No More Tribbles

I've been having a real problem with Fox and Hounds. 

I constructed it as a stealth plot. It is what I call a "Tribble" plot, after David Gerrold's excellent description of how he constructed that fabulous Star Trek episode; things are happening on the surface and they look important but every now and then the camera cuts away to the tribbles getting more and more numerous...until suddenly everyone realizes the tribbles are the real plot.

The problem I'm hitting is that this is Penny floundering in Field School and finding London confusing, and Graham is dragging her out on a rather "Steed and Mrs Peel" series of interviews with colorful local characters.

Which means the poor reader is presented with a whole bunch of stuff and no way of knowing what of it is supposed to be important.

Part of this is intentional, and something I mean to continue: I call it out explicitly in this book as something The Doctor does (Doctor Who); that there are all these things happening that look like background detail or throwaways until at the climax one of them matters.

In the television series Eureka this is multiple and blatant. Last episode I remember watching, there was a new computer gizmo being tried out that predicted disasters before they happened. One of the ones it tried to warn about was a leak of cooling gel in one of the labs, and it looks like the gag was entirely about the Sherif Carter getting it dumped all over him. Except at the climax, the computer core is running so hot it is predicting that it, itself, is about to overheat and explode...and they save the day by dumping the cooling gel all over it.

Well, the way I've constructed Fox and Hounds, it it 16K words before The Blitz is brought up, 21K before the dig at the air raid shelter begins, 33K before they got shot at and realize there really is a mystery afoot. Graham isn't even brought on screen before 10K, and the connection between his Roman Coin problem and the Nine Elms dig, although hinted at, isn't made explicit until 60K (out of 77K current draft.)

That's because it is unfolding as a mystery plot. But there's no backbone. It is fine if Spenser walks around Boston for fifty pages before finding anything out, because he goes into the story knowing he is on a case. Penny doesn't know she's on an adventure. She even calls this out right at the top of the story; "I'm here for school."

So my editing problem now is to reveal the tribbles. To put in more of those scenes David Gerrold described where it is obvious that despite all the running around after Klingons and annoying Federation Trade Representatives, there is something important building.

And as of this moment, the best way I can think to do it is to make it Penny's perception as well. To have her actively addressing the idea that school isn't fulfilling enough and despite wanting to leave Athena Fox behind and become a real archaeologist, she'd love to have some interesting historical problem to dig into.

***

I complained before about how easy it is to put everything on the nose. I avoided doing that. But that means the historical focus is weak.

Story starts at the ancestral home of Lady Jane, the Nine Days Queen. There's a few random bits but the next big chunk of history is Armistice Day and the Great War.

With Nine Elms the focus finally zooms into the Blitz, specifically, 1941. That's an all-sides envelopment; the Blitz Experience walk-though exhibit at the Museum, cosplay as Ack-Ack Girl, the dig, the discovery of Linnet's diary.

But at the end of the dig there's an epic trek through Battersea Power Station as an artifact of the 20's (it isn't, but that's the main focus), then a trip to Shakespeare's Globe, before we finally go into the tunnels...but even then it is largely about Crossrail and a bit of Bazalgette and really not much of the Blitz at all.

So I've got some work trying to find a focus here.

Double Chin

I was sicker than I thought. But now it has broken and I'm full of vim...and tempted by far too many things.

Like...I've been thinking about picking up a cheap violin, swapping my octave strings to it and making that the chin cello, and reverting my first violin to, well, violin. Or more importantly, to silent violin so I can get some more practice in!

But here's the crazy idea. I have a short-scale bass -- it is a baritone ukulele with extra-dense strings that plays in the same pitches as an electric bass. And the electric bass and the orchestral double bass share the same pitches (and octave.) And I've seen people use a violin bow on a guitar.

Well, it works. I can actually bow my u-bass. But only sort of, as it lacks the cutaway and the curved bridge. That's the bow from my chin cello, which means it is carbon-fibre and has bass rosin on it already.

So...why not hang those Kala strings on an electric violin and make a chin bass?

Right. First problem is the scale length. The scale length on my u-bass is 21". Scale length on a violin is under 13". Ah, but viola goes up to 17".

Next experiment. Held the fourth fret (roughly 17" from the bridge) and retuned to the open string pitch. And yes, it still plays. And it still bows.

Past that, I really can't tell. The next problem is those strings are just too massive for standard pegs, so have to redesign the peg box. But it is probably do-able. It wouldn't sound great, I imagine, but it would be a heck of a cool thing to build.

How long goats live

Not a fun week. High temperatures and higher smoke -- smells like a dumpster fire outside and it went into the red zone several times. I come back from work into a hot apartment and what can I do but open the windows and let smokey, slightly less hot air in?

Plus we are clearing out a warehouse. To make room for all the stuff from a warehouse we're moving out of. We recycle, though, so this means taking everything out of the packaging and binning it correctly and is not the kind of labor to be doing in this sort of weather.

Saturday I couldn't face editing so I dragged the gaming machine out of the closet. Thing about open-world games like Skyrim and Fallout 4 is you can ignore the core game and go off and do things. My favorite Skyrim pastimes are either being a bard, or running a farm. I want to play an archaeologist and poke into Dwemer stuff but that would take more modding to make really plausible.

So my current Fallout 4 I assumed the Sole Survivor's mind snapped and he has decided he is a Roman legionnaire. I'm ignoring most of the quests and all the main plot line and using mods to let me build all the crap I want. I'm not even using the stock settlements, but instead building my own forts and townships up in the nearly vacant Northeast corner of the map around Vault 111. Unfortunately I can't find any Roman armor, and because of how settlements work I can't build roads from one fort to another (much less a Hadrian's Wall).

***

Editing is not going well. I have no confidence in the story. Or my writing.

I've started redrawing the coin at least. And although this week has not been one for either writing in the evening or thinking during the day I still managed to solve one scene re-write. Really, what I need to do now is put on the appropriate music, open a beer, and charge through the remaining big hole.

But I think I'll focus on getting it ready for beta instead. Maybe I can deal with the grammar checker. (Dammit -- and I have the Geordie Dialect check to do as well. Plus I am still fumbling for Linnet's voice, and that needs some attention).

Picking a Book

Dratted Apple. I suspect PhotoShop and their new stupid requirement to run their Cloud application just to let you use the software was also at fault.

My computer was running ridiculous hot, and stalling out on simple tasks. I checked Activity Monitor and it was Apple's Crash Reporter that was the culprit, taking up as much as 70% of the CPU and running constantly. 

And of course this is part of the "it just works" under the hood of Apple. Meaning no preferences pane, no control panel...ah, but there is the UNIX core down there and a power user had figured out how to delete it. I ran Terminal and sudo'd the fucking thing gone and my computer is back to not being the hottest thing in a small room on what are predicted to be several very hot days in a row.

***

I'm plowing through the "blue line" part of the edit.

Also took time to draft up my first scene/part divider idea so I could prep manuscript for the beta readers in something resembling final form:

And I don't like it. Surprise! I might try a new inking; I had thought damaging the coin might take some emphasis off the hat but it just made things worse. Time to try drawing a trowel and see if I like that better.

Anyhow.

What I did was read the book quickly from top to tail looking for places where there was a big block of description or expositional dialog. I marked all of those by changing text colors; blue for "this could be condensed," and red for "I really don't need this."

The next pass is going to be for through lines and necessary information. I'll be jumping around a lot more with that.

But there are a couple of scenes that need to be re-written completely and I've hit the first big one and I'm stalled picking out a book. The scenario; Linnet is in the Nine Elms shelter, reading, and Wentworth passes by and says something.

But what book? Every book I've looked at so far goes way off into things I don't want to have come up in that conversation. I want her to be cautiously optimistic and I want him to not have an easy dismissal of "That Buck Rodgers stuff."

First problem. Rationing and attacks on convoys. She's not going to be getting what's hot off the American presses. Second problem; most of what's exciting and appropriate in SF at that point is in pulp magazines with gaudy covers. Which is actually sort of cute in a geeky way and I might be able to work with that.

Third problem; SF in period, especially from British authors, was depressing. There was a big phase of rise-of-fascism dystopias going on. SF, even in the pulps, had moved a bit beyond Buck Rodgers and was already into socialist, psychological, feminist, and other themes. It was at that point straining to be literary -- even though the New Wave was surprisingly far in the future.

So here's a few I considered; Olaf Stapleton's Star Maker. Ridiculously cosmic scale, philosophical in outlook (although Brian Aldiss describes his take on the nature of existence and the future of humanity as being told in terms "vast, cool, and unsympathetic.") 

Contemporary C.S. Lewis was appalled, and yes he also gets on the list with Out of the Silent Planet, unabashed Christian polemics on a basically unrecognizable Venus; to my opinion, Narnia if it was trying to be serious enough for an adult audience (but only succeeded in being ponderous).

Gray Lensman is on the list but was being serialized in an American pulp. It does come up later in the novel...but I'm not sure I want to establish it quite so strongly as a running theme.

L. Sprague de Camp provides Lest Darkness Fall. The hardcover British edition wasn't until 1941 but I suppose I could let that slide. The big advantage is also the disadvantage; this is a Connecticut Yankee story in which the time traveler tries to stave off the Fall of Rome. So on the one hand, it lets Wentworth get on his horse about last stands and fallen empires, but on the other, it is off the tracks for Linnet.

There's a peculiar little book in the rise-of-fascism mode that was in Britain in 1937 and got recommended by a Leftist reading club. Written by a woman under an assumed name, it describes a future England under the deified memory of a savior Hitler. It is both future history and feminist dystopia and there's a lot of fun resistance and fifth column stuff going on. That title jumps out at one, though; Swastika Night. 

Which makes my conundrum even more complicated. I am going to elide most of the details -- this is a novel, not a book review -- but leave in just enough so the reader would be able to recognize the work. "This de Camp fellow is one of those fantasists, right?" "No, I believe he studied history."

In Katharine Burdekin's case, though, the novel is obscure enough (just recently got a big push from a feminist press) she really should get her details recorded.

(That's 1943 or 1944, I forget which. The title story is an absolute snooze, written by the editor himself and having nothing to do with the previously-painted cover.)

Music Notes

 I am so overdue to record something new!

Trouble is, my skills keep improving, so I keep putting it off until I am "good enough." Well, that, and until I have time (and with the current plan to write the next two Athena Fox books before I stop trying to push that series...)

That practice really needs to include more reading and more ear training. So I opened the theme to Deep Space 9 on MuseScore but tried to do the trumpet part by ear instead of looking at the chart. I was getting that high note with the screamer mouthpiece, but when I checked it with the chromatic tuner, it was only a D flat. So what's going on?

Oh. My chromatic was set for Trumpet, so properly transposing, but the MuseScore track was in Orchestral pitch. So actually that part is a whole-tone lower than I thought it was. Still a high trumpet note for a non-jazz score.

Incidentally, this isn't just me making up terminology. Kelly really does call the MPC that:

And, yes, that really is a "non-whistling" string I ordered:

I put the new set of nylon strings and the aluminium E on my newly re-fitted bridge and I do like the sound. I had confidence to go through a couple of practice pieces with the mutes off.

See, this is where the chin-cello really helped me. The violin is another loud instrument and it makes terrible noises when you are still learning. This makes it too easy for someone like me to go at the strings weakly, which besides poor tone also leads to things like poor bow control, a lack of authority in string crosses, etc.

I have to hammer at that chin-cello to get it to play, especially on the C. Plus my current chin-cello is based on a solid-body electric so there's not a lot of volume either way.

Notice the extra-thick strings. And that's my carbon-fibre bow.

***

So I have the latest "that would be amusing" project in mind:

I've had versions of this thought before but I woke up with it feeling even clearer. There's a sort of rather formulaic fantasy/epic music with lots of repetitive figures and basic chord sequences that doesn't keep a composer up all night trying to work out the harmony (something that's killing me right now in, say, trying to do proper voicing on the Hellboy theme).

With random ethnic instruments, of course. Well, to some extent, I now play both basic elements of the orchestra and a smatter of ethnic instruments. And although my music theory is basically pants, I know enough to fake my way through a I to IV chord change and a minor second key change on top of it.

It is also more-or-less how I used to build music on keyboard. Question is whether I can do this with real instruments in any sort of efficient way...

The Big Black Mamba

 So after a good week of hair-pulling, I've realized the decisions I made for the book were pretty much the right ones in the first place. 

Not even sure I could structure it better if I chose to re-write from scratch. All my notes ended up being variations of "do what is already there, just punch it up a little."

I did have some good insights as to some of the key things happening in the sword fight scene, and how to better work with the pants scene. And I'd already decided to re-write the panto scene from the top, and I've more or less come around on extending the final sewer trip a bit with some more incidents.

I used to think of re-writes like surgery. As I get better, it is more and more like a laparoscopic procedure. Not quite out-patient, but getting closer.

And that's good, because line edits always feel a bit like murder. A story and the people in it have a sort of false life, and getting down to the individual sentences and word choices strips out the illusion. It becomes like waking from a dream.

What I mean is, when you are having a dream, there is this illusion of all sorts of lovely detail and consistency, but when you try to remember and write it down you realize just how little was actually there. Story is the same way. Strip it down to words and that face that you picture in your mind so clearly is a mention of a hair color and a frequent grin. And with one edit, the grin can go away.

***

None of my beta readers so far read on a computer so I have to have a print-ready manuscript before they can even get at it. Makes me less eager to make use of their services. But even the paid readers I've been eyeballing, I don't want to contact until I've at least run my own grammar check. And that needs to wait for me to finish the clean-up and tightening.

And I'm so over this. I wish I could just send this off to a publisher and let them worry about it. Well, sure, their in-house editor would mail be back with a list of things they need me to do, but at least that would be a month from now.

***

Finally got into it yesterday. The only good thing that came out of being sick (although I spent most of today feeling so ill I watched the pilot of Deep Space 9 and the first half of Megamind). 

I already blue-lined around the spots where there was a big lecture that either felt extraneous or boring or out of character or more like all three. Well, I'm finding it surprisingly easy to throw out half those paragraphs entirely, and re-write the survivors to be more compact. And also more in keeping with the characters and the themes and arcs as I worked them out through writing the rest of it.

Pitch?

 Preview of the revision-in-progress:

So that's with the Tomb of Atreus background, new render of the calyx with cleaner ground and no bullets and a godray that took ten hours of render time even at 1/4 resolution. I had the side lighting cut because Dad complained about it, but I needed them to detach the pot from the background so rendered those off as a new layer and comped that in this morning.

One thing PhotoShop does not do, apparently, is let you adjust the kerning on individual letters. I'm still delving into that, though. (You can, of course, turn them into a bitmap and manipulate that.) It's really a sort of awful font -- Diogenes, and it was free at least. But it has the "Greek without being too awkwardly Disney Hercules" look about it.

And I just realized I'm breaking another rule by using a serif font with a sans serif. Well, with a decorative. The serif font is Archaeocaps, which is a caps-only font with a slightly awkward look that does sort of put across "history, but modern."

It's a tough cover problem, trying to juggle archaeological thriller with detective cozy. The other is worse. I haven't quite figured out how to not make it look like a crime novel.

And rewrites are going very slowly.

***

During lunch at work today I took the bridge off my violin and thinned it down. The main reason was because the mute didn't fit and it was cutting into my practice opportunities.

It's funny. You look at the "how to fit a bridge" and they all explain how to use sandpaper. Then the old pros speak up, horrified that you'd use anything but a very sharp knife. Well, I'm lazy. I used sandpaper. Although I did use a knife to fit the feet a little better than they had been.

The bridge fit. The violin also sounded nicer, much nicer. I am not into the bright sound and I just splurged as well for a "non-whistling E string." And a set of nylon-core (not the really expensive silk-and-gut ones, though). Strings don't last forever anyhow, and my A string had just unravelled and I had to scrounge up the strings I had before I got the Alphayues.

One thing led to another and I swapped back the old chin rest and it is finally starting to feel like it is placed right on my shoulder. Still some tension though, mostly in the arm.

Anyhow!

I put the strings on but left them a little slack so everything could ease in a little. Came back a few hours later, and with no reference pitches in my ear over that entire period tuned in the E to as close as my tuner could register it.

So maybe I do have perfect pitch? I really need to spend some more time training it up.