Zero Hour

I've hit a place in the book where I both realize I don't have nearly enough understanding, and don't even know how to research it, and that I really don't care.

I'm just pushing through to the end. Penny has finally made it to Wentworth's ridiculous Zero Station, my one sop to realism that he may have repurposed an existing room  -- "Drainage or something," Penny guesses -- from the earlier station.

I had a nice collection of pictures of tunnel insides from the Northern Line Extension all ready, and I threw them on to my second monitor -- and they don't match. That took a bit of time, mostly staring at them (and watching another video of a TBM in action) before figuring out why they looked different.

While I was looking for explanation I stumbled upon the cutest narrow-gauge they had down there while the TBMs were still working.

So of course I had to put that in the story.

Did I mention how tired I am getting of Penny's vocal and narrative mannerisms? And here I'm facing a third book of them. So far my readership is some 90% older women who know my mom, but they are going out of their way to say how much they like the character so I guess I'm stuck with her for a while longer.

(Something about how she is heroic but realistic. I dunno.)

So I really had no idea how long the Tomb Crawl was going to run. And I wasn't padding it, exactly -- there's a wealth of material I barely touched. But I knew I wanted it to feel sufficiently epic. Well, from the moment she arrives at Kennington Green to the moment she realizes she's trapped in the Zero Station is four thousand words.

The plan is for another crawl, a crazier one through the Bazalgettian warrens currently containing the Effra, and onwards to a slightly-excavated Roman ruin. Haven't even decided what it is. I'd like a military outpost, because Wentworth has been going on and on about 300-type last stands.

***

And Japan is on. I still have qualms about where it sits in the overall character arc. It is in some ways too much, too soon. But I can play off those elements, make that part of the plot that having to suddenly be utterly convincing as the Famous World Adventurer, or falling head over heels in love, is indeed not what it seems and doesn't unfold the way you'd expect.

But, really, any qualms are outweighed by the ....oh.... anyhow, are outweighed by the fact that I could probably sit here and type the bulk of it with scenery descriptions and amusing misunderstandings and language fun without having to reach even as far as my own bookshelf.

And that's something I need right now. Even on this very productive day I've stopped multiple times to look up something, and that's not a good way to write. Worse, the sorts of things I'm looking up become a meal with way too much roughage in in. I need to write leaner -- even if I have no good idea right now what leaner looks like.

That "oh" in the middle of the paragraph above? That was me getting ready to type how I wanted something actually historical -- archaeology would be a bonus -- and then it hit me. As much as I don't want the reader to be facing pages of hard-to-memorize Japanese names, there is a historical but disputed business when Kusanagi was stolen by a rival clan. Or something. I forget the details, but there are reasons I want to use it...

I was a teenage Beowulf

Finally into the fight scene. Just downloaded two books on stage fighting and already read one cover to cover (well...a lot of it was warm-up exercises so I skimmed it).

Once again there is so much wealth of things I can't put in the book or my critics will cry at me again. "Birdie" is one of those instant expert types (just add factino and stir). He's got a fancy "combat ready" sword from one of those Chinese companies but has no idea how to use it. Penny has had one class in stage combat, and she's ended up with a display sword with rat-tail tang. Graham is also in the scene and he's actually got HEMA background -- although he hasn't owned up to it yet.

And oh yes, we are starting in the Tiring-room at Shakespeare's Globe in Bankside. So there's props storage and a curtained alcove to stab your Polonius in and the stage is trapped and above the awning is the machinery for producing gods on cue. And the thatched roof with sprinklers in case another cannon shot gets loose.

Oh and just because that's never enough, "Birdie" (his name is Guy, he was calling himself Fawkes at the Battersea Power Station break-in, and another guy on that hack started calling him "Birdie" after, one presumes, the phoenix from Harry Potter) has a scouse accent which is he trying unsuccessfully to hide under the most up-town version of Estuary that doesn't slide all the way into Received Pronunciation.

At least this means no funny orthography. Although Penny does chose to remember that Tony, her Geordie foil, had called Guy a wanna-be "reet bobby dazzla."

So I had a bit of real luck on this. I asked on Quora and a very cool lady from Oxford explained a bit about the Globe backstage, and we shared a few theatre stories (and then I clicked on her profile and, oh, past president of an archaeological society? Whoah, I feel abashed.)

So I know more than enough about the Globe, stage fighting, and prop swords to drown my audience. The problem now is going to be sorting it and figuring out how much I can leave out.

All the time I was struggling with the second slot on my tenor trombone, I was thinking it might just be easier to switch. So I kept looking at alto and soprano trombones. The one advantage of the soprano is it slots exactly like a trumpet, so I wouldn't need to retrain my lips. Downside is it barely sounds like a trombone. There are some plastic altos that are really cute (and cheap) but they sound plastic.

And wouldn't you know. I'm starting to find the lip for the tenor. I still don't like the instrument. Trumpet is more satisfying.

But at least I'm not shopping for a new trombone. Oh, no. After the fuss with the contractor I ended up with the chin-cello hanging by my desk for "loading screen" practice. And I've realized I can really make use of that silent violin practice to improve my fingering.

So I want to switch that back to violin strings. And buy another electric to switch my octave strings to. So, yeah. There's always something in my Amazon shopping cart!

(That was an obscure post title. I'm pretty sure that was Book of Sequels. Anyhow, it promised plenty of "Saxon violence." I didn't manage to work in my continuing adventures with the Yahama Venova but, yes, sax is part of the picture of my growing stack of instruments.)

The quickest way to get to Harlem

Boy. A thousand words done this morning. It's barely lunch. I am just steam train. And that was with editing of the previous day's work, too.

Aladdin is still in at the moment. I might leave it to my beta readers. The competitors are Dick Wittington -- I did previously mention the Lord Mayor (he was having a big parade at the time) -- and Jack and the Beanstalk. I sort of like Wittington for being more obscure, but both are good Principal Boy roles and both are a rags-to-riches story which sort of vaguely tracks with other themes I have going on.

I did change the venue from Elephant and Castle to The Mudlarker and I'm going to add a storage locker proximate to the "under the London Bridge arches" original and future location of the Vauxhall Playhouse.

And I've done the last quoted excerpt from the diary. It was brutal. In that I had a dialog section within the diary, and since this isn't set out typographically with a scene break or italics this means quotes in quotes. I broke the rule of new paragraph per speaker last time I quoted from the diary, but that was what I had to do this time. And because of the rules of rolling quote, it looks like this:

“‘Rest. Recover,’ his mystery friend told him. ‘If you miss this war, there’s always another on the way.’ And without a change in his voice he turned to look up the stairs. ‘And I see you’ve already started training your own.’

“‘It isn’t like that. She’s a civilian.’

Yeah, my grammar checker is going to hate me. The mystery man with the Dick Tracey jaw is of course Orde Wingate. And once again a choice forced on me; I can't follow the proper last-names-only because then I'd have a Wentworth and a Wingate in the same conversation.

So Linnet is off to interview at Baker Street and in the final diary entry she'll reveal she is leaving for Bletchley Park or wherever. I've forgotten which of multiple addresses for SOE would be appropriate in early 1941. I've started looking stuff up while I get to it rather than try to keep track of it all now.

And another loss. I wanted to talk about pub names at some point and how a lot of the animal names "Red Lion," etc., whilst still rooted in heraldry and the partisan sympathies of publicans, are these days most often part of foreign-owned chains. Elephant and Castle being Canadian at present -- although I can't tell if they have any of the ones by that name in the UK.

All of this in aid of doing the title drop, of course. That, and I need to get around to pointing out that Vauxhall is or was quite plausibly Fox Hall. I had the thought today, too, of doing references to British children's books for the Part names. I already have two, you see. Well, time to see if I can't chase Fawkes back to his hole. Now that my intrepid pair knows who he is.

One slapstick sword fight coming up. I took today off work too. My boss is happy I'm taking some time off -- I was looking ragged, and things are as quiet as they are likely to get, and better yet, I have a bunch of vacation hours now and it looks to be many months before I'd be able to spend them in the proper way.

Perhaps by this weekend I'll finally have her exploring her first (approximate) tomb.

Loverly

2,000 words completed today. And there's an "oops" there -- I was aiming for as low as 70K but I am going to be crushing right up to that 80K by the time I get to the epilog.

Only 600 words was about Panto. I described the theatre a little more in the first draft, but before I'd finished the chapter I'd knocked out several descriptions that didn't need to be there.

And I never did explain what a Panto Horse is.

This whole sequence feels like it is pulling sideways, but then I've felt I've been pulled sideways since the dig ended. If I was the kind of person who could do a massive re-write, I'd try to work it so the dig ended suddenly and the very next day Penny went on her illegal entry back into it.

All along I've been trying to chart a course between getting too scattered, and being too on the nose. I just got done writing the beginning of a scene at the Elephant and Castle pub, which is in fact in Elephant and Castle and very close to the temporary spaces of the Southwark Playhouse. And then I found out there was a pub called the Mudlarker. Which would be perfect for a meeting with local metal detector people. And is right on the bank of the Thames near the New Globe. And, as it happens, near the previous and future home of the Playhouse; under London Bridge.

Could that be any more appropriate to the themes of underground and rivers and even the idea of theatre as a bit subversive?

I also should not have picked Aladdin as the show being done by the Lambeth Larks. I'd just thrown it out there during a much previous scene and didn't feel like going back. But there's cultural context that gets thrown into the mix. Plus the cross-gender casting doesn't really hold, not for modern productions anyhow (well, not for modern productions in general -- even Jack of the Beanstalk fame is probably played by a young man in modern productions). The sole grace is this is where Widow Twankey comes from but in the final scene I couldn't even put that in (plus the reader has probably completely forgotten that I referenced that character way back in Chapter One).

Well, I'll think about it. After I've reached the end of the book. There's themes and arcs I'm trying to weave and I don't know if they are going to work.

I think the other part of my discomfort is that all of this stuff, from the last working day of the dig to the sword fight at the Globe, is interstitial. Scenes that have to be there to wrap up certain plot lines and advance certain other plot lines but otherwise don't have an identity of their own.

I'm into the final Detectorist scene now. This was an arc that started back in Chapter One. Basically, local metal detector clubs got pissy, and she's meeting with them to tell them that as far as she knows archaeologists working on the Underground aren't blaming them for anything. But that's it. The entire outline for the current scene was, "She meets with them." It doesn't even matter what happens. Everything that plot line was supposed to do, has been done.

Except I ended up offloading some of my diary problems in this direction. I just couldn't organically work the diary stuff into anywhere else, so now I'm stuck with a scene where Penny is reading the diary to a group of strangers.

And this is the Diary day where we get Captain Wentworth's real name, and Orde Wingate stops in, and Linnet drops hints she's volunteering in the direction of SOE. Plus this is also where Wentworth tries and fails to communicate to Linnet how he feels tainted by the violence he partook in and the capacity for violence he discovered within himself, and Graham simultaneously tries to warn Penny that she is taking her arrow-dodging, bomb-daring "heroism" with too light an appreciation of the possible consequences.

The Panto stuff only has a tiny payoff in this book. It is another window to the dress-up character of the distaff Indiana Jones she's been playing at. And an excuse to talk about her flirtation with the role of the kind of hero that really only appears in fiction. Other ideas from this I intend to get into in the Japan book, where one of the main characters is a senior member of the Takarzuka Dance Troupe.

And I still have to struggle through the Old Globe scenes. Boy, there's suddenly a lot of theatre going on.

Oh and oops. I have one more reenactor scene to write before she finally starts her big Tomb Crawl.

Hair

Pulled a fourteen-hour day Saturday. But we had the test chamber back in operation by Monday. And then I found out a contractor was coming into my apartment Monday so I spent all Sunday packing up computer and table and everything to make a space. By Wednesday I needed to take a day off...and I'm still tired.

Weird. Spent the lockdown just dealing. Now that I'm back to work, I'm finally getting to all the little annoyances. Replacing light switches and window cranks and so on. The place has never been cleaner (okay...it was cleaner before I moved in. But it is getting better. And more comfortable.)

Also re-haired a bow. My cheap bow -- not even the forty-dollar carbon fibre one. Boy, was it cheap. When I got it open, I found out the wedges were soft plastic and they'd been glued into place. But now I know basically how replacing bow hair works. And, yes, I've been back to practicing on the violin. Seems like all the music I want to write now has a violin part.

Unsurprisingly, not a lot of fiction writing done. Have had several ideas about what to do with the Japan novel. I still think Paris should be first but that one would bring out all my bad habits so I want the change of gears the Japan book will give me.

And on that. I had a nice talk with a family friend who just finished the Athens book. There's a trend here. Well, besides that older people seem to be liking it. And that women like the character -- and that's a relief, because male writer trying to write a female character (in First Person POV, to boot)...

But there's also a repeated "You must have done so much research."

Which is, right there, a writing fail. It isn't supposed to look like you did a lot of research. You are supposed to DO the research, but then you put in the book only what absolutely needs to be there.

And that's been worrying me a lot about the London novel, because it feels dense and complicated to me.

But this last time, and yeah some of the things my German friend said, are giving me hope. I am thinking at this point that just maybe the stuff I spent time researching is not the stuff they think I spent time researching. And maybe I'm lucky and most of the stuff I'm sweating in the London book is on me, not on them.

In the Athens book there's some Greek mythology and some Bronze Age history. And some other history (even a bit of Roman stuff). Heck, in chapter three my protagonist gives an impromptu lecture on the Thera eruption and its effect on the Minoan civilization. And this is what I meant. I already know this stuff. I didn't research it for the book, it was just there. Every single one of Penny's impromptu lectures was me, going off the top of my head just as she is.

Same way that every time in the book she quoted Shakespeare from memory, I wrote it by....quoting Shakespeare from memory. Okay, sure, I looked up the passages and I edited a little here and there, but the basic lines, like the lectures, was me just writing what I know without having spent any specific effort towards it. So I don't think of these as "hard" or "complicated" and when I weigh density of prose and all that I undercount all this stuff.

Thing is, names and dates are a flag. They code as Serious History. They codee as "obscure facts that someone had to look up." And I think that throws up a barrier to the reader, too. When they realize they are being fed history, they tense up.

Meanwhile, this is what I actually spent time researching:

What do signs look like, are there seats or compartments on the train, does the desert come after or with the meal, what time is check-out. A lot of daily living stuff, in other words.

So the London book might or might not pass. There are a few bits of "throw a lot of dates and names at you" things. Bradgate Park and a bit of the history of the Nine Day's Queen. The history of the Battersea Power Station. And of course stuff about the London Blitz. And there's a very brief bit about the geology of London which is likely to send some people screaming.

The stuff the reader probably won't have trouble with is stuff like what is in a Full English Breakfast or how the rooms are arranged in Graham's "flat" (actually a two-up, two down walk-up with an expanded garret). I think. I think it will just come across as description. That's my theory, see. That if it isn't really exotic (like describing a kimono) then it is just "stuff." It is still a pub and a cab and a train even if some of the details are different. Nothing to get scared of.

And the history stuff was largely unfamiliar to me so I had to research it myself so I'm a little more conscious of it.

But, sigh. There is stuff which I didn't have to research but which might or might not bother the reader. That is, give the reader the sense of being overwhelmed by facts and details. Stuff like British pop culture. There's a sort of running reference to Doctor Who (the idea -- not really made explicit -- is that Athens was a gods-haunted place but England kicked theirs out and replaced them with pop-culture heroes. So The Doctor is the functional equivalent in this book of Athena Polis in the last.)

Possibly not helped by something I've been doing since I was a role-playing game referee; that the world has a life independent of the protagonist, and there will be things going on around her that she doesn't understand and never will. In many cases these are what TVTropes calls a "Genius Bonus"; a reference that isn't spelled out but that those in the know will, well, know.

I named Doctor Who and The Doctor. But in a different scene the actor Tony Robinson shows up and someone says, "Oh, that's Baldrick." And later someone in his presence says, "She has a cunning plan." And there's no explanation for this.

Heck, I lampshaded it in a different scene. When they discover the fabled White Room at the Battersea Power Station one of the Urban Explorers makes a crack about a white room by the station, and another comments on the lack of black curtains...leading to a third complaining he has no idea what they are going on about. (That sequence started with someone talking about the Dark Side of the Moon -- but here Penny explains to the reader about the Pink Floyd album cover.)

Sigh. Breakfast is over. Time to once again put the computer in the closet, tuck the table up against the wall and prepare to stay extra-late at work because it looks like the contractor is going to be tearing holes in my ceiling through the weekend. 

Great Klonos' carboalloy claws!

I've reached a very annoying scene.

Over the third part of the book I've been trying to sneak in a parallel story. While Penny is digging with her fellow archaeologists ahead of the construction crews at the old Nine Elms Station, a local paper has been publishing excerpts from the diary written by a young women who sheltered down on the abandoned platform during the Blitz.

I didn't get the parallelism as good as I might have liked. Well, I also didn't like it to be too obvious. Well, the way the scenes shook out for me as I moved from outline to actually fleshing them out, Penny's relationship with her friend Graham is hitting critical points just as Linnet has finally managed to start writing about Captain Wentworth, the man responsible for sticking an Aux Unit depot in the Nine Elms shelter.

And they are bonding over SF. Which was a somewhat late addition on my part. Wentworth is mooning over the glorious last stands of the past, from Rorke's Drift to the Siege of Acre. Linnet, not to be a passive part of the conversation, is coming back with the armageddons of, well, Buck Rogers.

And this is already tough as hell to write because while an educated woman of 1940 -- particularly one that educated largely on pulp magazines -- is a familiar voice to me, quotes within quotes are just not much fun. The scene I'm working on, Penny and Graham are discussing Linnet's latest diary entries where she discusses what she and the Captain talked about and this is less Phillip Nowlan and more Christopher Nolan.

(Cue the Inception sound effect).

There's two other things on the table at this point. Penny has been zig-zagging back and forth between being a responsible -- but boring -- worker bee of an archaeologist. A junior digger. And in the excursions inspired by Graham, she's been running around meeting eccentric people and eventually getting into more and more "stunts." Like breaking into Battersea Power Station.

So this is coming to a head as well. At the center of this particular story, as much as it is wrapped in a mystery and a Blitz story, is Penny feeling forced to decide between Serious Archaeology and being Indiana Jones.

But there's a subtler side to this. Whatever happened in Athens that let Penny be a real-life Athena Fox, it is an uncertain magic. The main reason she got shot with a bow at Highgate Cemetery is so she could be bleeding and in pain for the rest of the story. Stunts don't always work and real violence isn't like the movies.

One of the things Captain Wentworth is hiding is the kind of violence he experienced first-hand in ugly things like the Arab Revolts. And Linnet is in the same naive stage where she is going to volunteer for SOE before this is all over.

And Graham may appear to be an ordinary, out-of-shape guy, but he's a serious Roman reenactor. Well, something he did let him understand something of how violence really works. It is a lesson Penny is going to be learning deep under the streets of London. It is something I'm going back and forth on endlessly and having a lot of problems with myself because it totally changes the feel of her stories.

So I'm trying to fold this in as well. My Inception conversation over chicken tikka masala is trying to parallel not just Linnet and Penny both spending their days/nights down in the Nine Elms shelter, it is both having too close a contact with worlds of fantasy and having an older male mentor figure (though not Mentor figure) who is for whatever reason unwilling to try to explain to them the true cost of violence.

And thus it is going to suck. I mean, sure. I can write it. I can cut out a lot and it would probably be a better scene for it. Allusions the readers doesn't get just makes them bored and confused. The thing that really sucks is I can't possibly put in it what I wanted to put in.

All those months of figuring and outlining and researching and everything I know about Captain Wentworth and his past and his relationship to Linnet I can only touch at third hand, through a half-dozen snatches of quoted dialog. And that ain't enough.

The other thing I realized this weekend is that Penny is exhausting. Maybe it is just a quality of First Person. Maybe it is her energy and raw nerves and the way she jumps around like the later regnerations of The Doctor. Or maybe it is the peculiar effort of going inside the head of someone very different from you and having to feel what they feel as you speak in their voice.

Whatever it is, I had to take frequent breaks. So I'm happy I got 2-3,000 words done over the weekend. Even the first draft of the Lensman scene. Next chapter includes the sword fight, so I know I'll lose a little time doing some specific research for that. Might even open my book on the New Globe. Assuming I still have it!

In a white room with black curtains by the station

Battersea sequence is almost finished. In the middle of writing it I realized it was a pretty good Tomb Crawl.

Well, duh, that's why it was in the outline in the first place. I sort of forgot in the struggle to write the thing. So my protagonist is deep in a maze of passages, climbing and crawling and otherwise struggling to break through to spectacular hidden chambers, solving puzzles and dealing with dangers both environmental and human. Well, not really the puzzles. That will have to wait.

So about as close as I can get to a classic "steal the golden idol from the booby-trapped ancient temple" and not completely violate serious history and modern archaeology.

***

The rewrite was great and reinforces why the "get the draft on paper first" style works. I'm a revise-as-you-go but the idea is still there.

The first version of the abseil scene was perfectly functional. I had Penny open a few stitches so focus would go on that after the rescue and I wouldn't have to figure out what everyone's reactions would be otherwise.

Yeah, better choices. The revision, there's more emotion. She does not have a plan when she grabs him, so there's more tension and it helps advance the theme of her plunging into things unwisely -- something this book is going to make her think about more. And the obvious aftermath was, when I thought about it, that the guy she rescued would get angry and blame her for all of it.

I won't be surprised if I don't come up with a stronger way to play the Goldeneye N64 scene as well. That went decently. The Station A control room is really harder to describe. Little annoying stuff, like I can't say a paneled ceiling because it makes it sound like there's control panels up there. And it is also showing me that more and more I'm changing a place slightly because it is easier to describe that way. That's not good historical fiction work there.

***

I'm almost done with Battersea. Should clock in around 5K when done, right on estimates. Just have to figure out where I'm going with the White Room.

The only reference I've seen on it is it was a "minimalist mock-up" of a luxury flat with hot tub and walls that were mirrors when they weren't white. Here I'm changing history and making something more interesting but I am having trouble deciding what.

The conclusion to this is a grudging acceptance of preservation of history via redevelopment projects like this, where the old control room can be rented out for weddings (yes, just check their website). So I'd like that whatever the white room is, it pays homage to the original station and doesn't just use it as a convenient shell.

But I don't know what. Maybe I should just go with the hot tub. And black curtains.

***

White room scene is done. Going by the dates on blog posts, that's 6,400 words in 7 days. I'm hoping to get some of the next scene on paper before the weekend is over but I suspect it won't be many.

(And, yes, that means that over the Battersea sequence I name-dropped two movies, a game, two songs, an album cover, and four or five fictional characters. Plus made two more veiled Doctor Who references and there's a character who has clear roots to Blade Runner.)

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.

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.

Mixed Batteries

I just finished reading another of the Rivers of London series of extremely-urban fantasy. This one had a lot more in South London and in various underground locations and it was neat being able to figure out more-or-less where the characters were. (Having been reading a lot about those locations).

They are good popcorn reads and if they weren't ten bucks each on Kindle plus the time to read them I'd be shoveling them in. This one in particular I was conscious of reading it in three minds.

One was just enjoying the story. Another was taking notes. And the third was watching the craft.

On the notes; happily for me, they visit the New Covent Garden Market, and he describes the (early days of) construction in the Battersea area. (Among the small notes I took is that Aaronovitch chooses "Portacabin" over "Portakabin" -- the latter being the original trademark, the former a slightly more common usage as a generic for those construction site office trailers).

I didn't learn anything I'm going to use out of his various descriptions of the Underground, including one of the Deep Shelters, but it was nice to see the name-drops of everything from Bazalgette to the Ghost Train. And, yes, there were places where I could tell he'd re-arranged things for dramatic purposes.

Now, I don't know if Ben was writing for a general audience or if he simply wrote for the UK audience and trusted that those across the pond who wanted to try would make the effort. There is a lot of UK slang in here, and London geography is presented constantly in a form that would make a Black Cab driver take notice. Bits like commenting "Nobody takes the Vauxhall Bridge in the morning unless they are working at MI6."

And it isn't strictly a style choice; police slang, he explains. So he is trusting his audience to either know or to make the effort to figure out the rest.

***

My big accomplishment yesterday was to go through a whole bunch of scattered references and try to stick highlights into a relative chronology:

22 July 1940 LDV renamed the Home Guard
Aug 1940 the “Invasion List” circulated
the London Blitz 7 September 1940 to 11 May 1941. 
It is described that heavy raids were on 7 and 8 September with heavy crowding. The 7th struck the East End hard.
8th September East Enders forced their way into the Liverpool station.
By the end of September 79 underground stations were in use.
The Occupy Savoy took place in 14 September 1940
14 Oct 1940 Balham station flooding 20:02 
Evening of Oct 15, 1940 was Kennington Park disaster. 
Mid-late October “it was decided” to build the deep-level shelters.
Construction began 27 Nov 1940. No new stations were begun after mid 1941, and everything but Oval (and two others) were finished by 1942
By the end of 1940 the situation in the tube was settled and comfortable with stoves, sanitary facilities, food services.
14 November Coventry bombing
In Nov 1940 Brandt was publishing his pictures, and there was extensive journalism into the shelters.

So turns out the mobilization is lagging well behind the bombing and the shelters, meaning my Blitz Diary will run through '41, quite possibly into early '42. Which means I don't get to do the Blevin's Boys, or V1/V2s. Well, not in the diary, at any rate.

And, yes, those are just bookmarks to the research. I remember enough of the Kennington Park collapse that I can put a mention in, then flesh it out from my collected research and resources (I have an entire pdf on just that one).

Sigh. Podcasts, I can do while working or walking. Videos, I can do while eating. Finding time to read is tough. I have so many books I would feel better if I had read.

But then, I'm not writing history, exactly. The diary is going to take up no more than 5K out of the target 70-75K page count. Which according to my current outline and estimates I will probably hit even without it. I would love to keep reading those books and write the entire story of "Linnet," from Battersea bookshop to overseas with the SOE. But that's a different story. And quite possibly a different me.

Instead I'm aiming at finishing this one as quickly as I can. I don't have much hope of finishing this month, though. These are the second-hardest chapters (the opening being the hardest). This is where I try to build the arcs and weave the themes. This is where it stops being "London is weird" and turns into living there. And this is where Penny's story becomes once again an Athena Fox story.

Gimme Shelter

The image of Londoners sleeping in the subways is one of the emblematic images of the Blitz. That, and the ruins of London (although all of England was hit and the city of Coventry wracked worse), and a picture of firemen struggling against a blazing building that is as likely as not from a film made in the 50's and not a "real" footage.

When you dig deeper --as it were -- you run into references of the Deep Underground Shelters, which are largely still there. More footage has been shot in those shelters for a number of movies than was ever taken in period. Because here is where it starts getting interesting.

The possibility of needing shelters had been discussed between the wars. The government expressed doubts, though. More publicly stated was that they didn't want the people to develop a shelter mentality, to hide instead of doing the necessary work to support their society. Less publicly said but very much there was the fear that people left to congregate underground might start to talk to each other. Might get certain ideas. Might organize.

It is hard to understand at this time that the great fear was not Germany, but Communism. And even the Aux Units were less concerned with Paratroopers than they were with Fifth Columnists.

And they were right to fear this.

This is why Anderson shelters, and public shelters such as the one at Kennington Park. Shallow, poorly protected, and little protection for the poor for that matter; corrugated iron was hard to come by and many of the poor lacked gardens to dig into. When the bombs began dropping, the doors were locked at the tube stations. There was barbed wire around Oval (in the Kennington area). The public shelter was flooded and stinky and too small and the last was perhaps to the good because it collapsed when a fifty-pound bomb hit it, killing almost everyone inside.

This started a growing movement -- and, yes, local Communists take credit for some of it -- to squat in protected basements of the big store. To charge into the really, really nice shelter under the Savoy. And to force their way into the tubes.

And the government may have expressed their desire not to see a troglodyte life (their words) spring up, but they hadn't counted on just how widespread the destruction was of homes. And how little the poor, already stressed enough, could afford to rebuild. Of course the poor had taken the brunt already. The rich were often in the country. The poor were right where there was industry. So they went to the tube and they camped there not just for shelter from the bombs but because they had nowhere else to go.

It wasn't until almost a year after the Blitz that any of the deep shelters were completed. Some, like Kennington, never were. Basically, they never got used.

Testing the Dialectic

Finally got over the hump, figured out how to make a scene that worked, completed 2,000 words and brought the novel to almost the middle point.

And this morning has all been in trying to generate a decent map of Highgate Cemetery. I think my google-fu has grown weak.

I remember how searching online used to be. Before the spiders had crawled up and down the web indexing everything, you searched in a dendritic tree. Tentative searches until you could find a hub, then exploring the branches off that hub, working crabwise, hoping you were going to finally stumble upon a webring that had everything.

Root searches have a flaw. I turned up one actual map of notable tombs at Highgate, but it was a copy by a retiree of what is apparently a free map handout from somewhere and there is no explanation. So many hours of trying to track down the names mentioned.

Can you imagine the difficulty in trying to restrict search terms to find a "Scrimgeour "who is actually buried there? If you don't make "Highgate" a required term, the engines fill with Harry Potter. If you do, then the results fill with travel agencies wanting to sell you tickets to go visit the cemetery. And low on the page? More Harry Potter.

This is both a historical novel (apparently BookBub calls them "Present-Past." No, I don't like it either) and an action scene. So I need to know the actual historical person and I need to know what the stone looks like in situ so I can figure out if my characters can take cover behind it.

Well, I have enough stones to make it work. And I've looked at the landscape. Which is really lousy for the kind of action I had contemplated. It is far from clear fields of fire. Plus there really aren't any handy stones lying around. And the place is public and crowded and sneaking weapons in there is a level of ridiculous that's only going to be surpassed by the sword fight I'm going to have among the stalls of the Globe itself.

I'm doing it anyhow. I'm trying to leave strict realism alone because that way leads to boring events.

And the stones aren't lining up at all right. Heck, the one guy I really wanted there (as opposed to the guy everyone expects to be featured), is on the West side. Which is guided tours only and restricted hours. So...it's gonna be more Bullit geography.

(I couldn't find a picture of Karl Marx driving a Ford Mustang GT Fastback, so instead here's a traffic light with, yes, a little picture of Karl Marx for walk. I wonder who is stop? Pick your Austrian School favorite.)

So my week total is off. I'm writing the last chapter of Part II, and before I gave up today put down 800 words of draft on it. Had to stop just as a medieval broadhead spanged off the tomb of Claudia Jones, British black feminist communist and that's a lot of ists. The "beat" isn't happening and I have to go back and find the moment. 

But I have confidence that by the end of the weekend I'll be in planning for the third part of the book. 

Ron's Ron shirt was as bad as Ron himself

Tried to cut a character. Should have been able to.

The reason he is in there is I needed someone to speak dialog that didn't have an agenda to it. The two Geordies are always on the attack, Stu is too often being Serious Stu, and Susan Morris' thing is being quiet.

Thing is, dialog should serve multiple agendas. Having Hanif in there to make the conversations easier for me is a sign that I'm not a very good writer.

***

Plus that's one more character. Sure, there's only one character aside from the narrator who is in over half of the scenes. And the group that ends up on the dig is only four people. (And, yeah, honestly Hanif grew into his own way of looking at things that wasn't quite Tim or Tony or Stu).

That's Tim, Tony, Stu, and Hanif for the digging scenes. Add Susan Morris, Steve, Leslie Cuvier for the field school (there's a Frank but he has two lines and never comes back).

At the Imperial War Museum it is pretty much Mick and Sarah. There were two other women but just for one chapter. On the other hand, they were reenactors so they had two names each.

The thing that really adds to the name count is that Penny and Graham are going around talking to character actors; collectors and clubs and other peculiar people, and they all have names and they are all one-scene wonders so should this count against me? James, Hanif, Derwyn, Jackson, Cynth, Cephrin, Petrichor, Guy, Sahir Ganga Colwyn, Kenny, and I'm sure there will be more.

And I just added Nyovani Brent from the museum and I strongly suspect she's going to bring friends.

Still, this shouldn't be a problem as long as I don't have to have too much of the, "Remember what James said about what Kenny had told us the day we saw Cephrin?"

That and voices. I've given up on doing the voices for this draft. I'll come back around and put the right Geordie-isms and try to clean up the errant Americanisms.

***

And that's another issue. No, not that I'll never get all the distracting and wrong American usages out of a cast who is almost entirely not American. It is that my narrator-protagonist is starting to learn the language. And there isn't space to show her learning that an elevator is called a lift -- instead it just shows up in her narration.

***

So more luck. I've been watching an interesting BBC programme called Blitz Street, where they built two typical houses then blew them up. And I've been streaming various movies and series about wartime London via Amazon, including the amazing Home Fires.

I was doing some spot research to find some appropriate items to be dug up by my characters when YouTube tossed me a Time Team episode in which they dig up a row of flats that were demolished in the Blitz. Perfect! So perfect, I'm just stealing their finds for the book.

***

This has not been a productive weekend. Just before I broke for the night I decided my protagonist is going to have a small emotional breakdown at the dig. Then there's the next episode of Costume Porn to write -- I've decided on an ATS "ack-ack girl" for her, but Mick is going Home Guard this weekend and this is when I introduce the reader to the Aux Unit mythology.

And then a weird two-level conversation. Then a trip out to one of Charles Booth's "vicious, semi-criminal" neighborhoods to look for a hostel she can afford, and the big melt-down.

And then Highgate Park, complete with a ranged-missile duel. So there's a lot to go before I finish Part II. The word count still looks low but I think I might end up in the right place when it is all done.

Really, I've only been writing actual text since the last week of March. Heck, I only had the elevator pitch for the book on the 7th of December. And that's before I took a month off to do an edit of the last book.

So I guess this isn't bad progress. Still, if I didn't go back to work in May I wouldn't really mind...

The map, please

I've reached that point in research I reached during the last book; the point where I find out it is easier to zoom out Google Maps and just spin the globe to the spot I want. The shape of the Thames past Westminster and the loop it makes around the Isle of Dogs is so familiar I can find most of my locations faster by scrolling than I can by typing.

I'm hitting between 1K and 2K a day. For every hour of writing, I'm still spending an hour looking stuff up. But less time, now, contemplating the plot arcs and trying to figure out how to tell the story better.

The poverty arc really isn't working. The Steve arc is in trouble. I'll tinker with those in a bit, though. This morning's work is to cut-and-paste to take the site description from later scenes and move it to a brand-new earlier scene. On re-read the transition was just too abrupt.

And, really, the pacing would feel better if there was another thousand words in Part I. It is a bit crammed with background information and set-up and taking it slowly can't but help.

I haven't gotten around to yanking the previous mention of the Kennington Loop but yesterday I wrote a brand-new scene to Show, not Tell. Not that the Loop itself matters to the story. Nor does the proposed Tootencamden Line, which I got a chance to name-drop in this new scene. The scene also gave me a chance to put a rail fan in the book, so that was all to my advantage.

(Actually, I was going to explain how the Northern Line Extension is going to come off the Loop, but I don't want to set that up as an easy access to the system. I have something more epic planned for the big action scene.)

So the main challenge this morning is to put down enough words to make the scene seem comfortable and un-rushed, and just enough specific detail to give it a sense of verisimilitude without drowning the reader in gasometers and Tesco and cricket grounds and so on.

And then pick up the narrative again with my last big "poverty" scene, where I want to show the inside of a hostel. And that one is the same problem, except the detail I don't want to show too much of...I don't know myself.

Then back to the Imperial War Museum for more costume porn.

Rough Sleeping

Isn't that an amazing map? And it turns out, that strip through Limehouse and Ratcliff is still there on modern maps, except now it includes more of the Isle of Dogs.

But, alas, I really can't follow this up the way I want to. I know there are options beyond hotels and hostels and Air BnB. There are worlds, intersecting worlds of shared rentals and sleeping rough and shelters and St. Mungos and crashing at a friend's.

I'd love to write that book. I'd love to write the book in which the diary of the shopgirl (who is sleeping rough on a railway platform herself) is presented in full-page excerpts.

But that's too much work. Plus I think it might be the wrong kind of book. When you get right down to it, being hungry and having uncomfortable living spaces isn't the story of my heroine, it is a temporary obstacle. She doesn't do without because archaeology really doesn't pay that well and life is hard for everyone. She'll do without because she's lost in the desert while searching for the Golden Orb of Somebody.

The intersect with the past in this one is entirely filtered. It is through study and discovery and exhibits, not through direct experience. As much as in some other book I might have my protagonist re-live the experience of someone in the past (or just set the damn book in that period in the first place), the closest Penny is coming is with a little dress-up and some museum displays.

Besides, her poverty problem is artificial and temporary. She has her plane tickets. She has friends she can borrow from. She most certainly has people she could crash with. The only reason I've got her, in the chapter I'm working on now, taking the tube down to Brixton to look at a poor neighborhood with council estates and all that is to ramp up the pressure on her while I work around to the climax of the book.

Plus I need the page count.

So don't look for a deep look into the realities of being poor in London. This is just going to be enough surface impressions to sell emotional arcs of the story. Nothing on the practicalities of the hostel circuit. Just a bit of dirt and grime and the experience of riding the tube.

Research Triangle

A modern writer might ask, "What's the point in 'Write what you know' today? Can't you just Google it?"

And it is a fear. We remember the delights of the surprising and the obscure in so many books we had read. We remember having that glimpse into how to fly a plane or who the Hittites were or what a Lighthouse Keeper's life is like. We grew up as writers practicing how to do that; how to tease out those rare plums and then frame them for the reader. Is that all gone now?

I don't think it is.

Because here's the thing. There are still advantages in knowing a subject before you decide it should be in the book and then open that Google search page.

Three things come to mind.

The first is that you know the thing exists. That's not small. I had another "meet for lunch scene" I needed so I set it outside the New Globe theatre. Of course I looked it up, and found pictures, and looked at it on a map, and used the map to find somewhere to sit. But I did this because I already knew there was such a place (I've been there) and it was something that fit in with what I wanted to do with the book and the character.

I've done a lot of blind searches in which I wander around trying to find something interesting to have in a scene or to build the whole scene around. The India Club restaurant is one of those; I didn't know about it. I did, however, know that the most traditional London food there is...is Indian. So I had that head start in knowing where I wanted to look.

The second is you understand your results. When you know something about a subject, you have a better filter. You know what is good data and what is suspect.

You also have an idea of the shape of the box. That gets into the whole difference between a designed educational course and self-study; the latter tends to be blind to its holes. The former makes sure you get a proper survey of all of it.

Knowing something about a subject means you know when your source is only telling you part of the story, and you have to look in other places as well.

And of course, if you already know the subject, you know the resources. Or at least the shape of them. While I was researching the "getting dressed as a VAD nurse" scene I ran into a "Burda 125." I didn't follow it up, but I not only know what it means, I've done that before. How to look in the Burda catalog and how to find a pattern in it from the name or code. The fact that I knew something about the subject made what the Google Search turned up more useful.

The third and last is that when you know something, you have started connecting it in your mind. You know things that are like it. You know things that spring off it. When I wrote a scene with a Venetian busker in a previous book it was based largely on me knowing the operas being quoted. But I also have known buskers. And he has a little amp and I've helped someone buy one for her own performance so I know how that works, too. Not well. There's details I didn't know (but didn't bother to research because they didn't need to be in the book.)

The plumage don't enter into it!

Just finished a monster 2,800 word "scene." Actually, three scenes; I'm lumping several together for ease in editing.

Puts me at about 16K. It is moving more quickly. The research seems to have been about right. I couldn't do it just from the materials I'd copied and saved, but they told me what I was going to do and led me in the right direction to fill in a couple of details.

About James Greathead and Cretaceous clay and the proper way to describe a Norwegian Blue.

It is quite likely when I go through the primary edit passes I'll take a third or more of the various name drops and references out, and then explain better the ones I've left in. Greathead and Brunel matter, for the plot and themes of the book. Monty Python, not so much.

Actually, there's one more text chunk but it will be simple. They are going to get fish and chips near the Tower then watch the first part of the torchlight ceremony.

The following chapter is insane. I'm going to jump over the visit to the Lambeth Larks (my invention) at the Firehouse (my way of referring to an actual Kennington theatre) and head straight for the Imperial War Museum.

Which is dripping with poppies (don't know why those weren't in the previous scene), and otherwise going crazy for Armistice Day, and I haven't even figured out what costume the reenactor group is talking my protagonist into.

More research. (My thought is the next weekend she plays an ATS. For this one, some kind of nurse or somebody that would be seen on the streets during the Blitz.)

Monday, she finally gets to do some real archaeology.

I just found a "Dressing as a..." video (from a series I knew about before and always intended to use as reference) for a WW I volunteer nurse. And I found a book written by one of her experiences (same person who wrote National Velvet) Which was free. So...I guess the first costume is going to be a VAD.

And the Tower scene is written. It was just a little 200-word coda.

The game's afoot.

I'm at 12,000 words and the plot is being introduced at last.

Research-as-you-go is still a thing. Was prowling around neighborhoods finding a nice restaurant to hold a meeting and the choice -- The India Club -- required watching a YouTube video to understand the "back alley" comments made on a review site.

And I've decided I am fine with silhouette conversations. The bit I'm in now, Kishan, Derwyn, and James are all talking, but nary a one of them will be so much as mentioned after this scene. So I don't care a whit which one is actually speaking.

Sure, they've ended up having character. But the choice I think I need to make for this book is a lot of dialog passages where nobody is named because it isn't important and the reader shouldn't think it is important.

But anyhow. I've gotten through another day of Field School and more arguments and confrontations and visited the statue of I.K. Brunel and we've had tandoori. But now they are ready to talk about the plot.

Except it has been long enough, I have to go back through my notes to look up what the plot is!

Boudicea

So I thought about turning Helen and Amy (the two TBM's) around and having them dig towards Battersea. Also thought about renaming them so I could make some remark about barbarians advancing on Londinium.

But I'm willing to go with history. The main things I have to change is to delay the work at the actual Battersea Power Station -- which is very close to but not contiguous with the Battersea Power Station Station (according to sources TfL is already making roundels which read merely "station," but I know some wag is going to stick a superscript "2" on the ones they can reach.)

And of course the original Nine Elms station is being rehabbed to serve a new line...which is probably lower and may be even across the railways or something.

And since I've got so much detail on Kennington Green, now, I'm using the real thing and because of the delays on the Northern Line Extension, I might even be able to use it as it was historically. To the best of my ability to narrow it down, the current (as of today) Google "satellite" image is within a month or two of when my story is technically set! The street view varies, with some of it being before the Acoustic Shed was taken down.

The main difference here is not only is the real Kennington Green very small, the archaeology was completed in June of 2015 and there was nothing of archaeological significance found. Basically, it was Kennington Common, along with the somewhat more fruitful Kennington Park. The only "structure" recorded is a pond, with a ditch running to Vauxhall Creek, and the residents filled it in sometime after 1790.

I'm thinking strongly of giving them some dead space inside the hoarding but outside the acoustical shed, where they can find damn-all but at least train on methods. I presume the Field School had a better idea, but whatever plans they may have made change when they get a chance to work at the old Nine Elms platform.

I still might slow down Amy and Helen, though. In our world they broke through in 19 Nov 2017, but it would give the story an extra kick if I delayed them by exactly one year.

***

In any case Kennington really works for me. I was going to explore part of the neighborhood anyhow because returning character Graham lives there and is going to put Penny up for a week or two. The neighborhood is a crazy-quilt mix of gangs and violence and cricket players and retirees and some extremely expensive housing and it is a gay mecca. So pretty much everything. All sorts of odd history, too.

And oh yeah. Within a year of the story, the police chased down a guy who was carrying what they called a "notched machete" (the picture looks like something from the stupid part of the Museum Replicas catalog) and someone fired a crossbow bolt at the pitch of the Oval during a match.

But besides being colorful, it is experiencing the same forces...a kind of gentrification, really...that is hitting along the entire Northern Line extension. The same forces that are gutting the Battersea Power Station and ripping down the New Covent Garden Flower Market in order to put up million-dollar condos with a mere piffle of low-income housing added to the mix (guaranteed 6.5% but they've changed it at least once already. Pray we do not change it further).

What any of this has to do with archaeology I'm damned if I know. But it is pretty much a success of once again throwing my would-be archaeologist into a situation where historical preservation is just one chip in an ongoing struggle.

A dog's breakfast

Campfire has a new version out. They are being very nice in letting people use the trial version free until the end of April. And they do seem very nice, well-meaning people.

I still quit without bothering to save. I still have my original problem, which is that it is proscriptive. As such, I find it too limiting. I wanted to try to block out my timeline. I started that, then poked into character arcs to see if that would help. Can't start an arc without a character -- well, that lets out the thematic arcs I wanted to chart, or the arc of "what have we figured out in the ongoing mystery." Started a character anyhow, and got stuck again on the "must have A first name and A last name."

Well, damn good thing no Russian novelists are using this, eh? Or to go from the sublime to... well, James Fenimore Cooper, whose "Deerslayer" carries more names than he carries bullets.

Scrapple bothers me in that you can't resize the boxes and even changing the color is a bit kludgy.  There's no useful variation in lines and they can't be labeled, either. But it is enough for now.

***

Spent yesterday planning out Part II of the London book. Part I came in at 8.7 K which is a little light, but on successive re-reads it doesn't feel overwhelming for the reader. Not too many descriptions or facts, very little strange dialects to wade through (much, much less than I expected). A few too many characters, though.

And today...was both curse and, eventually, blessing when it came to nailing down some details.

This is why we do research. Every time one door closes, another opens, as my old Gaffer said. Great guy but terrible cabinet-maker. Anyhow!

There already is a Herne Hill station. It's above-ground, but in any case the actual neighborhood is a bit in the wrong place. I might still use it but there's a bigger problem. See, the construction work at Battersea Power Station is part and parcel of the Northern Line extension off the Kennington Loop.

And a look at the real map and it doesn't make sense to put a station where it crosses the Victoria Line. It really does want to be close to New Covent Garden Market. And, oh yeah, Battersea Power Station Station (yes, really) is pretty much right on site, and the giant shaft and construction lots and etc. were there before the subway got very far because that's where they lowered the TBMs from).

So does this mean I can't have a scene at the deserted power station? And what about the supposed rehab of Nine Elms (the old historical, which is UNDER New Covent Garden Market)?

My plotting doesn't even like the....oh, boy. As I was typing this I saw the answer. It is a doozy. I thought about a low-key infiltration off a surface entrance. Well, the actual Northern Line Extension is deep as heck. It runs under the Victoria Line. But since I'm already sneaking into Battersea, seems like I could revisit and actually get into the tunnels that way...

Anyhow. I was worried about the scale of construction and the high profile of the project, but it works. Not in the "we're working on a little subway thing in the middle of a somewhat down-market suburban area" I'd originally envisioned, but in other ways. Ways that work in to the themes I've been building into this thing all along. I just need to juggle stuff to make them work.

So that's been my morning. Reading articles, watching videos of the construction, reading pdf's of archaeology/geology in the area.

And, well...still haven't narrowed down on what it is the London Field School is offering to their students before they start digging at Nine Elms. I'm close, though. There was a glassworks in Lambeth...somewhere...and a cemetery discovered in the work on the New Covent...that place.

And I think I have it. Pity I already talked about skeletons, but I can have them working in ground that is past the Victorian layer, with the good stuff already out of the hole but at least some stratification to identify as they see if there is...oops, yet another document...an old Roman road.

And, oh. Nine Elms itself is the name of a road that ran from York House (in Lambeth, a bit West of the Imperial War Museum) to Vauxhall. Presumably, back when it actually had a Vaux Hall.