High Noon at Highgate

 I am finally over my discomfort and writing again.

Or, rather, revising. I just got done with revising the scene at Highgate Cemetery. That wasn't one of the big three, though. Just a bit I wanted to do better with.

Like a lot of notes, this has come not so much out of beta readers or even out of re-reading but out of being away from the book and thinking about random things and that ends up taking me back towards a moment in the book that no longer works for me.

The "bum" conversation is probably getting fixed, too. Funny. The big note I got was about what might be called objectifying the character, and I'd already been moving that way through round of revision. Threw out the original "pants" scene, gutted the second photo shoot scene, re-did the conversation after the Aladdin rehearsal. 

Which means really I have only a few bits and random lines to tweak. Plus reworking the pants scene in a completely different direction I just thought of last week that not only is stronger for this book, but sets up stuff that will pay off in the next book! But that means going through every single scene Graham is in and tweaking and adjusting.

Plus the same thing for every scene in which Geordie dialect shows up. Again funny; my latest version is that Geordie is friendly. When Tony is being insulting, he's not in dialect. When he is in dialect is when he is being nice. And that's pretty much how most of the lines were working out anyhow.

Sometimes writing -- especially revising -- is all about being smart enough to realize when you'd been making the right choices already, and just focusing in on those.

Still, considering how much (how little) I normally get done during the work week, I don't expect to get through the big revisions in less than a week. And I'm chomping to get this uploaded and in the store.

***

Finished Alien Isolation. Still really nice game, good design, incredibly respectful (but in a good way) towards the original material. There's a section where Marlowe, captain of the ship that found the Nostromo's flight recorder and decided to back-track it to LV 426, narrates to Ripley's daughter Amanda -- and you switch POV to play through their landing. Meaning you get to walk out into the crazy landscape, climb into the derelict, and check out the Space Jockey yourself. That POV doesn't have a close encounter with an egg, but no worries -- Amanda can and will get killed by face-huggers multiple times before you complete the game.

Anyhow, this is true fan service. And very playable. Although the stealth sort of went out the window in later parts when so much is happening, the settings are either too open or too constricted, and the Alien is stalking you full time, there's really no point in trying to use all those wonderful sneak mechanics. Just go straight for the objective and hope you don't get killed before the save point.

I had three minor bugs, none of them fatal. There are sometimes weapons left drifting in the air after an encounter. There is an annoying sloshing sound that happens when you save with the flamethrower equipped (the easy fix is just to reload the weapon). And I stumbled into open flames near the very end and my hands were visibly on fire even after I got into a space suit. Made it hard to read the motion tracker but other than that...

There's a few things I don't know whether to call poor design or sadistically clever design, though. I watched a play-through and it really brought home for me how the game misleads you into things that seem sensible, might even be sensible in the early game, but actually hamper you later.

Lockers. There are lockers all over that give you that "action possible on this object" glow when you are near them. You are meant to hide in them. Which works, but... getting in is noisy, getting out is worse, you can't craft or reload or even change load-out when inside them, you can't see what is going on very well...and you can still get found.

What does not glow or otherwise alert you is hiding under desks or surgical cots. Where you can do everything...including prepping a noise-maker to distract the Alien so you can escape, or preparing your flame thrower in case he looks the wrong way.

Second is the motion tracker. It is cool and all, but it takes up part of the screen and blurs the rest slightly. Meaning your attention is on the motion tracker -- which doesn't tell you if it is an Alien or a friendly or a Working Joe, if the Alien is on the ground or up in the vents, and doesn't show anything if the enemy is sitting still (which both the Alien and the Joes love to do).

Plus enemies can hear it.

Thing is? Once you've picked up the motion tracker, you get a beep when something is moving near you. Several beeps, in fact. You can't get direction, but you can certainly get a nice alert just by listening.

And listening is really the thing. The Alien makes different noises depending on if it is in the vents or on the ground. It makes distinctive sounds when transitioning. The Joes also make enough noise you can usually hear them coming. So you can get a pretty good sense of what is coming up on you and from where just by using your ears.

Related to both the others; crouching is cool because it automatically puts you under things if you can duck under them. It makes you less visible and there are several sections where there are counters or whatever and you can pretty much waltz through in a crouch position.

But it slows you down. It restricts your vision as much as it breaks the enemy sight lines. And it even blocks you from seeing pick-ups and other useful things that are on top of tables. It really is more sensible to play the game at a walk most of the time and crouch only when you are actively hiding from something nearby.

The instinct the game leads you to is to crouch all the time and hide in lockers frequently and hide behind the motion tracker until you figure out the Alien can hear it and is homing in on the sound. And I can't decide if this is a design flaw or sadistically good game design. It could even be argued that this is an immersive ludonarrative connect to Amanda starting out wary and over the course of events becoming daring and heroic.

I'm going for sadistic, though. Late in the game, it delivered the schematics for the EMP generator version 3.0  Which is the great tool for taking out (preferably groups of) Working Joes. (The biggest groups you find, alas, are either in the server room or the reactor core, and both of those are wearing electrostatic suits.)

Of course I didn't meet a single Working Joe for the rest of the game. Oh, no wait. I did meet one. Who was wearing the EMP-proof coveralls. Thanks, game. What I could have really used was more flame. Nothing else seemed fast enough to stop those damned face-huggers.

I am tempted to play again. Well, part way through. Just to finally use the Pipe Bomb and the EMP bomb properly. Dealing with the Reactor Joes was really damned annoying when I hadn't been prepared for them.

***

I'm more and more convinced Japan is too deep to do simply. I mean, I think I can write a book that looks simpler to the reader. But it is going to take six months at the least to write. 

Alienation

 

(image from Gamasutra article)

I'm doing better at the game than I am at the novel. Either of them.

It seems like a joke. 2020 has been such a rough year, I'm relaxing by playing a game where you run around an exploding space station chased by an un-killable monster.

(Really, Fallout 4 made more sense. Rather like Skyrim, where you can purchase a pre-made home, the ability to craft a nice player house in Fallout 4 means the best part of the game is, after a long hard day, relaxing at home playing a character who is relaxing at home.)

Anyhow. Alien Isolation has been good at addressing a fault I have in playing. I tend to want to play meticulous, planning the optimal way to go and reducing risks. Well, the Alien itself is randomized. It can -- and it will -- pop out with no warning and kill you on the spot. You can hide, and you can throw noisemakers to distract it, but it learns; if you throw too many distractions it will learn to ignore them. And it will figure out there's someone around throwing them. And it will look for you and if you stay in the same hiding place too long it will find you.

So it is actually a better plan to keep moving, take chances, and deal with failure and having to go back from the last save point. I had a much easier time with that once Ripley found the flamethrower, though. Up until then, if the Alien spotted me, I was dead. After that, I was willing to all but walk up right behind it. Because as long as I had a few squirts of fuel left, there was at least a chance I could frighten it off long enough for me to escape.

(The most satisfying moment I had in the game was actually before I found that flamethrower. I managed to pop a molotov cocktail right in the thing's face. Got killed by Working Joes a few minutes later but boy did it feel good to watch the Alien shriek in dismay and run away.)

***

I won't get notes from my other potential beta readers for weeks. So I'm trying to do the edits this weekend and make the book purchasable by Monday. 

Every time I sit down, though, I have a "who am I to be trying to do this?" moment. Weird. I think it is the character. Or maybe the real-world setting. I never had this kind of reaction when I was writing science fiction. But this series, every time I try and work, I get hit by Imposter Syndrome.

When I'm in the groove, I am Penny. I just write in her voice, and write her thoughts. But it is never easy getting back into that character when I've been away from it.

***

I went and got another book on Japan. I caught a podcast interviewing the author and it sounded so interesting...

I may have to give up the idea of pushing the Japan novel out in four months. I've been at it for two months (well, I've been revising the last one all month) and I still don't have the plot.

Armies always plan for the last war. This book is in reaction to the last book. I want a big, obvious plot with known stakes that shows up on page one. No more slow burn. I also want an antagonist that is visible and known and that the reader can hate and want to see defeated.

At this point I haven't even decided if this "external" plot needs to be linked in any way -- physical, thematic, allusion, whatever -- to the "internal" plot. Which at least is looking fairly solid. This may be another thing I need to unlearn. I've gotten too used to plotting from the inside and it doesn't lead to big flashy "world saving" plots. 

Maybe I need an Alien to chase me. Some sort of editor-alien, looking more than a little like Brandon Sanderson I imagine and screaming about "show don't tell." (Or possibly it is a Queen Alien and the repeated cry is, "But, Jenna...!")

Anyhow.

I had one Kindle page read a couple days ago. I mean one page. That's as far as they got. That's...not helping.

So. I need to fix some things. There are places that I thought were in character but my beta thought was objectifying, and I don't have to agree with that to agree that they don't benefit the book sufficiently to be worth struggling to keep.

So I need to go into the "shot in the bum" sequence and...

...I can't do this.

Turning off the editor now. I'm going back to getting killed by an Alien.

Believe it or not

 First I was waiting on beta readers. Then the first one got back to me and I had to take a break and reset emotionally.

It's funny. A story is words on a page. That's all it is. Those words are surprisingly thin. Not even quite a skeleton of the world that you are hoping to bring to life. So it should be no surprise that the world the reader experiences may not be the world the writer experienced.

But that's not the point of today's remark. The point is, it is a world, a whole world that exists in your mind and the words on the page are merely the reportage. Before you can change those words, you have to change that world. And it feels like a life change. Like changing jobs or moving to a new town or redecorating. You have to let go of all your memories of what had been and clear your mind until you can begin building what it is now. It takes a little time and, yes, it can be emotionally jarring.

***

While I was doing that, I played games. (Plus I was depressed and still getting over a cold and it was really hot). And I am really enjoying Alien: Isolation.

I didn't expect to. The play can be nerve-wracking. It is like the ultimate stealth game, except that you are up against an AI that doesn't helpfully patrol in a fixed pattern. 

But also, the scenery is gorgeous. I'm mildly disappointed in the Sebastopol being yet one more of these ruined, debris-strewn settings. I liked the whatever-it-was better; it was described in-game as being a sister ship to the Nostromo, only cleaned up a hell of a lot after a lot of hard work.

Still, even in the station I just love the way the tech looks, especially the stuff you have to interact with -- including the save points. (Yeah, that's one trick they do to make it exceptionally nerve-wracking. You can't save-scrum. You have to make it alive to the next save point. And yes when I decided to stop and take a break last night I was on what is apparently the most frustrating episode of the game, when you are trying to get out of Doctor Morley's office and the Alien has taken an interest in you.)

And now I'm going back to play from the beginning. It's a relatively short game anyhow, but now that I know I won't see the not-the-Nostromo again with time to crawl around and enjoy the scenery, and that I missed a couple of important pick-ups...  And maybe this time I can finally get out of Doctor Morley's office.

New Dimensions in Novel Covers

 But not intentionally.

I just spent two delightful days going around the bushes with tech support when my corrected book cover wouldn't upload properly. Over and over I checked; the template was 3208 pixels wide. My document was 3208 pixels wide. The cover that worked was 3208 pixels wide. Why is it displaying at the wrong size?

Tech support -- and the forum, when I eventually got into it -- were no help. "Did you use a template? Did you remember to erase the template? Did you account for bleed and trim?" Over and over "check the size," they say. "I checked the size," I say.

Until I finally figured it out. I found it through experiment, actually. And confirmed it through experiment. Unlike all the other graphics work I've done in the past, where pixels rule, the cover importer is entirely set by whatever inches the document claims it is set to.

But depressingly, I can't even upload the final revised covers. Because I am in editing and the page count might change.

And the editing? I have two beta readers who will get back to me "soon."

***

So I'm basically stuck on finishing Hounds. And that's making it really hard to clear that book from my head and focus on Wedding.

I really need the sit-down time to read my research. I have Gender Gymnastics: Performing and Consuming Japan's Takarazuka Revue and Come and Sleep: The Folklore of the Japanese Fox. There is, I just realized today, some weird intersections between Takarazuka and Kitsune. I also want to go back and review Astronauts of Ancient Japan, a beautifully stupid book in the von Daniken mode. 

I am still amused that the speech-to-text on my phone can handle "Hideyoshi" and "Kusanagi" but "Ohayo Gozaimasu" confuses it and it still doesn't know what to do with "scene" and "beat." And I've pretty much given up on dissuading it from thinking "I've seen a fox."

After a week of work (well, mostly a week of being sick and playing Fallout 4) my only process insight is that I spent a lot of days during the last book where I wasn't ready to write a scene and thus, didn't write.

So I'm going to try to outline tighter. We'll see how it goes. I'm not unhappy with the results at the moment. I think my discovery writing stumbled upon some good stories to tell in the London setting and I didn't, in the end, waste that much time in backing and filling. But I have so many stories I'd like to try to tell and I would be so happy if I could work even a little faster.

Whose Line is it Anyways

One of these days I'm writing a book on writing. I'm looking for a term now for unattributed dialog. Orphaned dialog. Headless lines. Detached word balloons.

This is when there is a line -- usually of low semantic value -- that doesn't get attributed and can't be easily linked to a specific character.

So not what happens when there are two people in a discussion and you omit tags (like omitting the repeated header from MIDI "Running Status" messages). Aka:

"It is not," Alice said.

"It most certainly is," Bob countered.

"Is not."

"Is."

"Is not, and I have the graphs to prove it," Alice concluded triumphantly.

Also not the case when you have a speaker with such a distinctive voice, or a specific subject, or there was a previous line directed towards them:

"Engineering?" Kirk glanced towards his chief.

"I canna give ye nay more; mah poor wee bairns are burning oop!"

Well, I thought I had an example, from the scene in the station when Doctor Who is first mentioned, but it turned out to be a bad example. There's two or three orphaned lines in that scene but they could just as easily be attached to an alternating speaker.

I made the choice for Fox and Hounds to over-attribute. I am going with the general advice that "said" is invisible so I'm including it more often than is strictly necessary. I did notice, though, reading to see if I had a better example of an orphaned line, that I tend to leave off attribution of a lot of Penny's lines. The reason being; she's the POV character, and conversations happen because she is there. In many cases, she is reporting on it because she is part of it.

Well, that and she has a distinct voice.

***

I was glancing over the print version again -- I have a bunch of corrections, edits, and general tweaking to go still -- and right there on page 7 I hit a dangerous one:

“The task of the archaeological field worker,” Leslie said, “Is to get the data out of the ground."

Goddamn automatic capitalization! I feel like turning that off if it is going to do that sort of thing to me. The second quotation following the attribution should, of course, not be capitalized; "is to get the data out of the ground."

But since the automatic capitalization did this, it may occur multiple times in the manuscript. That means I have to go through the whole damn thing manually. And it has to be done by hand because it entirely depends on nuances of phrasing that automatic tools are very bad at understanding (heck, ProWritingAid doesn't do well with clauses. Dialog is pretty much beyond it.)

Well, I can probably find most of them by searching the combination (, ").

***

I am conflicted on directions here. I am eager to get Hounds in the store, but at the same time, I could build momentum better if I had another book coming out within a month or two after it. Add to this, I have beta readers currently working on Hounds, and I am still into the experiment of trying to finish Wedding in 4-6 months.

And I just got another email. Mom has been beating the bushes, and the family friends she's found have all been more than what I can ascribe to being merely supportive. Oh, yes. And not a one of them reads electronically. It's all print, all the time.

***

Just found this absolutely perfect guide to the proper capitalization of dialogue:

1. Steve said,  "Good morning."

2. "Good morning,"  said Steve.

3. Steve said,  "Good morning,"  then sat down.

4. "Ladies and gentlemen,"  said Steve,  "good morning."

Half-Title

 Prints arrived. Gave one out, will be giving two more this weekend. Spotted several things that I want to adjust before the release.

Among them being re-arranging the Front Matter. And...humph. I looked at the information page at KDP. I looked at Wikipedia. Those more-or-less agree, but only more-or-less. Then I pulled a dozen paperbacks from my own bookshelf and not a single one agreed with the KDP/Wikipedia style.

So I'm going to go title page with copyright on the verso side. TOC, epigram on the next recto after that, and half-title on a third recto just before the prologue starts (also on recto, like all of the parts and chapters).

The ebook will be almost identical, except that the TOC is actual links (I discovered how to do that).

***

Then there's some graphics clean-up. KDP was barfing at the full cover for Hounds for some reason so I stuck the front side image into their Cover Creator. Which is okay, but I like the control I get over doing the full cover myself and by the time I had Knows ready it was taking full covers again.

There's a nice bare spot on the back cover of Hounds. I am so tempted to put up a request for a pulp magazine cover or a playbill on Fiver and see what happens.

***

And editing. I am afraid I may get structural edits from my beta readers, and it is too late to apply those. Once again, I'll learn from them and move forward. I have a dozen edits of my own already (read most of the print version myself). Half of them are places where italics got left off or I want to check if it is Defoe or Dafoe (It's Defoe). But the others are slightly more work.

Re-doing the sword fight and the Geordie Final Exam to bring out the drama and the various threads. Actually, I think that's it. Although there's a self-locking door that bugs me but I haven't come up with an idea for it.

Oh, the italics? Turns out that the method I was using to highlight text for work notes carries through in formatting even with "ignore formatting" checked in the compiler. So I had to hard-format the entire text, then go back and put the italics back in. And I missed a few.

***

Didn't identify any specific ways to improve my method. Did get some metrics out of it. Hounds was done in eight months, and only about four of those months were actually hammering out text. Planning took a full two months and formatting and re-writes another month or two. Somewhere in there was a month of re-writes on Knows, so I'm not counting that.

It was still long enough so I'd lost some of the specific notes I wanted when I got to the scene they were for. But at the same time, I really need a certain amount of simmer time to get the ideas together. I am quite convinced the reason I've re-done the sword fight twice already is because I pushed to write it before it was quite ready.

So I'm not sure how to tighten down to six months. At least the other issue; the lack of focus in the plot, is something I should be getting steadily better at.

...quickly dissolve into banality and romance

Title taken from a Quora question on horror movies.

A Fox's Wedding is officially started. I would really like to kick this one out in six months. (On re-tracing of notes, Fox and Hounds took eight actual months -- although stretched over nine in calendar time, it was interrupted by a month of editing work on The Fox Knows Many Things. And on that note! I am doing another edit round on Hounds, meaning it will technically be in third draft before it is published.)

But back to A Fox's Wedding. As much as I'm already generating ideas -- and putting a few things off the table as well -- I really need to hold off on brainstorming until I've done the pre-planning.

That's a bit of brain work there. I want to identify what parts of the process could be better. I want to find where I could have written a better story, and even more, where I wasted time.

But anyhow. A few things I already know: I've largely given up the idea of a strong overall character arc through the series. Penny is still growing and learning and will do so for at least another book, but the place she is emotionally and in relation to her character and archaeology at the end of Hounds is really not where she needs to be to make Wedding work. So I need to think of these as episodic, not as strictly linear.

I want to use things I already know. However. The Writing Excuses podcast had a recent episode titled, "Write what you want to know." I like that. So the Takarazuka Review is in the book and I've bought my first book to start reading up on that. (Because I know almost nothing about it but I've always been fascinated).

I'm also pretty set that there will be scenes in Kyoto, and in Tokyo. And the Fushimi Inari shrine (the one with all the torii gates), and Toei Uzumasa Eigamura (the Edo-era standing set near Kyoto). Business that is probably in it is the earphone bit (with her friend Aki giving her lots of not-always-useful advice), dressing up as a Geisha (possibly with shamisen), and a big training sequence.

Things that may or may not be in it; wartime Shinto, Kusanagi (the sword, not the anime character), the Zanryū nipponhei (the last of whom probably died in the 1980s), Lupin III, UFO cults, Iga Ninja, a Rocky V twist to the training, and a "Yamatai" episode (aka the death island from Tomb Raider 2013).

Things that are probably not in it; the Tokyo Tower (anything I want to do with it, I'd rather do with the Eiffel), and Moe.

Re the latter. There's not going to be a lot of people calling her "cute" and trying to get her into amusing costumes. It could be fun but there's a better book for that (specifically, the No Man's Sky archaeological survey/Great Nintendo Burial book). So the joke I'm going for here is that to most of the Japanese she encounters she is westerner; crude and suspect and freakishly huge. And yeah there's a ton to unpack there so that's a lot of fun stuff to be writing with.

I've also decided to use the stuff I know: Speed Tribes, the Home Dramas I watched on TTV, other things which are really a decade or three anachronistic. I don't think this virus is going to calm down in enough time for me to fly back there and do more on-the-spot research, and I've got a bookshelf full of stuff I'd like to get some use out of.