The Art of Forgetting

I've a light design due by the end of the month and I barely remember the steps. I'm hoping that as I start attending rehearsals and so forth it will come back to me.

Also feeling stuck in plotting on two different books. Familiar feeling, though. The second worst part of planning a book (the worst being having made those decisions, then realizing half-way through that they don't quite work, and having to re-plot in the middle of the book. That kept me up for over a month on The Early Fox).

The next Athena Fox book, A Fox's Sleep, is set in a mining town in Colorado. But right now, what it really wants to do is be another dual-time narrative, with the modern-day including Penny crossing paths with local law enforcement, Jim Rockford style (small town law enforcement -- a subject I know so very, very little about). And the other being the experiences of a boy who either works in or adjacent to a coal mine around the (rather long) period of strikes and subsequent violence.

That's a ton of research and that's not something I want right now. For the book, the smartest thing to do is sit down with another half-dozen books like the one I just finished (Death in the Pit: The Ludlow Massacre and the Birth of American Labor Rights), and not even think about plotting until that is done. But I really want to charge into writing itself.

For the space opera, first-book-in-a-series All Systems Blue, I still haven't nailed down how character and theme work together. What I want is a Horatio-esque; not just the career progression of a young officer against the background of military action (In Space!!) but a character that carries the book(s). Someone with an approach that is distinctive enough that when the big moment comes, the reader will nod and say, "Yup, that's our gal."

In the interest of getting it written this decade, I am sticking with the framework of getting more-or-less marooned on a mining world after an alien attack, having her "in a cave with a box of scraps" moment but only so far in that her cobbled-together hardware eventually gets her back to her ship. And then she gets dumped on "Legations" world, a place with a big city full of different aliens with trading outposts and embassies and all that who are about to get attacked by those same guys from the beginning...

Oh, and I've been working on new blurbs (aka, Amazon descriptions) for all five of the Athena Fox stories. And cover art continues. I'm happy enough with The Early Fox (a minimalist regional-mystery flavor New Mexico landscape and your basic sans-serif -- which I kerned myself, out of brute force and ignorance, not any particular training or skill).

I am not doing so well with new covers for #1 through #4. The one thing I'm sure of is I want to make them look current, and like mysteries with adventure/thriller elements. I'm giving up on the retro-pulp/Republic Serial stuff, or trying to push the Romancing the Stone role/reality confusion. Maybe there is such a market, maybe the right approach might reach them, but even then the stock photo model stuff isn't looking right in today's market.

There may be a reason I feel like the biggest thing I've accomplished over the past week or so is binge-watching multiple seasons of the Rodney McCay Show... aka Stargate:Atlantis

A reach

Last week, was watching the new season of Reacher, and old episodes of Supernatural, and both shows went to Philadelphia.

Well, I was in the City of Cheesesteak Love this weekend. Drank at McGillis, ran up the Rocky Steps. Thinking of setting a story there.

I sure as heck couldn’t do worse than those two. Sure, I get Vancouver Doubling, but this is a case where just throwing in an establishing shot of the William Penn statue atop City Hall doesn’t do it.

Edit: Episode 5, they finally have some scenes that look like they were filmed in Philly. And, okay, it messes up the essay, but Reacher actually did pretty well in some sequences in the opening episode, and elsewhere, that were definitely that city.

Okay, I was mostly in Central City; stayed in Rittenhouse and the job was just up from the Delaware waterfront. And there are generic glass blocks in those districts, and newer buildings.

But like Paris, or the City of London (aka, the part with the old Chris Wren streets), it is a town with a very specific stamp of architectural style. Especially when you add the more creative skyscrapers (the older ones, especially, have enough Art Deco and bas reliefs to be at home in Gotham City), you know at a glance what town you are in. No mistaking it for New York or Chicago or Boston.

Architecture is only part. The one thing you don’t seem to do is hear that Philly accent (the best sample I found was a recording on the crosswalk button). They do love that cheesesteak though.

(Also breaking the mold, Chicago locals aren’t fond of “Chi-town,“ and you had better not refer to San Francisco as "Frisco," but the vocals in Philadelphia are fine with “Philly.")

They are friendly, with their own multiculturalism. More permeable than San Francisco (which tends to lock into neighborhoods like a really small patchwork quilt), less comfortable than Oakland (the tensions are easier to find).

And maybe it is just the current fad, but their approach to history has a distinct shading. Okay, I haven’t been back to Beantown in a while but my memory is the only thing there’s more of than Dunkin’ Donuts are the “Paul Revere once had breakfast here” plaques. Same with the DC area. 

In Philly, there’s context. I’m surprised a certain politician hasn’t sent his goons over to demand a few plaques torn down. They’d be at it a while, though. There are quite old and established monuments right in the tourist part of town that celebrate not the flag-toting boosterism of the American Revolution but the hard (and constant) job of creating and upholding democracy.

The context was always there. On the Olympia, displays on the naval victories of the Philippines campaign did not shy from the atrocities committed, or the profits made by United Fruit. This isn’t just inside museums, either. It’s all over the streets.

Oh, and yeah. I was viewing all these exhibits on the tangled weave of human rights, corporate profits, and the struggles of a young nation to define itself and how things were supposed to work, and my light reading for the trip was a book on the Ludlow Massacre.

So I’m taking notes on, I guess you could call it three books now. 

Spending what felt like the larger part of the trip enmeshed in the travel technology gave me some thoughts for Blue. An exhibit on the post revolutionary war China trade at the Independence Seaport Museum gave me some fun thoughts about trade activity on the frontier. And there were some possible parallels, even, with the naval battles against Barbary pirates. 

Keri Sinclair is still up in a J-tube trying to fix a circuit, and her world is changing by the hour. It is what is supposed to be happening at this point in writing the book, but I am getting real impatient to start cranking out chapters.

When she gets out of that tube, she's got a visit to still-unnamed-station in her future. This is at least a big transship station. Might be shipyards and stuff too. Not sure yet. The one thing I'm pretty sure of is Oberon is visible from there. Whether Oberon is visible from anywhere else, I don't know yet. Strange stars are... strange. That scene is growing bigger and bigger. A failure of her skills as an officer. More about the relationship between her and the ranking enlisted in the power room. Probably a brawl. Probably drinking, too. 

Less progress on the other two. I've named the coalfield wars adventure A Fox's Sleep. That part of it (that Penny is trying to keep a low profile) is likely to be the least of it. I've sort of settled on a data center, I want to explore the way that the more obvious social control of the company store et al were polished up by Rockefeller and his cronies until they are subtler (and often harder to fight). 

And archaeologically, it is about protecting a site and applying for it to be on the Registry. What I want is for a boy that died during one contested event to be a sort of town mascot, and for his story to be used by two sides of a political fight. They don't want fresh archaeology done because they have gotten good at spinning it the way it is.

Oh, and the Bell Witch. Maybe.

Thing is, the specifics of the Ludlow Massacre are so fascinating. I don't want to change anything about it. I binge-read several Lincoln Child/Douglas Preston books recently as well (hey, they are mystery-thrillers with a strong regional flavor. Exactly the market I'm aiming for now). One featured the Roswell incident and stayed within the (updated) facts -- such as Project Mogul. Another left New Mexico for a Donner Party story that, again, stayed pretty close to the truth.

But then there was one with a party of hikers in New Mexico going mad and running out of their tents near-naked into the snow and I am ashamed I got a full chapter in before realizing this was the Dyatlov Pass incident. Okay, the writers did manage to tie it to a couple of fun bits of New Mexico history in the end, but there are more and more places where they chose to change the facts to make a better story.

And it still bugs me. I've had to do it, I'll do it again, but it bugs me.

It's like putting the Chicago "El" in a story set in Philadelphia.