Recalibrating Goldilocks

I'm not going to London.

Well, pretty sure.

Instead I'm going to write. I've reached a point where I'm just theorizing in empty space. I need to start putting down text. I need to blow through this thing and see what I learn.

Okay, I think I learned a lot from the last one, and from editing it and reflecting on it and trying to figure out what I need to do better and how to do it. I know I go on a lot about "look and feel," and I haven't changed my mind about how that is subtle and difficult to find. I would love to go to London if it was the only way to get the three precise words that gave a sense of the brown mass of the old Battersea Power Station looming against the overcast sky.

That was the reason to pick things I knew, things I'd done, places I'd been. That hope that I had somewhere that strong sense of the gestalt of a thing. Not necessarily a truth. More like a convincing lie.

Anyhow, there's a Goldilocks zone between not knowing enough to write convincingly about a place or a thing or whatever, and having so much it was a lot of wasted time collecting it. I collected what the signs looked like inside German train stations.

Okay, sure, I did end up with a line in the final novel. Part of a line. "The signage was in German and English and was very good." But, really, I didn't need that line at all. And there's the sneaking suspicion it wouldn't be there if I hadn't looked up the stuff.

So, yeah. I think I've honed my sense for what is going to be in the final manuscript. I've outlined this next book about as much as I intend to, and I've got a basic breakdown of how many words there are actually going to be about certain things.

I'm opening in Bradgate Park, with the field school in session to learn about survey techniques and get a live demonstration of metal detectors. There's going to be some banter and probably a Simon and Garfunkel reference. I need to know if there's a named open meadow and if this really is a dog run and if you can see the folly from there. And that's about it. Two words about trees, three about grass and I already know two of those because I'm doing a gag about wellies; drawn from -- yay! -- personal experience on a parachute jump into Maryland.

And the metal detectors? If it comes up in dialog, a brand, and probably some gaff about how you listen to the signal.

But that's all I need. That's my new Goldilocks zone. I don't need to go there to get enough to sell the scene. I don't need to stroll over the park with Google Maps or whatever. A couple of pictures will do me -- and the rest is character interaction and dialog.

Oh, but this doesn't mean no research. That first scene is about archaeological methods. No; this book is about Penny learning them, but it isn't about teaching the reader them. It will be mostly left off-stage; "We studied all day. That evening at the pub Doug said..." (I'm going to make her run a dig in a later book. That's when it will come up!)

But I still have to read the Excavation chapter in at least one of my books on Archaeology.

(There's a new rant building in me about how the whole "Athena Fox" angle has nothing to do with the story I want to tell about Penny in London, and how it isn't giving me the stories I thought it would. But later.)

The British Museum has lost it's charm

Well, no, it hasn't. I'm just on the fence on whether I want to run out to London within the next few weeks.

Putting aside whether I want to run up a new credit card bill right now, and allowing that "research for a novel" is just an excuse anyhow; this would be a tourist trip and is worth whatever that is worth. Putting aside all that, I'm wondering if having a first-hand experience of the "look and feel" of the settings I will be using will improve the book...or make it worse.

***

So far the two people who I know actually read the last book told me there's "too much stuff." Said accusingly, in fact going out of their way to tell me there's too much.

How, exactly, is this helpful? What stuff? They say it like it is obvious, like there are words that clearly shouldn't be there. That there are words I went around adding in, like a cook suddenly gone crazy with the pepper mill.

No, it isn't obvious. I know the text is dense. I know because I've spent my entire writing life trying to decompress, trying to write less dense. But I don't even know if I'm decompressing the parts that need decompressing! Was there too much dialog? Too much description? Too much action? Too much movement? Too many concepts? Too many new words? Too many explanations? Or maybe not enough?

I feel "not enough explanation" figures in there somewhere, balancing with "too many concepts." The other advice I've heard often enough to be annoying is "You know all this stuff, and you have to understand the reader doesn't."

Like fuck I do. I've forgotten most of my research already. When I go back and re-read, and yes I do re-read, I am reading with a clear mind and little to no pre-knowledge. I know this because I'm finding typos and missing words and unclear phrasing and if I already knew exactly what I expected to find, I'd never see any of that, either.

The sole advantage I have is I know what stuff is plot-important and what is set dressing. I know what I can afford to skim through where a first-time reader doesn't.

So which things are "too much" and which things are better replacements? Because it is easy to say you have too much description, too much action, too much dialog...but you are also required to have a book that is at least 70,000 words and if those words aren't any of the above what they hell are they?

So I'm theorizing into a vacuum. Maybe if I was in the place, the setting would insinuate itself with simple, direct language, I wouldn't get caught up in all the "details you keep adding, shame on you" and I could knock out the text (also, without having to spend all that time strolling through Google Street View and so forth trying to get a sense of the places).

But maybe it is description that people are complaining about and if I saw the actual Highgate Cemetery I might end up putting too many of whatever those wrong words are in there, and have another crap book nobody wants to read. Maybe it is better to shut down Chrome and stop finding out anything because then it might accidentally make it into the book. Oh, no, I gave the actual name of a Tube Station! The book is unreadable! Too many notes, Herr Mozart!

***

I roughed out an itinerary. I know some well-meaning person is going to go, "Things never quite go as planned when you travel." So, what, you don't plan at all? Nonsense. I've travelled enough to have a realistic idea of how much to strive for and to build in lots of slack and cut-outs.

Looking at a week. Would like to do more but I don't have a lot of vacation hours saved up. Airfare and hotel is about a thousand dollars. A little more and that gives you one hot a day -- which got me through the last trip I made to London.

Turns out Field School isn't on, not this time of year. Would still like to do a day trip out to Bradgate Park. Two hours by bus, each way. So I wouldn't really be able to make a full day of the British Museum, but I can probably hit that, the Imperial War Museum London, the Globe, take another stroll through the old pedestrian tunnel, visit Highgate, pass through Trafalgar (not strictly necessary), take a gander at Battersea Power Station and the Vauxhall neighborhood across the Thames. And make sure to hit at least one pub, and have some proper fish and chips. And if I can find one, the Full Breakfast.

An Imperial War

Outlining is proceeding apace for the new novel.



Did I mention this is really the worst possible series for me? I thought this was a series where I could cheat -- combine my own travel experiences with my knowledge of various stupid pseudo-archaeological ideas and wrap it up in a little goofy adventure.

Instead it is a thoughtful inquiry into our interaction with history, set in carefully researched and very real locations, firmly grounded in fact...with a little goofy adventure.

Anyhow. I'm doing it in Scapple, mostly because Scapple is a cheap option and I already know how to use it. It is Mind Mapping software; a grandiose term for connecting boxes with lines.

The main reason I went to it for this one...turned out to be unnecessary. One of my first questions was whether I have enough material and if I can make balanced parts out of it or if too much is happening in the wrong part of the book. So I wanted software I could make different size boxes in.

Well, turns out making a column of tentative scene names padded out the vertical dimension sufficiently. And gave me something to count and calculate. And that answered the first question; I need everything I've put in, even the stuff I tagged with red or orange, because the word count is already at 2,000 words a scene.

(The diagram above is not really an outline; it is about blocking in the basic chapter structure. The true interconnections, and the interweaving of plots and themes, would be a heck of a lot more tiny dotted lines.)

***

And that includes the Imperial War Museum. And I have no idea what I'm actually going to do there. I just created the box, and it filled a space that needed filling.

And it is making me think more and more of making that trip myself. I can just barely afford it right now. I'm also still waiting for new medications and new exercise regime to properly kick in and stabilize. The plan -- such that it is -- is a mere week in London, with a day trip to Canterbury and Kent (I won't be going by horse). And another day trip a little bit oop North, because there's a perfect location for a scene.

And the British Museum of course. And pay even more money (tickets are selling out fast) for one of the Underground's tours of closed subway stations. And there's a few other underground attractions. Kent is the most ambitious, as that's a sort of volunteer field school. So I'd be paying a hundred pounds or more for the privilege of kneeling in the dirt all afternoon digging a small hole with a smaller trowel.

But this flies even more in the face of wanting to write quick and dirty. The sad reality is that this thing is going to be enough of a pain to plan and execute that quick and dirty isn't happening whether I chose to spend a vacation doing research.

And, yeah, I already have growing sketches for four more books. Just added some new notes for two of them; the American Southwest, with Heritage issues and CRM and NAGPRA as the B plot to a story about Archeo-gaming, the No Man's Sky archaeological survey and the Great Atari Burial, retro-computing, Gamer gate, Tomb Raider -- with cultural appropriation tying the two plot threads together. And some nukes, because you gotta have nukes.

The other; Notre Dame and restoration and preservation, crossed up with an Umberto Eco plot of a group of maniacs who think they are on the trail of Templar secrets (they aren't), and as a B or C plot, warbirds. I may not be able to get her up on the wing of a plane, but it is about time to get in one.

When that April with his showers sweet

There's a field school in Kent that's a mere hundred pounds a day for a lecture and a practical exercise. Which is most of the way to Canterbury, which got me thinking about Chaucer, and a production I worked in which the Prologue was read in what certainly sounded like the correct pronunciation.

Which is a lot easier to learn these days. At least to a point. Used to be you'd have to find a tutor. You might with luck find a recording -- on vinyl, even (we had one at our old house of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or, as it became known in our family, the "Grain Knickt.")

***

How well you learn it is another matter. It is a constant back-and-forth from the Maker movement, and lately I've been seeing it in musical instrument instruction. You can learn from YouTube. It still isn't optimal.

But we've reached the future predicted in such works as "The Machine Stops" (by E.M. Forster, of all people). Short attention spans...but still driven by the social need to possess and demonstrate knowledge.

With the increasingly interconnectivity (and searchability) of the modern knowledge base, getting social standing increasingly rests on either obscurity or novelty.

In the later, there is social currency in being current. In being leading edge. In being the first to discover. And this being the age we are in, this is of course being monetized where possible. Heck, you could say Omni magazine was doing the same thing, as was episodic television, "Did you hear what Will Rogers said on the air today?" back through broadsheets and...well, you get the picture.

The latest form of it is the inflated prices of early releases for video games. Being the first to release a review or play session is worth something...worth enough, at least at this moment, to pay for the game.

In the former this takes the form of ever more obscure sub-disciplines and interests, and an inevitable gate-keeping. One form this takes is of course the "Nobody is interested in that anymore; it got too popular" (to paraphrase Dizzy Dean). The other is the "False Geek Girl" accusation and similar. And boy howdy, this kind of testing of newbies has been in every hobby ever.

***

So perhaps nothing new here. Increasingly obvious, in some places. I made mention recently that the practicalities of sword fighting was a not-very widespread understanding. Until connectivity hit and HEMA is a thing and it is trivial to bump into someone who really does know what they are talking about and will shut you down.

There's a lot of that in history. Always has, but the process is faster and the diffusion wider. Places like the question-and-answer forum Quora make it easier and easier for people who really know that specific subset of a subset of a subject to find the question and give it a real answer.

And this is where we come to writing.

People who have been writing for a decade or more have developed habits. The desire to ferret out obscure and interesting things to put in the book. The desire to do the research, because research was hard and it was a worthwhile skill, valued by the audience, to get it right.

And we have trouble letting go (I'm using, I hope, the generic "we," as I've seen these problems and am trying to find how to solve them). I've read more than a few books that still seem to "show off" that they could find the date for the Battle of Lepanto or that they knew which tube station serves the Tower of London.

What I feel increasingly is the true cachet lies in the ability to synthesize. To take all that readily available but largely unformed, unfocused, even contradictory information and understand enough of the totality to make a strong and original synopsis and new insights.

Which is totally what artists and writers have always done. We're just compressing the scale. And adding to the amount of grist to mill through to get there. A Florentine might have read ten books before forming a novel insight into the nature of the Greek tragedy. Now, we have access to a thousand erudite papers (and many many more less well-formed opinions). You spend more time winnowing and less time grinding.

***

But there's a counter opinion.

I self-published a novel the way I generally read now, and the way most of the writers and readers I communicate with on various media read; electronically. I only grudgingly made a hard copy available (and didn't spend nearly as much effort formatting it) because neither of my parents read online.

And oops. I've sold exactly one electronic copy. The others are all hard copy. And, sure, they are to friends and family -- they are all to friends and family -- but that only increases illumination on that point.

Not all readers are immersed in the same electronic sea.

It may be trivial today for the writer to look up the date of the Battle of Lepanto (1571), but the reading public is an aging public and one that is still in love with the physic book and they don't have the one-click ability to find out what the hell is a Lepanto anyhow?

I do this when I'm reading on Kindle. Again, this is not new. My dad tells me he pulled out an atlas to read the long chase scene in Dracula. What is different is that it is so trivial and common to a certain class of reader we are in danger of forgetting this isn't everyone's experience.

There's a divide here. The internet generation is multi-tasking and easily distracted. The book generation wants to curl up under an oak and not let anything get between them and the book. The Kindle generation is listening to music and checking email and thinks nothing of popping off the page to follow up something.

But, no. I don't know what this means. It is just one more thing to fold in over the effort to write a decent book.

Arkham World: The Tyranny of King Washington

The Tyranny of King Washington is an overpriced DLC in three installments for Assassin's Creed III (the American Revolution one.) It is amusing to play and the production values are high, but as alternate history it leaves much to be desired.

The Assassin's Creed series has always had an uncomfortable relationship with history. On the plus side of the ledger, there are so very few games that even attempt to give a ground-level, personal view of a historical period (the market in history is generally combat sims, which either give you a General's view, or let you ogle warplanes or tanks but never engage with actual people).

The Assassin's Creed series doesn't even go after the low-hanging fruit, having games set in Alexandria during the reign of the Ptolemy's or New Orleans during the French-Indian War. And their Age of Piracy game spent as much time on land and deep in politics as it did on the High Seas.

On the negative side; well, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag took the piss on itself by setting part of the game in a game company who are writing twisted, dumbed-down, player-friendly versions of the real events they witnessed through the techno-magic of the Animus. Liberation (a full-length, fully independent spin-off of the AC III core game) took it a step further by revealing that the game play experience is being sculpted as propaganda by the, well, the fictional secret rulers of the game universe. Ouroboros, take a bow.

Well, alternate history is the historian's playground. Historical fiction can be hard work. Alternate history, good alternate history, is harder. You really have to understand the period before you can work changes on it.

More, alternate history is really about how history has unfolded in a unique way. A story set in 1930's New York can be a love story, a detective story, whatever. A story set in an alternate New Amsterdam is going to be about why it is different and what those differences mean.

The Tyranny of King Washington does not deliver.

The first thing the game delivers, in fact, is another disappointment. In this history, Ratonhnhaké:ton did not leave his native village, train as an Assassin and take on the name Connor. Most of the first installment takes place in the frontier and involves multiple Mohawk characters. But what do we learn and experience that is new? Damn all. Ratonhnhaké:ton goes on a stereotyped Spirit Journey and gets magical animal powers. This is about as anthropological as the latest New Age book from a Plastic Shaman.

Even for the trite and the stereotyped, the game is not in any way designed to let you interact with the Mohawk people or explore the village. Trapping, tracking and hunting skills are still there, left over from the main game, but there is no reason to employ them. The game comes so close; the landscape is a surreal ruin of supernaturally deep snow, destroyed towns, dead bodies, and prowling wolves, and there is an option to feed starving locals. Which you could have hunted for some of the game which is, oddly and remarkably, still hopping about without a care in the world, except that there is insufficient benefit from it and you can get all the food you like just by ambushing soldiers and rifling their pockets.

And of course there is no exploration of what it means for George Washington to gain super powers and go mad. You meet Franklin and Jefferson and Adams, but they have no insight, no discussion; there is none of the frank conversation you had with any of these men in the main game. There aren't even interesting choices being made; Benedict Arnold, like so many, is simply and rudely brainwashed to follow Washington. There's no calculation, no lesser evil, no nuance. Just mechanics.

In a strange way it reminds me of Mass Effect III. This was after the excellent lead writer had left the company, and this may be why with the coming of the Reapers all the interesting human stories stopped. George Washington's army, like the Reapers, have plowed through everything as an unstoppable force leaving little but ruins and a small cadre of desperate survivors who can spare no thought for anything other than where to get gunpowder.

With no history to give, and no interesting side stories, and no interesting people to watch for more than a dramatic cut-scene, all that is left is the usual meat of running around from quest arrow to quest arrow killing whatever you encounter, and sometimes being forced by the script to play with some annoying special mechanic for a while instead of continuing to do the game play the game has been training and rewarding you with until then.

Ratonhnhaké:ton goes on a spirit journey three times. Each time he meets a different spirit animal and each time gets a different super power. The bear is the least unbalancing but also the most annoying in that it allows you to do a ground-pound attack like a small bomb. And the game then throws up endless doors and fences at you to force you to use your Bear Powers on instead of just climbing over them the way you normally would.

It is very Batman: Arkham style. Tomb Raider did this, too, which each new weapon you got causing extra-special doors to spawn in your path that oh-so-conveniently required that exact device to overcome. The Batman series did it well and made it satisfying. Tomb Raider less so. In Tyranny, it is merely annoying. Fortunately, there isn't much of it.

On the other hand, the Eagle allows you to, well, fly. Which means all the climbing and jumping might as well go away, since it is easier to just fly across the city. You fly so very well it is trivial to lose pursuit, making the entire Notoriety mechanic a waste of time. You can kill a squad of soldiers in broad daylight, take the money off their bodies, fly to safety, then swoop down to drop a hefty bribe in the hands of a town crier who makes the entire populace stop paying attention to the six foot tall Native American wearing face paint and the skin of a wolf who keeps turning into a bird and flying around.

And then there's Wolf power, which you get early in the first installment. Call up ghost wolf assassins, that's bad enough. But it also lets you do another thing which wolves are well known for; turn invisible. The only thing that keeps this from breaking the game completely is your health bar depletes quickly while the Cloaking Device is enabled.

The only good thing that can be said is that after playing the main game through you probably have your fill of free-running and wall climbing and those ultra-annoying stealth tailing sessions. But these new mechanics are so incredibly overpowered they don't become a new tool; they become all you do. And they aren't as interesting. The levels are largely imported from the previous game and aren't designed around the new mechanics.

Take assaulting a fort. Used to be you'd have to either laboriously sneak in through the gate, or fight your way through from a sally port. Now you just fly over the wall. Boom, done.

The only thing that keeps you from basically being a Marvel superhero at this point is that the game only allows one Special to be mapped to a key at a time. And me, I found back in the main game that the Rope Dart is the only special weapon or device I ever need. The heck with laying bait or whistling up a horse or even firing a flintlock. Rope darts stun every enemy, even the highest-ranking mooks that otherwise can't be attacked even with a counter-chain, and they drag the enemy to you where you can deliver a coup de grace. 

It is only the annoyance of fussing around with switching Specials that keeps you from swooping over a wall, dropping down with a Drop Bear to kill half the lot, then going Ghost Doggie to snipe the remainder. The game was, basically, so dirt easy at that point I pretty much went with just one Special and stayed within the limitations. Also, the Eagle Assassination is, if anything, even cooler than the Jump Assassination.

So all said, it is an amusing addendum to the existing game. But not worth the money it costs, not even at Steam Sale prices.

Hello darkness my old friend

I've got a plot now.

Might be a wee bit too much in it.

I went into this series with two intentions. First was to be able to play with pseudo-historical materials without lending them further support. The other was to draw from experience and, basically, write something that was fast and didn't take a lot of research.

Well, the first is pretty much a failure. What I am doing instead is talking about history and archaeology, the process and the influence, nay the dialog, it has with the modern world.

So this one, I'm talking about Field School and CRM; about the realities of the Diggers at the front lines of actual excavation, as well as all the barriers against excavation. And also talking about the ways non-archaeologists are interacting with the historical record in ways that are both positive and negative; the metal detector crowd, the urban exploration crowd.

And that's what I mean by a lot of stuff. Field School is what gets Penny to the site of the adventure. Coin Collectors first find the MacGuffin, and Detectorists are involved. And that's why I titled this post with lyrics from Simon and Garfunkle and if you get that, you've been exploring some weird corners yourself.

But that's too staid for the Lara Croft/Nathan Drake side of Penny's alter-ego. So the Detectorists don't have much to do with the plot. Instead it follows urban explorers to get some running and jumping in, chases a HEMA hanger-on to get some swordplay and so forth accomplished (the last book had a slap-fest fist fight. This will be the bladed-weapon equivalent.) And the explorers and the secrets in the earth and the uncovered material from the Blitz and particularly the Underground shelters and, way in the background, the Thames Barrier and the North Sea, all lead towards another urban exploration only this one heading in true Campbell fashion into the Underworld.

On the gripping hand, there's probably no Roman stuff involved, theatre may form a very small part of it, and there's no even that much of typical tourist stuff. Although I'm still trying to come up with an amusing incident to make a trip to the Tower a thing.

When Pigs Fly

I'm still plotting on the London book. I hope this isn't going to be how the series goes. I'm telling myself the problem is in trying to use the real world and be somewhat realistic about it, but it could be I'm just pants at plotting.

Well, I guess the holes are getting smaller. Each time I circle around, I find a remaining gap, but the rest of the structure is firmer and firmer; more interesting, more connected, more grounded. So there's that.

And I'm changing history. Partly because it would be too much work to find a real thing that works, but more because if I shift things just a little I can use real things that are real interesting. And, yeah, I'm changing names anyhow. I didn't mind making fun of Golden Dawn in the last book, or naming major museums -- it did bother me a little naming smaller but equally real commercial establishments -- but with the politics of this one the various and sundry organizations for the Field School, the Northern Line Extension, the Zero Station, and many and sundry clubs involved in urban exploration and metal detecting and so on are all going to be fictional.

Back somewhere in my notes is that this is a series where the unlikely happens. Where the idea of the Adventure Archaeologist who speaks seven languages, can translate Sumerian Cuneiform like reading a shopping list, who has traveled the world taking risks, exploring, climbing, fighting, etc., etc., meets the real world. And sometimes works.

So I'm not going to send her to Paris and have her clinging to the side of a random office building. No, she's going to climb the Eiffel Tower, dammit! I might not have a robbery at the Louvre but it would at least be at Musee d'Orsay.

So this is what I nailed down today:

There's a real opportunity here for her to learn Urban Exploration and practical climbing skills, but I'm not going to really go into it. The theme of this one is Underground. It is almost Campbellian, in fact. So she may hear of Parkor, but she's more likely to meet Trainspotters (of the London Underground variety).

(Yeah, that's MIT. And dammit; the old name for the Steam Tunnel explorers of M.I.T. was "Vadders," and you know where it comes from? Colossal Caves! Which opens up retro-computing, James Dallas Eggbert, the Dungeons & Dragons hysteria, M.I.T. "hacking," the Great Atari Burial...)

But that's the next book. Or somewhere later. In fact, this one I'm backing off again from any real talk about Lara Croft or Uncharted or any of that.

I also might not have much time for Panto, the Old Globe, etc. I'll see...when I finally get to outlining the damned thing!