as well. KDP stops you at several points during upload for a self-published manuscript for you to declare if you have used AI. As of the moment, this doesn't matter. But it could change in a moment, and every trend in the market suggests it will not change in a way that is good for those who declared.

The best outcome is that Amazon unveils their own AI engines, and declares their legal department has determined you must pay the extra charges to have their AI used on your work instead. Which contract by the by will also require permission to use your work for training data. No, I haven't heard any rumors of this. But KDP is so far from hurting for more books, they could easily dump all of the self-published works that used AI, probably without hurting their bottom line in the slightest.

How can I find these editors and artists now? What protection do I have that even a well-meaning person who I have contracted with before isn't feeling the crunch as real artists are being crushed under cheap AI crap, and is forced to sign with that devil in order to pay their own bills?

None.

Bad Kitty

The reason to write a history-themed book, whether history, alternate history, or "archaeological thriller" (which seems to be the only common catch-all term for "things from history impact a story set in the present") is to enjoy history. Both the well-known, but also the lesser know. Or, at least, lesser-known aspects of the well-known.

And sometimes that involves changing the history, because real history is too messy and hard to cram into a plot that has the right story arc to it with dramatic payoff and proper resolution, or is just has some inconvenient date or location.

My feeling is it is better to change it than to lose it entirely. As long as your changes are to the letter of it (June instead of July) and don't change the underlying meaning (it had to be July because that's when the monsoon season begins).

In July of 2014 an explosion occurred at the Waste Isolation Plant Prototype in the southeast corner of New Mexico. It released radioactive materials and caused the complete shut-down of all operations for a number of years. The barrel of waste at fault began at LANL (Los Alamos National Laboratories) during their own trouble years (specifically called out in some reports as between 2008 and 2016), and was the fault of the use (by apparently a subcontractor) of the wrong brand of kitty litter.

I really want this incident to be mentioned in my New Mexico murder mystery, set in early 2019. I want to (will) use as a clue, a silly little logo of kitty litter in the circle with a line through it, used as a jokey promotional item by a rival waste clean-up contractor.

That contractor, who is currently going by "EvilKitty" in my notes, (pretty sure I'm going for something like "Patriot Compliance Solutions" as the company got big at the tail end of Reagan's presidency), may be all over Penny's little mystery. And is the element that ties both plots together; the victims of the nuclear industry, and the Cold War secret that someone is willing to murder to keep. Oh, and also make a neater way of getting Lon Davis, the Atlas F site outside Roswell, and Penny's investigation of the dead body at White Sands into one single whole.

The timing is bad, though.

There was an earlier incident at LANL with some plutonium rods. That one was in 2011 and really kicked off the Los Alamos exodus that all but crippled their plutonium work for several years.

2011 is also closer to the ballpark for another important clue. Sand. The White Sands Footprints were discovered in 2009 and may have been because an unusual amount of sand had dried out and been lifted by the wind (a typical cyclic event of the dunes) following the drought of 2006-2008.

I decided I very much still want The Thrice-Dug Grave (which would have been a lovely title if I was doing straight mystery stories and not a series that was supposed to be archaeological thriller). For that grave to work it needed to have someone digging the body back up around ten years before the date of the story. Chose a zone around 2011 and this is pretty close to the sweet spot when Freeman would have left LANL, Juan Baca's body was dug up in search of The Source (aka the McGuffin), the refilled grave would be about eight years old when Penny dug it again during the Bell-Bleekman excavations just outside Holloman AFB, and enough white gypsum sands would have been in the backfill to provide an important clue.

But I really wanted this to happen at the same time the Test Bed (nearby in WSMR) got a final clean-up, and it would be really, really handy if someone could drop a matchbook...err, a cheap little pin with the cat piss logo on it at that site.

But not only is this jumping the gun on the shut-downs at LANL and WIPP, it almost makes more sense with the timeline and politics that much of this clean-up happened within a smaller number of years following the redirection of Star Wars from brilliant pebbles...and a ambitiously wunderwaffen-type effort to pull Project Pluto out of mothballs as yet another proposal Reagan might have been willing to pay for.

I know you are busy saving the world, but...

Side quests. 

It's a mechanism seen in so many games because it achieves the goals of lengthening play, letting the player put their stamp on their character through choices outside of the main campaign, and with chances to personalize (and improve) their gear, and of course to explore the world and the lore.

Like James Bond Plotting, it seems like a natural fit for novels as well.

Really, most of a plot is this already. There's two major forms going on; first is actually plot-related, but takes form as various odd errands that seem to be necessary just to get the clue or the part for the magic demon-defeating weapon or whatever. Second is stuff that builds character, builds world. The biggest difference is that even in games with a Reputation or Morality meter, non-game stories can build all sorts of important character growth into these side stories.

I had already intended the plot for The Early Fox to be heavily on having to do a thing for a person to get the thing to give to some other person so they would tell Penny the next clue. But now I'm thinking about the second kind.

C plots.

But it might just be that I manage to get a chest cold and spent a week out of work with a nasty cough and no energy and no brain. I'm slowly coming back to the book, and staring at my plot wondering what the hell it was that I was thinking -- something that must have felt so clear then I didn't put it in my notes, but now that fever has burned out more of the remaining brain cells, can't remember now.

But I got a lot of HZD done. And watching another Let's Play.

Aloy -- gets a lot of side quests. By Forbidden West she's got not just main quests, quests which grant weapons or armor, and collectibles, the new upgrade system requires so many specialized parts those become a quest form in and of themselves.

At least it has broken slightly with the "go here and kill everything you see" of Skyrim. Instead, it is "go here and shoot these specific parts off some of these machines." Which makes combat a lot more complicated and strategic as you are trying to balance getting all that useful loot against, well, surviving the encounter as well.

Aloy even lampshades this at least once in dialogue. "I get it; you want me to go there, shoot some machines, bring you back some parts."

At least the game has more excuse for the quests which are doing errands for random people. As opposed to people walking up to the full kitted-out assassin in black armor and a really bad reputation and asking him if he'd mind making a run down to the chemist for some sticking plaster.

Aloy, on the other hand, has a huge reputation for helping people. As of the start of Forbidden West she is the Savior of Meridian and Anointed of the Nora (she hates both titles. And don't bow, either. The Anointed doesn't like it). Plus Seeker, Thrush of the Lodge, and Chieftain of the Werak.

Well before the second game is over, she's also Savior of Plainsong, Champion of the Tenakt, and Ancestor Reborn. Take the last just as one example; the Quen worship the Legacy of the Ancestors, those figures of mostly-lost history who showed the way for their tribe to grow and prosper. Aloy is one of them returned in flesh. Yeah, maybe not exactly the person you'd turn to to pick up your laundry, but absolutely a person to do the impossible and save some lives doing it.

All of the titles above are basically titles of "wandering do-gooder." Seriously, though, she could be getting a lot of "help us out" quests just with her Focus alone.

Which does happen more than a little in the first game, as people come to her as "the Nora who can see the unseen." Yeah, welcome to being the only person after the apocalypse with a fully functional Google Glass.

Also one of the greatest diagetic excuses for a HUD that I know of -- because even as there are some clever ones out there, going back to at least Half-Life where the HEV suit contains the display unit that shows you that game data, the Focus is also a key part of the story. Not just a tool, but the way discovery of the Focus changes Aloy's life, and also as it turned out changed Sylens' as well and led to the awakening of HADES (and thus the plot), and of course quite a lot of plot-related "who has a focus, who can listen in to another focus" stuff.

By about an hour into the game, Aloy has the only gliding wing (sure, Gruda had one, but she killed him...and took it), and also (unusually for any tech left within eyeball range of the Oseram) the only grappling hook.

So they really should be coming to her all the time with "Hey, my cat got stuck in a tree. Could you grapple gun your way up there and glide back down with it? Only take you a moment."

But, no. They'd rather ask her to beat up a few machines.

The dangers of au vis

Au vis openings are always tempting.  It is nice to have something that makes a good hook, especially over a transition; a linking element, a match cut, even a Gilligan cut.

The problem comes when you need to backfill. And it starts with the backfill being almost necessarily in past perfect tense.

I have a new rule. "Any part of a story in past perfect should either be long enough to allow it to be dropped into simple past, or so short the question never comes up."

That is, either it should be a brief recap, or it should be a full flashback. Because what falls between ends up taking things that should be in a proper scene; that is, should be dramatized with full five-senses writing, and turning them into explanation instead. Basically, unless you work to fix this problem, the recap ends up being all telling, no showing.

I had two of them in the Roswell sequence. I had a hook opening with her driving a pickup truck, and I had a fake-out opening for the Roswell museum scene.

And I didn't even realize this was a problem. It wasn't like I had anything I needed to say about Roswell other than the way that one sketchy incident is heavily leveraged as the big tourist draw. Practically the town identity.

No, the problem is that I'm not letting the reader enjoy the experience of visiting the place. I don't need to give more information about the town. I need to have Penny experience it in real time, not in a rushed recap (rushed because otherwise I'd be either stuck in past perfect so long it would get uncomfortable, or I'd have to do the "slip" in and out of full flashback mode.

The driving is actually worse. There's a bunch of character beats here. Really, that's one of the three things the drive is doing; scene-setting, a little philosophical conceit, and a chance for Penny to do some stuff in character.

That was my big accomplishment of today. Realizing I needed to toss two more chapters and rewrite those.

(The real project today was looking over the outline and trying to figure out what actual scenes that make it into an actual novel. It probably needs more stuff happening. But not exactly plot. Maybe C plots; maybe some fetch quests.)

The Other Guys

I've been archive-binging at Mythcreants again (they have a lot of archive).  

Had a scary realization; I don't have a supporting cast.

Okay, this is understandable. For the New Mexico adventure, I'm consciously not letting Penny have anyone she can talk freely to -- partly to get a whole "Desert Solitudes" thing going (and concentrate on descriptions instead of dialog), but also to try to head off the damned info-dumps.

Even if both Dylan and now Luke keep angling for more screen time, so much so I'm already making jokes about love triangles.

And the original model was largely Tomb Raider, who in the first go-round pretty much only had Werner Von Croy as a returning character. The Legend trilogy gave her a support team, but they only barely appeared in game play (and were sharply reduced in number during Underworld).

Not to mention returning adversary Natla.

Setting a precedent for the Survivor trilogy, which admittedly started so grimdark it made sense most of the cast didn't make it to the end of the first game. Not sure why they kept Jonah but lost Sam. Probably too lemony for EA (that bridal carry after the big battle...ho-yay!)

Anyhow, what is scary is that not only have I never noticed before that I didn't give Penny a solid supporting cast -- I mean fully fleshed-out characters with their own arcs, not people who sometimes pick up the phone -- I don't even know how I could write these people.

This is when I'm four scenes into Part II and my not-really-an-outline is telling me I'm short of material. In fact, it feels like there's not enough story for the story, period.

Add that to the ongoing stuff at work, and...all I want to do is turn out the lights, put on headphones, and play Horizon Zero Dawn. I might not even leave the Sacred Lands.

The Name of the Cow

I got there. And before the weekend was out I pushed through almost 4K past where I'd stopped for rewrites, completing the "aftermath" scene that follows the body drop, and beginning Penny's sojourn down Blue Highways. In a rented Toyota Tacoma, though, not on a motorbike wearing a helmet painted with an American flag.

 I'm probably going to reconstruct that opener several times before I call it close enough. But I'm pushing on to Roswell. Again the difficulties of this approach are killing me; I don't want to go deep into conspiracy theories and I really want to avoid getting into any detail about Ancient Alien stuff. If for no other reason, than it inevitably drags in Penny's historical knowledge -- and her history with similar conspiracies.

And I'm trying for, not quite blank slate, and certainly not a reboot, but not having quite so much baggage.

And McDonald got his real name. That was always a placeholder, even if I was starting to take it seriously. But I like the idea of a very ordinary hispano name that leads many of the people Penny is interacting with to think of him as just a random old guy on public support, who died without accomplishment or legacy.

Which is also what motivates Mary Cartwright (who is also hispano, with strong links to Santa Clara Pueblo, but doesn't get a revealing name. So I guess she's taking over the "yes, intermarriage is a thing" point from MacDonald).

Juan Baca.

No, not "baka"

Or "bacta"

But one of the family names of original Spanish settlers which are still extremely common in New Mexico. So a direct link to idea of heritage and identity...all the way back to who exactly was walking along that ancient Lake Otero (and when!)

Sometimes still spelled "Vaca," shortened from "de Vaca," and, yes, probably has a direct connection to that famous explorer of the southwest, Cabeza de Vaca himself.

A Secret Test of Character

I got most of the draft re-written. If I push through tonight, I might be back up where I left off and be free to spend the weekend seeing how many chapters of the next part of the book I can push out.

The beats are better. Clearer, at least. Tom Bell is still turning ally too quickly, and Julian Bleekman isn't getting enough love, even when I gave him a whole scene to use. Also, pushing Dylan out just caused Luke to take over his slot as good-looking, sympathetic friend. At this point it would take far too little to tip it over into a full YA Love Triangle. And Miguel and Jesus can't for the life of them get any screen time.

But then, I only had 8K to work with. So I'm not entirely unhappy with all that.

No, the problem is, I've realized I don't like Penny.

I don't mean as a person. I don't entirely mean the difficulty of writing her. I mean that she may not be a good character to hang a book on. Or a good character at all, but that's part of the problem; I can't say if she is believable or nuanced because she seems so very unfocused to me.

She wasn't, after all, designed.

Penny is the result of multiple unplanned, on-the-fly decisions made to allow the plot of the first book to work. And others that were meant to aim her at where I had originally intended to go; to evolve quickly into a fairly typical confident, wise-cracking hero.

Instead I got a motormouth neurotic, bouncing between overconfidence and ruthlessly tearing herself down; both born of an extreme lack of confidence. And yet I keep writing her into situations where she needs to be brave one moment and paralyzed the next, physically competent but without the applicable training, deeply informed on nuances of history and culture yet with huge and surprising gaps in her understanding of even the basics.

I set out, in the current book, to roll back a few things I didn't like. A big one was getting rid of all the lectures and a necessary corollary was to make her less educated in the subjects at hand (because when you've got a motor-mouthed First Person protagonist, if they know anything about a subject, they are bound to blurt it out.)

I wanted to put her back in danger and make it relatable, which meant downplaying her history of (unlikely) successes and her hard-won skills.

But I don't like what I'm getting. She's sounding, well, childish. She's so out of her depth she feels like the damsel character the real hero will be rescuing when he shows up.

And as usual when Penny plays things close to the chest, it is hard showing the reader what is actually going behind that plucky cheerful more-than-a-little-ditzy mask.

And yet this is still closer to where I want to be. The Tomb Raider-archetype 200-casualty firefight in the streets of Cairo got dumped pretty much as soon as I tried to actually write anything like that. Like it or not, I need that world where a ten-minute training montage doesn't give you the ability to beat up ninja warriors, where snarky dialogue filled with pop-culture references doesn't impress the bad guys, where the minions have names and few problems can be solved by punching them in the face.

And yet, and yet, a book where these pleasures are still represented, even in mutated form. Where there still are those beats of adventure and heroism and wish-fulfillment. 

So I don't really know where I need Penny to be, much less how I would go about getting her there now that there are so many books already down. On the latter, however, I will say I am flirting more than a little with the idea of making a three or four book "America" cycle, part Jessica Fletcher, part Bill Bixby, as Penny wanders the blue highways being an amateur sleuth in various strange parts of rural Americana.

Need to see a woman about a mammoth

Worked out the plan, got back into it. One useful day of writing before the weekend ended. Wanted to push forward but decided to do the rewrites first.

The revised Dune Drive sequence went quick. And then there was a line about the mammoth footprints and I wanted Doctor Bell to mention how long they'd been finding trackways at White Sands. I know I saw that somewhere. There's even an amusing story about the first Harlan's Ground Sloth tracks; the discoverer thought he had discovered Bigfoot!

So I did a quick top-level search. And of course, there is damn-all from that angle on the animal trackways, because everyone wants to post and repost off the three or four releases by Bennet's team on the human footprints.

But...I hit multiple reposts and re-telling's of his first publicity release.

So The Early Fox opens with a Pleistocene sketch. Rather pastoral, because that worked for the book. Later, Penny gets a look at what are inferred to be the footprints of the woman and child (and mammoth).

And here's the problem. As of these early, pre 2021 paper findings, the child was around three years old and a bit of a weight to carry, especially on slick mud. And while there are other children who jumped in puddles (specifically, in the water pooled in the footprint of a Harlan's Sloth in one set of prints elsewhere) this one was only on his or her feet while the girl/teenager/young woman/smaller man put her down to switch arms.

And she was booking. Moving at a pace that, especially at her height and stride, would be close to a run.

Add this to the fact that essentially all of the other trackways (and this includes the majority of the animals as well) are traveling in groups. And to the oddity that she apparently sets out with the child and returns hours or days later without it...

There's a story here, and it might be a dramatic one. This is the trackway that crossed a mammoth both ways; it stepped on her footprints, and on the way back she stepped on its footprints. And actually; there was a Harlan's Sloth as well, though she may not have noticed it. It noticed her, or perhaps just her footprints, and got up on its hind legs to look for danger before turning around and going somewhere else instead.

Oh, yeah, and this was early and thus may not be deep. The first reports were before the radiocarbon tests and put a bracket of 15K to 10K BP on them; from the known opening of the ice passage to the extinction of the mammoth in NA.

So should I rewrite that, too? This is one of those cases in which the rewrites cascade; the scene I'm working on now is the one where Penny looks at her tracks.

The downside to going dramatic with the material is that it sets up an unanswered tension. She might be running from something. She is alone, which is unusual, she is in a hell of a hurry, and she returns without the child. That's questions the reader is going to have and the trackways -- and the rest of the novel -- never do explain what is going on or what happened to her.

But...there is another perspective. This took commentary from one of those many reposts I mentioned. To us, this is a strange and threatening land. Cold, wet, those massive looming glaciers (not terribly close to Lake Otero, at least), and truly insane megafauna. Even if the twelve-foot tall Harlan's Sloth with the eight inch long digging claws is a shy herbivore, and the mammoth is a herd beast (for all that is good and bad about that!) we've got dire wolves, sabre tooths, and lions; basically all your apex predator dreams, only three times the size (as Penny puts it, the Pleistocene is like Texas; everything is bigger there).

But that's the world she knows. That's the world she grew up in. It may be dangerous to her, but that freak-out level of "surrounded by giant monsters" may not be her world picture. I glanced over the existing draft, and yes I can increase the weight of the child and the speed of the girl and all of that but still keep the general flavor of the scene. Urgent, possibly important, certainly dangerous, but not this major thriller Clan of the Cave Bear set-piece of Pleistocene adventure.

Unscheduled Rapid Disassembly

Maybe that wasn't the solution. I wrote fast, but I was breaking things. I hit the story beats I wanted, but awkwardly. This story could be told better.

I actually know how. Dylan was the root of most of the problems; he was too nice, too chatty, and he made it too easy to slip into the "a friend tells Penny stuff" mode. And I wanted to do so much more with Doctors Bleekman and Bell. And there were some smaller problems, like I didn't give time for the "useless wasteland we use to test bombs at" to develop, or explain what the hell this dig was about and what was at stake.

I hadn't defined how Penny feels about the military because I was trying not to describe them all (and reveal the holes in my research.) I also didn't have a good read on where she should be emotionally with finding a body.

And in my effort to reset her to more of a blank slate without all that messy history, and to show not tell and leave more space for the reader to come with their own impression, I've ended up making her, well, dumb. And that's going to remain a problem.

(And I am still intensely uncomfortable with the way I can pretty much pick an emotion I want for her to react with, and make it work. Means either she is one flighty girl, or means her character is way too undefined and a bad character.)

Anyhow. I can see how to use Bleekman and Bell, and involve the "Duke Boys," as Penny started calling the two Field Technicians who aren't Dylan. And places to take Dylan that make him a better character. To make the idiot lectures much more confrontational and to have a lot more emotional underpinning going on.

I already discovered that in the earlier draft. Tom Bell was being patronizing, but protective, and even as she disliked the first Penny also valued the second. I can put her not just in conflict with him but in conflict with her own instincts and internal conflict is always the good stuff.

But.

These aren't bandaid fixes. These aren't things I can do by moving around descriptions and changing a few names. This is top-to-tail re-write.

So...all that "progress," and what I have to show for it is 12,000 words of shit.

I think I'm gonna turn off the lights and go play computer games for the rest of the weekend.

Doctor, doctor.

I got to the body drop!

10,000 words down. It feels great. Maybe I've finally broken the pattern. I finally started pulling out the portable keyboard over lunch at work and somehow that's kept me in the zone long enough to get writing done on a work night as well. If I can keep up 5,000 words a week, I'll be done in under four months!

Well, I've got the first draft of the body drop chapter. The first part wasn't so bad. The second part, NEST sweeps in as well. It was meant to be a fustercluck and it is on the page, too. I'd already established that my Project Leads were stickler about titles, and then I added another stickler to the NEST team. Too many people to keep straight, and far too many of those people were insisting on "Doctor."

Another thing that is hitting me is my light outlining. I had to actually come up with a reason for the NEST team to come in -- even if it was just a training exercise -- and that meant some hurried reading on neutron activation and helium-3 detectors and such fun stuff. I basically had to commit to a certain decay chain to make things work. 240 Pu to 241 Pu via neutron capture (please imagine the proper superscript), 241 Pu decay to 241 Am, 241 Am plus beryllium to form a neutron source that NEST could detect from a helicopter.

And I planted the idea that the neutron activation (of things like the man's metal belt buckle) is too strong to be accounted for by the tiny amount of Americium they found in his medicine pouch.

(That "medicine pouch" is also a jump ahead, and one of those weird compromises of actual research. See, while there are huge difference between the different tribes regarding ritual practices, one thing that is generally true is that burial practices come under the category of "never to be shared with outsiders." In fact, one of the standard books on Tewa Pueblo beliefs has been chastised for sharing certain rituals. Even though the author was himself tribal.)

(So I'm three steps removed from being able to show something accurate. I don't know, personally. If I did know, I would be morally obligated not to share it. And if it was right, I shouldn't portray my Tewa character as identifying them as correct! This puts me in a strange place where I am borrowing things from other descriptions. That is, descriptions which are probably wrong, but which my readers could well tell me that I am wrong because I am using them differently from how they heard them!)

(So I have Penny and others calling a thing a "medicine pouch" even though Penny, at least, knows this is probably wrong. And my Tewa character bluntly saying "I can't tell you." Sigh.)

Oh, yeah. And the same game is going on with the "source." Right now, my version of it is there was weapon's grade plutonium and some beryllium alloy involved in the "thing" that Freeman and MacDonald were working with. And the NEST guys know very well that all three (that is, counting the well-known Americium-241 decay product) are characteristic of nuclear weapons. So they aren't willing to say, and like my Tewa gal, trying to be careful about saying that they can't say!

Which is a big theme of the story anyhow.

Which also hooks in some rather frustrating ways to the rest of my story-telling. I'm trying to cut back on the idiot lectures. The worst of them were coming from Penny, though, so I've actually had to make her more of an idiot. So there's a lot of stuff going on and some of it is being expressed in technical language and...I feel like I'm ending up in that same place I didn't want to be, with the reader feeling lost.

I've tried to cut down as much as possible all the stuff about archaeological dating and Bering Strait crossings and Paleoindian stone tools and...well, there's a hell of a lot of stuff going on in these opening chapters. Not because I need it to tell the story that will occupy the bulk of the novel. Because Penny only gets to enjoy herself at her first real stateside dig for a very small number of days -- and pages -- and after that it is off driving dark desert highways towards Roswell with country music playing on the radio in her rented truck and a giant black hummer on her tail.

Oh, yeah, and just to make things even more fun, I'm setting up her consciously putting aside the pop-culture references. Which means, sigh, I have to show her doing a lot of that. In the first 8,000 words. Before the body drop.

I have, however, made some progress at decompressing. Some progress at showing not telling. And some progress at shifting this book towards description-heavy instead of dialogue-heavy like the last one.

Once I clear the room of all these opening-sequence-only characters.

In the redraft of the scene, I decided to move anybody getting checked out for radiation to later (if at all). So instead of finding something and going "uh, oh," the NEST nerds are finding something and going "Ooh, this is weird. Can we take it home?"

At some entirely random point it felt like a thing to have Penny yell at the NEST team. As such things often go, that propagated out until that's a key to how she gets the answers she's after from the guy at the New Mexico WIP (that is, the all new, all-shiny, this-one-will-work-better version of Yucca Mountain.)

Another follow-on is that dropped all the technical details from the conversation. Finding out that there was plutonium involved (assuming that's what I end up going with) won't happen until much later in the story.

I still have yet to decide if MacDonald actually had anything on him. And when Freeman went back to re-dig the grave. At the moment, my best timeline for that matter is he lost contact with MacDonald after the Star Wars days, and didn't learn about his death until somewhere around the Los Alamos problems of 2011 that caused a number of physicists to quit.

I just hope I can stay ahead of my writing hand. This is too good a sprint to lose by having to go back and do more plotting.

Perils of Research

I've been writing up a storm. Hit 5,000 words this weekend. And that was with gutting several scenes and doing them differently.

But I'm writing well in front of my outline and I've hit a point where I can't discovery-writing my way out of it. I actually have to do a little planning.

The first draft of the current scene was a conversation. Okay, it was about the personalities of the two lead archaeologists on the dig (which is inappropriate for that time and place -- save it for the bar after work). And about Pre-Clovis.

But the problem was -- it was a discussion. Once again, I've got someone lecturing at Penny.

In re-writes my "Penny looks at footprints and makes her own conclusions" worked great. And I stopped and rewrote/padded out the start of the dig for more scene-setting and for more of a focus on the physical part of digging, and less on laying out a unit. That's for different reasons.

Clovis, though. This is why I end up having lectures, because there are so few good ways to get the info out. The best thing to do is, of course, not having the info there at all. And, yeah, since basically all the paleoindian stuff in this one is just background and theme, I don't have to get it in there in time for the climax. Penny's mental Bat-Computer can spit out the whodunnit without needing to know the arguments for and against the Coastal Route.

Of course, right here when she is actually digging on a potential pre-Clovis site, would be the time to do this stuff. It matters to her at this moment. And if I've done my job right, I've intrigued the reader. That's the other thing about that info stuff; you want to be dropping questions on the reader, letting them worry about them for a while, and answering them -- after you've given them two or three new ones to chew on.

Again, if I've set things up right, the reader is wondering what the deal is with Doctor Bell. And is wondering why two of the diggers are name-dropping something called the "Gault Assemblage." And wondering what the big deal is about something being Pre-Clovis. I'm not sure I want to kick that can 50,000 words down the road, to the point where Penny returns to Alamogordo to close the chase.

Anyhow, Clovis. Here's today's brilliant idea; demonstrate it through knapping. That was on my original short list anyhow, that I wanted her to do it. That does put a slight delay on things, though, because that means I really need to find the time to get my box of rocks and my antler out and learn a bit of that stuff myself. I've finally figured out where to do it so nobody is stepping on bits of broken glass (out by the garbage cans. No bare feet there, and the gravel will grind it fine over time.)

I of course have no idea what character to do this with. What questions, what relationships have I built up to the point where this is meaningful? Dylan has his own arc and I'm cutting him out of the picture as soon as I can manage it. Doctors Bell and Bleekman have theirs...I already jumped the gun on Bell, showing that while he may be a dinosaur, he's aware of it and willing to try and do better. Which was within a fifty words of Penny realizing there was anything he needed to do better.

(There was just the perfect dialogue opening. Such is writing.)

So I stopped to look at my largely empty mind-mapper doc for this book. And watch some of Dark Wind, the AMC-Whatever series based on Tony Hillerman's Navajo mysteries. Which is all in Northern New Mexico but I've known that for a while.

Whatever else happens in that lunch-time conversation (I may just cut it entirely), there's an Air Force check-up from Holloman during it. So just to make it quicker work when I got there, I looked up what kind of civilian-origin truck it would be, and what colors it would be painted.

Tried to look up. Frustrating. According to sources, there are so many options from Strata Blue to OG to NATO camo to Desert camo to that cute blue Air MP paint job. And a few options in vehicles, too.

Penny isn't even a car person. This thing is gonna do six words of description at the very outside. Could be, when I get to the one sentence, it will be "A truck drove up." I am kinda hoping for "A Chevy pickup painted dark blue" but here's the catch; it could be anything. But anyone who had been stationed at Holloman in 2019 would know exactly what it would have been.

As errors in research goes, it is something probably no reader will ever catch. But it bothers me. Yeah, it bothers me. There's a reason I've been shying away from outright historical fiction.

(Says the guy who is intending to write four more vignettes; Egtved Girl, the Pueblo Revolt, Valentina pissing on a tire...and of course Lucy.

(The reason I agonize over this damn truck is that Penny is slowly realizing the depth and extent of the military-industrial complex in New Mexico, especially around the Tularosa Basin. Which is significant setting as she will be sneaking in and out of the White Sands military reservation. And significant to the underlying plot as well.)

(I am trying to time this stuff out, but my first plan -- to drive through some fancy well-guarded gate in the prior scene -- fell apart when I got a good look at the actual entrance at the civvie-facing and largely residential end of the base. Stallion Gate, from what I could see from my parking spot and what I could remember without taking pictures, was a lot more impressive.)

Cover Girl

No, really, it has been a productive writing time of late. Finally talked myself into trying the iPhone-and-keyboard brunch during the workweek (that is, in the break room at work) and it, um, works.

But not as much as this morning, where instead of being early to work I hammered out 3/5 of the next scene in one intense session. Pity I can't keep that pace up; the next two scenes are going to take detours to refresh on some research material.

And all of that has damn-all to do with covers. I want to start that cover order, really I do, even if it is too early to do it. But that group really likes me to tell them what to put on the cover (we don't pay them enough to read the actual book). And I still have no good ideas.

So I wanted to revisit that hybrid cover concept. Like putting the Zuni sacred symbol in the New Mexico sky. Maybe not good branding because it looks too Hillerman but anyhow. Opens up splices like that. I had an Impressionist sky over a Paris rooftop view for the last and I could take something like that further. I mean, hell, there's a riff off the sequence from Kurosawa's Dreams in that same book, with Penny trailing the bad guys through animated Van Gogh fields.

I can't do a simple combination for the London book without it looking steampunk, but could do a slash-rip with one side being London Eye all lit up, Shard and all, the other being a black-and-white of barrage balloons and searchlights during the Blitz. Which makes it look more like a time-travel story than a dual-time narrative, but what can you do.

And it founders on Athens because while there is an absolute natural of a giant floating Greek helmet as the main visual element (presumably this one has the human element as foreground) I refuse to do a Corinthian helm. And furthermore, Laconia delenda est!

More useful at this moment, though, if creating a LOT more difficulties, is that the "Fox" titles are absolutely mystery cozy. Which these sort of are, even though they fall closer to Archaeological Thriller. Just a dialed-down action level (but the LA expat I met in Paris told me she hadn't expected all the James Bond stuff in the Paris book. Her words, not mine! And that's probably the lowest action level of all of them. Nobody even shoots at her in that book.)

The fresh take here is to go and do those Artifact titles, but do them properly. They don't have to be portentous and they shouldn't be silly or too obscure (a little hard not be somewhat obscure. History is like that.)

This tells the reader this is archaeological thriller just from the title alone. And it gives some idea about the cultural focus, so a reader who might not otherwise look but does want to read about turn-of-the-century Paris might be tempted.

So go with The Mirror of Amaterasu. And can also go with The Athena Sherd. Or Shard. Or just sidestep that whole issue and call it a "Fragment" or something. (Potsherd works, too.)

And, yeah, I know, too many books don't offer that immediacy of artifact. Not one that sounds interesting and that actually fits in the plot. We're not putting a Roman coin on the cover, either. In the title in this case but you know what I mean. The Blitz Diary makes it sound like it is a Blitz diary. That is, straight historical fiction, not the adventures of a student archeologist in modern London. Similar could be said for, oh, The Notre-Dame Gargoyle. Not to mention it isn't a gargoyle -- but that's another hill for another day's dying.

Okay, okay, The Zero Room is sort of intriguing. It doesn't really nail down history or location -- except for someone who already knows it. The problem is that this, like the Mirror, is giving away plot. These are unusual Archaeological Thrillers. The heroes don't set out to find the titular artifact. The nature of the thing is actually a big plot reveal. Zero Room might be obscure enough (but that also makes it less useful) but Mirror of Amaterasu will be staring the reader in the face probably before Penny even realizes the cult has one of the Three Treasures. (And no, not a washing machine.)

And New Mexico, the "history" is not a simple and distinct period. Okay...there's a bunch of stuff about pre-Clovis, generically Neolithic. And kind of a big point (ahem) that pre-Clovis is striking for being pre-Clovis. That is, for not having the Clovis Point. There's not a diagnostic artifact (in the transition period there's a Stemmed Point tradition, but you dial the way-back machine to the White Sands Footprints, and there's nary an artifact to be found.)

(Okay, the buzz is going around now about a possible travois. I buy it, sure I do. But some drag marks in the sand isn't enough to make me bronze that one. And there's not a nice culture name going with it. It's just generically "Pre-Clovis." Which is basically labeled by site anyhow. So people will talk about Monte Verde or the Gault Assemblage, but there's no equivalent to Bell-Beaker People.)

And the other half of the not-really-a-dual-time narrative is...a nuclear weapon. That artifact and that doesn't-have-a-name culture don't go together outside of Ancient Astronaut writings.

Still, unless you know the references (most won't) the current title choice is "Fox does something." I'm at the point where I'm having to source the quote in the epigram. "...said Napoleon." Pity changing titles is basically new book, new ISBN...and a completely fresh lack of reviews.

***

And "The Thing of Thing" just came back to me. I think I lost that insight because it fell apart like all the others. But this was capturing a concept about the story that wasn't necessarily an artifact. "The Mirror of Amaterasu" is quite literal -- the Yata no Kagami does appear in the story -- but it also sounds like and can be read as conceptual. That is, of a way of looking at Japan, of the way Japan looks at its own past. At what turns out to be a key character arc moment as Penny re-enacts the moment when the goddess looked at her own reflection and was, essentially, reborn.

"The Relic" or "The Secret of Montmartre" works, and picks up the thread of belle epoque because while Montmartre is still damned well there, it is strongly tied to that period. And it and that period is strongly tied to the artists like the Impressionists. Which isn't just the title being accurate to the book, it is offering a contract to the reader. "Want to read about the Paris Impressionists and get a little archaeological mystery with it?" Um... "Treasure of Montmartre" also works. Well enough for this exercise, at least.

The Blitz, as I mentioned, is more key to the London story than is the tube. So it is absolutely " The thing of the Blitz." Or "...London Blitz."

And oh yeah. Remembered it now. "The Face of Athena" or "The Legacy of Athena" for the Athens book. In this case, the dual meaning is both the sherd and the almost-lost early Attic pottery workshop, but Penny being inspired (manipulated) by Athena...ambiguously, both the goddess and the character she created.

The Athens book always has the problem of looking like a Percy Jackson wannabe. So there's that problem. If the title seems to be making the same promise that Greek gods are going to play an active role in the text...

Three steps forward two steps back

Which sounds like a country dance. I'm sure there's a country music song (in fact, I think I've heard it).

I expanded the opening scene to around 600 words. Trying not to get too Pleistocene Diorama about it; only one mammal (other than human) is shown, and the only flora detailed is some ditch grass. One other megafauna is talked about via the third-person narrative POV, with just enough it can probably be recognized as our old friend Smilodon.

No Giant Sloths, sad to say. It was getting too crowded. They have to wait for the next scene.

I got to 1200 words before I decided to rethink a thing or two. I thought twice about giving David Bustos any lines, as he is a real person. A public figure, but still. Created an assistant for him...but at that point realized I was falling back into bad old habits.

So have Penny draw her own conclusions. The reader is going to figure out she's looking at the person in the previous scene even if what Penny grasps from looking at some footprints isn't very detailed. And this is the magic of this whole thing, anyhow; the mechanics of glimpsing the past through the specific evidence that is sitting there in the ground.

There will be plenty of idiot lectures later. I can't quite get all of them out. As much as possible I'm determined to have less information total, and to present as much as I can organically. This, despite this being a mystery format where largely the plot advances through interviews. (The big difference is something I intend to be trying; unlike the lecturer who dumps an info-dump on the narrator, a witness is hostile and information needs to be extracted.)

Next scene is just Penny going from motel to a burger joint and going "Well. Here I am, a college student from LA, in a small southwestern town." In re the focus and information-glut abatement, she's not quite going to be blank slate but I am not bringing her background with her. Especially, the POV won't shift; what is there is what she does now.

I am going to try very hard not to mention film classes with Mr. Rodriguez (and his unholy fascination with '80s movies). But she is going to make a crack about Footloose.

 

Foolish Hobgoblin

I have it but it is controllable.

Give me any containers "in assorted colors" and I will want so hard to put different things in different colors. Screws in the blue bins, nails in the red bins...oh, but then there's more nails than there are red bins, and there's no color for bolts...

I keep thinking of some theme to hold my book covers together. The point of a series is not to save work in concept creation (plot bunnies breed like bunnies). The point is to get readers liking one and trying another. Or trying one because if they end up liking it, they know there's more like it waiting.

So branding. A closed series has a certain advantage in that you can do the visual equivalent of a liet-motif.  Same for titles, for that matter. Blackdamp, Firedamp, and, err, Afterdamp (I refuse to name a book Stinkdamp.) And there's few enough, and they are all around the same core concepts, you can do a Forging of the Crown, Quest for the Crown and End of the Crown. And put the titular artifact on all three covers. But even then, you can do some sort of symbol and for three or four books you can get away with using the same one.

Maybe it is the discovery writing. As with those damned assorted colors, I keep trying to come up with some element I can play with across every cover in the series, tying them together visually and helping to forge a series identity.

And each time, each idea, I hit on the exception.

This has been true for pretty much every linking element I've thought of. Frontispiece maps was an idea I floated. So, sure...any one of various maps of London, from Bazalgette's sewers to modern South London to -- useful to help the reader follow the Big Crawl of the climax -- the route and work sites of the Northern Line Extension.

For the Kyoto book, the theme is expressed by that motion from outside to in, and the Transcendence HQ Penny works to infiltrate is in a literal bullseye shape, ring within ring. 

And even Paris, it might be amusing to pull up another old map. The Petite Ceinture. Or better yet, the layout of the Paris Exposition of 1900.

Then we get to Athens. Okay, this is getting harder and harder. A diagram of her boating fun across the Adriatic. Or a map of Odysseus' long journey home from the Trojan War.

And the New Mexico book? Sigh. Although, just maybe, a map of White Sands. But already, you are seeing how it doesn't really come together as a cohesive theme. Or add enough to the reading experience to make it worth putting in.

And, yes, I've already fallen away from the three-legged stool or whatever it was, of a specific time and place in history (The London Blitz, the belle epoque, the....err...Greek classical age? Sigh) A specific city (Athens, Paris, London....Kyoto and Tokyo...Alamogordo, Albuquerque and Roswell...Sigh.) And a specific archaeological concept (or an intersection between archaeology and the greater world; archaeological looting, NAGPRA, Ancient Astronaut mythology...)

Perhaps needless to say, covers fell down before I'd even finished the first one.

That was back when I wanted to make a more obvious spoof of the "Archaeological Thriller" (as the book trade seems to call them these day). These are usually short, portentous titles with a well-recognized historical figure or period and a titular artifact (according to one source, often a document...leading to so many names for these things that are more-obscure names for "thing with writing on it.")

Not that the latter is unknown in the actual historical world. We've learned so much from the Narmer Pallet for instance. And pseudo-archaeology caught on as well, which is why we have things like The Grave Creek Stone.

The first was really obvious. The Enceladus Calyx (which for most of the book is just one piece, which ended up getting called The Athena Sherd). And I could with a stretch identify the London book with the first Roman coin (I think it was a dupondius). And the Japan book....err, I can't put Kusanagi on the cover, because that's not just a reveal, it's a fake reveal (it turns out to be the Mirror of Amaterasu. Which, come to think, would make a cool title itself). With a stretch, though, I can stick a stone fox...that is to say, a kitsune such as adorn the Inari shrine in Kyoto...and that hits a lot of the thematic beats about Japanese mythology and shape-changers.

And we hit Paris. Okay, okay, we can do Paris with le Stryge. That's what I put as the scene divider anyhow. And it is a known symbol of Paris and strongly associated with Notre-Dame de Paris...but it also has damn-all to do with the belle époque.

Which leaves New Mexico. That would be, what? A picture of a nuclear warhead?

The latest inspiration to strike was architecture. I've got a revised cover concept for the first book which is just the Acropolis detached and drifting as a background element. I don't really like it as an approach, but say I push the travel aspect with the covers and identify the location. 

Emblematic architecture fails quickly. Plus, who wants to read a series of books about a bunch of old and increasingly obscure buildings? Athens -- Acropolis (or to be specific, the Parthenon). Paris...err, Eifel Tower is too on-the-nose. Notre-Dame and Sacre-Couer are a little too "every European city" for people not really, really familiar with the specific buildings.

This goes double for using the Palace of Westminster and the Elizabeth Tower. Okay, maybe Tower Bridge. Although I could see the London Eye...downside is Penny doesn't visit any of these places, and I can't exactly put the London Underground on the cover. I could put the Battersea Power Plant but then readers would think the book was about Pink Floyd.

I had to let seasons go early. Paris is Spring (it is literally April in Paris). Japan is the Christmas Season, but more thematically, the crux takes place in the snowy landscapes of Mount Haku. But there's only four seasons, so even if I go with London being rainy (because that's the stereotype) and New Mexico being sunny, I run out of distinct weather patterns before I run out of book ideas.

Plus, I'm kicking around at least one idea that takes place mostly indoors in a space museum. So what's the weather there -- hard vacuum?

Abstracting the idea of "visual motif associated with the setting" could do a torii gate for Japan, a desert with the sacred red sun (stolen from the Zia) of the New Mexico flag standing in for the sun. And, and...I really can't think of anything so direct for the other ones (and I don't even like those two). London during the Blitz, the typical visual of the barrage balloons...but that makes it look like a Historical. And the only Greek iconography everyone would recognize is a Corinthian Helmet, and, well, fuck the Spartans.

See how all these organizing principles end up having at least one glaring exception?

Anyhow...I have no ideas for the cover for the next book. And I'm already talking to the cover people to go order me a new cover.