Knits up the raveled sleeve of care

Finally got some sleep. I was feeling physically ill from want of sleep but today, finally, there's no work, no contractor coming in to work on the apartment, no noisy party outside, and I could finally sleep in.

I am less than inspired on the book. Heck, I got mildly inspired by the thought of pulling an edit on the trunk novel (Shirato) and getting that out there. (That thought came out of house cleaning...in a roundabout way.)

Also new thoughts on Japan. What I wanted to do with it is too far along certain paths in the overall character arc. So I'm reconsidering which book in the series to do next. The "Paris" book, if I could figure out how to do it in a way that doesn't amplify my current faults. Or something new. I want to get her to Paris before Notre Dame burns but I have a few winter months to play. Boston maybe. Good thing the Big Dig is dug already...

(Yeah, there it is again. The "where do you get your ideas." Writing archaeology adventures, no week goes by without reading about something that would be cool to write about.)

(That said, I could use an idea that would work well in winter. I should go through my list of Fox-related titles and through the sticky elements of the character arcs. All I have at moment is I'd like an adventure that gets her some additional notoriety -- that sets up Japan better -- and that gives her a chance to get some more acting in and otherwise work on her poise before she has to pull off the Great Deception necessary for the Japan book. And also one with no romance at all. And it would be nice to get into some solid history. Not that London during the War isn't, but how about something from an era where there aren't living witnesses?)

(I'd like to send her mountain climbing some time, but winter and mountains is suicide. So is going to check out the Duga radar. Although I would like something outdoors. Central America? All the adventure archaeologists head that way eventually...  I guess I should hit up my travel experiences too but I'm running out of places I've been.)

***

I think the scene I'm stalled on now is another "the perfect is enemy of the good" problem. I had this idea of the big heart-to-heart between Penny and Graham being where she finally explained what happened in Athens, they read Linnet's diary where she talks about her intentions to join up, and Graham cautions her on the pitfalls of the path of heroism. More-or-less. It's complicated.

But the diary isn't lining up. Linnet's relationship with Wentworth needed another chapter to develop, and unless I can kick the discovery back a day the visit by Orde Wingate has to wait for next entry. And the Athens stuff -- at this point it feel better for Penny to indulge in a "how did I end up here?" when she's in the flooding Zero Room under Nine Elms.

Oops. Was that a spoiler?

Sigh. I had dreams of this great scene that would bring everything together. I haven't learned how to write that well yet, though. So the delay in getting back to work on the current scene is basically me letting go of the what could have been and sitting down to write the what must be.

In fact I think I'm coming all the way around until the discussion is in terse exchanges in the middle of something else. Quite possibly running after the suspect.

My poor Krell

Two steps forwards, one step back.

I figured out the basics of how the Goldeneye N64 scene should work. And decided the way I'd resolved the Eiger Sanction bit didn't.

Fortunately I'm getting better and better at changing the whole thrust of a scene while keeping bulk of the work. Basically, I'm getting faster at knocking out raw prose and I'm not in such a love of my words I feel I have to keep the original draft. So I can throw out an entire dialog exchange and, using what I learned in writing the previous one, whip out a completely new one in almost no time.

I hate to agree with the "rough draft at any cost" crowd, but having something on paper, anything at all, does make it easier to work out the wrinkles.

So, yeah, I've got skullduggery in the control room. And Control Room A is pretty wild:

That's the 1930's one; construction started n 1927, they started generating power in 1934 and tidied up until 1935. They spent money lavishly on this side; it was all designed to let important visitors stroll around admiring the "Temple of Power" (yes, they called it that).

And I was so careful to set things up so my characters infiltrate through to Station A. But even though they weren't able to finish Station B until after the war, spent a lot less money, and had to "make do" with stainless steel. this is what they ended up with for Control Room B:

And that's the one that looks like a set from Forbidden Planet. Also easier to describe, and could make for more convenient blocking (that is, arranging the not-really-a-fight scene.)

Well, I think I've already bollixed up enough of my description. I'm using the excuse that the building was changing almost daily once the reconstruction started, and I'm selectively drawing elements across a span of a couple of years, anyhow. But that doesn't excuse that I am really not sure what the turbine hall looked like. For all the time people have been writing about this place, getting complete descriptions is tough.

Well, I'm also thinking of going wild with The White Room. Somewhere, if you read the right trade magazines or knew the architects, you could get the correct story on the mock-up of a luxury suite that was constructed some time between 2008 and 2012. As of 2016, it was apparently one of those rumored grail-like objects among the roof and tunnel crowd. And almost certainly less spectacular in reality than it is in the stories.

Well, I'm thinking of doing something a lot wackier. A modern Art Deco, probably, although Spaceship Cabin is mildly attractive, especially with a Diesel Punk flavor. Thing is, it all depends on how the Control Room scene arc works out. It may be that the chapter will end there instead and we'll never see the White Room. White or not.

(There's a running gag in the Nine Elms Station dig about the Green tiles which are mostly white. You take your fun where you can find it.)

***

And I'm already wiped out after recovering from sick and pulling a full day at work in the heat. I'm glad tomorrow is a half day.

Rapping crab

Well I dunno. I went to work, didn't feel good, and even though I stayed until 2:00 took myself off the clock for the day. And called in sick today. Probably not the virus. Feels familiar. Sometimes my gas line just gets some water in it and experience says the best thing to do is rest and wait for it to go away.

***

Moved my Animals and did some other minor edits but most of yesterday was doing a cover-to-current-point re-read of the whole text. This time, the politics stood out and some of the history was repetitive. It's a timing thing. I wanted to have the diary-writer give her W.W.II experiences but I wasn't able to set it up so that's the primary account.

This morning's task is to work out the mechanics for the abseil scene.

Here's the setup. The infiltrators are abseiling down into Battersea Power Station. Fawkes is showing off, makes a stupid mistake, and Penny has to put her own life at risk to save him.

My constraints, then, is I have to describe this so it sells the beats to the reader; that Penny knows what she is doing and Fawkes doesn't and the only choice open to her is a risky stunt. It would kill the scene if the reader has constructed it differently enough in their mind that they are yelling, "Just grab the rope, you idiot!"

It has to be concise, both for flow and to avoid the conservation of detail trap (aka the Chekhov's Gun problem). And for extra points; it should adhere to standard practice if any part of it reaches the standard of reproducibility (don't tell the kids how to make explosives at home), and it shouldn't require bad-naming manufacturers or products.

I was playing with having him set up for an Australian, but that just adds too much time and detail to the moment (even though it simplifies the rescue tremendously). Same goes for Dülfersitz technique.

I was tempted to use a gri-gri. A backwards gri-gri is an easy-to-make real world mistake, and they occupy that perfect place where they are suspiciously new and high-tech and novice climbers very much are attracted to it's auto-lock and ease of use and, as a result, put themselves and others at risk through not understanding it properly.

But that's too much explanation, and it puts too much emphasis on the particular tool and manufacturer thereof.

So I'm still flirting with a double-carabiner setup, wrapped incorrectly. The big problem with this is that the rope is still there and that confuses a lot of the rescue. (We call it rapping/rappelling here and shorten carabiner to 'biner. Europe prefers abseilling and shortens it to a crab.)

The best I've come up with so far is the basic tubular belay device (I'd call it a Reverso to make the text flow more smoothly but, again, Petzl.)

And this is where I feel my kind of detail is the right choice. Because this isn't a Wikipedia vomit. Sure, you probably could construct the mechanics of this with enough time reading up and watching videos. That's more or less how I learned. Except that I've actually done it. I've done standard, Australian, I've even used a gri-gri. And I've gotten it wrong. Nearly hurt myself bad at least once (used a belay device on a line that was too thin for it to grip properly and nearly burned my hand as well as pancaking).

Here's the trick, and I hope I can describe it with economy in the actual scene. The typical tubular belay device (sigh) has a wire loop that keeps it from sliding up the bight and also makes it easier to carry around. When you rig for belay (or abseil) you form a bend or bight in the rope and shove it into the device. Then you take a crab and clip it through the loop of rope and the wire loop as well.

I've done it a dozen times. It is always so obvious I've never gotten in even the slightest danger over it. You clip the wire loop (which is kind of in the way, especially if you are fumbling at this with gloves on) ...and miss the rope.

The clean way to do it is to unclip everything, attach the belay device to the rope, then bring the crab back to your harness and clip it to the belay loop. Then of course you do a buddy check, but Fawkes' arrogance in omitting that is easy to describe.

The lazy way, especially if you already have the thing clipped on for easy storage, is to pull the rope to you, shove the loop in and feel for it with your fingers so you open the crab and close it again without losing the wire loop. Spin the lock closed on the crab and you are done.

Now I just have to write the scene.

***

That scene is done and I count a thousand words of new material but yesterday was mostly editing to that knocks the average down to five hundred. Unless I can figure out the NEXT fun sequence. Penny knows that one of the guys on this infiltration shot at her. What I want to do is having her sneak around the turbine hall or something trying to get behind him without giving him a chance to get the drop on her...and without being sure which guy it is!

Well, the turbine hall is gutted. The electrical rooms are still there and I might be able to plausibly do some sneaking. I suspect it will come out less exciting in print than it was in my imagination. That's what happened to the Highgate sequence.

Man, there's still a lot to go. The sword fight may take some figuring. And then the solo hack into the tunnel is going to be a few pages.

Not many people can pull off a decorative vegetable

It was probably a mistake to read so many things from UK authors while I was working on this novel.

Well, it isn't like I read most of what was on my want list. I just turned down a diary by a woman who worked at a lathe building parts for airplanes. During the war, that is. And there's another one which is mostly about the East End but still (from the sample chapters at least) all sorts of amazing things about being urban working poor during the war.

(And no, I didn't finish either of my archaeology books, either. Although I did read cover to cover a book about CRM planning. It wasn't actually much of a help but it was cheap.)

UK writers love being obscure. I was just reading a comment on Cockney Rhyming Slang that explained how the greatest art was coming up with one the listener had to strain to get. There's no street cred in using the slang everybody knows already.

And, well, using Ben Aaronovitch's books as an example isn't completely fair. He is writing for a post-Google audience. I think he completely expects you to notice when he is making a pop culture reference and, if you don't know it, type it into a search engine then and there. (Especially for ebooks as you can do that within Kindle Reader).

Example; when he's mentioned that some of the "Falcon-Aware" (as in, they know that magic exists) street cops have started joking about putting garlic buds in their lapels, "Seawoll suggested celery but I was the only one who got it."

So he's told you right off that celery in the lapel is a pop-culture reference and it is an obscure one, too. Oh and Ben used to write for Doctor Who.

***

I think I mentioned somewhere else that one of the things going on in these books is learning language and having fun with language. So Penny is picking up various sorts of UK usage and slang. But whereas the first book was largely blow-by-blow, covering every waking instant, this one crosses several weeks and there is quite a lot of "three days later..." in it.

So there's an entire scene where someone explains what "pants" means in British English. But within a scene or two either way Penny is referring to a cell phone as a "mobile" in the narration.

I'm really everywhere with the narration, anyhow. She's mostly using the American terminology and I've gone out of my way to assert it in a couple of places -- she describes Graham's place as a row house with entrances on the first floor, for instance. But various bits of correct (aka UK usage) language sneak in over time and most of them aren't explained to the reader except in context.

***

I have a scrap of graph paper where I jotted down the numbers from a couple of podcasters who believe in more structured plotting. It isn't quite Save the Cat level, but it is very much, "The first plot point must occur at 22% of the length of the book..."

Well, a quick stroll through the page counts and I'm coming within a few percent so far. And that's without having nailed down things with a heavily structured outline. Just instinct for how long to run a chapter and when something needed to happen. That's good to find.

***

Took a day and a half off work. Was so tired I ordered dinner so I'd have to stay awake (and hopefully get some writing done) while I waiter while I waited for it to arrive. Well, delivery was quick. The food arrived in under an hour and I was in bed in another. Slept twelve hours, and still was dragging today.

But I also got some four hundred words done that night, and another four hundred in the morning. Perhaps I've finally hit the place where it will start to go quickly.

Of course I'm plowing through another crazy conversation right now. The outline is, "Things become increasingly uncomfortable between Graham and Penny." (There's a blow-up scheduled in another couple of chapters). So subtext happening during a conversation. And what's the conversation? Why, about how the war changed society. Yeah, there's a few things there I have to look up as I go.

***

Stayed late today to have some peace and quite to practice brass. The trombone is now...functional. I can more-or-less get through a tune on it. I'd like to work the higher, sweeter register more but, really, I picked it up for the low end and all in all I like the trumpet better. The trombone lip is just too big and blubbery and the slide isn't as satisfying as tapping those trumpet valves.

So I pulled out the trumpet and my lip is still mostly there. Blew the cleanest, nicest-sounding (aka bright, sweet, brassy tone) "Slag Morning" (aka Pazu's trumpet tune from Laputa). But I've just barely got the C above the staff. I have lost a little lip in the reduced practice hours.

Oh and yes "Masterpiece Theatre" is next in my practice rotation and the damn thing starts on the second C. With a trill that's either on the top of the staff or just above it.

Plus I built a helmet. But that's another post.

Blitz Spirit

I've gotten through the biggest of the "Diary" scenes. There's more to explore, but I've at this point said all I'm going to say in this book about the Blitz experience and particularly sheltering in the Underground.

I've been archive-binging at the History Girls blog, and they have some wonderful stuff on W.W.I -- particularly in late 2018.

Yeah. Because rotten historian I am, I set out to write a book set in London in 2018 but exploring secrets of the Blitz, and it wasn't until I'd worked out the main plot I realized that the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day falls right in the middle of the story (the first weekend of the three-week span of Penny's adventures, in fact).

Well, it does reach out; she gets to take part in some W.W.I reenactment activities at the Imperial War Museum London, and she watches one of the candle lighting ceremonies they were holding at the Tower of London over that week. And the Captain Wentworth who appears in the W.W.II diary discovered in the Nine Elms shelter is a veteran of the Great War (as well as several other less savory campaigns in the interwar years).

Once again, I'm at a place where I am depressed about or afraid of writing for at least as many hours as I actually write.

(And, yeah, I finished the Steve talk and the Who's on Pants routine. And two days later, cut the first completely -- it isn't in character, it puts the focus places I don't want it, and it slows the narrative to be where it is. And edited the second and am thinking about cutting it, too.)

Yeah, and the scene this was all supposed to lead up to, I've already decided won't work in the original form.

***

So I took the day off to write and to do some errands. Around ten, took a walk around the block, picked up groceries...suddenly felt tired, lay down, half-slept until six feeling terrible the entire time. This isn't right. I am spending far too much of those valuable waking hours struggling to concentrate. And I don't have a solution.

This chapter is pants

I mean that's practically the theme. I hope it actually comes out better than that.

It is another struggle. I'm looking forward to the simplicity of some action sequences. I made up a mix tape of the stuff I was usually listening to during the first book. After messing around with a couple alternatives to iTunes I found that the old stalwart, VLC, does a bang-up job in doing shuffle play from a designated folder. Or CD, if it comes to that.

But it doesn't help when I have a thinky scene to work through. The "pants" scene at the center of the chapter I'm working on is when the tension of the shared living arrangement between Graham and Penny comes to a boil. But I realized -- again, late in the day, and why I don't believe in nailing down too much in the outline -- that this is set up by what turns out to be the final scene in the Penny-and-Tony relationship arc.

Which is yet one more conversation of people being clever and snarky. This is, after all, the chapter that will also include the "Hercules Hedgehog" conversation that's been in my notes since the first week.

But before I can get there, I have to do a Penny and Steve conversation and this one is extra annoying. I still haven't worked out Steve yet. I'm pretty much going to have to write through the climax when he finally does whatever it is he will do, and then work backwards from that point, adjusting previous scenes to make his behavior fit.

And that's where I am this morning. Fighting a fatigue that even Peet's coffee and my brand-new electric kettle (very British) can't cure, being depressed about how many more months this is going to take and how few copies the previous one sold (I'm counting on the power of a series to finally turn the numbers to green ink...but that's two or three books away).

Basically, this is the conversation where Steve says, "What's a pretty girl like you doing in a job like this?" Only, you know, not quite as crassly. And that's not even the worst part. The worst part is how she's going to reply.

Maybe I will try the music. It's gotta be better than avoiding it entirely and surfing Quora and updating my blog...

Baaaaaalzac

This would be a perfect opportunity to write a novel. Social distancing for three weeks; stuck in the house with food and a computer and time.

And I feel pretty healthy. Weevils got into my grain supply and I had to throw some out. Something in a sealed bag seems to have gone a bit off, though. Painful, sweaty cramps until it worked its way through and out. But the next day I walked down to the shop, practiced trombone, picked up my trumpet to carry home, and purchased a battery charger to try to get my car running again.

Anyhow.

Writing a book in which the central theme is being under siege, a conflation of memories of huddling in underground shelters during the Blitz, personality conflicts and my protagonist's inner struggles, and the rising tide of the same North Sea that swallowed Doggerland. It seems a perfect match.

As of this moment I have 36,000 words of notes -- 140 pages if you want to count it that way (page count is a very poor way of estimation because the value of "page" is application-dependent).

And another 7,000 words of collated research, mostly on the first couple of settings.

For all of all that, I have 800 words of first draft of the prologue scene -- a draft which doesn't work and will need to be re-written practically from scratch.

***

While we're on the numbers game, it turns out I red-lined almost 2,000 words in the current version of The Fox Knows Many Things. The Fox will know a great many fewer things by the times I'm done editing. The cuts are relatively easy. I'd actually like to expand a little on Ancient Greek myth and literature, though. At least explain better the references I'm still using so the reader who hasn't been soaking in the subject will be able to understand.

***

I have this impression that if I could just start, this one might go fast. I suspect that's a dream. I know I will be mostly doing research-as-I-go. Like, I have a couple of cute things I want to do at the Imperial War Museum. One of them I dreamed up last night will take, err, a bit of research to do right.

Sigh. By the end of this, it is going to look like I am a total World War II buff and couldn't keep myself from showing off everything I knew by cramming it in the story. No, I really don't. I'm going to have to research the hell out of most of this. And after I do, I'll leave most of what I learn...out.

Blog of the Plague...oh, I did that one already

When Daniel Defoe wrote his book, he had letters and diaries from the period to draw upon -- most certainly Pepys, possibly Johnson, and apparently largely from the journal of his own uncle, Henry Defoe. London was indeed suffering under a recurrence of the bubonic plague as he wrote, but the Great Plague had struck when he was but five years old.

It occurs to me that this will be one of the best documented pandemics of history. At least in the Western World. Because Shelter-in-Place has arrived on top of a mature Internet. In a weird acting-out of the scenario described in E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops we are all huddled alone with only our computers for company.

The Blitz hit London at a sort of height of diary-making and letter-writing. So the street experience of that was exceptionally well documented, and unusually, letters and diaries had been through the previous decades (and no doubt the previous war) been filtering down from the elite -- the "lettered" classes -- to all walks of life. It was not unusual for the lightly-educated to be prolific writers.

We are no longer exactly a letter culture. Texting and Twitter and the like have moved us to a fast, pseudo-conversational intercourse far from the long empathic reads of books and diaries and multi-page letters. That culture still exists, but it is circled back to being a minority; authors, reviewers, scientific papers, stalwarts like the Times -- I am thinking in particularly of the New York Times Review of Books, many of which seem longer than the books themselves.

And, yes, the novelists. Who are going uneasily through a changed landscape themselves, as the digital world is both wider and more fragmented, more open yet less lucrative.

But I digress.

***

My company is closed for at least the next two weeks. The future looks rough for it; we build high-end audio equipment and a big part of our client base is the musicians and shows who are currently suffering badly. So there's no assurance we'll get back to normal after this is over.

I have savings to last out the month and probably more. I have salable skills for the on-line economy, if that turns out to be the best thing going. So many of us were living close to the margin already, and the arts are always like that.

I spend decades doing gig work. The conundrum there is that you either have time, or money. Either you are working and have no free time, or you aren't working and have no money. Well, this one is different. I'm not working, I have a little money, but nothing is open. My town's been shut down since Monday night.

The line is still out the door at the local grocery store. I have food in the house for at least a week, but past, well, today that is with more and more creative improvising. As I look at the odds-and-ends I'll be increasingly faced with -- a bag of walnuts, some buckwheat flour, three small jars of saké -- I am oddly reminded of cooking in Skyrim, where after you are down to mostly cabbages you find out you can combine green apple, cabbage, and salt pile to make "Cabbage-Apple Stew."

Yeah. I was a bit zonked anyhow, so I cocooned in place -- turned out the lights and played Skyrim all day. I needed the vacation anyhow.  Played the Special Edition because that one has the three official DLC included, even though the mods available through the in-game handler are not as good as the ones I have loaded on regular Skyrim.

And oddly enough, Skyrim gave me a bit of an insight to the next novel. I'm still not liking it. I'm not liking the first. I'm not liking the choices I finally made, although I do not know if there was another set of choices I might have discovered.

Really, when you get right down to it, a story is a complicated and subtle enough beast that you can't sit back and logically work out all the pieces before starting. The only way to learn what is going to work, much of the time, is by trying it.

Well, there are choices I can still un-make. Despite there being print copies out there now (a surprisingly number of my friends and family don't read digitally). I'll see where plotting takes me in Book Three, assuming I am still on for it after the London book.

Metaxas

Finished first draft of the crazy scene with a bunch of Athenian art students arguing about politics and identity. That was fun. But it has made me understand better why the detail I've been putting in is a problem.

Basically, I've been writing at the edge of what I understand. So that's bad because you should always know more than you put in. The reason for this buffer is so you have control. So you can nuance and be selective. If all you know is on the page, that margin is gone.

And here's the flip side of that. That means I'm writing for the reader who can see where I've fallen flat. If there is a reader who can absorb everything I've put in, it is unlikely that reader is exactly as informed as I am. Instead they are going to know some aspects more deeply than I. So what they are going to experience is strange omissions, skewed focus, and outright mistakes.

And I am doing no favors for the reader who is less informed, either. If they try to understand everything I have put down, the will discover the text is too thin at the edges. The detail is lacking, the explanations aren't as good as they could be. Because of course they've found the place where I, too, am struggling.

So it is better if the text is pitched for a simpler approach. For a more focused view of topics that I feel comfortable enough in to explore alternate ways of talking about them until I have found what is most powerful and most clear.

Having subjects that are under my full control means I can treat them in essay fashion, introducing the topic, developing it, providing example and counter-example, then recapping.

What I am writing right now is history-based story. The central plot engine is similar to that of a mystery; there are questions which are slowly answered. So, sure, I can throw in side quests and red herrings, from Metaxas to Metaxa, but in the end the primary focus and support will be on the facts of the case. Presented in full, explored, revisited.

+ + +

Oh right, health. Too early to say anything. I'll have more news Thursday.

Sanguinary

I'm moving ahead again on the novel. The one thing that has definitely gotten faster is the cycle between thinking it is shit and thinking it makes a decent read.

I came this close to buying a reference book on Greek ceramic art but wrote the scene without it. This is the museum chapter I've been intending since basically page one. One more section to go but I had to pause to think about Schliemann.

Well, not so much what I know about Schliemann. Although I refreshed and I had forgotten some interesting tidbits. Such as we possibly have him to blame for the current symbolism of the swastika. No, the question I'm on right now is whether my protagonist knows the full story of Schliemann or whether this is a good place to give her a little lecture on how Indiana Jones is a bad model for archaeology.

On the way bumped into another wonderfully Croftian setting. A "labyrinth" (that was the history show, not me) network of caves under Crete, parts of it used by the Germans to store munitions, closed up until a few years ago...and when they opened it, first thing they saw is the Germans didn't take all their bombs with them. There's some archaeology there too but this particular show is a bit lugubrious and they haven't gotten to that yet.

Oh, and all that got me dropping a few more notes on the adventure with the working title The Aurelius Dupondius.

I have nothing like a plot yet. Just the likely elements; Romans, London, coin collectors, violence. And a sort-of-theme; "Reality ensues." This is the one where pretending always goes wrong. This idea started for me as a running gag; brits always seem so capable in spotting attempts to fake an accent. It even shows up as a gag (multiple times) in Doctor Who, so it is a trait they are aware of themselves. So this is the one in which every attempt to run a bluff or a Chinese Fire Drill fails, every physical stunt ends the way they usually do on YouTube...all the way out to violence having real implications and lingering effects.

But that's probably not the next book. I think it just might be Badgers. That's the name of the work file...in the back of my head is a better working title; Full Metal Werewolf. Because it is basically transhumanist milSF with a horror twist. And the more you think about it, the closer those three really are already.

(Although Full Metal Jackal -- although it doesn't hint the horror genre tropes aspect -- is a very useful thought towards developing the background of "Dave." If you really wanted to gene-tinker soldiers around pack hunters, is wolf really the best template? What about hyenas?)

(And yes, whatever I do is going to be both for relatively sensible reasons and still deconstructed to hell and gone. No vet thinks highly of the super-soldier myth, and anyone who has actually studied military history and tactics is going to be going "why would I want a better Rambo if I could have a soldier that better integrated with an effective combined arms approach?")

Oh, yeah, and something snapped and I was finally able to get out of bed and get some work done. Which included getting to the doctor and I'm on another new drug. I am hopeful but not sanguine. And will be getting a lot more blood drawn either way.

Lost a lot of work hours, though, so money is going to be tight for a while.



"Apocalypse Howl" is also amusing...but makes me think of Alan Ginsberg, not Urban Fantasy.

Location scouting

Wrote a chase scene today. Set it in Venice the way Bullit is set in San Francisco. Sure, I checked maps and street-level pictures and videos to find places where certain specific actions could plausibly happen. But I used them without regard for where they were in relation to each other. I also didn't name anything, so nobody is going to know.

I also gave up on getting the setting of the next chapter completely accurate. Half the point of this book was to use what I already know. So I'm borrowing the ferry I actually rode instead of trying to describe one unseen. I'm changing the names anyhow.

There's a fine line there and I don't know what or where it is. Books name institutions and public figures and commercial products all the time. Characters in books will buy at Sears, drink Coke, vote for Truman. And it gets more specific and more close to home. Parker named specific books by specific (living) authors, and actual businesses in the Boston area.

Well, I'm naming a few actual places as well. I've just made a point to be even-handed, and the smaller the entity (like a single bookstore in Venice) the more neutral-positive I want to be. Lufthansa I'm willing to criticize. A small tratoria I'd as soon just say, "the food was good" and leave it at that.



Last week I got to fly on a short-hop business airline. Private terminal, no TSA, no lines. Shoes stayed on. Different experience and an extremely positive one. Flew to Burbank, which is an experience all in itself. I managed to remain calm while shaking the hand of someone whose shoes probably cost more than I make in a year. What isn't making me calm is that my company is ordering tens of thousands of dollars of material based on MY measurements. No pressure!



And it has nothing to do with the "location" theme of this post, but messing around with the Yamaha Venova seems to have sharpened my trumpet chops. I'm pushing through the scales fast enough the cheap valves on my current trumpet are starting to hold me back. I'm also getting the first two or three pedal tones on a regular basis. Oddly enough the violin hasn't completely left me; I pulled it out and was able to get through a couple of tunes even without the shoulder rest.

My new neighbor really hates it when I practice at home, though. That's something I have no good solution for. Well, it can wait. A lot of things can wait. I'm walking again (after having dropped a battery-powered drill on my foot from high enough to drive the bit through my shoe), and hoping to steadily increase my exercise and decrease my waist.

And I'm past the mid-point on the novel with more and more of the foundation work already done. Blew through a 2,000 word chase scene in one writing session. I already have the bulk of two or three other scenes worked out in my head. The biggest thing I have to worry about going forward is whether I fall so short of my page count I have to add some new element to the mix.

Gue news

So of course it didn't last.

Saturday was also two performances of the kid's show. Under two hours drive out, over three back, making about a ten hour day. Walked into the woods on the way back to collect some sticks for a lyre bow.

Mixed on an unfamiliar board (Behringer X32, not actually that different in concept than the Yamaha LS9 I spent so many years on). The real problem was having no sound check. Not the first time I've had to deal with this, though. I was able to fire up the board long enough to play a sample of the backing track and thus set my rough master level and gain staging.

Took the spare body pack up to the booth and that gave me a ballpark trim and fader setting. So then I roughed in the rest of the mix levels based entirely on dressing room chatter. The first minute of the show was of course a mad scramble as I trimmed up everything to where it actually needed to be but having that ballpark and making sure I'd gain-staged to where the signals would be a useable level (not on the verge of clipping, not at the bottom of the fader travel either), really helps.

Sunday walked around the lake. Had a slight cough but didn't think much of it.

Woke up early on Monday, walked to work, carved out the sound box on my Shetland Gue during break and almost put in a full day. But was starting to really hack and wheeze. Crawled home, threw the HEPA filter on turbo mode, and collapsed on the futon. 

Bronchial cold. Didn't kill my energy so bad, but really took the inspiration out of doing anything when every time I got my blood moving I'd go into a paroxysm of coughing. Of course Tuesday was another performance so I suffered through that then crawled back into bed.

Today, I'm taking off work completely. 

So up he rose to run once more

Finally over the 'flu and in the middle of that excess of vigor that comes sometimes. So did something I've been dreaming of for a while. Literally. I have this recurring dream where I wake up well before dawn and decide to go out for a run.

It went better than I'd feared. My endurance is shit right now. Could only run a block or two before I had to drop to a walk. But after a few rounds of that I caught a glimpse of the "zone." My heart finally answered the engine-room telegraph, the bounce came into my stride, etc. I erred on the side of cautious for this first time out, of course. And I'll have to see how my legs feel two days from now. But I'm aiming to do it again. (Plus now that the rain is over, resume walking to work on alternate days).

Started building a Shetland Gue. Made the mock-up above to check dimensions. This may look crude, but it is capturing bridge placement, scale length, "action" height, string access, foot shape. I built it to be comfortable held between the legs (seated), and close to vertical, with the supporting hand on the near pillar and the bow at right angles to the string. (I've noticed in videos, though, that many players hold it far off vertical and often bow cross-wise to the strings.)

There's an intentional modification to the traditional design on this one; I opened up the access hole to allow fingering up to the first octave (I also spaced the strings to allow placing the hand between the strings...some players do this to finger the drone string in addition to the melody string).

I did more research on tonewoods, including what woods are native to Scotland, but since this is more an experiment than a fancy instrument I went with white pine once more. I'm pushing the capabilities of that wood, though; taking the back and sides down to around 1/4" (the soundboard is once again 3/16" basswood, but I'm going to experiment with a bass brace on it).

Did most of the power tool work yesterday and probably should have glued and clamped the body then, but I felt like smoothing out the chamber a little more first. But then, the horsehair (for strings) doesn't arrive until next Friday so there's plenty of time to finish the rest.

Uncharted Worlds is done. Good enough. Cut the violin part, played with the mixdown. Really, it should have been an octave down. That's a danger of working from a MIDI file. By the time I'd compared with the original recording, my instrumentation was set.

Lessons learned. I'd really like to have another piece recorded by Tuesday but I can't think of anything that's close enough. Terminator is still struggling -- I want to try the Shetland Gue on that one and see if it solves any of the problems I'm having. At least the trumpet has come along to the point where I should be able to do that part of the Hellboy cover cleanly. Latest exercise has been rolling up and down the partials as fast as I can, top to bottom and back again.

But I have two performances today, I might want to go into the shop Sunday and put a couple more hours on the timeclock, and I might be walking to work Monday...

It's here

The outline came to me today. An illustrated book on the Sea Peoples arrived too, but the outline is what I mean.

Not the whole thing. Just the bones of what happens on Crete. Wanotreus is key (might be Wanotrias...I'm unclear yet on the correct masculine endings in Mycenaean Greek.) Oh, and Didalios. I'm still working on his name, too. Actually, might be telling he (like Kessandra) has a Mycenaean name, not a name with (presumed) Minoan forms (as is glimpsed in the Knossos tablets).

Anyhow, I've figured out the basic progression, the one that folds in physical location, evolving goals, evolution of understanding, useful shifts of perspective, etc. The inner and the outer plot as well as the thematic plot that sits over it. And it folds in the historical Palace of Knossos, un-repaired damage and Mycenaean redecoration and all, the Pylos-style workgroups, the Knossos style workgroups, the big festivals alluded to in some tablets, Scribal Hand 103, the vision of the Stone Birds, the Saffron Gatherers....

This means I can stop with generalized research. I can break down into a chapter plan and break out specific research questions. And as I find the answers, instead of trying to tuck them away against further use in a bramble-pile of general research, I can plug that data directly into chapter notes and character notes and setting notes. This just made the heap of research a heck of a lot more manageable.

Oh, and I'm going to redeem Paneb. But I'm getting ahead of myself. One of the big structural questions I still have to answer is if I'm interleaving episodes with the other characters during the Crete sequence. I don't want to do a lot of time jumping if I can help it, and the Deir el Medina stuff is too much fun to try to cram it into an epic flashback. I'm not against resetting the clock once at the top of Book Two but the Crete outline has some very convenient gaps/time skips in it anyhow where it would make sense to cut away from Kes for a while and return months or years later.




Also arrived is a new order for a Holocron or two, some metal-wound strings for my U-Bass, and a new prescription from my surgeon which is currently kicking my ass. So it is going to be a busy time here. Or I'll decide I need a break and play a little Mass Effect...

(Yeah, I'm starting to grasp harmonic analysis and reharmonization. The Hellboy theme I'm trying to re-arrange for U-Bass and trumpet seems to be alternating A minor with A Major...going up to an AM7 chord at the high note. But there's something else in the original recording, after the first statement of the theme...some further harmonic development I'm not quite grasping yet.)

My dog has no nose

When I was on Prednisone my sense of smell returned for a brief time. That was interesting. The world became more real to me. It underlined the way I'd been feeling disconnected for a time, feeling as if I was watching a movie instead of being in a real place.

Post surgery, however, the sense of smell is returning much more slowly. And subtly. Unfortunately my state is on fire again (a condition I'm afraid will be with us every year now). All that soot in the air probably not the best prescription for a healing nose. By Friday I could smell it. By that point, it smelled less of wood smoke and more like a dumpster fire.

So so far it has been bad smells that have made it past the threshold. This weekend, though, I was at a barbecue, and I was so happy to able to smell grilling onions. The literature is unclear whether I will ever get the full sense of smell back but I've finally confirmed I have some. (Another weird effect; the taste of the coffee I've been drinking at work has changed.)

Ah, but there's always something. I got so used to the way my voice sounded with a stuffy nose and ears. Now it isn't trapped inside my head any more. I'm hearing it from outside, and it's weird. Half the time I'm talking I think I'm listening to someone else.

Isn't the psychology of senses fun?

We have reserves

I'm back to walking to work a couple days a week. Today I was conscious of having strength I wasn't using; of having reserves. But I was also conscious of how shallow those reserves were. I feel like I am healthy for the first time in at least a year, but I also feel really out of training.

I was in the Army Airborne and that kind of physical demand gives a young man a ridiculous physical reserve. I kept up a significant percentage of that with weight training and cross country running after I got out. It is an interesting way to be. You are always conscious of having a lot more strength available than you need for activity of the moment.

There were times when I would chose to "drop" an extension ladder, or climb on top of a piece of scenery, or move a piano by myself, but even then, I wasn't peaking out.

It's like working with free weights. When you work a weight machine those clever cams balance the load to what your muscles can provide at the extension of the moment, and all those pivots and slides guide the weight, keeping it just where it needs to be. In free weights, you don't press your ultimate limit. You can't. You have to have that extra bit of strength to balance and support.

Running, even walking with a reserve, means you have strength left to support your ankle and cushion the heel strike and otherwise protect and ease the motion. When you lose that reserve, a walk becomes a process of letting each foot slam down in front of you just before you would topple over. You don't have enough left to deal with an unexpected curb or even a crack in the sidewalk.

The only thing I've done that I was conscious of finding that exact point where my muscles could give no more is in rock climbing. Specifically, in bouldering, which places the crux (the hardest moment of the climb) in a position of prominence. Even doing a gym pitch of less than a hundred feet on top rope you husband your strength and move smart so as to save yourself. On a bouldering problem, there might be only a dozen moves total. So the climb becomes much more about that one place where you either can hold it, or you can't.

So I'll never have what I had when I was still in the Army; that overabundance of strength and endurance that made every walk a dance, that sometimes made moving and working feel like you were on tiptoes in a china shop -- a "World of Cardboard" perspective. But I look forward to having, again, more than the minimum needed to put one foot in front of another. Or to make it through a work day without having to collapse at a desk and take as long as possible to catch up on emails.

Return of the Triads

Finally got the Behringer hooked up (61-key MIDI controller). Some weeks ago built a cute little 1U rack to let me stick the Firewire audio interface below the laptop and both of those over the keyboard. This weekend I dusted, then added music stand and mic stand...and there was still enough room left for the bass amp. And when I got back to work for the first time after surgery I took some break time for a personal project and sewed up a dust cover for the Behringer.

I'm reading up on theory, particularly reharmonization. I'm splitting my attention between a "folk" cover of the main theme from The Terminator and a sassy small-combo cover of the title track from Hellboy. The latter is where the reharm is really going on; I'm fiddling around with a piano part with some jazzed-up chords.

Having great fun staring at the things and going, "Is that the root? Does that make this a perfect fifth? Or am I actually in A minor and that makes this diminished?" I'm rather convinced -- my dad agrees -- that all these fancy chord names are applied after-the-fact. First a musician plays something that sounds good. Later they go back, figure out where their fingers actually landed, and go, "um, Am7flat9 extended, right?"

Of course since they carved up my nose I have to put off shoving air into a trumpet for a few weeks. Been good for violin and chin'cello practice, though. I've almost got the instinct programmed to complete the string cross before I start bowing, but every practice session I have to lean on it again. Still, progress; I can sometimes cross two strings at once without a horrible noise. Next up -- intentional double-stops!

(I'd say eighty percent of my practice time right now is just walking scales in first position, using the fourth finger instead of the open string. Because there's where the problem is; getting clean from the fourth on one string to the first on another, and back again.)

(Also asked for trouble going to arm vibrato. Means I've lost the security of the neck and sometimes when I leap over to another string I get totally lost. Err...basically, in the default grip the violin is nominally pinched lightly between thumb and the side of the index finger. When you do arm vibrato you pivot off the thumb and there's clearance between your hand and the violin. So when you make the jump to arm vibrato, basically, instead of sliding your grip up and down -- like on the neck of a guitar -- your hand dances spider-like above the fingerboard and you just have to try to keep track of where you actually are at any one moment.)



In the wings is a pop cover of the Assassins Creed III music -- soprano sax and maximum schmaltz -- and I have been dreaming of a mashup between I Am the Doctor and the last part of Tubular Bells -- "And introducing....Cloister Bell!"

Is my energy returning? Maybe. Confidence? I suppose. When I think about it, I'm still lousy at playing an instrument, but mostly I don't think about it and just enjoy whatever it is I am doing.

Paging George Berkeley

I'm visually oriented. No big surprise there; humans generally are. What I mean specifically is I'm at home, resting after surgery, and I find it really annoying when I need to use the ice pack because it covers my eyes. I'm awake and alert and thinking about the writing I'm working on and even if I'm listening to a podcast about writing (the Writing Excuses podcast, which I discovered through participant Howard Taylor, the writer and artist of webcomic Schlock Mercenary) I am bored and impatient.

Odd. It is about words, but more, about the concepts those words are intended to capture, but I want and need to see the words on paper. The podcasts are barely enough to divert my attention from cold eyes (literally; the ice pack, again).

Yeah, surgery. I don't remember it. They hooked me up, I sat around for about four hours until they had me walk over to the operating theater holding my bag of Ringer's in one hand, I lay down on the operating table and blinked the sleep out of my eyes in a quiet room with blood dripping out of my nose.

Retrograde surgical amnesia. Surgery might have been painful. I might have panicked going under. I might have complained about the fit of the mask. I will never know; those experiences were edited from me like the gaps in the Watergate tapes. Total lost a little over an hour. As far as I know I had contiguous memory from waking up in recovery but my only checksum is that the timing works.

That is; I had a blood pressure cuff on and I counted three inflation events in the time before my anesthesiologist came over to check up on me. They felt nominally the same elapsed time between each, and I know the machine is typically set to a fifteen minute interval, and the anesthesiologist confirmed it had been about an hour since I was wheeled in. So I may have lost a few bits here and there but I still experienced them as contiguous elapsed time (I have a pretty decent awareness of elapsed time when sleeping, generally able to guess within 25% of how long I've been under).

Yeah, it was kind of a Femi Estimation day. I had stuck my book (aka, iPhone with Kindle) at the bottom of my property bag and I got rather bored sitting there in gown with wires and tubes dripping off me waiting for the doctor to arrive. Started studying the parts of the IV, all the various glands and valves up to the bag of Ringer's Lactate (clearly marked, plus the cabinet it came out of was within my line of sight).

Wasn't until I thought about the problem of keeping air getting into the line that I realized the length of the tube had to be carrying saline and, from the looks of the valves, at sufficient pressure to keep my own blood where it belonged. Then I looked at the drip chamber where the level wasn't increasing and it became obvious there was a positive pressure in the system. Aka it had been dripping into me all this time.

So I estimated the droplet size and rate (2-3 mm in diameter, falling at one per second) and that came out to 500 ml/hour. Figuring the bag had been on for two hours at that point and presumably had started from one liter, that was within a factor of two. Tried to calculate column height versus blood pressure as a cross-check was a no-go, though. But there was another nice cross-check; I needed to piss, human bladder holds about .8 liters, typical urination from a less-full bladder is 1-2 cups and a cup is either 250 or 350 ml (I couldn't remember, but then I was only going for about a factor of 2 accuracy). Hadn't had any water since leaving home that morning so that was basically the Ringer's going through.

On the way back from the bathroom I let the bag in my hand go below my heart level and I got red tint in the line about ten cm up from my arm. Nice cross-check; the positive pressure was indeed column height. Over the next hour I made a mental mark on the bag and was able to verify a flow of around 100 ml over 20 minutes.

Yeah. This is how physics geeks pass the time. You should see me contemplating the competing regimes of convection, conduction and radiation over a cooling cup of coffee.

The operation? Nasal Polpectomy and turbinate reduction. I'm in the second day of recovery and mild inflammation is setting in but I'm basically able to breathe freely through my nose for the first time in at least a year. Too early to tell yet but I have a strong feeling this is going to return a lot of my strength.

Holding Pattern

Sick most of the week. Work a half-day, collapse on the couch, stir long enough to eat a little and sleep ten hours. Not a lot done.

Better now...but still feeling overwhelmed by the creative projects. Even after winnowing out and concentrating down I still have two massive difficult things going on. One is trying to get some music done. The other is writing my first serious historical fiction.

Weird note on that. The last two fanfics were both subtly historical pieces. One was set in 1995, the other in the first decade of the 2000's. The later also involved me in fairly intense research about pre-dynastic Egypt, the Battle of Lepanto, the Siege of Marienburg, the reign of Rudolph II (and his Kunstkammer at Prague castle), and the Manhattan Project.

But I've only completed a novel once (it didn't sell) and it is a hell of a task. Making it historical fiction only makes it that much more insane.

Meanwhile I'm getting conscious again of just how poorly I play my selected instruments. The project currently in Reaper files is stalled because my fingers aren't fast enough for a guitar riff I want and I can't seem to move forward without it. And the other ideas percolating (so very, very many of them) depend on more music theory, more sight-reading. I've done ninety percent of the work towards setting up a keyboard so I can work at the piano again to problem-solve and try out ideas, but that last ten percent is rapidly declining under "Oh, here's a flat surface to put these bills and magazines on."

Last dozen practice sessions on the violin have all been bowing exercises. I picked up some bad habits. Or never learned the good habits. Had to go as far as simply holding the bow still and trying to rock from one string to another without making any noise. I've been dipping the bow, especially when chasing a scale up the neck. I've also been overcompensating when I cross strings.

But the worst is that I was starting the stroke before changing the bow angle. It is a millisecond difference in timing, but I'm finally getting programmed into my muscle memory to start the stroke after the angle change. And that cleans up my sound so very, very much I'm reluctant to do anything else, not practice tunes, not record, not do another video until I've made that instinctive.

That's gonna take another week worth of practice. Oh, yeah. And surgery is three days away.

Illuminated

Still sick, Dracula is looming, and got an emergency call from a lighting designer friend to help a friend of his "do a Broadway lighting effect on a community theater budget." So I've been deep in calculations on LED strips and not at all amused by the way most vendors won't tell you the wattage you are working with.

(LEDs are always prey to this. Vendors for individual LEDs love telling you mcd's -- milli-candela. Which are an area dependent measure thus can only be compared across LEDs with the same view angle. Strips, meanwhile, love to tell you how many LEDs total, to the extent that some don't even bother to tell you how long that particular strip is! And even when you get the data, the numbers don't always add up with what the vendor is claiming.)

And, yeah, was tempted by idea of rolling up my own 6-channel Power MOSFET DMX-512-speaking PWM board. But not this time; the show installs on the 1st and although I could design a board and get the PCBs fabbed on quick turn-around committing that kind of money without a chance to prototype and test is not a good idea.



On the novel, finished the first book on the Hittite Empire, half way through a book of tales from Ancient Egypt and getting deep into a collection of more academic papers on the late Bronze Age in the Mediterranean.

The characters are coming along. The more I read on Egyptian magic the more I like the Scribe character. He's pretty firmly in my mind a "crouching moron, hidden badass" type (to use the TVTropes term). Academic, geeky enthusiasm for old texts, can read anything (and speaks a few dozen languages as well). An unprepossessing body reminiscent of Amarna-period depictions, and gives no impression of martial prowess. But he's scary smart, Batman-level of prepared, and when he (reluctantly) whips out a magic spell...

The Mycenaean mercenary is coming along, too. He's sort of the audience POV, even though the culture he hails from has its own oddities. He's terribly steeped in honor codes and other aspects of what eventually gets recorded by Homer; he's a sort of a textbook of Heroic Age foibles, Achilles sulking in his tent and all.

The "Minoan" seer is giving me more trouble. Except for her gift. I've dreamed up an idea I haven't seen used elsewhere, an idea that could be a lot of fun even if it doesn't have any connection to any culture I've yet to study. And it fits in wonderfully with the way Egyptian magician-scholars of the tales come across quite a bit Indiana Jones, fighting their way into tombs to steal books of lost magic.

We forget that the past, too, has a past, and they were as fascinated as we are by long-passed cultures. After all, as the quote goes, the pyramids were older to Cleopatra than she is to us.

Ah, the Minoans. You got to envy the Hittites. See, all the common terms we have in Modern English for Egypt come down to us through the Greeks and Romans. The Minoans got hit later, with Sir Arthur Evans naming them after Greek myths. But the Hittites vanished from history. They weren't talked about by the Greeks, or by Roman Scholars, or by French or German or English speakers from the antiquarian age. They didn't (mostly!) get hit with labels given by scholars who were trying to see the world of the Christian Bible in everything.

They got discovered second-hand through the Amarna Letters. Through contemporary Egyptian writings, and then through their own writings. We didn't basically discover them until we'd gained the ability to read about them in their own words. So most of the names given to things Hittite are pretty much accurate transliterations of what they actually called them.

That's...unusual and lucky for most peoples, really. Especially when you are talking those on the losing side of history, the names we still use too often today are the names given by their wary neighbors, if not their conquerors. Names that translate far too readily into, "Slave," or "Our Ancient Enemy."

In any case, as much as I want to play with a Minoan point of view, to have some nice arguments and contrasts of perception, I haven't figured out how to defend a cultural relic of the height of their civilization finding a place amongst my cast two-hundred odd years later.




And, no, I still don't have a plot. I'm still pretty down on it being a quest novel. Of a motley collection of characters who could only have been thrust together by the most extreme of circumstances, becoming fire-forged friends and eventually accomplishing miracles.

There's two models I am currently considering. One is the "Heart of Darkness" model. The other I don't have as handy a label...perhaps call it a "Count of Monte Christo" model.

The former is a quest from a place of safety into the heart of a storm. More-or-less, the characters would launch from the court of Ramses III and journey along the path of destruction of the Sea Peoples to discover the greater evil that they in turn had fled from.

The latter is a quest to. Whereas the former begins in a place of strength, this hits nadir in a very early chapter. They've discovered a dangerous secret, and they have to fight their way across a world at war, against near-impossible odds, to deliver it to the right hands. It's the "After we get out of the inescapable prison..." plot.

Both models have their attractions. I am tempted either way to have a Ten Thousand back story for the Mycenaean. With or without his own Myrmidons. That is; they are the remnants of a mercenary army that barely escaped the fall of Ugarit, Hattusa... or even Illios. It did get sacked more than once, after all. Plus earthquakes and fire. (And to top it off, a German antiquarian with his dynamite...)

I am wary of the temptation of putting in too many historical in-jokes (or mythological in-jokes). There's a point at which this needs to be about the late Bronze Age, not about the familiar works and events and people of later ages. They should face their conflicts and solve their problems organically, not somehow through the power of being the protagonists in a novel written in the late 20th century come up with the exact same solution Scipio Africanus used against Hannibal.

Still, it is hard not to drop a mention of, say, a people largely unknown outside a peninsula of the Greek mainland who are already taking both warrior culture and a certain terse way of speaking to extremes... You know the sort of thing I mean!



So, yes. A lot of the book could be within larger social circles than our small band of adventurers. Within the fractious fighting for leadership and position within the remnant mercenary force, and the complex relationship between our main Mycenaean hero and his mentor, say. And it seems far too likely that even when they make it at last back to Pi-Ramses court intrigue ensnares them and they are forced to even more heroics to get that all-important warning to the Pharaoh, activities that drive them deep into the politics of the court and the Scribe's position there.

I don't want to go the route of larger strategic operations. I want chariots to figure at some point but our view of the battles will remain largely that of the individual foot soldier, not that of the generals. Still, modes other than the solitary heroes making only the most shallow contact with the events they move through have their attractions. Tolkien hired one of his hobbits off to Denethor, after all. He knew.

The thing I'm most sure of is the climax takes place in the Nile Delta in 1175 BCE. (Even if the real climax of the hero's arc may have taken place months earlier on an icy, lonely hill in the heart of Scythia.)