Done

I am so done with editing. Heinlein said never to revise except under orders of an editor. I wouldn't go that far. I just can't deal with this one any more.

So I'm running the pages with the most changes through the spell/grammar checker. And then putting the revised text back up on Kindle.

Because I really need to work on the next one. Ones. Probably still the London book.

But I've moved the Military SF one to a front burner to simmer. I think I need to hit my Jason Covalito now. And that may lead me towards other references on the evolution of the horror genre. Which I'll somehow work in around the rest of my research.

Such as, if I'm going to be having a lot of locals talking like locals talk, then I should maybe sit down with a few seasons of Eastenders.

Can't even

The Battersea Power Station would be wonderful for a chapter I want in the London Book. Except, the Battersea in 2012 -- before the current consortium moved in and actually started construction.

Similarly, Aldwych Tube Station is almost perfect. Except for some major details I'd have to change.

And sure, why not? The point is to have fun with history and place. You want a chase scene across Tower Bridge or a sword fight on the Tower Greens, despite the fact that in the real world the Beefeaters would break it up instantly and the rest of the book would be about how much fun jail is.

And I need to put in more action. I need to get more exciting with history. I need to cross that line and have archaeological mysteries and interesting discoveries that aren't, quite, legit and mainstream.

That's not a slippery slope, though. That's a greased ramp on a C130 in flight.

***

Editing is not going well. Sure, I'm seeing lots of stuff I could clean up, or at least try to do better. Just this morning I threw out the second paragraph of the entire book and rewrote it almost from scratch. It gets better, but the sentence structure and basic narrative voice in the first half is, well, horrible.

But it feels pointless. The response from all the beta readers has been, "Hmm." Not positive. No. And same indicators from clicks and page downloads.

On that evidence I'd say this was a failure. The idea for the book didn't pan out. There's no point in even thinking about a sequel.

So write something else? Well, if I missed so badly on this, then doesn't that mean my instincts suck? Maybe not, but there's that general depression and doubt that makes all the ideas and half-starts in my files look thin and trite. I don't feel as if I can write any of them.

A book -- any creative idea -- takes on a life of its own. By which I mean it has a sort of strange integrity about it. A sum greater than the original parts. There is a sense of what fits and what doesn't. And I've lost that sense. I no longer feel like I have grasp of this whole to which adjustments can be made. Instead all my ideas are floating as fragments no bigger than themselves.

But I'm reading another "archaeological thriller." And I've read others. And I know the form, and I know what is in it. And I have to believe that what I created looks similar.

And that there is a market for it.

Why is that watermelon there?

When you read a book, there will be things you don't understand. I know, it's a broken record. But I keep coming back to this because it matters.

Some of these things are within the world of the book. Why this person did something. What happened to the mouse. Others are external to that world; quotes, allusions, references.

We can subdivide the latter further; at one ends, there is that which is visible and that the reader understands. For anyone of my generation, any variation on, "Luke, I am your father" is going to be noticed, recognized, and understood. Despite the diminished place of the classics today, a reference to a Trojan Horse is still strong enough one can make it with little supporting detail.

Then there are allusions which are visible but not understood. Something sounds significant or like a quote, but they don't recognize the reference. For me, it was "Yngvy is a louse!" as it appeared in Fallen Angels. I simply hadn't read the right book yet.

(Thing is, the idea of not getting it is embedded in the very fabric of that book; it is about obsessive science fiction and fantasy fans using their knowledge as shibboleths to communicate under the noses of an oppressive future government.)

And finally there are allusions which aren't visible at all. Nothing stands out to that reader, at least not this time. I had this experience reading The Stars My Destination; I'd completely missed the Count of Monte Cristo thing, for instance. Finding these is one of the delights in coming back to a book years later, and discovering things you had totally missed.



Obviously this isn't just allusions. This goes for all sorts of references, quotes, historical persons, whatever. Say, a Huck Finn looking Mississippi boy named "Sam," who hopes to one day be a riverboat pilot. Okay, that should be obvious to most people.

It should be obvious that if the reader who gets it feels clever, it is because it wasn't easy. And if it isn't easy, then some readers wont. So getting some and knowing you are missing some is inevitable. Possibly even desirable; you feel smart for getting the ones you did get, and fairly tested by the ones you didn't.

***

A big problem is when these are plot-critical. They should never be plot critical. You should never have the reader told the hero has "Learned what Luke had learned" and then base the entire last third of the book on the implied nature of his relationship with the Darth Vader equivalent.

The thing is, how can the reader know they won't be? The biggest risk here is not when the reader never notices, but when the reader spots something, doesn't understand it, knows it has meaning that they didn't grasp, and agonizes that they won't be able to take in the story properly without it.

They should trust the writer, really. They should be able to trust that the reader will never play games with plot-critical information. If it is necessary to understand the story, it will be in plain language. But for some reason the reader doesn't always do so.

And this is where the allusions and quotes and so forth become a problem. The reader knows information is being withheld from them. Not from the "readers of the book" generically, but THEM. This specific reader, who doesn't like the same pop songs as the writer and the writer's little circle of friends and thus is being cut out of something important. The writer is so into sharing their esoteric knowledge with their fan club they are cutting the reader out of their ability to enjoy.

Not saying this can't happen. But why is this the default assumption of so many readers?

My guess at this moment is this is exactly why there are shibboleths. It is about the importance of defining group identity. The reader in question has cultivated that sense of "belongs in my group/doesn't belong in my group" and is quick to identify what they think is an attempt to test them, to ask them for a password, to litmus test them. They expect gate-keeping. They expect a book to be written to exclude them.

But, you know, they aren't entirely wrong.

And that's why I singled out Fallen Angels above. It is in large part a masturbatory exercise in making the facile "Fans are Slans" (another shibboleth) meaningful in a larger (if invented) context. It is a big signal saying, "If you don't know 'There will come soft rains' then you aren't the audience for this book."

***

There is in fact this sort of gate-keeping going on in genre. A better way of looking at it, though, is as contract with the reader. It isn't specifically about undefined terms and unfamiliar words but that is how the outside may perceive it.

Science Fiction, and fantasy, have built up legacies of tropes and assumptions and terms. As much as people are complaining about it now, for instance, the term "chainmail" is going to be instantly recognized by an experienced reader. They will form an image, an idea, in their minds, and this saves the writer a great deal of effort.

Because you really can't explain everything. Sure, you could create a future world in which the equivalent niches of teleportation and robots and so on are filled by things that are distinctly different enough to need explanation and probably deserve their own names. It can be done, but it is a very different book than one that gets right to the action.

And a similar effect is in certain areas of historical fiction. If you aren't recognizing typical words used to describe a Regency setting, perhaps you shouldn't be picking up book nine of a twelve-volume Regency Romance.

It gets weirder with, say, the military SF branch of modern science fiction, where certain things are simply assumed and let stood, regardless of whether they make sense outside of the genre. Accept that not just faster-than-light travel but communication is possible, that infantry (with only the barest nod towards combined arms) will continue to rule the battlefield, and nukes are mostly a nuisance. Accept powered armor is a good idea and has no insurmountable technical challenges. Or find something different to read.

When you do dive into an unfamiliar genre, you hopefully do so with a humble acceptance that the problem isn't with the writer, or with the genre they are writing to and the norms of that form, but with you. That this is going to be hard going until you've learned the basics.

***

There's a couple of other sneaky aspects to this. One is domain; as touched on above, you feel stupid if your experience is in the wrong domain. Again I think this says more about the reader than the writer, but since the writer works to define the domain for the prospective reader...

The first book of Stross' Laundry series opens with some computer geek references. This is fair warning of one domain; that you are going to get more out of the book if you have a certain bias towards programming/computer lingo and humor, as well as retro-computing and a couple of associated things.



For me, I suspect I flew right over the references to British pop-culture that were also there. It wasn't until I was in the third book when I spotted enough of them to realize they had been all over the landscape. So this is something that could have been a barrier; I could have spotted these too early and been convinced that I wasn't the audience for these books.

The other sneaky factor is that as writers our ability to understand the reader's experience is limited. What I mean in this specific is you hear from people who are on networks with you and thus share similar interests.

YouTube, and Quora, are two gathering-places that reach somewhat outside my usual cultural haunts. Just recognize that there is a super-culture of online/English literate and other, much more subtle gatekeeping going on; algorithms working in the dark to put you in places where you feel at home.

My experience there is both tossing out and encountering from other users what are clearly quotes. On a YouTube comment thread about something not even computer related was something like, "I have no moose but I must scream." And the upvotes said I wasn't the only person to recognize the Harlan Ellison quote. Elsewhere, I did a terrible paraphrase of a line from The Tempest and I got upvotes for it.

And this is the sort of self-filtering we get. It is easy to see that there are people who will get it. Whatever "it" is. What you can't tell is what that proportion is.

***

So is this a problem of writing, or a problem of marketing? Everyone has their own personal limit as to how much they are willing to have to learn on the fly as they read. My own line is somewhere around Eco and Robert Shea; I'm willing to read the truly dense and crazy, but I'd prefer to read something more comfortable. Actually, I'd say Joyce is right over that line for me. I may tackle it some day, is what I am saying.

I can't say this isn't domain specific because I suspect it is. It took me a long time to learn the trick of reading history. I've read fantasy and SF for so long I don't even think about the process. But I am not a terribly active mystery reader. The kinds of things you are supposed to be actively trying to understand in a mystery are things I am not focused on.

Show me a weird term in an SF book and I'll be happy to worry away at it until it finally gets defined. But show me suspicious behavior by a suspect and I'm content to sit back and let the detective figure it out for me.

The point I'm laboriously crabbing towards is this isn't something I'm dealing with in the book I'm editing. Well, not just that book. It is something I need to understand for any book I set out to write.

And it can't be put as simply as "putting too much in" or other such litmus tests. You can't define "too much" -- you can't even define what is a thing! Is Sacre Coure too much? Is Montmarte? Is the Eiffel Tower? Is Paris? If you are writing milSF, can you assume rank structures and ideas like NCO, PT, and Hurry Up and Wait don't need explanation, but kinetic energy is a pill the audience can't swallow?

How can you determine the domains that will be perceived by a reader as a barrier, and when do you actually want to accept those as barriers? Because like it or not, every genre has and needs a language and an assumed truth and you can't make a book serve all readers without making it serve all of them poorly.

I don't know. I do know why the watermelon was there...two different reasons, one internal to the text, the other external (and the second I find more interesting). And this example, too, forms a sort of test. Because the audience that was right for that movie responded positively to the watermelon -- even though it is never explained within the confines of the movie itself.

(There is an argument here that Buckaroo Banzai was specifically placed in that mythic space where it is staged as if it comes out of an existing canon already familiar to the audience. The first Star Trek movie demonstrated this on a canon and a fandom that did exist. The Road Warrior did this really well, although I am not sure it intended to -- it may have been a side effect of the Western template and general mythologizing within that particular script.)

(And can you tell I am now at Volume Six of The Tardis Eruditorium? Yeah. Post-post-post literary analysis of the evolution of Doctor Who in a psycho-geographic mode. Say that five times fast!)

At the moment, though, all I can say is that I'd rather have the history in my "Athena Fox" stories and try to find the audience for that, then gate-keep myself by taking out whatever makes them distinct.

So, actually

Some of these are sort of like that.

Yeah. ProWritingAid is flagging a lot of weak language. I was already aware of the missing commas and, on the other hand, comma splices, and the "tee-up" particles "like, actually, so," and so on.

And I'm fine with it. Really. I'm 2/3 of the way through a SECOND grammar and spell check (boy, am I tired of this book now) and the software keeps nattering at me about them, but I am fine. Really.

Because these are all good verbal tics for my narrator. Better than that, these are verbal tics that she can progressively lose as she gains confidence and poise through the series. She can use more certain language. More direct language.

Although I'd love to send her to Japan next and expose her to the whole idea of polite language and the weird way future tense echoes feminine speech. There isn't exactly a future tense in Japanese. There is a "It hasn't happened yet so we aren't sure how it is going to go" tense. And that's very similar to the "I'm just a poor woman who isn't certain of her facts" mode. Which is sort of related to polite speech, except polite speech is more about using flattering language on your superiors, the longer and more elaborate verb forms, and various bit of indirection; you don't say, "This is my friend Bob" you say, "Over in that direction is a person named Bob."

Sort of. I'm distorting things to make a point. Even if I've forgotten what the point it.

I also watched a few videos on "not like other girls" and similar harmful ways female characters are being written and portrayed. I missed here, too. Of course. I wrote my protagonist to be comfortable with her appearance (and sexuality). She sees no problem with caring about her appearance and liking to dress up and she doesn't consider that this has damn all with her equal willingness to rough-house and rock climb and all that.

Trouble is, the book didn't give her enough of a chance to show this. So instead there are just bits that stick out...in the middle of something seemingly unrelated she's suddenly gushing about shoes or worrying about her hair. I'm afraid it looks weird.

One more thing I hope I can do better in the London book.

F, as in Johann Sebastian Bach

I got to the last page of grammar check. And then my dad turns in his notes.

Some of them are very dad notes. Which is to say they are the sort of thing I would have thought of, and worried endlessly about. The difference...the reason I have a book and he doesn't...is that I can after enough effort put them aside.

I have a "leg clad in lederhosen" at one moment and he worried about the fact that lederhosen only reach the knee. So is "leg" the right word, or should you say "thigh?"

Yeah, this is the sort of thing that would make me pause in the middle of writing a scene. But it is also the sort of thing I know doesn't matter to anyone but me.

Of course this is one of the biggest conundrums for a writer. You see the story from the inside. So you worry endlessly about justifying and explaining things that the reader will usually take for granted or not even notice are happening. Meanwhile the reader is worrying about things which are so obvious to you that you never thought they needed explanation...

Then he has to note that in German, the musical note we call "B," they call "H" (which is how Johann Sebastian was able to compose a tune around his own surname). This is, mind you, after giving me grief for putting too much in; too much detail, too many obscure things.

The context here is I have a character named Sharpe. That was entirely setup for a third act joke. And he was always going to have a stuck-up name anyhow, but making him Edward E. Sharpe let me make another joke about enharmonics; on the piano, E sharp is the same note as F natural, just as F flat is the same note as E natural. (They are actually different notes in theory, which is why the Germans use B for B flat and H for B.)

But no way that would go in the book. Heck, on the draft he saw, someone else nicknames the guy B flat -- the current draft changes it to F natural.

***

Dad gave me several useful notes which I've folded right in. These are largely places he read too fast and stumbled, but that's fine. I'd rather catch the stumblers than demand all the readers pay perfect attention.

He's also, though, opened my mind to some structural changes. As has the Writing Excuses podcast I was listening to at work today.

Big one being not frightening the horses -- I mean, first readers. The podcast put this in context; within the Kindle ecosystem, a lot of potential readers are going to pick up the first first pages for free to see if they like the book.

Well, the first few pages include one of the toughest info-dumps in the book. Or at least what looks like an info-dump. Either way, it can be heavy reading. It's the lecture on top the Acropolis, and Penny doesn't do this sort of thing again until the book is over half way done. But it sets up an expectation that the whole thing is going to be heavier weather than it really is.

So I simply need to savage the thing even more. That scene is doing three jobs; it is scene-setting Athens and the Classical era, it is showing Penny being working and being competent (nothing worse than starting with your protagonist doing nothing, just waiting for the adventure to start). And it was teeing up things, like the autochthonous origin of Athenians to the Gigantomachy, that will come into play later.

Well, I can screw the latter. I like having things repeat and having layers of resonance but I like having a book purchase more.

***

The other part of what is turning into yet another big edit is thinking about what fills the space. I've ranted before that people don't like description, don't like dialog, don't like mindless action. What exactly does that leave?

I mean, I've been trying to take one of the spices that defines this book and, really, my style out of the thing. I can't just leave a space.

So what I want to try is to punch up the emotion. That goes into dad's notes as well; he had trouble with a couple of transitions and what punches them is not just making the facts clearer, but giving the emotional beat time to breath.

Penny is adjusting far too easily to getting stranded in the middle of Europe. Sure, she is focused on the way out and the text should follow that focus. But this is a place where I need to tell as well as show. I can't just let her emotions be inferred. I need her to own up to them.

So, once again, another edit.

These Rude Mechanicals, who never before now labored in their minds

I've done all the re-writing I can stand. Now is the mechanical work; running the entire thing through ProWritingAid again to catch any new mistakes.

Overall I am happy with that piece of software. It, like several other language tools, leverages an online databased and presumably a learning algorithm. Meaning it has to have an internet connection and it takes it a while to finish scanning a page. Means an edit session takes up most of a day, as there's a significant wait each time a new page is loaded. Which is where I'm finding the time to write this.

(The worst part of this is there is no progress bar. It is finished when it is finished. Many a time I've started editing, only to have new errors belatedly pop in as the algorithms continue to discover them).

But that also means it can handle things that would normally be a flag and laborious check. It recognizes famous names, oft-used quotations, place names, names from history, and foreign words. Some of these are not so easy to look up to verify.

Does mean there's a risk of SpellCheck error. If might have found, for instance, a word in the wrong language and thus failed to flag what is actually a mistake. It seems pretty intelligent about this, though; I've only caught it once or twice trying to fix something unrelated into a song title it thinks it recognizes or something.

Like all good tools, it flags and it lets you decide if you want the correction. The problem I have is that it hates passive tense and always flags it. It also makes some mistakes in dialog punctuation and it also doesn't always pick up idioms that include general-purpose words; I am often finding it marking me for subject-verb agreement on one word out of a compound that is, of course, in proper agreement. So I can't clear all the tags without a lot of extra work.

Fortunately, I'm using it off-line; it recognizes a Scrivener file and will happily open and even save to it, but for safety I aim it at a duplicate and make the actual corrections in the home file.

Maudlin Bedlam

And for a different view:

I had -- have -- too much detail in the early chapters of The Fox Knows Many Things.

There was a reason. These are about being lost in a strange land and not knowing how to do anything and thus having to pay attention to everything. Every sign, every social tic, every overheard word, until you get a grasp of what in heck is going on, how to get food, where to find transport, and how not to make an ass of yourself.

But it still drags, especially if the reader hasn't clued in to why it is there.

I just finished taking a bunch of extraneous details out, from a reference to an old movie to a description of a German breakfast. But that doesn't get at the real problem. It might make it worse.

I've got labored descriptions of fairly banal things. A typical DB train carriage. The Frankfurt airport. I think it would have been stronger to go ahead, have the crazy descriptions, and yes go way outside of the needs of the story, if it could be some of the things out there that are actually fun.

I felt at the mercy of maps and schedules. I couldn't do a scene at Neuschwanstein Castle, Mad King Ludwig's insane Bavarian gingerbread fantasy, more Disney than the Disney Castle inspired by it.

Okay, sure, I was able to juggle so I could go to a middle-ages street fair and even glimpse a little of the joust, and get to Oktoberfest. The former of which I'd been to and had photographs, so easier to write from life. But, really...I got my protagonist all the way to the fancy Frankfurt airport but the plot didn't allow her to reach the concourse. Not even the aging split-flap display, infamous for skipping letters thus announcing flights to "London, Deathrow" and similar.

I could do Piazza San Marcos but I couldn't quite work in the interior of the basilica or even a gondola ride. Much less actually make it down to Rome.

Heck of a Tomb Raider story, really; the deepest she ever got underground was the bottom of a cistern, the closest thing to a high-speed chase was a commute down the autobahn, and the big Artifact at the core of the story...is a clay pot.

But this is what I'm realizing as I plot up the next one. Sure, set-piece scenes are fun; to climb the Eiffel Tower or run with the bulls in Pamplona. But big or small is in the eye of the beholder. You can admire a vintage plane without having to fly it with a bomb on board and two engines on fire. You can go see a show in Bromley as easy as you can take in one in the West End.

Maybe Odysseus isn't the best model for this. Maybe it should be Ulysses. Sure, I did get Penny to get into a fight with a giant. But it seems to me that visiting a museum should be as interesting; as long as it is intriguingly different, insightfully observed...

And not too labored.