The Power of Hate

I am still working on the same scene from Sunday. Damn work-life balance. Time to think about retiring.

Okay; I did go back and revise the Atlas scene to try and focus the emotional arc and make more of a coherent mini-crisis out of it. And expanded and revised the Apocalypse Log.

And hit a plot question in the scene I'm on; I couldn't figure out why this Apache writer of westerns she meets with in Cloudcroft wouldn't mention the guy who is gonna turn out to be the murderer. That's a bigger clue than I wanted, but it ain't like the whole conversation can't just be about his hat.

I'm not good about writing red herrings.

Really, I never set out to write mysteries. Turns out it is baked in to the basic premise. I wanted to do adventure (archaeological adventure but anyhow) but with real history and real archaeology. And mostly an urban setting, meaning this is a lot less human-against-nature and more human-against-human.

Being realistic about history and science bled into being realistic about how the world works, and how the world works is; if you have bad guys running around with gun in hand a hell of a lot of cops show up. Have a murder or some other big crime, and some very careful police work and forensics gets into the picture. And even if they don't have time to solve it properly (or at all), that sort of attention does a really good job of shutting out the amateur.

So the best crimes are those where not only does nobody know who dunnit, they don't even know what was done, or even if anything was done. And that means neither does my protagonist. Instead of being a "The Zebra Killer has struck for the thirteenth time -- we need to find him and stop him!" it is more the Isaac Asimov quote about the usual sound of scientific discovery; not "Aha!" but "That's odd..."

Which plays hob with having a driving plot, ticking time bomb, or for that matter having villains nice and visible and easy to hate.

I'd be failing there anyhow. Not only have I consistently failed in creating villains to properly dislike, I also have been failing in having people dislike my protagonist. I mean, that is her method. She talks people around, gets them to like her, finds ways that cooperation is more effective. She's a regular Power of Love shoujo heroine.

Making me want to work with the Blue universe. Because there I could have a protagonist who isn't being supported, who is actively being blocked, even, both by actual bad guys and by people who are technically on their side of the great game.