Who was that masked samurai?

I had a weird criticism about the last book. It was a request to put a Dramatis Personae in the back.

I've never liked those. I've only really seen them on epic fantasy and MilSF which seem to go out of their way to have oodles and oodles of characters. Especially the MilSF, where they are endless lists of people who are in exactly one scene, on a radio, but we need to know where they sit in the Org Chart by rank and official position.

Well, I'm not going back and editing the book this week, even if I thought it was a good idea. Some people haven't quite made the jump to the electronic life. When I read, it is usually with a computer or smart phone near at hand so if I start wondering (as I did during brunch) what language a scene set in Tel Aviv would be in, Wikipedia is only a few clicks away.

(In fact, from within Kindle it is one click away).

But that's not it.

It took a while to understand this wasn't even about my core cast. Apparently I wasn't supposed to list those (after I'd gone and done so on my Author Web Site). It was the historical characters that were a problem.

In a book set in Japan, and that's getting close to the meat of it. My argument is that when I bring up, say, Ishikawa Goemon in the book, it is almost always put in context with "Ishikawa Goemon, the legendary ninja and bodyguard for the Tokugawa Shogunate." And that's all that matters for the story. (It is also most of what we know in history, as with so many other people of the period the story-tellers got into it big time and there is more strange stuff coming out of the kabuki theater than is ever documented about his actual life.)

And that got me to the edge of this complaint, but it took me another day to finally get it. It's the problem of feeling left out. Like you the reader are expected to know certain things. It can be a barrier; something I've cautioned new readers to, say, Military SF about; these books are in a field that has been developed since at least Heinlein and Haldeman, and there are a lot of internal terms and slang and assumptions about how the world works that you as a reader are expected to bring with you to the book.

And this is already a problem with Japan. Japan attracts Japanophiles. You cross the line very quickly between some assumed "normal" person who has heard of samurai but their understanding stops there, to someone who can tell you the complete List of Battle from any random engagement of the Genpei War.

Same with language; there the line is between "that's hardly Japanese at all" like "sushi" or "tofu" to "oh my god, you are one of those people" for "katana" or "geta."

The problem is basically one of trust. And I understand, and I have grappled with it. The reader has to trust that they aren't being expected to know this entire backstory, all sorts of things that will be narratively important but aren't going to be told to them. The previous book concerned the London Blitz and at no point did I go out of my way to explain that England was at war with Germany -- I expected the reader would know that.

And that's why I find this insolvable. For my critic, it seems so obvious; "You have to explain the stuff most people won't know." So I've got a story taking place in Paris. Do I need to explain that it is in France? Do I need to explain what the Eiffel Tower is? What about the Louvre? And, yes, at some point between the Pompidou Center and la petite Palais and Musee d'Orsay the reader isn't expected to know what that is or what they should know about it.

That part isn't as hard. I am quite comfortable in assuming this imaginary average reader has heard of James Bond but hasn't heard of Lupin III. (I can't think of any actual historical characters name-dropped in the Kyoto book that I could safely assume the reader had heard of.)

The real problem is, how do you assure the reader that you've told them what they need to know? I mention the Emperor Meiji several times. He's the emperor of Japan, I told the reader, he was a force behind the modernization of Japan, his rule marked a return to Imperial power (whilst constitutional) and the last of the Shogunate.

But this is where trust comes in. How does the reader know I'm not glossing this for the sake of the reader who already knows the importance of the Meiji Restoration? That I'm not expecting them to already know some other important detail about the man or his rule which is going to be important in solving the mystery/the climax of the book?

That's the thing. If I show them an obviously made-up person (or place) they are comfortable with the idea of "Her name is Natsumi, she's a schoolgirl who works at a shop, she's shy" being everything that is going to matter about this character. But there is some dark magic when they recognize that Yukio Mishima is a real person, and they get this terrible fear that they are being left out, no, that they are about to be kicked out of the club of True Believers for not being enough of a Japan addict to know ALL about Mishima.

And this was the last problem I had with the argument I had. Which is, how does repeating, "He's the emperor, etc. etc." at the back of the book fix anything?  

(And, yes, this can exist for fictional characters too. I always make a point of giving a few extra details when I pick up a character that hasn't been on screen for a while. I try not to just name-drop "Sakai" and risk leaving the reader floundering. Instead it will be something like, "And there was Security Chief Sakai, glowering as usual, in his spiffy red athletic jacket.")

(Of course, if the reader does have this terrible impression they should have remembered some important detail about this character from the last time they appeared -- how is a one-sentence blurb in an index at the back of the book going to do damn-all?)

My latest thought came in two stages. First off, that it may be a mistake to have, "Ishikawa Goemon, the legendary ninja" in the narrative, because it looks like you are saying, "You know, that famous guy." Again, I'm not sure why "Dale Carnegie, the race car driver" gets a pass but "Tokugawa Yoshitsune, Shogun" does not. But anyhow! It would be better to set this up as a lecture; "Yoshi-who?" "He was one of the Shogun who ruled Japan." "Oh. Thank you."

The second part of this, though, is what the index at the back is doing. It isn't supposed to provide any more explanation than is in the text. But when you see "Ishikawa Goemon: Legendary ninja" in the index, it tells you that, in fact, this is all the author thought you should, would, or needed to know. And, sure, the reader might flip to it in the middle of reading* but it it just to assure themselves that they didn't miss "And a notorious cross-dresser" or something that they really, really should have either remembered from a previous scene, or known themselves because the guy is so damned famous.

(He isn't.)

* Another blind spot for me. I read in Kindle. I originally wrote for Kindle. Flipping to the index is not quite the same as doing it in a paper book. You are always afraid the Kindle will lose your place if you flip around too much. And also, since you are already on a computer, if you are worried there's something about Yoshitsune you were supposed to remember, you can just double-tap the name and the Wikipedia page will pop up for you right there in the ap!

Writing about not writing

I'm still too disheartened to write, and either that or the slump of cold season and a week off work has kept me from wanting to create anything. Dabble, yes. Think about stuff, yes. But I don't feel like writing novel or recording instruments or even painting some of my 3D prints.

The KDP news is bad. I ended my advertising campaigns with no unit sales to show for it. Not a single copy. I did get over a thousand Kindle Unlimited page reads but it cost me over two hundred in advertising to do it.

Amazon is a numbers game. The more sales, the higher you list in the rankings, and the better you look to customers. Even better looking to customers is a high number of reviews. Even if they aren't all five star, as long as they aren't mostly negative it gives the reader confidence that other people thought it was worth picking up.

And I am suspicious. I haven't had a single unasked review myself. That is, they are either from people I know, or people I essentially traded reviews for (just done in a way that remains legal -- at the moment.) There are other sites and venues where you can grow visibility, including (shudder) Facebook (or whatever they are calling it these days). It just seems so much work and also seems very mercenary. But basically when I see a book which really isn't that great with a ton of reviews I suspect someone was out working Goodreads or something and begging reviews.

So with all that said:

I'm trying to reduce what is in the Paris book. This would be a great place to talk about colonialism and exoticism in art. But I'm not going to. There are some very strong economic and ethnic undercurrents, lots of intriguing subculture stuff, but I'm not going to go there. I really do aim to stay within the tourist-safe areas, sit at cafes and talk about Art; classical art, Academy art, not so much street art or outsider art or appropriated art.

I'm also going to largely skip the down-and-out. This is going to be budget travel, but middle class budget travel, slumming. As much as Penny can talk about having to watch her last euro, she comes from a comfortable middle-class background and she hasn't had to and never is going to have to live for years in a state of grinding poverty.

Things I'm not sure I can keep; Fantomas and the early generation of superheroes and villains in fancy-dress. The off-Broadway (or whatever stands in for Broadway there) theatre scene, cafe theatre and street theatre.

I'm not even sure I can do the Dan Brown clue hunt properly. I have mostly decided that although I love a good Dan Shea-complicated Illuminati conspiracy, I just can't indulge it properly in this book.

My cavalry officer and his adventures in the Great War...possibly the actual War Horse story. And for that matter, Colette, the Moulin Rouge, 1907 and the Rêve d'Égypte. That sexy mummy dance, and Colette herself, might be at the heart of the story. Or might not...I need to take more time to really sort out the pieces so I have a novel that can come in under 70K and not require massive re-writes to make all the mismatched parts fit.

It's not like I don't have time.

"On the third day it rained again..."

Video games have become the major platform for the epistolary story form. I finished both the main campaign and the Frozen Wilds DLC of Horizon Zero Dawn several days ago. Went back through to see if I could do a few things more elegantly -- craft more of a stealth build (sigh) and this time paid attention to upgrading gear. 

It did have one payoff. There's this one side-quest where you deal with a swarmy noble named Zaid. Aloy goes to a remote fort to rescue a captive, and on the way out Zaid pops up in ambush with a bunch of bully-boys and the Horizon-equivalent of a machine gun.

So I vaguely remembered this ambush on my second play-through. Went and mined the courtyard in anticipation and, it turns out, I was able to call the strider I had hacked earlier into the courtyard, too.

So I rescue the captives, Zaid does his big entrance... And his men stumble into the booby traps and the former captives polish them off neatly. Zaid does his big "I have you now, my pretty" speech anyhow while raising the machine gun -- I promptly knocked him over with a concussion arrow and Sparky the Wonder Horse ran over and stomped him to death.

So satisfying!

Anyhow, epistolary material in games is nothing new. Some games, like Bioshock and other Bioware entries, have all sorts of fascinating side-stories that are unfolded through logs and audio tapes. Even overheard NPC chatter can have little side stories. In some, the main plot engine is also explored through these -- often optional -- narrative clips. 

And games have an advantage over the novel in that, depending on the style of the game, they can be manuscripts that are read by a voice actor, voice recordings, actual video or holographic displays. So a bit more like those experimental theatre things where you walk around a site getting snippets from the actors.

There are games in which that is more or less the whole point. I think they call them "walking simulators" now. Basically Myst without the puzzles. Interestingly, a growing number of the big AAA games that have an interesting story to them -- like Mass Effect and as it happens Horizon Zero Dawn have a "story" mode that nerfs the difficulty allowing you to progress more easily from story point to story point. And, of course, explore the game world.

If I recall correctly, the original Mass Effect 3 added a third option; to automate all the dialogue for you so you could get back to the fighting!

In any case, I am very impressed by the way Horizon Zero Dawn handles the info-dump. In many games, there is a division between what are clearly side stories and the big background information, and the latter is pushed on you. This does happen somewhat in HZD, but even then the excepts are never "here's how we got here" or "as you know, Bob." They are made by people who are still concerned with the trivia, going about their daily lives and dealing with their own concerns, and the clues to what happened in the past are only read between the lines.

Even when you get a big dialog scene, where someone actually explains things to you (many of these are optional, too!) they are consumed by their own cares and give things their own spin. Nobody is going out of their way to paint a clear picture for the player. In fine epistolic fashion, the reveal of the war machines which wracked such havoc on the old world is in the form of a sales presentation!

(The closest moment I can think of to a "as you know, Bob" is when a Matriarch explains the origin story of the Nora -- Aloy's people -- to a group of children and young mothers during the evening festivities before the Proving. There is a level of euhemerism here as it does capture, however poetically, some of the ground truth of what happened in the past and how the world got the way it is. But you pretty much have to finish the game first in order to understand that!)

Of course HZD has an unfair advantage. Well, Bioshock opens with a complete outsider to the sunken city trying to figure out what is going on. HZD, however, very neatly maps the inner story of young Aloy trying to discover why she was cast out of her tribe and what happened to her mother, to her discovering not just how her tribe works, how their world works, but the quest takes her out into, first, interacting with other civilizations (the game calls them "tribes" but then Aloy is the POV character and that just may be how she views it), and then discovering not just what happened to the old world but that it is still happening -- and the mystery of her birth is of pivotal importance to the greater world.

I am slightly unhappy because of the usual AAA conundrum; for over a hundred bucks pre-paid the gamer is expecting at least forty hours of play. And that means the game has to both change things up to keep it fresh and also, unfortunately, it becomes a set of sequels to itself, each time upping the stakes.

You start the game as a Nora hunter silently stalking herd machines (which only turn hostile if provoked). By mid-game you are carrying a dozen kinds of high explosives and trick arrows and everything is a stand-up fight in a closed arena against a war machine the size of a condominium. But even Aloy realizes this; at some point she bitterly remarks that she went from being called "dirty outcast" by her fellow Nora, to being called "our savior, the Anointed One" and she finds the one fully as isolating as the other.

This is a smart game, in other words. It doesn't hold your hand...well, except literally, as the tutorial section is a very well done and admirably brief section where the child Aloy is instructed in hunting by her guardian and fellow outcast, Rost. And just when you might start to get tired of having everything explained for you, it dumps you into a scary, unarmed, cat-and-mouse against a dozen searching Watchers.

But this isn't a review. This is just me talking about a master class in backgrounding without making an annoying info-dump out of it.

I Love Paris in the Winter

 ...which is a song lyric from the musical Can-Can. And, no, I don't. I would like to go to Paris again but I've seen Paris in winter and I had some very cold days and one much worse night. A story I might borrow from for the next Athena Fox book.

Which is on again. More or less. I have a theme now with some degree of emotional investment from Penny and a change arc of sorts. Which is enough. I want her to continue to change and grow through the series but I can't put her in personal crisis in every single story. I have the bones of a plot and the basic forces involved in it.

I don't have anything close to a resolution. That's bad.

Anyhow, it is cold here as well and I'm well over it. Was sick with the chills for the last couple of days -- Sunday spent half the day wrapped up in every blanket I had with the heater running full blast and was still shivering. Bounced back today and went out with only my Henley in lieu of jacket. But still not quite feeling up to running down to the wood shop to record some more music.

I am still, all in all, feeling creatively depressed. I feel like creating again, and I have confidence in the act of creation itself, but it feels so futile. I am dumping advertisement money on Amazon right now and I gave away a bunch of ebook copies last week but the series just isn't catching on. Having a low number of reviews is a flag...not a red flag maybe but at least a yellow flag...to potential readers. There are probably other amateurish signs on my Amazon pages.

At least I've got a slight uptick on KEDP reads but as far as those numbers go...I'm paying THEM about three cents a page (if you go by what I'm spending on advertising.)

And, oh yeah, although I am feeling more creative, it all seems to be writing-oriented. Not feeling like doing music and more's the pity as I have this nice empty shop I could be hanging out at right now and at least get some practice in without feeling so self-conscious.

(Actually, some of my neighbors might be working anyhow. And trumpets and violins are LOUD. The sax is worse -- there is no mute for the saxophone, not a practical one anyhow.)

Cognitive Evolution

 I'm reading up about early humans. Realizing just how much work goes into planning out a new fantasy world. Except that this is faster work. Dreaming up shit is so much easier than trying to research.

Oh, but that's where I am right now. Yes, there is a fabulous space after the Toba Eruption; multiple human species, some of them retreating back again from what might have been a global cooling, the development of many of the attributes of recognizably human culture (roughly, the neanderthals had cave painting and flutes and burials but the whole package is probably later).

And today I got a glimpse of what the emotional structure should be for the Paris book. Now that I have admitted it really does need an emotional structure. This can't just be a mystery but I need that inner plot arc as well.

I hit #26 in Travel Adventure Fiction but I am also basically paying people to read the book. Spending about fifteen bucks a day on Amazon advertising and giving away the first book for free. But, hey, yesterday a Kindle Unlimited reader finished off the book in one day and that's money in my pocket there.

I should probably be getting involved at Booksy and Goodreads and all that to gain more publicity. I still have no confidence in my writing, though. Not enough to be that aggressive about getting people to read it.

Still not writing

It isn't exactly burn-out, and it certainly isn't block. I more than half wonder if the stomach pills I am on are doing something, because I'm just not that excited about anything creative.

Including music, although I have fond hopes I might actually record a new piece over the just-announced winter break at work. (The reason? Besides being too burnt out by evening, I'd have a quiet space at my shop to record.)

Put the first book on a one-week give-away. Two downloads so far. Also made it up to #57 in Travel Adventure (Fiction).

So anyhow, the Paris book. Once again, despite having other ideas that might even sell better, (at the very least, I can place them more firmly in genre, and genre signaling is a much more sure way to find your readership) it is the next Athena Fox that is closest to being able to start now.

I think what I am missing on this one is the emotional connection. I wanted this to be the vacation episode. After all I dragged her through in the Kyoto adventure, I wanted to back off from the angst and have her, for once, face things as a confident hero. But I'm realizing that without the inside/outside plot structure, I am lacking much of the thrust that makes me want to write it.

And I've been wool-gathering too long. Brainstorming is cool but you tend to think of too many ideas. The part that I need to be getting to is plotting, where I focus the book in on the idea that will work. I still feel that this episode's MacGuffin is a National Treasure type hunt, with all the crawling around famous buildings and well-known artworks finding unlikely hidden clues. But I still haven't been able to work out what that actually means in terms of action.

There's also a few other stories I want to tell. I call this the Steampunk Superhero story, but that's a phrase that is likely to give the wrong idea. Exploring Steampunk in several ways; as a fairly shallow mining of history for flash and nostalgia for a class-ridden and yet somehow "more innocent" time. As the actual future shock of the trenches of WWI, but also the earlier glow of the fin de siécle era and the charming gadget future lightly mocked in the En l'An 2000 postcard set. And in the form of the tricked-out heroes and costumed villains of the turn of and the early 20th centuries, the Arsene Lupin and the Fantomas.

Oh, and there's also my La Boheme group of artist friends trying to navigate the search for a voice amidst all the pressures of popularity, Academie, criticism, and far from least, finances.

So I think this is mostly a story about the story of Paris, the illusions of Paris, the symbols that have grown up around Paris. The Paris of the Paris Syndrome, not the living city.

But, then, I intended for most of A Fox's Wedding to be in the areas of international hotels and the modern equivalent of the jet-set, a global culture of well-to-do that is almost completely divorced from anything specifically, organically, or traditionally Japanese.

And that didn't happen.

The Map, Please

I am SO over book covers. See, this is why people do traditional publishing; you let the publisher worry about figuring out markets, handling advertising, doing book markup and hiring artists and all that.

Out of all the Fiverr artists I've worked with, I'd say only one has my whole-hearted approval for what he provided and how easy (and fast) he was to work with. My last cover artist -- well, it wasn't his fault, he had a life event and that happens to all of us.

But I got so damned tired of looking at what were supposed to be temporary covers I finally broke down and just took the false starts and unfinished work of my last two artists and finished the damned things myself. They aren't as good as they should be. But they are better than they were.

Athena Fox Series Page at Amazon

And as soon as Amazon finishes approving the new uploads I'm going to put Book #1 on sale (99 cents, or maybe just give-away) and throw some new advertising money at it. I am feeling it is likely this series will never do well but I've been going through a ton of other books and the faults I know about in mine, I'm seeing in other books that are at least making some sales.

Not that I expect to make money. I just want the damned thing read!

***

So I had an alternate idea. Not for the first time, and an artist I brainstormed with came up with the same. I've gotten bored on my cover-and-branding research because as far as I could tell it was largely random where Amazon places a book. I mean, I got up to #120 in "Japan Travel Guides" with the Kyoto book. And I certainly didn't place it there.

Artifact covers are sort of the thing, if you include sites in your artifacts (aka, Great Pyramid, etc.) The exception seems to be female leads that aren't historical or cozy's (Amelia Peabody is both) -- those get the only three-quarters-and-up shots. Like I am using currently. (Some of the solo male protag or more commonly team-based ones have a distant figure, usually silhouette as well.)

Anyhow, so I could do map covers. Map and artifact, but this being something small and portable. The devil is in the details, and the worst is that maps have copyright. Anyhow; London book would work with map of the Underground, of the Northern Line Extension, or Bazalgette's sewer plan (at least that one isn't copyright!) And a dupondius of course. That properly suggests the "Roman stuff found under London."

Athens book? Oh, I have so much Athens stuff I'd love a street map, but also could push the Odyssey theme with a nautical map, particularly of the waters South of the Attic Peninsula. A potsherd would look weird, though...so a Medusa medallion.

Kyoto is weirder. I don't think a map would help. But building plans of the cult compound could be cool. Artifact almost certainly a magatama necklace.

And Paris ain't written yet.