Planes and Trains

There have been books with a lot of travel details. Dracula had the last-act chase. The (intended) final Sherlock Holmes case had a bit of a chase, too. Verne's Around the World... is almost nothing but extensive detail on how exactly you get from Point A to Point B. The World's Worst Books also have lengthly descriptions of characters plodding from Point A to Point B, although they are overshadowed by the same characters making long telephone calls to explain how they got from Point A to Point B.

What I'm leading up to, though, is how different it is today to be writing them.

I'm writing a modern work, which means I can basically use up-to-date schedules, reviews, pictures, and even real-time tracking. I currently have open the Lufthansa reservations page, a page that reviews the Business Class (and only) lounge they maintain at Athens International, and a FlightTracker page showing the exact route of a past flight, right down to how many minutes were spent taxiing.

I also have open pages showing the weather, time of sunset, and lunar phase for the exact date used in the novel (October of last year, if you are wondering).

One could far too easily slip into the mistake of a published, official Tomb Raider novel (reviewed elsewhere on this blog) that descended into an almost stop-by-stop description of a journey through the London Tube. The trick is, as always, to find the details that stick. The places outside of mere numbers like the exact time of sunset or number of seats in an Airbus320 "sharklet" variation, to the places where flesh meets metal; where a human being reacts to the thing. That's why travel books and blogs and reviews are so useful.

And even better is having boots on the ground. Or unlaced shoes in the mere 30" of the so-called "Business Class" of the Lufthansa flight from ATH to FRA.

Shopping Trip

Huh. I just looked around to what the standard was for handling text messages in a work of fiction. There isn't one. Some people (and style guides) are being reactionary and demanding it be treated just like dialog;

"Are you ready?" he texted.

 Others are looking to the example of epistolary works like Dracula and setting out each message in an isolated and indented chunk of text, such as:

    Are you ready?

But I hold with those like the current crop of YA writers, who are facing the task of depicting a digitally integrated world in which internal monolog and in-person conversations and text chats are all twisted together in a continuous skein. For them, are you ready? is the clear leader.

My "no research" novel is taking enough research it is actually making me feel better about the Bronze Age novel I didn't feel competent to tackle yet. The modern world is so filled with detail, every single thing you try to nail down becomes a rabbit hole. And once you've found them, it is an almost impossible task to communicate to the reader. If you put too much in they'll get confused, if you leave too much out they'll squawk. There is such a surfeit of detail, and everything that does get in needs to be explained. Somehow.

Of course, every single age there ever was, was a modern age. 1860's Kansas City had "gone about as fur as they can go." For me, nailing down whether they used the Murex dye in Mycenaean Crete is a heavy research task, but once I've nailed it down the environment is simple and straight-forward.

Or is it? For us, today, the Bronze Age must remain relatively simple. But people are complex. They always have been. For Kes, holding a purple-dyed thread in her hands, there must have been as many connections, as deep a rabbit hole, concerning that seemingly simple thing. The meaning it had within social systems, within economics. Its connections to the gods and other religious practices. What it reminds her of in the rich natural world around her -- connections that have already been explored for generation after generation of poets and myth-makers.

The advantage to the writer is that all this stuff, thank the gods, remains optional. I can put it in for color, and create context where it will reveal character or deepen theme, or I can leave it unsaid and the reader will not miss it.

Still, all in all, is is tempting to reflect on having to write a generic space opera, all comfortable used furniture and technology and science that I (think) I already know and all of that messy clutter that people drag into their thoughts and conversations is both made up and optional.

(Not that it would ever work. The big problem I have with the generic future setting is, no way people are going to lose that baggage of history. They presumably care less about the American War of Independence than we care about the Battle of Gqokli Hill, but the Information Age is one of those things that's really, really hard to take back. If they want to talk about the campaigns of Shaka Zulu they are going to be able to reference them. At length.)

So I just got 900 words out of my protagonist drinking a glass of ouzo (there was some food involved, as well). I'm still a little split on how many words I want to put in with her joining the other tourists and doing touristy things. That stuff is there for two reasons; to set up for later explorations of what it means to be a Modern Greek, both blessed and cursed with the heritage of the classical world. And to have plain simple (and even instructional!) fun being a tourist in a cool place.

On the larger of the pro sides, my outline said I'd be at 20K before I left Athens. On the con side, I'd really like to, before this weekend is over, write up to the point where she boards the plane to Frankfurt.

At least it is still going quickly. That 900 words was this morning's work. And I'm not entirely burned out for the day. And there's the biggest pro of them all in my current planning question. This is the origin story, and getting on that plane is the first really big step of my history buff and YouTube programmer turning into the Adventure Archaeologist she was born to be.

Buridan's Maker

There are times when being a Maker places one in the same hypothetical position of the donkey caught between two piles of hay, unable to decide which is closer.

You see a thing that looks cool and think about buying it. But then you realize that -- thanks to the skills and tools you've accumulated -- you could make your own. So you circle around that for a while.

Building it isn't a neutral proposition. Is owning the thing worth the time and resources you'd have to invest in building one? Perhaps not. So time to reconsider purchase. Well, since you've now re-valued how much it is actually worth it to own the thing, and you have to subtract the added value of increasing your skills and, of course, that it would be fun to build, maybe it isn't worth buying either.

No matter how long you chase this one around the circle, you still end up stuck between two piles of hay.



(Yeah, I want a hand drum. I have a decent bodhran and a cheap darbuka but what the piece I'm working on cries for is the rough-edged, meaty sound of bare hand on stretched hide.)



I also had the shortest crisis of confidence ever. I've been writing all day, finished the chapter and the draft now stands at 10,000 words. And I've reached that point of exhaustion where it all starts to blur and I can't even make sense of my own writing much less the actual data I'm trying to work with.

I hit a YouTube video about a conflict I'd never heard of (Celtic invasion of Greece in about 200 BC) and in the comments section, people are beating up the video and quoting Pausanius at each other and having ridiculously detailed arguments with single posts longer than any of what I'd thought were overly long historical discussions in mine. Face it, the stuff about who bridged what river is trivial.

But I forced myself into chapter planning for the "Just enjoying being a tourist" breather chapter, and hit another video over dinner to get some ideas, and here is a guy who is doing very nice camera work and seems quite personable but is on the Acropolis and keeps calling the big building they have there the "Pantheon." (Plus a bunch of other just-read-the-signs mistakes).

So am I confident? No. Am I in fact feeling overwhelmed by all that still faces me in the novel? You bet. But I'm still going.

(I've got a hell of a Spartacus going on with my dialog right now. In the big pissing contest, Athena Fox, Signor Cosimo Nardella, and Vash go into lecture mode with identical sentence structure and word choice. I don't even know, now, how I'm going to get everyone's voices distinct.)

A terrible feeling of wheat

Did I mention I hate the predictive speech-to-text on the current iOS?

The crazy gallery reception chapter is almost finished. Just have the bit where a Greek Margaret Dumont presses a protective amulet on her, and a short conversation with the gallery owner just before Penny, done with the marathon bit of improv she just pulled off, has a bit of the shakes and what will only be her first ouzo of the evening.

I'm already at 4K. Does mean I still fall short overall, though. And, yes, I could easily expand any of the existing conversations. I could have painted a more detailed picture of the Minoans, for instance. But this would only, to borrow a phrase, fatten the book, not expand it. What I really need is either more plot...or a "B" plot.

As it is I feel there's a little much already. Especially since a lot of the history and myth being talked about isn't important to the central conflicts. Both chapters 1 and 2 are largely about people showing off their knowledge; chapter 1 is Penny on the Acropolis demonstrating how she's able to have a successful history show on YouTube, and Chapter 2 is a fluid, multi-side conflict masked as polite conversation:

“Alea iacta est,” Howard raised his glass to us. “The die is cast.”

“Said?” Vash prompted.

“Wasn’t that Caesar?” Safe bet; Howard had all the signs of a military history buff, and that “est” made it Latin. “When he, what was it, crossed the Hellespont?”

Vash shook his head. “The Rubicon. Caesar crossed the Rubicon.”

“Alexander crossed the Hellespont,” Howard amplified.

“So did Xerxes,” I said.

“Alexander threw a spear into the soil,” Howard volleyed back.

“Xerxes had the river whipped,” I replied.

And never mind that the Xerxes story only appears in Herodotus and Caesar had spoken in Greek (if he said it at all). That's history for you. You can always drill deeper. Always.

Yes, there are plot-important things hidden in all of these, but for the most part they are subtle. Still, one can't just have a man jump out with a gun. Because that's not plot, either. Plot is, well, plot. Not description or dialog or action, by themselves, but what those things advance.

Speaking of which. Somewhere down the road I need to do a complete dialog pass. This is mostly to get the different speakers sounding more distinct. I also want to listen to a bunch of native speakers (I'm pretty sure I can just search "interview Greek musician" and find something) to get some of those subtleties of word order et al that come when someone isn't speaking their first language.

But also I want to make some distinctions between Penny's voice and the voice she puts on when in the character of Athena Fox. Dialog is one of the places I can underline the access she has to confidence and a projection of competence when she is in character.

(And apropos of nothing, my file names for the current "books" of the narrative are "Agora-Phobia," "Black Forest Hams," and "Owed on a Grecian Urn." If I somehow manage to add to the plot, it might give me a fourth; "What Does the Fox Say.")

A Mirror for Which

I don't understand the logic of why the mirror gag is terrible writing.

First person is a strange voice to write in, anyhow. Some people dislike it for anything in the adventure or thriller genre because the very fact that the narrator is telling this story means they survived the events they are describing. I'm not sure this is a real problem. And I don't mean via the counter example of those H.P. Lovecraft characters who scribble their very last moments in their diaries, right up to the final "aaargh!"

No, the really tricky thing in first person is not, to my mind, the presence of the speaker. It is the inferred presence of the listener.

There is a very subtle graduation from the indirect, universal "you" of, "You could drive from London to Greenwich in about thirty minutes on a good day. This was not a good day," to the disconcertingly personal "you" of, "You might not think a 90 pound girl could flip a grown man with a clever bit of Aikido, but..."

In earlier times it was entirely acceptable for the narrative voice to drop a "Dear reader" in here and there. There's the famous Frederik Pohl short story "Day Million," which not only makes the presence of a reader explicit but directly attacks them for their primitive, parochial understanding.

In most modern genre fiction, though, there isn't an implicit listener.  In first person, the narrative is meant to feel like the internal monolog of the person having the experiences; not dissimilar to how the simple past tense is used to imply events that are current -- not events which are long concluded.

But it is still very odd that, "I was five foot two and had red hair," is unacceptable, but "I'd been in Dallas for ten years but I'd grown up in Brooklyn" is totally ordinary. And this goes, too, for explaining technical details; whereas the third-person narrative is often forced to chose between raw info-dump or an equally immersion-killing "as you know Bob," the first-person narrator seems more able to get away with going on in extreme detail about things they already obviously know and have no visible reason to be suddenly explaining.

Add to this the comment made by several writers; that first person narrators are allowed to lie to the reader. This is particularly odd if you think about it. In third-person deep penetration (the default for modern genre fiction) the reader is along for the ride in the skull of one person, privy to all of their thoughts and emotions, seeing everything they see (and only what they see.) In first person, you would think that same transparency would be the rule. But it isn't.

Of course first person also has voice. One of the things I like -- but which can also be dangerous -- is that in a third person story internal thoughts are more commonly treated as dialog; "I've got it!" he shouted. I hope I've got it, he thought grimly.

This is used sometimes used in first person, especially when said person is specifically forming a thought. In other times the first person simply "thinks" as part of the stream of narration: "The entire slope was in motion now. This was not good. I swiveled downhill and shoved with all my life on the ski poles. Dammit. The tree line was too far away..."

That said, you can do this (to some extent) in third person as well. Third person deep immersion takes on the color of that third person's voice. This is especially pointed if you are swapping narrators during the story. Each character will see the world differently, focus on different aspects, describe things to their own understanding. You can't take it too far, though; a ditzy third-person could probably get away with, "The dude with the great hair leaned into the window, bare chest glistening," but not, "The cop guy yelled into his radio-thingy and more cop stuff happened." There is a certain lofty perspective, a certain accuracy of observation and clarity of language, that all third person narratives require.

The trap that is impossible to escape in first person is that it does always feel like a motor-mouth internal monolog. Like the person is terribly self-absorbed and narrating their day as they go. Plus, of course, the voice is so present and so constant any verbal ticks are going to in time become extremely annoying.

(A previous and largely abandoned novel, I was going to alternate POV between a third-person narrator, deep immersion on the male protagonist and essentially truthful within his limits of understanding, and first person from the female protagonist but gaudy, sometimes even purple prose and a visibly blatant disregard for the actual facts in favor of a fairy-tale romanticism.)

On to Atlantis!

The writing finally started happening. In fact, it is happening so well right now I'm tempted to take a chunk of the week off work to keep at it. 5.5K in the can now, and ready to hit the crazy chapter at the Atlantis Gallery.

Sure, I was able to save a bunch of text from the previous draft. But there was a lot of re-arrangement and quite a lot of new stuff from scratch. I think I've accomplished a pretty good balance on the opening chapter; showing the situation, making it interesting in the moment but also laying the ground for later chapters, showing the character enough to make her interesting and also leaving the right amount of mystery for later.

I decompressed the opening prologue some, and shifted around the "asides" to make them work better. It is a strange thing I'm trying there; basically this is a fake-out opening, showing the adventurer archaeologist in action only its actually a budget video. I really shied from the usual approaches, like doing it all in italics, but I did want to clue in the reader and, rather more importantly, slip in some background information. So I've reserved the italics for a pair of disembodied voices that comment on the action.

Anyhow. Been messing around with some new approaches to keeping track of the text I shift around. Anything I delete, I shift to a save folder just in case the original was better. I set up macros to color blocks of text, which I'm currently using as green for desired additions, red for things that should probably be deleted, and blue for general commentary.

The problem I think I have is that I treat prose too much like it was, say, lyrics. By which I mean the flow and the rhythm mean too much to me. I've read about writers who block in a scene using vague, general terms then fill in the details later. I can't do that. The difference to me between a Mercedes or a Lincoln as a background detail is not just what each might say about period, location, economic status, but which fits the meter of the surrounding line, brings the sentence to the proper length, has the right vowel sounds.

Which means I really don't have the luxury of skipping over something with a RESEARCH LATER tag and coming back to it after I have a draft in the can. Also, when it comes to details of location and technology and similar, the action IS the thing. I need to know before I write the scene if the character is carrying an axe or a sword, because a sword can go into a scabbard but an axe is going to be awkwardly in their hand the whole time unless there's a sentence there about them setting it down.

So the next chapter may turn out to be really, really annoying. Because there's a free-wheeling conversation that jumps from one thing to another the way conversations do. I know the places I want to go and the personalities involved but not the order or the Traveling Salesman algorithm that takes the conversation where I need it to go.

You Get a New Fnord!

I got another phish in my email this morning. Proper USPS colors and images. Leading text; "An package containing confidential personal information..."

So I got a new theory. The notorious spelling and grammar of 419 and similar emails is actually intentional. It's a fnord. They are looking for people who don't worry about details, who skim through text and skip fine print. They are looking for people who will be swayed by the emotion of getting a bargain or unearned money or saving their computer from the horrible virus some kind person in Russian just discovered they have.

Or maybe it is a true fnord. People who think they are smart are the easiest people to fool. They want us to gain an unwarranted confidence in our ability to spot these impostors at a glance. Then, when all is ready, the real stuff will roll out...