On the terrace, with a cutlass

I lost track of the other point I meant to make in the last post. And that is how ridiculously easy it is to justify a certain kind of set dressing in-story. I set up up a situation in my last fanfic where Teal’c — having promised “not to go shooting up the place” — ends up defending Croft Manor by making use of the museum’s-worth of ancient arms and armor displayed in the lavish halls. To the extent that the mercenary leader responds to the increasingly bizarre reports he’s getting on the radio with, “Is this a SITREP or a game of Clue?”

But that was just for the amusement factor. Since I'm doing a story in Athens about antiquities smuggling it would be both far too tempting and far too easy to end up with a climax that's drawn straight from one of the duels in The Illiad. Bronze armor and all. But I don't want to go there, not with this. I did a whole set of short stories in which I played this game and hopefully that got most of it out of my system.

(I'm trying to think of a clearer example of what I'm talking about, this sort of taking a theme and putting it on everything. Say the plot de jour is a pirate treasure. It would just so happen that the only marine salvage vessel they could get their hands on was an old sailing ship, it would just so happen that one of the bad guys lost an eye and a leg in the Gulf War, and it would just so happen that a major chapter takes place on Talk Like a Pirate Day.)

Sure, classical subjects are going to come up. People are going to quote Homer. But they'll also quote modern authors, and talk about the current economic woes of Greece, and use FaceBook.



And that sort of segues to my current issue. My plot is getting pedestrian. Sure, there's some amusing stuff happening; my protagonist is going to almost fall from the Acropolis, be thrown from a ferry boat, and try to wrestle a giant mook (he's about to smash the titular antiquity). But I came up with this idea as a way of excusing or at least smoothing an acceptance (okay, let's be honest; my acceptance) of both some pseudo-archaeological discoveries and some crazed stunting around. Plus the conceit that untrained amateur without legal standing is going around discovering things and fighting crooks and whatever.

I don't want to do a story that only verges on the implausible then drop the reader into a sword fight on a submarine as it sinks into Atlantis in the next book. If I mean to write more than one, I'd like to avoid as much "early installment weirdness" as I can.

Even if I’m dry of ideas right now for some new action. In fact, all I can think of at the moment is...to look towards The Odessey for inspiration.

Disclaimer

Authors writing historical or history-themed fiction cover a spectrum of research ability. Oddly, though, they don't seem to plot in a bell curve. Instead the numbers cluster nearer two ends. On one, there are writers with a frighteningly good grasp of their subject. (They do vary in how well they can carry along the reader; some bring the reader in painlessly and some overwhelm the reader: reaching some sort of uncanny valley with Umberto Eco, where being overwhelmed and confused by the wealth of detail is actually a large part of the draw in reading him.)

On the other peak, there are writers who are indirectly frightening. As in, it is frightening that they managed to get published (and get positive reviews!) Now I've said before that accuracy isn't everything and there is more to good historical fiction than getting the date of Caesar's assassination right.

Still, it is somewhat comforting that few people are writing straight historical fiction from this kind of poor grasp of the material. This is more a tendency of what I've been calling "Artifact Stories," where some Lost Ancient Object of Power drives what is otherwise a standard thriller/adventure/mystery. (I'm going to give a pass to historical romances, first because there's no blanket statement, but second because their goals are generally different.)

In any case the middle ground is less occupied. I have a special fondness for those authors who inhabit it. I suspect it is a transient position; a writer might assay one book set in 44 AD Rome, but by the time they've written two or three they've probably became rather informed about the era.




That's just random musings and has no bearing on where I am now with my own attempts at historical fiction. As I develop the current book, I've been discovering what it is I'd like to do if it were a series. A bit late for this one, though. For instance; I think it would be a nice pattern to always feature two eras of history and/or two distinct cultures. My plot, however, is pretty much centered on Greece, although there's bits from both Classical and Pre-Classical eras.

And oh yeah. And maybe the answer to one of my research woes is to just put in a disclaimer. I want to use my own travel experience both for the time it saves and for that intangible authenticity of actual lived experience. But I don't want to strand some poor traveler by gushing over a shop that was there twenty years ago and was in another town anyhow.

So what the hell. Go right ahead and spell it out in the front matter. "The scenes in Town X are based on my own experience in Town Y in the summer of 2011..."

Jumping Jack Splash

So, writing a novel set during the late Bronze Age was turning into years of research. So, I took a step back to do something that didn't have "any" (well, "much,") research. So, now, I'm having some real problems with that concept.

Italy is one. I'm sending my protagonist to Athens and to a small town in Germany because I've been there or near enough. But geography is not my friend, and as the plot evolved it looks to be sending her to Italy as well.

And, yeah, it is disheartening how easy it is to fake a certain kind of shallow flavor. Way back when, I wrote a short story about a game of Assassin at UC Berkeley that goes...strange. In the first draft I went for a 1980's techno-thriller flavor. It didn't work for me, and in the next draft I went film noir. And in a surprising number of places I could literally cross out "black catsuit" and write in "battered fedora" and not have to change another word.

(The old role-playing game Champions institutionalized something like this in the "power effects" mechanism. Say your character could leap tall buildings in a single bound. It didn't matter if they did it with spring-loaded boots or by turning into water and splashing. It was just...color. The referee couldn't say; "It is below freezing on this day and SplashMan can't use his water-based powers" because if that were true, SplashMan's player would have gained character points creating that disadvantage.)

In any case I find this shallow and cheap and these days pretty much shows the reader you can use Google. The good stuff, the stuff I think adds value, is when I've got insight or deep understanding or the personal experience to give a boots-on-the-ground impression. And -- as the bronze age novel was proving -- it is really hard to get to this kind of stuff without a lot of work.

And then there's something else that's bothering me now. It first hit me when I was reading about the rather complicated situation of people in the UK who use metal detectors, but before that I'd been thinking about the Solutrean Hypothesis and how you can't engage with the problem comprehensively without talking about the modern-day experience of Native Americans.

What his me is the problem of cultural appropriation. Which is sad and amusing because that's an underlying theme in the very book I'm working on. I guess I'm reversing myself again; I'm uncomfortable putting stuff in about living people, existing organizations, etc., etc., unless I can be really sure of my facts. 

And for that, even having been there or done that, I'm not entirely comfortable. Maybe my experience in Athens was personal and atypical and I mistook a lot of what I was seeing. Heck; this blog started with me assuming my technical theatre experience was both typical and comprehensive enough to justify my pontificating about it.

And after all of that...do I even remember enough? I remember going through some rigamarole with automated ticket sales/trip planner machines in Germany. But do they still have those? Heck, I'm not sure I remember how the Ath.ena transit pass worked; where you bought it, what it covered...and I was just buying and using one last month!

Morning becomes electric

Didn't feel writerly (or up for much of anything). Went to breakfast. Brought my folding keyboard (it goes practically everywhere with me now).

And boom. You know, though, I've changed my opinion. I don't think the morning is necessarily the most creative time. I think it is because it is your first time back at work after a long break to mull over stuff.

I was typing like mad all the way through breakfast.

So I've figured out my gods. And most of the remaining holes in the plot. I'm still sort a Big Bad, and there needs to be something else going on in the climax. And there's a "stuff happens here" sequence after my protagonist crawls out of a Roman Cistern she's been thrown into near Rothenburg.

And there's at least one more little hole. I want to do an echoic scene, an eerily similar moment to something from her very first video. I even have the character for it (another character who doesn't fit the Campfire template, as he has no name that anyone in-story uses). But I don't know where on the trail from Germany to the Peloponnese it fits.

Round Earth Atheist

I've been trying out a new piece of software called Campfire. It is a writer's helper; not a word processor optimized for writing books, like Scrivener, but a story planner.

It is practically public beta so it might seem unfair to rate it now, but in the current state I don't find Campfire useful to me. At the root of the problem is the problem of being prescriptive without also being proscriptive.

Okay, take the character page as example. It prompts you to fill in a box for first, last, and middle name. That's prescriptive; it is reminding you that you might need to come up with the full name of the character because it may very well come up in the story. This is why this software exists; it is a planning software, an outlining software, that helps you nail down details and get them all in a form where it is easy to look them up again in the middle of writing an action scene.

But. Commander Spock doesn't have a first name. His culture doesn't apparently do those. But he does have a naval rank. So this first, last, middle name format is proscriptive here. My new protagonist has at least three names and they are situational, which is an approach that clashes completely with the "this is the real name, it has surname and family name just like everyone we hang out with."

As I said above, this isn't necessarily a criticism of the software as executed. I know they are working on it and will give more flexibility in later versions. (Top of my list is the mandatory background images for all the work pages are pre-installed. I have to look at either Watercolor Portland or Romantic Sunset and that really throws me off when I'm trying to think about sun-drenched Athens and Classical Greek architecture.)

The real conflict is that between having something that will hold your hand and make sure you dot your t's, that puts things in a format where you can easily find, search, compare across file; and with having the freedom to go outside of those rules.

(In the current version the, well I have to call them compromises, are that you can add additional custom blocks on top of the required blocks. Sort of. They appear in a second screen and the primary screen can't be edited. And as for sorting, all of that is handled by meta tags which are not abstracted from any of the previously mentioned blocks but have to be added by hand.)

For the moment, then, I'll stick with Scrivener. (Out of the things I would really love to see in Scrivener, the ability to add string between the index cards would be a wonderful, wonderful thing. It does do some sharing of meta data and will actually track things like character names across files, but being able to visually track connections between elements...)

I'm doing this because I'm trying to solve a little plotting problem. Well, it looked like a little plotting problem ("who thought it was a good idea to invite her?") but it turned out to be just the corner of a big carpet. In the back of my head, events are being manipulated. Manipulated by people that basically are the Greek Gods as presented in Homer.

But I haven't solved if this is obvious to the protagonist. Or to the reader. Or if it is actually a thing and some book down the line we'll actually meet them. Right now the gods are being deniable. It might just be a string of coincidence.

And that's the problem. If "Guilleo" (this character's place-holder name, and that's another thing that clashes with the name block scheme of Campfire) is talking the people at the gallery reception into letting "Athena Fox" visit the archaeological dig in Germany, is that because he is an honest art dealer and doesn't like looters, or because he's an undercover cop possibly pretending to be a crooked dealer himself, or because he's actually in Venice right now and this is the Goddess Athena herself indulging in her second favorite past-time (impersonating a mortal)?

If he is just what he seems I have a cute little scene in which the two of them are bonding with some language games -- but then who thought inviting her to the dig was a good idea? If he is undercover then I get both that scene and a later scene when he is surprisingly hostile (because he's trying to maintain his cover) and I can use him again at the climax -- but then why did he think it was a good idea to get them to invite her, a civilian? (The goddess's motivations are no problem; she figures tossing an Athena Fox into the henhouse is going to stir up things usefully. She's right.) It could even be that the goddess is working at cross-purposes to the cops, but that still begs the question of...are there actually gods in play, and does anyone notice?

This is even getting into my map, because if "Guilleo" is actually Italian then I have an excuse to stop off there on the way back from Germany, and that means I'm going the Venice-Patras ferry boat. (I am dead set on a ferry boat scene but my experience -- and the first draft in my head -- was based on the particulars of the Pireaus-Heraklion ferry. And I know the final action is on an island off the mainland but another thing I am absolutely going to get into the finale even if it makes no sense is The Olympias.)

So, gods. I'm also on for the deniable...but even this is tricky. I have a spooky little girl showing up early on (to do a short info-dump) and there's going to be hints all over her that she's not what she seems. Hints that my protagonist isn't seeped enough yet in the classics to pick up on; for instance, Spooky might give her a necklace with the head of Medusa on it.  And there may be owls later.

I mean, Penny has got to figure this stuff out eventually because that's how her character works. She figures stuff out. And the reader needs to figure it out otherwise why waste the paper on it. But what is it that they are figuring out....and is it actually necessary and functional at some junctions of the plot?

I had hoped that if I could stick all these characters and their relationships in Campfire I might be able to figure it out. But as I said at the top......nope.

The Adventure of the Carmelite Scapular

Titles are hard.


In the modern marketplace, the title of your book has to do more than attract the wandering eye. It also has to identify which of an ever-increasing number of ever-so-much-more-narrowly defined genres it belongs in.

The casual browser doesn’t want to have to read blurb, description, worse yet sample pages in order to find out whether it is actually the near future military werwolf vampire urban fantasy romance that they've been binge-reading these days, or a retro high fantasy action adventure with space ships instead.

Not that this is exactly new. The very idea of SF and Fantasy as definable (and different) brands is this. Brian Aldis did an amusing riff in his encyclopedic history of the field in which he talks about “rich autumnal colours” as one of the signifiers of a Fantasy cover. And someone commented (possibly on Charlie’s blog?) that if they saw another cover of a young woman in tattoos and a leather skirt looking back over her shoulder against a background of night and CO2 ground fog they'd puke up.

Out in the world of historical fiction, there are two kinds of covers I’ve been seeing a lot of. There’s ones which feature a young woman with a challenging expression and lots of diaphanous vaguely-period stuff blowing about her. And there’s ones that are a picture from a pot. Or a fresco — especially for Bronze Age tales, the Minoan frescoes and Mycenaean pottery get a LOT of play.

So my "Crete" should really have The Saffron Gatherer on the cover. Dammit. (Yeah, it's Minoan. Deal with it.)



The novel I'm struggling to name now is modern-day archaeology. Sort of. There are two dominant genres I am aware of that are set in the present day but involve archaeological and historical investigations. One are largely thrillers, the other are more solo adventures.

The lines blur, but the thriller is more likely to have “An international team” in the blurb, one that's “racing to stop a global threat,” and the solo adventure is more likely for the blurb to start with the name of the protagonist. Also, the solo adventurer tends to wear their series nature more openly, if only in the sub-title. (The Swabian Earspoon: a Rake Briskly adventure.)

And especially the later seems to go for artifact titles. Or you could call them MacGuffin titles. Sword of Destiny and Aztec Mask and so forth. Which often matches the content inside; an artifact-centered vision of archaeology, a MacGuffin-driven plot.

So. The fact that I'm both using and deconstructing the formulae means I should probably use an artifact title. That's the way to attract the mainstream audience for this sort of adventure-archaeology romp. But at the same time I'd like to clue in the reader.

So it is tempting to do an Artifact Title that would make the reader go "Wait, what?" In fact, I'm leaning more than a little towards something like The Münster Kylix. A Greek pot in Germany is a clue that something is going on. Also tempting is place names and thing names that just plain sound funny. That's why I used The Enceladus Oinochoe* in my last post.

But at the same time, I'm also tempted to go completely off this formulae with something like, Owed on a Grecian Urn. (Which would be appropriate to the plot, but...would make it look like a quirky detective novel, not an archaeology-inspired adventure.)


* Also appropriate to the plot; Enceladus is a giant met by Athena in a battle that's a frequent subject across several periods of pottery art. And an oinochoe is a small round bottle used to hold scented oils and often apparently worn tied to the wrist of athletes. If I can make the archaeology work out I want to reference that particular fight in the novel in just this way -- pottery art -- as a subtle foreshadow of a later incident. Except for plot reasons the pot should be larger, large enough it can be broken into several pieces -- what they call "orphans" in the antiquities trade -- but broken in such a way the figures aren't damaged.

And then there's the minor problem that more people have heard of Enceladus the prominent moon of Saturn than Enceladus the prominent figure of the Gigantomachy. It would give the title rather more a science fictional flavor than I intend at this early stage.

Black Forest Hams

Plotting on The Aurelius Dupondius or whatever the novel's going to be called. I put an archaeological dig in Germany because I felt I could fake Germany a little better than I could fake Italy.

And then I remembered some of the things I'd seen there (besides Rhine Castles. Lots and lots of Rhine Castles).

Things like this medieval street faire. Along the narrow cobblestone alleys (well, not this pic, but mostly) between more-or-less older looking houses, were craft stands and food stalls and lots and lots of beer (which many people drunk from cow horns...probably because then you didn't have to return your stein for the three euro deposit.) Many people in costume (some better than others).

And there was even a tournament:

Which besides being fun in itself is also probably explanation for why some of the people at the street faire were walking around in steel armor. Which means it is the kind of detail that's very cool to have in there for Penny (with her near-lack of any spoken German or much local knowledge) to try to puzzle out.

Yes it is cool but yes that’s a problem. Because it is cool enough for the reader to want to visit themselves. That is, it is reproducible. That is, I do a disservice to the reader if I name the wrong town.  And, heck...six years later, I don’t even remember the name of the town I was in.

So now I’m trying to track down an actual location that’s preferably in East Germany and/or in the Black Forest and has a medieval faire and is on the circuit for the Jousting associations and preferably has a nice schloss in town as well. Oh, yeah. And includes a potential Iron Age archaeological site. Romans I can leave or take but a cistern or two would be lovely.

Yeah, so much for “no research.”



Okay, where I was appears to have been Bad Münster am Stein-Ebernburg, a small and rather quiet town mostly rehabilitation spas and clinics. The only record I've pulled up so far of a medieval festival is from 2013, which sounds like about the date I was there. They do claim it is annual, though.

I'm leaning quite a bit towards Rothenburg ob der Tauber, in the Franconia district of Bavaria (Bad Münster is West of Frankfurt). Rothenburg has one of the bigger medieval faires, including a torchlit parade. The central Old Town is very medieval, very backlot Bavarian, so much so it featured in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (along with King Ludwig's wedding cake Disney castle, Neuschwanstein). 

There have been some experimental archaeologists casting bronze and smelting iron in a nearby forest. As far as other archaeological digs, I have no idea. I need to hit the more academic resources for that (my membership to JSTOR has to be worth something.)

Another problem to contemplate is it is a long way back to Athens for my protagonist. Especially if she's avoiding airplanes. It is either a long train ride to the Italian coast and a 30+ hour ferry to Greece, or an even longer train ride.

But then, there was that Danish princess who according to stable isotope analysis was not only born in the Black Forest, but went home for a visit before finally being buried in Denmark. In the Bronze Age. I hope she made a big detour around the Forest of Tollense, though.