I feel that this act as it is does not convince me and cannot convince the listener.

The above is a quote from Puccini himself, as he struggled with the impossible last act of Turandot. The problem he faced is that the most sympathetic, most Puccini-like heroine in the opera is murdered late in the story, and he faced the impossible task of bringing the audience around to accepting the climactic love duet would be sung by and to her killer, the "Cold Princess" herself.

Some reviewers believe he pulled out some of his Puccini magic, wrapping meaning and melody around to create a strange synthesis between the kind gentle slave-girl Liú, who gave her life for love, and the princess Turandot who has been up to this moment executing would-be suitors right and left. But any such legerdemain took place after Puccini's sudden and untimely death; he left this his last opera uncompleted.

#

Here's all the opera quotes in Part I of my current draft. (In Part III someone will give partial translations in English, and also utter the words, "Nessun dorma.")


...“La tua pronuncia è unica…” he started. Then he beamed, operatically. “La donna è mobile,” he said instead. “Muta d'accento!”

“Tu pure, o Principessa,” Giulio said, sounding like he was flirting with me. “Nella tua fredda stanza, guardi le stelle.”

For a moment his expression was serious. “Vissi d’arte,” he told me softly.


Rigoletto and Tosca are in the Public Domain and are quite safe. And, as is the nature of opera arias, the public name is the same as the first line of "Vissi d'arte," "La donna é mobile," and "Nessun dorma."

The most-quoted part of "Nessun dorma" is the second stanza, containing "il nome mio nessun saprà!" Which I will not quote in the novel, nor will I use any of the popular English translations. My in-universe excuse is that Penny has found the only street singer in Venice who doesn't know much English. At the moment I'm considering having him conflate with a later verse and say something like, "No-one but you shall know my name."

I actually look forward to taking flack for an "incorrect" translation. That means that a fellow opera buff will have read the thing. Well, doesn't take that much of a buff; it's probably the most famous opera aria in the world. All three are way, way up there; they are the kind of excerpts people would recognize, from art dealers to gondoliers to, well, many of my readers.

It is there because it advances the plot and supports the theme, because playing with language and the embedded meaning in artworks are both part of the process of problem and solution, the conflict if you will. And because it falls within the class of material which can achieve "pleased recognition."

This is true across all sorts of fiction. It isn't just a trivia game the reader is playing for points. Say you are doing a story set in the 40's and you mention "In the Mood" is playing on the radio. Most readers who have chosen to read a story set in the 40's will recognize the name and remember the song. They will run the gamut, of course, from just starting to learn about the period and struggling to remember key details, to being extremely familiar with the period and wishing the author had made a less obvious choice. But for all there will be that moment of recognition, of knowing the reader and writer are on the same page, sharing and communicating a similar understanding of the material.

You would expect a globe-trotting story to expect you to have heard of Venice and know it has canals and gondoliers. And that you are going to see people saying "hello" in German. And set in Athens, someone is going to bring up the Persian War, Greek gods, Homer, and Ouzo. And you expect to learn a few things you didn't know before, but also be presented with things you are happy to recognize.

And I'd venture there will be quite a few people waiting for Penny to finally share in their knowledge. In the scene above, she immediately recognizes something is up, but it isn't until Venice that the shoe finishes dropping.

Sing a Song

It is annoying.

Songs are copyright, of course. The music, the sheet music, the lyrics, most recordings. As are many things. ASCAP, however, is very protective. Basically, you can't quote a single line of a song in a work of fiction. Nor is it easy to get the legal rights if you chose to go that path (just figuring out who to contact is a chore).

Means you end up with scenes that are the narrative equivalent of those weird cigarette brands you used to see in movies. But instead of having something that looks familiar but isn't the same, instead you have these weird gaps in the text where the characters (and narrator) are suddenly forced to talk around it.

"Like Shakespeare said, 'A rose by any other name.'"
"Or like John Lennon. The Beatle's song 'Imagine.' You know, 'something something something.'"

I have people quoting from Tacitus. Quoting from operas that are older than 1929. But then I get to certain scenes where I have five hundred Oktoberfest guests clapping and singing and all I can write is, "They sung that song by John Denver."

There are two other places where a song comes up the same way a quote from Shakespeare would come up or a plot line in a movie would come up in conversation. In one case my historian character is about to board a plane to Istanbul and -- just like everyone I hang out with -- immediately quotes from the song. Except of course she can't. She can only describe that she thought of the song or sung part of the song but I have to leave the actual words unsaid. There's another bit where an impromptu rendition of a Disney song crops up from an unlikely source. And if there's one rule to live by in copyright, it's don't mess with the mouse.

It reads very weird when you are in the middle of a fully-quoted conversation, is what I am saying. And it isn't because those words have a special poetry that, alone, can express my meaning. All I want to reference is the presence and meaning of the song in this particular decade, in the same way I'd give the color of an automobile or the author of a book or the ingredients of a pizza.

(It is especially odd since the title of the song occurs in the chorus. So if you write, "She sang 'Country Roads'" you are fine, but if you write, "She sang, 'Country Roads...'" you are in copyright violation?)

And, drat, it is worse. I've got a couple of scenes dependent on snippets of the librettos from three operas being quoted. It has to be the actual words, in the original Italian, for them to work. And it turns out that although Puccini is indeed in public domain, "Nessun Dorma" -- is not. (It was completed after his death and bears a copyright renewal date in the 50's).

Yes, there is Fair Use. But it is notoriously murky. There is no bright line. No seven second rule or anything like that. It is determined by a judge evaluating the balance of four conditions (commentary, transformative use, damage, and extent).

It still annoys me that the Orangeman can play a recording of Pavarotti singing the thing, but I can't risk quoting as little as a single line in my novel.

Yes Rly

The experiment was worth it. Another evening of tinkering with Kindle export options and I got a half-way decent looking text. Which I looked at both on the Previewer software and on Kindle for Mac (I can't, however, preview on my phone without going through a lot more hoops. Fortunately AnkleZombie's Preview software will simulate phone display.)

So it scans pretty well. A lot of the stuff I was agonizing about, like too many sentences beginning with "I," too many extraneous details, too much detail overall...well, they basically work.

The character stuff -- specifically, the interaction with her pursuer through the bulk of the book -- works as poorly as I thought, though. Good thing that's the major item on the work list.

I'm finding actually the stuff I'm marking for deletion now is mostly explanation. The context seems to be explaining well enough without the narrator having to spell it out.

But I still need to go back through all of the Germany chapters before I can move forward.

Owl Really

So I figured out how to do custom scene separators in Scrivener. Actually, I figured out more than that. As of the more recent Mac OS the 32-bit kindlegen no longer works right from within Scrivener. Amplezonk is pushing their new .mobi formatter, the Kindle Create system, and last I heard only have links to the 32-bit -- but they are also offering Kindle Previewer 3. Which, surprise surprise, contains kindlegen 64-bit inside. Because after all you can modify texts slightly from within Previewer, so of course they just stuck a copy of their own editor in the resources and leveraged that.

If you control-click to look through "Package Contents" on the ap, you'll find the executable. Make a copy somewhere useful (like the Applications folder) and point Scrivener to it, and you can output a Kindle reader-compatible eBook straight from Scrivener. 

As part of this process I ended up changing the way I organize again. Although you can easily uncheck or otherwise identify work files within the "Manuscript" folder as non-compiling, it is slightly smoother and cleaner just to keep all that stuff outside. Since the nature of a text file (and even if it is a "folder," as in has text files in hierarchy under it) is unrelated to the format and contents, it is easy enough to write in scenes and later collect or promote to chapters et al.

Inline graphics are easy. The thing about Scrivener is you can automate all the centering, spacing, enumeration, and etc. of titles. Generate a TOC on the fly as well. Which is great for eBooks because just putting "Chapter One" in a bigger font would mean sometimes it would wrap funny on the end-user's machine. Doing it in code means it scales properly with viewer size and font size.

It will of course pop the standard "#" or the also-common "* * *" between scenes automatically as well. Or you can point to an image stored in the Scrivener project, in typical markup: ($img:owls.png;h=50). Seanan McGuire is one of the writers I've seen doing that recently.

So...printed out a photograph of an Owl of Athena discovered during the Parthenon restoration (I bought a ceramic copy of that one while I was at the museum, too). Taped that on to the light-box I got a long time ago for just such things. After finally finding a brush pen that wasn't all dried out, mocked up a black-and-white treatment. Edited in GIMP, added an alpha channel and exported as a transparent PNG (so it will work with off-white paper).

And why? Well, the new outline is starting to take shape. But one of the things I'm trying to solve is how it reads; how it flows, how much time is spend between things and during things, how much it seems to jump around, etc. For that it would be cool to be able to see the text in something resembling the final format.

This isn't just for ease of viewing. I actually pad scenes or added lead-in material to compensate for what I was feel are problems in chunk size and transition. So this is going to help me know what actually has to be in the text.

And at the moment the cuts and changes are fairly small. The changes really start to hit at a place I was unsurprised to have them hit; at the point where the real adventure starts. Most of what I'm doing is punching up certain characters, giving them more visibility and a more specific role, and most of that is going forward.

Except as a result of these notes I really, really want one more Germany scene now; some excuse to scale the walls of a castle in the process of doing something heroic. Saving a kitten, I don't know.

But back to writing. As nice as it was to spend an evening learning about how to set up chapters and scenes in Scrivener, and some of the more advanced export/compile settings, and of course do a little graphic arts, it is way too early to play with my probably-a-bad-idea cover.

(Greek pot on one of those dramatic gradient-and-fog backgrounds. Photo-real black-figure ware, but created in 3d with the figures in modern dress).

* * *

A slight edit: although it is possible to use a transparent image in Blogger (it requires replacing some of the stock CSS) it is not currently supported on Kindle. After struggling with it for a bit I went through my Kindle library, turned on the sepia page color option, and opened every book I owned that had extra graphics for chapter titles and similar. Not a single one passed the white square test.

Zombies of the Heliopause

Back a few months ago I made a throwaway joke about a "near future military werwolf vampire urban fantasy romance."

So I started plotting one. I've been having so many issues trying to repair the plot for the current novel, I wanted to see if I could actually write a clean plot if I started properly. So every now and then I take a break from the one and jot a few notes into a growing file.

Plus I had some spare parts lying around from an abandoned short story that was a tongue-in-cheek transhumanist take on classic horror tropes.

Given that I've also been watching a lot of videos about writing, including of course Terrible Writing Advice, it seemed obvious to go full Meyer and make it a vampire werewolf love triangle (In Space). So yeah...it's a tranhumanist Twilight meets a bleak and gritty Starship Troopers. (Or Halo meets Abbot and Costello meet Dracula and the Wolfman. Only without Bud and Lou. Take your pick.)

Well, the best comp title I've got for The Enceladus Calyx is "An archaeological Romancing the Stone -- without the romance." Which really underlines the weakness I'm struggling with now; that there are no strong central character relationships, positive or antagonistic.

So why not build a novel around a young idealistic pilot, a gene-spliced super-soldier who fears his animalistic instincts, and a cryogenic rescue turned immortal cyborg infiltrator, in a doomed romance amid a whole bunch of ground-side action in the setting of an apocalyptic Total War?

I'm not saying that's seriously the next novel, but it sure is fun to work on when I need a break.

pining for the fjords

I had to stop writing just short of the Munich chapter.

The novel's not dead. I could finish it from the present outline and it wouldn't be that bad.

But it should be better. So I'm trying a new outline. And that's driving me back towards the basic questions. Shoe-horning thematic material into what I already had didn't seem to be working. I need to take it apart to much smaller pieces in order to rebuild.

Take that very Munich chapter. I was having fun with my protagonist buying a ticket to "München" and after figuring that part out, still says, "Well, at least it isn't October yet." Oktoberfest of course is mostly in September. The next bit I wanted was she sees someone she didn't expect to see again, everything clicks as she figures out who actually threw her in a well in a previous chapter, and reacts by leaping across a table to tackle him. Then there's an amusing battle-of-competing stories which is less a fight with an opponent and more a harsh lesson on the basic techniques of social engineering.

So, yeah. As outlined, she gets some answers to the central mystery, and she gains some new skills, and it closes the arc of one of the characters. It has an actual antagonist and there is conflict with him. But...

This was intended to be, and I still feel should be, an adventurer-archaeologist story at heart. And there is a lot of variation within that concept but a common core plot module is to go to an exotic place and, despite opposition, solve a puzzle that advances the final goal. (Typical goal being "get the artifact." Whether the artifact is the goal of the bad guys or a way to stop the bad guys or a key to something else with the bad guys getting in the way, there is almost inevitably an artifact center stage).

So. As per the current outline she didn't chose to go to Munich. She doesn't go there hunting answers to specific questions. She doesn't struggle against opposition to solve a puzzle, well, not very clearly. This would be acceptable in a full work as there are times when what the protagonist achieves is to befriend the right person or stumble on a discovery or otherwise advance through the story in other than doing a specific archaeological puzzle. The problem is, the Munich scene as outlined is entirely typical.

I have other issues, of course. Even if I do nothing to the thematic plotting and the creation of concrete antagonists, there are structural problems. The first-act development takes too long, with the plot starting after a lot of extraneous material has been presented. The big crux either happens too early or too late. The story is meant to be primarily Athenian, but switches tracks far too early to spend time in two other nations; settings that largely do not advance a central coherent theme.

I've been complaining about being constrained by geography and time. Places and events are where they are, even if it is inconvenient to the plot. But the current set of problems comes from the current plot structure. I don't have to go to Venice at all, and I don't need to do a big episode on the Adriatic; I could, for instance, fly out from Munich (or even from Frankfurt) and move the ferry scene to the Aegean.

This is the problem of having outlined the mechanicals. The outline essentially said "it should take this many thousand words to get from incident A to incident B, pad out the journey with other incidents as needed."

The first sign of trouble was when the word counts weren't lining up. The second sign of trouble is that I can easily put in enough incident to hit the outline, but that same outline never had specific goals and obstacles that were integrated emotionally and thematically by using specific characters to embody them.

Sure, you don't have to plot this way. Hemingway got a hell of a story out of a man, a boat, and a fish. (So did Melville...well, there were more people on the boat and that's one big fish but anyhow). It is just the strongest plot.

And what's so frustrating is the pieces are there. I have characters who could take larger roles. I have themes which could be made clearer and more concise. And I have settings that are exotic and could be used as proper steps on the quest and arenas for conflict and puzzle-solving. If you squint really hard, that's even how Munich is currently being used. But it isn't focused enough to work.

So I'm stopped while I try to re-plot. If I can find the through-lines then I can do a heck of a lot with juggling and re-purposing scenes. And I will have stronger material to expand the existing scenes and build new ones; at the end of the day my word count won't be so terribly impacted. IF I can solve this...I might still have draft done before the end of the year.

Scrivenings

Based on the actual draft starting somewhere in early April, I'm averaging 10K words a month. At that rate I actually would have the first draft done before the end of the year.

That's NaNoWriMo pacing.

Is even slightly better than that. I've hashed out a lot of deep plot and character issues over these early chapters, and I have hope and a not-unjustified expectation of getting faster. Also I'm doing a lot of editing as I go -- very much against NaNoWriMo tradition -- and it will take mostly clean-up passes to get it into final shape.



But today's essay is about Scrivener IOS.

I've written several scenes from scratch, and done some editing, with nothing but iPhone and -- the almost indispensable -- iClever keyboard. It works...well enough. All of my complaints are basically due to limitations of the iPhone, especially, the limited screen real estate.

Oh, and to my current working methods, which leverage parts of Scrivener which do not emulate well in the IOS version.

So. Basic typing is good. One immediate and wonderful enhancement over using the built-in notes function is pinch-zoom. Basic hotkey functions work. And you are within the Scrivener file structure, meaning instead of typing into one long document, you are typing into something of controllable length which is nested (and can be nested indefinitely) into a hierarchy of chapters and scenes and projects. You can also flip back and forth between certain related documents with a single key press.

I wouldn't want to work without the external keyboard, however. Too much screen real estate is lost otherwise.



But as for the more powerful edit functions: well, first, selection is a pain on IOS. So selecting a block of text to paste it elsewhere is better left for the main computer. Split screen doesn't seem to be functioning, either, and that hurts in two ways; one is being able to cut and paste between documents so as to, for instance, save a previous draft to the cut file. The other is being able to leave a window open with the research data.

The iPhone version also lacks corkboard view. And, because of how IOS handles files (and memory issues) it can't do Scrivening mode. This is the ability to seamlessly string together separate documents into a single continuous read. If I was splitting files at the scene level this would be more painful. As it is, though, it is easy enough to tab through consecutive files. Oh, and there also doesn't appear to be the ability to move files around in the hierarchy, not on IOS. So to have this ability to arrange and re-arrange you need to duck back to the main computer again.

Fortunately synchronization is easy and smooth.

A last edit function I miss on the IOS version is hotkey text color. Let me get to that in context of my current work flow, though. First I set up a file structure with named folders for research, draft, and general planning -- the later has theme, outline, elevator pitch, and side discussions I want to keep intact instead of spread out among other folders.

Within the draft folder I have, currently, a five-book structure. Each "book" folder contains three sets of files; a set of drafts by chapter, notes pertaining specifically to each chapter, and catch files for deleted material. As I write the first draft of a chapter I plan the basic structure within that chapter's notes file, then flip between that and research files in the lower part of the split-screen with the draft on top.

When I go back for editing, I add the cuts file to the split. Usually, though, I start by reading through and using colored text to mark potential deletions (red), potential insertions (green) and line notes (blue). Then when I do the actual edit the deletions get saved in the cuts file (in case I change my mind later, or hope to move that cut material to a different scene), the line notes get cut entirely, and the insertions, when properly expanded and integrated, are converted to standard black text.

And obviously none of this process works on IOS.

I could probably come up with alternate ways of working. I used to jumble notes and cuts at the bottom of chapters during construction and editing, and delineate line notes with ///. This would work on IOS, but would get annoying when you can see such a smaller slice of text to begin with, and have more work to scroll to the end of a file.



So, yes. If planned around the functionality that is in the IOS version, I could write a novel entirely on the iPhone. But as it is, I'm happier to be able to do certain kinds of work there and leave the heavy lifting for a full computer.