Red light, blue light

I found the reviewer who left that very cool review of my first book. (She said she hated the main character's politics but enjoyed the book anyhow, giving me five stars.)

So I could go on about history being intrinsically political, but instead, this was a much better review that I could have gotten from a red state, Trump supporter (who doesn't appear to have drunk all the Kool-aid, though.) I also got a four-star from someone who writes quick-read erotica with a very slight sheen of F&SF. Not even sure why she chose to review.

The thing about Goodreads is that it is a more in-depth, more direct reader-to-reader (and sometimes reader-to-author) dialogue and thus they tend to be more critical. Amazon reviewers generally understand the Kiss of Death of the five-star system; that five stars is "Average," and anything less than four stars is, "caught fire then exploded."

Anyhow, I'm finally moving into outlining the Paris book and some of the other characters are American. That's putting me perilously close to some class warfare, red-state/blue-state, and Ugly American stuff. I'm going to try to keep that out of the book as much as possible. Still, the main bad guy is basically a spoiled frat boy and it is going to be hard.

So right now, I would be trying a couple of scenes out. But I am having trouble picturing Paris well enough, despite the "hub" location of the story being the same street corner in Montmartre where I'd breakfast each day when I was in Paris.

Paris Match

I finally have a plot. Took from November to nearly the end of January. And I'd been thinking about the Paris book pretty much since I started writing the Kyoto book.

So much for writing faster.

This may be where my process goes wrong. I read a lot of stuff about how you can plot by taking one of the basic plot structures and plugging stuff into the holes; I need a hero, I need a villain, I need a third-act crisis...go. And I am hearing a lot in writing podcasts and so forth about how writers will do these sort of skeleton books and only in revisions do they figure out what the themes were.

Which is totally the wrong way to write a Tomb Raider story. You start with whatever historical McGuffin is in the latest issue of National Geographic, contact Central Casting for some villains to get in the way, pick a couple exotic locations from the same issue and there you are. Oh, look, we're searching for the Horn of Roland this week. Why do the bad guys want it? It has magical powers (didn't do Roland a lot of good, though).

Which is a problem right there. I didn't want to lie about history, or be cheap about history. And I'm equally uncomfortable with backlot "foreign lands" full of appropriately colorful locals (who do damn-all without the help of the white protagonist).

But theme? That's the problem. I'm still out there trying to figure out what it is I'm trying to say about history, archaeology, and modern society. About the abuse of the Classics, the Elgin Marbles, and, yes, about how too many people think the Horn of Roland should or would have magical powers.

And while I'm thinking, I keep exploring ideas, and too many of those ideas stay in the final mix, and they mean that inevitably, half-way through the book I have to revisit some of those questions and revise what I am doing. I stopped for rewrites twice on the Kyoto book. That's not good for my throughput.

(On the other hand, I put it up without further revision. Once again, I'm listening to these podcasts where professional writers are doing four rounds of beta reads and multiple revisions and several rounds with editors. But the numbers don't make sense. The self-published are rarely selling enough to pay for that kind of time or help, and the ones who do sell well, seem to do so regardless of whether they did or not.)

(Sure, a nicely edited book is more pleasurable to read. But saying that is far from saying that well-edited books sell well. It really doesn't seem to be the case.)

So anyhow. I have a plot. The themes I chose to weave give me good enough excuses to do the water tank under the Palais Garnier, the Jules Verne Cafe atop the Eiffel, the Moulin Rouge, a parkour chase sequence, goings-on at the multimedia Van Gough exhibit, and a climb up Notre Dame the night of the fire.

It just means I need la Boheme, Cavalry in WWI, Chanson, Collette, Montmartre, a Mummy, Napoleon, Parkour, Phantom, Steampunk, Theater...

Omicron to Omron

"If it ain't one thing," Yogi Berra said, "it's something different."

The way the past couple of years have been going, I'm expecting the seas to turn red any day. What haven't we had? Well, the locusts were mild and expected. There was only one big volcano. Still...!

So our workplace took a week off for the holidays. Except that we had to use our own vacation hours for that. Of course, right around then, I got sick with something that felt like it might be COVID. This was when you couldn't find a test anywhere and the lines were way too long for a sick person to stand in.

And no sick days or vacation left. So HR already hates me. Hey, they should know what happens each time they send out that email; "Someone in your working group tested positive, and..."

That was finally over and I was putting in a solid week's work again. We had yet another COVID scare and got a four-day weekend -- paid this time -- but on MLK day I collapsed at my desk.

Still not sure of the sequence of events but my BP went to something like 210/120 in the ambulance (I wasn't tracking well enough to memorize the numbers) and I spent a nice evening in a -- fortunately not terribly busy -- ER.

I'm back on hypertension medication and I haven't had coffee since. Still not fully recovered, though. Like the ER doc said, a hypertensive "urgency" (yeah, that's what they call it when you will start damaging organs but haven't yet) is like watering your lawn with a firehose. It can take it for a few minutes, but don't leave it on for too long.

But that makes me wonder. You know how car people say you should get out on the highway every now and then and "blow the crud out of the engine?" Well, maybe it works like that. I haven't had any gut trouble since then. Now, if only the ringing in my ears would stop...!

***

Yeah, I still can't concentrate on writing. I do have a nice movie night due at some point. Going to watch Phantom, Les Miserables, Moulin Rouge, la Boheme, and maybe Gigi while I'm at it. Have decided that "Collette" is going to be a major figure in the book and the big chunk of history.

And I've decided I really can't not have a scene down in the lake under Palais Garnier. So now I'm trying to plot in such a way so that sort of a thing makes sense.

A Penny earned

I tweaked my Amazon advertisement settings once again and at least now I'm not paying for as many click-throughs. The last book moved around 11 1/2 copies, and the only ones that don't belong to a friend or a reviewer are that "1 - 1/2." And maybe one ebook in addition. There was a brief uptick in the other books, mostly Kindle Unlimited page reads of Book #2.

So...the theory is still untested. I think if I had a half-dozen books in the series I'd see more of this cross-support.

Thing is, I don't even know if this is what I wanted to write. I'm calling it Penny's fault. When I wrote the first book, I thought I had to make it plausible that this person could be young but know a lot of trivia about history. The needs of the story also seemed to push her to be athletic and especially to be friendly and open and be able to get people to talk to her.

So basically the standard skills of your typical RPG character. Everyone trusts Aloy with their problems and asks her to run errands for them that usually require some death-defying climbing stunts and of course a bunch of robots to fight.

It all feeds back on itself, a nice little feedback loop. For better or for worse these became stories not about the history, the archaeological mystery, or the action-movie stunts, but about Penny, her personality, her growth, her internal conflicts, etc.

And maybe that's why each book continues to be hard. They have yet to become formulae. For the Paris book I'm still asking deep questions about the purpose of the series and Penny's personal arc and all of that related stuff I thought I was done with already.

Those numbers would look better if I could throw six books up this year. The last book was uploaded in November. And as of mid-January -- I still don't have a plot.

"Oh, I've got plenty of muffin..."

My silicone muffin tray finally arrived and, yes, you can make muffins in a microwave. Now to see if corn muffin is low enough in wheat so it doesn't make me sick.

And now I'm listening to Porgy and Bess.

I keep thinking of ideas for the Toba book. I sort of hate that those ideas fall into such classic lines. I've got a naive youthful hero with an older mentor/buddy figure who is himself a Gentle Giant, and he might even have a talking magic artifact.

(Since the original of that artifact is a "Stellar-nuclear bomb" this might not be that good of a thing. But we'll see.)

The Paris book is moving along slowly. Increasingly, I think half the story is going to be sitting in this one cafe in Montmartre. I've got several plot things to work on and I'm not sure how many of them are amenable to research; they might need to be brainstormed instead.

I've got a young man of well-to-do background coming to Paris at the turn of the century. Who will be a cavalry officer in World War I. And who will be involved in one of the victories of cavalry in that war. It would be nice if he was German or Polish or something because that would put a nice limiter on how fast his book can be translated. But that's still up in the air. For research I am definitely watching War Horse. After that I'll see where I want to go.

He also discovers something that, for lack of a better idea, can be creatively interpreted as him carrying or discovering a lead on, of all things, the looted gold Napoleon may or may not have left behind in the retreat from Moscow. I've been having trouble finding good sources on that one but I haven't started delving into research trees yet.

That's McGuffin stuff, though. The real driver is the conflict between Penny and a group of parkour addicts. Or whatever they are. They could be anywhere from street workout to Dérive. The thing I accepted today is that whatever it is they are doing, it makes external the internal conflict Penny is having over where she wants her show to go.

Which is striking at something even external to that; the idea of learning about and making discoveries in history via running and climbing and swinging on ropes around historically and archaeologically significant sites. That is, the exact "fun thing" the series was written to exploit!

This better not be "long"

Still feel weak and brain-fogged. Saturday was the first day since I called in sick that I haven't had to take a long nap in the middle of the day. I managed to do laundry today and I'm wiped out. Can't focus on anything, not even fiction (pity, because there's a couple of books I already have bookmarked that I could read for the Pubby points.)

The Paris book is still pre-outline. Where I am is seeing the general shape and feel of it. Gonna be a lot of scenes in the cafe -- probably one cafe in Montmartre.

And I'm going to avoid doing any more research than I need to establish that the plot is going to work. That is something I discovered over the last books. On the London book, by the time I finally got to the stuff about the shelters, I'd lost some of my notes and links and had to go back and re-read everything anyhow.

This time, I hope to research the details I need only when I am actively writing the scene they are in. But there is a risk there, too. I went back through the Kyoto book and I dislike it more and more.

Looks to me like it isn't the big names and big events that are the problem. I explain the Meiji Restoration several times, with examples, and Tokugawa Ieyasu gets enough on him so I am convinced, once again, that it would be stupid to make an appendix for his sake.

No, it is all the other guys and incidents. Tokugawa Yoshimune comes up several times, Tokugawa Yoshinobu once. And it isn't all Crown Prince Naruhito and of course Emperor Meiji; I name-drop all the way out to Emperor Go-Daigo. And there's Minamoto Yoshitsune, and Benkei, and Nasu (a hero of the Gempei War), and...

It almost looks as if at some point I stopped paying attention and trying to keep the clutter down. But yet; I had this sequence in the London book and nobody complained about needing a cast list!

“Paternoster Row was not as lucky. It had been months since I had been in our little cozy shop with all the friends of my lonely girlhood. All gone now, all returned to ashes. The Dickinson and the Dickens, The Republic in the blue and gold binding and Amazing Stories with the color already bleaching on that gaudy Frank R. Paul.

I did cut more than a few references, even in Linnet's diary entries, on my various edit passes. Maybe I should have spent longer editing the Kyoto book but I was just tired of the thing. And worried about my numbers.

***

The Toba book is actually coming along. I've reached that strange point where it exists for me, now. Not just a collection of ideas, but a place and people and stories that I just need to find the best ones to focus on. Even if the biggest chunk of planning I've done so far is to list the starting attributes of the "gods" and even then...I want to do a lot more with different relations to the "gods," ranging all the way from working with them as equals to having never heard of them.

At some point I need to sit down and do some charting to figure out what exactly is going on ca 75,000 years ago.

And I keep thinking about World Anvil or another of those programs. But every one of them, when I've drilled down through all the fluff about how many different kinds of things you can plan, look to me no more useful than a good sheet of graph paper.

If I used world building software, I'd want something that can crosslink the hell out of the data. Something with nesting levels and the ability to see the tree or explore multiple branches for the cross-links between them.

So far, the major thing I've seen that pretty much ALL of these software options offer is the chance to pay a monthly subscription because they are keeping your data hostage -- either in the cloud, or in proprietary formats that can't be read. And tables that might not be proscriptive, per se, but prescriptive can be just as limiting as the urge to fill in the blanks on currency valuation and specie and stamping and issue dates and all can blind you to the need to think about devaluation and currency trading and inflation.

(Or I could have said filling in hair color and eye color and favorite lipstick and you forget to ask how old they are.)

Oh, and Campfire? Yeah, my private name for it -- I still haven't seen a reason to change. It looks fancy, but they have yet to fix even one of the things that really bugged me when I first tried it (you couldn't change the background. Which meant while you were filling in details on your Iron Age civilization, you were looking at a generic late medieval European fantasy village. Really threw me off! And you would think, swapping a background image...oh, right. Proprietary file types, baked data fields...sigh.)

 

-- This time, he's mad!

Either all of this has jogged my thinking out of the ruts it was in, or the fever (my body temperature is going up and down like a yo-yo) is burning out synapses. I've finished the origin arc for Athena Fox. Now I'm ready to settle into a style and format -- or I'm free to experiment with pastiche.

I've known for a while that if I want to back it off from the over-the-top action heroics of the Kyoto book (well, at least that's what I had intended to do) I could still manage to get Penny back to a place of being a young naive student facing unexpected danger. But I'm realizing I could take her in other directions if I accept that each book is a bit of a soft reset.

Which they already are. Athens was an "innocent tourist pulled into danger," London was a "serious archaeology student finds more than she expected," and Kyoto was "dragged into playing a larger-than-life role."

I don't know why watching an old episode of Chuck 2.0 made me think of this. Maybe because parts of it were clearly filmed on the Jeremiah O'Brien. And maybe that linked into the research I've been doing on Paris, or the stray link that dumped me into a bunch of reading about the current struggle in Classics departments to re-define themselves, or a Let's Play of Tomb Raider 2013 (the one that got particularly survival-game gruesome) after that particular player no longer had any more Horizon Zero Dawn for me to watch.

But it is exciting to stage Penny as student or even junior academic, or running her own dig, or being a tourist, or even being an artist again. But more than that, to have stories shaped like proper murder mysteries with a first-act Body Drop and all, or as action, or as discovery, or as survival stories...

But once again, I am faced with the question of how to cut out a lot of the wasted effort and write more efficiently. So far, all I've managed to do is type the question, "how?" into my working notes on the Paris novel.

(Also finished the 2019 Les Miserables. The one that takes place entirely in one of the banlieues, largely amid the Islamic community. Pretty much nothing that I mean to put in the Paris book, but was worth it for the perspective of a very un-romanticized look at modern Paris.)