Half

Spent the morning touching up the Highgate scene. Took a while to find the right way to start Part III but finished the day with 1,500 words down and the half-way point achieved.

And it looks like no work yet. I could be done with the novel by the end of May if I could hit...about 1,500 words a day. Hm.

***

Japan is next. Sure, I could write something different, but this is working for me at the moment. These are finally turning into the closest thing I'm ever likely to get to quick-and-dirty. And that's half the reason to send Penny to Japan next. To a place she knows nothing about and can't lecture about, and to do an adventure in such a way that she isn't getting lectured at by everyone. Basically all surface textures.

Another reason is I want to change gears. Penny's spending the London book in overcast skies, digging in dirt, being cold and hungry. Basically depressing and very much about being a working stiff. The Japan idea is colorful adventure. Everything pretty -- and everything paid for.

This is also where it fits in her progression. London was the "have to work for everything" one. Japan is the free ride one -- but the free ride that's too easy (it's a plot. Of course it is a plot.)

What do I have in the mix otherwise? It is like the wishlist I started with for London. I got a surprising amount in there, too. Couldn't do Roman reenactors and as I worked got a lot more Blitz-centric (intentionally). Still haven't gotten to the Panto stuff and not sure how that's going to work.

Anyhow. Kyoto, mostly. Extra-scenic and extra-traditional, without being rural. Matsuri of course. Tokyo probably. The Takarazuka, somehow. The old Geisha quarter. The Toei standing set. I'm resisting the temptations this series throws at me to have things fall happenstance into being historical/genre appropriate but I'm willing to play with Ninja in a reproduction Edo-era town.

There's also in my notes somewhere a cult that has their own museum -- there's some stolen antiquities, I think that's how I heard about it -- and the museum is from the description I read a James Bond set sort of place.

I'm sort of off in a bunch of different directions with this one. I have the idea of her having an American otaku girl on the other end of a bluetooth earbud, giving her all sorts of not entirely correct cultural and language advice. I also have idea of Penny realizing the dangerous waters she is in and how easy it is to misread the cues of an unfamiliar culture.

Oh, yeah. And the title is A Fox's Wedding. Which actually refers to weather; when it is raining with the sun out. Connected to kitsune, of course it is. But it seems to hint that romance or some other life change is in the wings and I'd be happier if the title at least seemed to belong...

Last week of vacation?

I've got it down to a routine.

Wake and dress and check the news. Browse Quora over breakfast. Realize I am too ignorant of the world and too bad at writing to think I could write a novel -- and do it just as the post-breakfast lethargy hits.

Watch shows or play games until I can deal with it. Finally get some writing done before bed.

***

Finished Part II Friday night. The Highgate Cemetery scene turned out less involved than I thought it would be. I didn't even get to use any Karl Marx quotes. Then I speed-read the book to date.

The early chapters are a bit too tight and jumbled -- it relaxes more as it goes on. And I'm really going to have to go into that bag of tricks I've been lecturing about on Quora.

The last book was a very linear narrative, but this one is very "meanwhile, back at the ranch." Not only do I need to go back and put in better sign posts for the reader, I need to color-grade the scenes to bring out the contrasts. So at every moment, the reader should be reminded this is a Dalek Dig scene, or an Exploring London scene.

And I'm still tinkering on the breakdowns for Part III.

The paperwork says I need to hit at least 25K -- same length as Part II. The Scapple file had 17 boxes for Part II, which turned into 33 scenes (aka text separated by white space).

The Scapple file has only 15 boxes for Part III. Fortunately, I think they will be generally longer. On the other hand, two of the gray-green boxes above might be getting moved to the top of Part IV.

No, all of these are names for myself. The section names within the Scrivener file are; Nine Days Queen, Encounter at Trafalgar, Imperial Wars, Gasometers, In a Pig’s Ear, Field School Days, The King of Hobbies, Crossrail, The Red Poppies, Remembrance, Nine Elms, The Harp That Once, Sting, The Dalek Dig, About a Degree, Brixton, Platform  9-3/4, Kennington Loop, The Diary, The Guns of November, Losing It, High Noon in Highgate.

Probably not going to show in the final print.

Testing the Dialectic

Finally got over the hump, figured out how to make a scene that worked, completed 2,000 words and brought the novel to almost the middle point.

And this morning has all been in trying to generate a decent map of Highgate Cemetery. I think my google-fu has grown weak.

I remember how searching online used to be. Before the spiders had crawled up and down the web indexing everything, you searched in a dendritic tree. Tentative searches until you could find a hub, then exploring the branches off that hub, working crabwise, hoping you were going to finally stumble upon a webring that had everything.

Root searches have a flaw. I turned up one actual map of notable tombs at Highgate, but it was a copy by a retiree of what is apparently a free map handout from somewhere and there is no explanation. So many hours of trying to track down the names mentioned.

Can you imagine the difficulty in trying to restrict search terms to find a "Scrimgeour "who is actually buried there? If you don't make "Highgate" a required term, the engines fill with Harry Potter. If you do, then the results fill with travel agencies wanting to sell you tickets to go visit the cemetery. And low on the page? More Harry Potter.

This is both a historical novel (apparently BookBub calls them "Present-Past." No, I don't like it either) and an action scene. So I need to know the actual historical person and I need to know what the stone looks like in situ so I can figure out if my characters can take cover behind it.

Well, I have enough stones to make it work. And I've looked at the landscape. Which is really lousy for the kind of action I had contemplated. It is far from clear fields of fire. Plus there really aren't any handy stones lying around. And the place is public and crowded and sneaking weapons in there is a level of ridiculous that's only going to be surpassed by the sword fight I'm going to have among the stalls of the Globe itself.

I'm doing it anyhow. I'm trying to leave strict realism alone because that way leads to boring events.

And the stones aren't lining up at all right. Heck, the one guy I really wanted there (as opposed to the guy everyone expects to be featured), is on the West side. Which is guided tours only and restricted hours. So...it's gonna be more Bullit geography.

(I couldn't find a picture of Karl Marx driving a Ford Mustang GT Fastback, so instead here's a traffic light with, yes, a little picture of Karl Marx for walk. I wonder who is stop? Pick your Austrian School favorite.)

So my week total is off. I'm writing the last chapter of Part II, and before I gave up today put down 800 words of draft on it. Had to stop just as a medieval broadhead spanged off the tomb of Claudia Jones, British black feminist communist and that's a lot of ists. The "beat" isn't happening and I have to go back and find the moment. 

But I have confidence that by the end of the weekend I'll be in planning for the third part of the book. 

Ack ack

Well, that was a failure.

Spent the morning cleaning up and revising some scenes. Then several hours poking around for more information on ATS uniforms and assignments and all that.

After lunch drafted five hundred words. The wrong words. The bit is too much and it drags the flow of the story off. Wrote a brand-new two-hundred word version. And, oops, now I was missing some character beats I really wanted to keep. Spliced and diced and came up with a four-hundred word version that builds on the character beats and doesn't dwell so much on the descriptions.

And realized it was the wrong approach altogether. There shouldn't be a scene there at all. I needed to offload all of those beats into the following scenes.

So that's where I stand now as I break for dinner; 114 words of the current chapter. Which is projected to hit 1200 to 1400.

Okay, the other reason for the break is that means I have to do the Home Guard now. So read up on their uniforms and so on and so forth. I bought a book a while back. Still haven't had time to read more than the opening chapters.

***

Of course. I'm getting better at recognizing block. There are times you just need a break from writing. There are also times when the block is your brain telling you the scene isn't working.

Pity the line at the grocery store wasn't longer. I read as much of one of my books as I could. And watched more of a couple history programs. And took some time off to play Fallout and watch Eureka and that's what I needed.

This morning I was finally able to recognize the scene didn't work and what it was missing. And took a long walk to hammer out new ideas. And now I have a plan. It might not work. But if it does I'll have a much stronger scene than I would otherwise. And if it doesn't? Well, I'll still be ahead because I know I need something, and I've had this scene circulating around long enough so I can grok it.

And I can't help but think of this in terms of the "write it first, then fix" philosophy I've been seeing a lot of people arguing for. Sure; I didn't know the scene was wrong until I tried it. But at the same time, I didn't have to write the whole scene to find out. For me, it would be a waste of time to write the whole book without adjusting as I discovered things, only to throw it all away to try to make a better job with the next draft.

My feeling is, if that's all that's going into your draft, then why not solve it in the outline? You'd have a better grasp with a good outline and it would take less time. I don't think a whole text is a good way to capture all the ideas of a book so you can then look at them analytically and try to shuffle them into a better form.

But maybe that's just me. I'm of the clean-draft philosophy. Of course, it might just mean I'm creating a draft with tighter weaves that is harder to pick apart and re-structure.

Ron's Ron shirt was as bad as Ron himself

Tried to cut a character. Should have been able to.

The reason he is in there is I needed someone to speak dialog that didn't have an agenda to it. The two Geordies are always on the attack, Stu is too often being Serious Stu, and Susan Morris' thing is being quiet.

Thing is, dialog should serve multiple agendas. Having Hanif in there to make the conversations easier for me is a sign that I'm not a very good writer.

***

Plus that's one more character. Sure, there's only one character aside from the narrator who is in over half of the scenes. And the group that ends up on the dig is only four people. (And, yeah, honestly Hanif grew into his own way of looking at things that wasn't quite Tim or Tony or Stu).

That's Tim, Tony, Stu, and Hanif for the digging scenes. Add Susan Morris, Steve, Leslie Cuvier for the field school (there's a Frank but he has two lines and never comes back).

At the Imperial War Museum it is pretty much Mick and Sarah. There were two other women but just for one chapter. On the other hand, they were reenactors so they had two names each.

The thing that really adds to the name count is that Penny and Graham are going around talking to character actors; collectors and clubs and other peculiar people, and they all have names and they are all one-scene wonders so should this count against me? James, Hanif, Derwyn, Jackson, Cynth, Cephrin, Petrichor, Guy, Sahir Ganga Colwyn, Kenny, and I'm sure there will be more.

And I just added Nyovani Brent from the museum and I strongly suspect she's going to bring friends.

Still, this shouldn't be a problem as long as I don't have to have too much of the, "Remember what James said about what Kenny had told us the day we saw Cephrin?"

That and voices. I've given up on doing the voices for this draft. I'll come back around and put the right Geordie-isms and try to clean up the errant Americanisms.

***

And that's another issue. No, not that I'll never get all the distracting and wrong American usages out of a cast who is almost entirely not American. It is that my narrator-protagonist is starting to learn the language. And there isn't space to show her learning that an elevator is called a lift -- instead it just shows up in her narration.

***

So more luck. I've been watching an interesting BBC programme called Blitz Street, where they built two typical houses then blew them up. And I've been streaming various movies and series about wartime London via Amazon, including the amazing Home Fires.

I was doing some spot research to find some appropriate items to be dug up by my characters when YouTube tossed me a Time Team episode in which they dig up a row of flats that were demolished in the Blitz. Perfect! So perfect, I'm just stealing their finds for the book.

***

This has not been a productive weekend. Just before I broke for the night I decided my protagonist is going to have a small emotional breakdown at the dig. Then there's the next episode of Costume Porn to write -- I've decided on an ATS "ack-ack girl" for her, but Mick is going Home Guard this weekend and this is when I introduce the reader to the Aux Unit mythology.

And then a weird two-level conversation. Then a trip out to one of Charles Booth's "vicious, semi-criminal" neighborhoods to look for a hostel she can afford, and the big melt-down.

And then Highgate Park, complete with a ranged-missile duel. So there's a lot to go before I finish Part II. The word count still looks low but I think I might end up in the right place when it is all done.

Really, I've only been writing actual text since the last week of March. Heck, I only had the elevator pitch for the book on the 7th of December. And that's before I took a month off to do an edit of the last book.

So I guess this isn't bad progress. Still, if I didn't go back to work in May I wouldn't really mind...

The map, please

I've reached that point in research I reached during the last book; the point where I find out it is easier to zoom out Google Maps and just spin the globe to the spot I want. The shape of the Thames past Westminster and the loop it makes around the Isle of Dogs is so familiar I can find most of my locations faster by scrolling than I can by typing.

I'm hitting between 1K and 2K a day. For every hour of writing, I'm still spending an hour looking stuff up. But less time, now, contemplating the plot arcs and trying to figure out how to tell the story better.

The poverty arc really isn't working. The Steve arc is in trouble. I'll tinker with those in a bit, though. This morning's work is to cut-and-paste to take the site description from later scenes and move it to a brand-new earlier scene. On re-read the transition was just too abrupt.

And, really, the pacing would feel better if there was another thousand words in Part I. It is a bit crammed with background information and set-up and taking it slowly can't but help.

I haven't gotten around to yanking the previous mention of the Kennington Loop but yesterday I wrote a brand-new scene to Show, not Tell. Not that the Loop itself matters to the story. Nor does the proposed Tootencamden Line, which I got a chance to name-drop in this new scene. The scene also gave me a chance to put a rail fan in the book, so that was all to my advantage.

(Actually, I was going to explain how the Northern Line Extension is going to come off the Loop, but I don't want to set that up as an easy access to the system. I have something more epic planned for the big action scene.)

So the main challenge this morning is to put down enough words to make the scene seem comfortable and un-rushed, and just enough specific detail to give it a sense of verisimilitude without drowning the reader in gasometers and Tesco and cricket grounds and so on.

And then pick up the narrative again with my last big "poverty" scene, where I want to show the inside of a hostel. And that one is the same problem, except the detail I don't want to show too much of...I don't know myself.

Then back to the Imperial War Museum for more costume porn.

Rough Sleeping

Isn't that an amazing map? And it turns out, that strip through Limehouse and Ratcliff is still there on modern maps, except now it includes more of the Isle of Dogs.

But, alas, I really can't follow this up the way I want to. I know there are options beyond hotels and hostels and Air BnB. There are worlds, intersecting worlds of shared rentals and sleeping rough and shelters and St. Mungos and crashing at a friend's.

I'd love to write that book. I'd love to write the book in which the diary of the shopgirl (who is sleeping rough on a railway platform herself) is presented in full-page excerpts.

But that's too much work. Plus I think it might be the wrong kind of book. When you get right down to it, being hungry and having uncomfortable living spaces isn't the story of my heroine, it is a temporary obstacle. She doesn't do without because archaeology really doesn't pay that well and life is hard for everyone. She'll do without because she's lost in the desert while searching for the Golden Orb of Somebody.

The intersect with the past in this one is entirely filtered. It is through study and discovery and exhibits, not through direct experience. As much as in some other book I might have my protagonist re-live the experience of someone in the past (or just set the damn book in that period in the first place), the closest Penny is coming is with a little dress-up and some museum displays.

Besides, her poverty problem is artificial and temporary. She has her plane tickets. She has friends she can borrow from. She most certainly has people she could crash with. The only reason I've got her, in the chapter I'm working on now, taking the tube down to Brixton to look at a poor neighborhood with council estates and all that is to ramp up the pressure on her while I work around to the climax of the book.

Plus I need the page count.

So don't look for a deep look into the realities of being poor in London. This is just going to be enough surface impressions to sell emotional arcs of the story. Nothing on the practicalities of the hostel circuit. Just a bit of dirt and grime and the experience of riding the tube.