The real maquis

 I am working on decompressing the early chapters. Among other things, I'm estimating I'm hitting about 60-70% of my target word count.

But there is already too much lecture. Doesn't help to put it in dialogue, because whether Penny thinks it in narrative, makes a recording for her show, or talks about it with Amelia, it becomes lecture. From the first book, I've wanted whenever possible to have the audience feel like they are learning the material along with Penny.

Well, there's an external source available. So I'm rethinking again, and I think I really do need to have Huxley's actual "voice" (aka his writing) come through. Only in bits and quotes -- I did the same thing with Linnet's diary in the W.W.II book.

Of course that one had the big advantage that someone was always reading the entries aloud. So you were sort of getting Linnet's voice from across time. As well as drawing the parallels of the "dual timeline." And of course commentary.

So I've got period descriptions (translations from French, mostly) of Paris and Montmartre, particularly, from a social realist sort of angle. 

Here is Victor Kibaltchiche describing the view from the top of the butte, where the basilica of Sacre-Coeur was under construction; "...(an) ocean of gray roofs, over which there arose at night only a few dim lights, and a great red glow from the tumultuous squares."

J.P. Contamine de Latour took a more romantic view; "...you felt as though you were hundreds of miles away from the capital... Everything about it was rustic and peaceful. Streams down the middle of streets... and birds twittered in the luxuriant greenery that covered the old, ruined walls."

The landscape changed quite a bit from the brief reign of the Paris Commune through to the end of the Third Republic and again in the post-war years. In Haussmann's time the steep terrain largely exempted Montmartre from the grand boulevards but as well from the large factories that were continually pushed further out away from the center of Paris. It remained scrub, a few surviving windmills, and when the displaced poor from what had once been the cramped warrens of the center of Paris were pushed out, they raised ramshackle hovels built of whatever was at hand and always in danger of sliding back down the hill with the next rain.

So the locations changed, the streets changed, the names changed. Trying to track down just what anything is called at a specific spot in time is always a challenge. It is particularly so here. 

And that leaves me with a problem. If I were to have Huxley speak, I more or less have the references to fake it now. But I'd have to go back through all of them, take and transfer copious notes, and somehow organize them into a form where I could present a specific slice of Paris (not just Montmartre, after all) at a specific moment in time, described not with the distance and the historian's cold eye, but as a spectacle, a direct address to the senses.

I'm never going to finish this book, am I.

New Minds for Old

Had an impulse, sharpened a pencil and tried to brush up my drawing skills. It didn't go well. But it does seem to have jogged my mind; I came back to the current novel and, oh boy.

So back to revisions. Maybe. I'm clear enough on what I'm going to be changing I could probably go a few more chapters first. My strategy on edit-as-you-go is I stop and go back only when I can't hold in my head all the ways the story is going to be different by the time the text hits where the fresh words are going to go.

The big change is complexity. I'm still tempted to completely re-jigger the chronology and open with "Mombasa Nights." There is probably too much going on in the novel anyhow, but at the moment my biggest concern is how much of it front-loads into the first chapters (that, of course, is why they've been so tough to write).

The driving McGuffin is the Dan Brown-ish treasure hunt, guided by an old book; a hunt for the secret which morphs into a hunt to stop the other group from making a mess of Paris with their methods.

I wanted Penny to recover a bit from the last couple of books so the character arc is more of a victory lap; Penny accepting that she has now grown into the experienced traveler. And admitting that she now has a taste for adventure. The character Amelia acts mostly as a mirror, the neophyte tourist through whom Penny understands how she herself has changed.

That's why my first scene isn't "Rain," it is Penny sitting perfectly poised at a sidewalk cafe and meeting Amelia there.

Later, I'm going to introduce Steampunk and parkour and there is this whole sub-plot thing about a group of artists and the "Steampunk Superhero" world one of them is creating. Which opens into all sorts of strange corners with the rapid changes in society brought on by technology, the hotbed of artistic development in the belle epoque, the shadows of war that form part of the fin d' sicle, class warfare, revolutionary history of Paris, comic books, Fantomas and the Penny Dreadfuls...

But that stuff, I can hold back on. The thing I decided early on is I wanted to have a Proustian revisiting going on. The first is a conversation Penny has about her career; she keeps bringing it up in her memory through the length of the book, each time seeing it in a slightly new light and bringing new information to the table. Another is what exactly she was doing wandering the streets of Paris in the middle of the night.

The revisions I need to do in the first chapters is to knock this back further, doing less dips into the past and revealing less, but even more importantly, keeping the idea of the treasure hunt front and center and putting excitement and fun in it. The reader should believe in this treasure hunt and Penny should, too. The cracks will show just a little bit later (I'm knocking stuff downstream, mostly).

But yet! Going entirely counter to the above; counter to the idea of keeping the treasure hunt simple and the past in the form of simple clues that can be solved, Paris as the perfect tourist spot (and not getting too much into the character of Montmartre, even), I have pretty much come around to the idea of the "Hux-Cam."

That is; regardless of how much of his actual words will appear on the page, I want Penny frequently turning to Major Huxley's book and showing what it was that he would have been seeing in turn-of-the-century Paris.

So I've got a hell of a lot of work ahead of me. Makes me want to take a break with something simple. Like drawing.

Lost Secrets of Fred the Plumber

I found another place where trying to do an Indiana Jones style "two-fisted archaeologist seeks out hidden artifacts" story in the real world doesn't work so well.

I'm writing the Dan Brown this time around. A treasure hunt around the conveniently symbol-laden monuments of Paris. But here's the thing;

The formulae is that each clue requires you to go to a place or thing the public has heard of; the next clue is painted into the background of the Mona Lisa or is buried under the Eiffel Tower. It requires some sort of written clue, preferably poetry, that is just simple enough so the general reader can solve the word puzzle, do the Grade B cryptography, and/or get the historical/mythological reference.

It also usually requires a shoot-out with the rival team.

It also requires something being discovered that is more than just the next clue in the sequence. That is something I'd missed when I set this up, and something that is going to be hard to put in.

When Dan Brown's unlikely heroes are getting a clue off a painting they are also realizing oh, aha, Leonardo DaVinci was also in on the conspiracy. When the latest ersatz Indy is brushing the dirt off a faded inscription he isn't just reading, "continued on next rock," he is also reading about how the Talos Robot shot burning rays out of his bronze eyes.

Major Jonathan Huxley is writing a scavenger hunt. He's quite open about it. Penny certainly knows it. That means there is no hidden treasure (well, actually, there is...long story and you'll have to read the book to get it). This is real Paris, though, and as close as I can get real turn-of-the-century, Paris Exposition and all that, and real Napoleon Bonaparte if it comes to that.

Not undead, not consorting with Deep Ones, not carrying any Atlantean super-weapons around (pity...Napoleon was a big fan of using tech to win battles).

So nothing to discover on the inscription de jour but "continued on next monument."

A whiff of grapeshot

I've been binge-watching Warehouse 13. In a recent episode, the historian (and general polymath) Artie describes the power of a missing artifact (a violin once belonging to Napoleon) as capable of making "13 Vendémiaire look like a garden party." 

If I had watched the episode four days earlier, I wouldn't have gotten the reference.

So on the good side of the ledger, means I am slowly getting more informed. The kind of historical research I am doing is so focused on a specific time and place, though, it leaves huge gaps. If Artie had made a similar comment on Frederick the Great it would have gone right over my head.

And the few readers who have commented on my books keep going on about how much I've researched. They seem equally split about whether this is good or bad, but I think all of them would agree that the books would be better if they were simpler.

Which, more and more, I am seeing as a problem of process and not something I can easily change. My feeling now is that not having time to write is a big part of the problem. As the man said, he would have written a shorter letter but didn't have time. I have too much off-line time in which I can think about plot and do research and too little unobstructed time to push words.

I've been trying. The last two weeks, I've been trying extra hard to write directly following work, or even take some me time during work, pulling out my portable keyboard and trying to write. And it isn't happening.

But then, I've been wrestling with a stomach bug -- it took me two days just to build a trestle table in the shop. So I'm not doing anything well. (And today is likely a wash as it is family day).

***

I wasn't intending to do a true dual-time in the current book. But I've reached enough material where I would feel comfortable setting a scene in Montmartre in 1900. Not, probably, in the "voice" of Major Huxley, though. I think I will skip actual excerpts from his memoirs and have Penny synopsize him for the reader.

Which was how I handled about half of the Blitz Diary material in the London book.

***

And as much as I want to try something else... In hopes that it is the subject/genre that isn't attracting readers, not my own inability to write... Well, nothing else is interesting me as much. I like exploring a place and society and creating one from scratch a la SF&F isn't interesting me as much. Heck, when I was doing a bunch of SF, my societies were basically borrowing from real societies I knew (or thought I knew!) something about.

And Penny is a really good choice for this. She's really not that complex a character, but what she is, is an actress, a cosplayer, an avid historian, and someone who throws themselves into the center of things. And that strange space she exists in between the (semi) serious student and still-inexperienced traveler, and the Athena Fox persona she portrays, means she can chameleon-like adapt not just to the setting but to the kind of story being told.

I can write a serious dig with her, or an over-the-top thriller, or a comedy. Whatever seems to make the most interesting combination with a place/history/whatever that also interests me.

A simple missing persons case

YOU KNOW HOW it works in those detective novels, right? The detective sets out on some seemingly minor crime. But the clues lead deeper and deeper, into a web of corruption and into the lives of the rich and powerful, into long-hidden secrets and family shame and of course multiple murders.

Writing is sometimes like that. I was working up the "New Mombasa" scene but I had problems. Besides all the timeline and plotting problems, it seemed to require me to change tense.

For three novels, I've been telling this story in "immediate past" tense. Now I was contemplating a lengthly flashback because I didn't see any other way to get this feeling of being alone in the mysteries of Paris after the cafes have closed.

As it happened, Quora popped up a couple of questions about handling tenses in writing and I got chatting with some of the regulars about it. That started a whole long chain of discoveries of different ways to handle that sequence. And the surrounding sequence. And multiple scenes both already in draft and yet to be written.

And it is still leading me. On the drive back from work I realized there's a different reason to go to the Louvre which saves the "mummy's secret" thing I was playing with -- and the Louvre is where I want to introduce Jane Dieulafoy.

And Colette is still in the plan. As is Jane Avril. And la Feé Verte. 

This is why we do this. Why we agonize over what seems meaningless. I could have written the scene as it stood in the outline and it would have been okay. But by following up on that one lead and seeing where it went I discovered not just a better scene, but a dozen.

In search of lost timelines

Finally, Chapter 1 is in draft. The first 4,000 words of the novel (counting the prologue), plus another 900 words into the next chapter.

That's seven percent of the book, right there. But I did just over-run my outline so I have very little planned for what exactly goes next.

I mean, I have the plot, and I know what the big hit points are, but I don't know yet how best to put it on the page. And because of the nature of this particular story, it seems Discovery Writing might be the best approach.

So here's seeing if I can plug through an entire end-to-end draft without having to stop for revisions.

The structure of this book is new. Not the dual-time thing; I've done that before. But all the previous Athena Fox books have been relentlessly linear narratives, presented in the "almost now" tense. That is, using an immediate past in which the narrator is reacting to what has just happened; as close as you can get to writing in present tense without being present tense.

That's always been something I've wrestled with in her stories. Since the narrator is in the moment, there has to be a reason in that moment for them to reflect on something from the past. It doesn't feel natural for Penny, in the middle of a fight scene, to say, "Oh and by the way I almost did cheer in college." It had to be triggered by something specific.

In the current narrative, I've actually got her ending a reflection with the realization that she had (in the almost-now of the narrative of the novel) been lost in a flashback. And there are going to be a lot of these. She explains early on that the old book she is using as a Grail Diary -- that is, a series of clues to follow across Paris -- jumps around in time. She even name-dropped Proust in that context. What she hasn't mentioned explicitly (because it would be far too meta) is that she is doing the same thing herself.

I've planned (in what little planning I have for actual chapter-and-scene breakdowns) that there are several plot-important events that will get revisited multiple times through the narrative, each time revealing a little more about what had happened, each time drawing a slightly different lesson.

(The first is her conversation with her friend and de-facto business manager Drea, as she plans the Paris trip. The second is her awful first night as her flight is delayed and the night clerk refuses to check her in to her hotel.)

This is happening, mind you, on top of what is essentially a lesson on historical method, as she analyses the memoir in terms of what Huxley knew when he was writing it (and what has changed since) and what his biases were. As well as changes in the names and places, of course. Not exactly new ground; there's even a bit in Raiders of the Lost Ark about how the length of a cubit depends on which text you are using.

But it does make it possibly challenging to read (I hope not too challenging). And challenging to write, and this is why I have the current opinion that I am best off just writing it rather than planning out every little bit to try to nail down when it will be "then" and when it will be "now."

Date with destiny

I haven't written a word all week. Work, a bit of illness, and what little energy I had left went into trying to complete my GOT cover on "Viking" instruments. Which is more about finally getting to grips with multi-part and section performance; all the trials of trying to play these parts in tune and on time despite strange fingering, strange harmonies, strange meter (strange to me, that is).

It took me weeks just to be able to get the ostinato locked in to the metronome.

The first massed strings came out well. The second, not so much. Where I am on violin, playing a slow line just exposes all my intonation flaws (as well as poor vibrato, poor bowing...) And playing whole notes in 6/8 time was just messing me up, for some reason. Anyhow, recorded six takes, cleaned them up (I was way off the meter in several places), mixed them together...and it sounds like crap and I need to try again.

Over the same period there was a "good" discovery, though. I finally decided the fingering of the B theme was too awkward for the Irish Flute (my Irish flute is a hybrid; an ABS low-D penny whistle with an interchangeable head. As such, it is a diatonic instrument and has no keys at all.) When I switched to the Western Concert Flute (my pink Medini with a C-foot) I discovered I'd improved greatly in embouchure whilst struggling with the Irish flute.

Still a very breathy, airy sound. That's okay; it works for this piece, and maybe by the time I finally get to "Commander Shepard" I will have improved my embouchure some more.

On the current novel, my biggest accomplishment is finishing some of my research materials. There is a lot left, though. This is probably the deadliest place for me to be; I'm not in a place where I can put down text so instead I wrestle with concept. It has given me a much better idea of how I want to work the CDG scene, and I'm finally starting to get a handle on Amelia (and some of the other secondary characters).

But the problem I have is I am always trying to simplify. Always trying to boil down the thrust of the story and the underlying theme into the simplest and most dramatic terms. But the more I work, the more it just seems to elaborate instead.

The underlying theme on this one is Engagement with History. When I finally got close to the end of Twilight of the Belle Epoche I realized Huxley, my memoir-writer from the past, is longing for the Paris he encountered in 1900 and the Paris he saw a decade earlier with his now-deceased father. He is writing now after the ending of World War I, as someone who had fought in the worst of it, and his last actual memory of Paris is 1913...when the artists had moved on to the less interesting Montparnasse, the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists had been supplanted by Fauvists and Cubists, Bernhardt was aging and Isadore Duncan was dying. And Stravinsky had just premiered Rite of Spring. So Huxley has never been back to Paris.

Meanwhile the main thread is two groups of treasure hunters; a pampered college kid off on a lark with his circle of friends, and a reluctant Penny with help and hindrance from the loosely-connected artists she is running into in Montmartre. Which through most of the story Penny sees in negative manner, especially as she is in the process of acquiring a proper History degree so she can move on to grad school as an Archaeologist. She is also ambivalent about the turn her "Bohemians" have made into Steampunk, seeing it as a bastardization that ignores the real threads of history.

And it all comes to a head when the treasure hunt is on the rooftop of Notre-Dame de Paris the night before the fire. 

But for all of this, I'm aiming for as short at 65K, preferably around 70K (the others have been lightly breaking 80K), without too much in the nature of deep soul searching, emotional outbursts, big character arcs. Or much action, aside from a few midnight break-ins, a death-defying climb, and some parkour. Pretty much a lot of sitting around cafes and looking at artwork; a nice vacation after crawling through the mud under South London, getting stabbed, and getting tangled up with one of the Imperial Treasures of Japan.

***

The Tiki Stars is getting closer. I might be able to draft the first episode without having to world-build much before hand; just try it out and see what I end up wanting to have. I've nailed down a little more of that first episode. This is where I put a lot of the series premise on display, so retro-tech, Space Adventure tropes, cocktails and exotica. A tiki bar with a dusky singer (modeled somewhat on Yma Sumac) who is one of the secret leaders of a revolution in a banana-republic-planet, and a down-on-his-luck space captain with a small but fast ship who is drawn into the middle of it.

Not really Spy-Fi (I want to to that up properly in a later episode) and not the whole revolution which goes both United Fruit and Jungle Planet directions, this is a bit more Casablanca -- but a better example might be Moon Zero Two (and, yes, the next episode is an extended Space Horse Opera with asteroid miners, claim jumpers, and an alien Space Cowboy).

But his ship is no longer named the Sad Puppy. That was a little too much on-the-nose.