Dan Browning

They talk about research in writing being an iceberg.  That you need to know much more than what actually goes into the book.

This is probably true. Every book is a set of choices; you go from all the variety of subjects and settings you might use, to the ones that will actually work for this one book. But to get there, you have to learn about the alternatives as well.

On this one, I had to learn about Colette before I reached the point where I knew she wasn't going to make the cut. I was also thinking about multiple eras of French history before narrowing in on the year 1900.

But there's an alternative. I think that Dan Brown achieves the (relative) economy he has because that is all he knows.

From everything I've seen he has a fairly decent balance, without so few historical tidbits that it feels empty (for all else they do right, the Indiana Jones films feel empty. The Young Indiana Jones series does much better). And without so many it feels overwhelming. And he might be achieving that because his iceberg has, against all laws of density, almost nothing below the water level. What he knows is on the page. He might in fact have researched enough until he could write a book about it (his plotting seems to indicate that!)

So anyhow I did a top-to-tail reread of Sometimes a Fox. Not that is a long project, as top to tail is around 18,000 words right now. And I got pretty depressed by how much it isn't working but I feel better now. It took a few hours but I know the edits I need to make.

There is too much detail and I'm going to have to trim some stuff way, way back.

Paris will do that to you, of course. It is a bit like Japan in that there are so many very Parisian things that have names that are clearly French. I've been doing everything I can to keep language off the screen. I've consciously got Amelia, the art fan and tarheel, using English names of the French artworks.

(Not always, since the puzzle pieces are sometimes language; there's one that Penny never gets; Huxley refers to "Elysian Fields" and the clue means the Champs-Élysées. Another clue of his is "Tiny Palace" and it means the quite literal Petit Palais.)

I changed my mind a bit ago and this is the book where Penny no longer accepts faking it in a language and actually sits down and studies. She won't get that good at French -- she doesn't have time -- but when she starts speaking French sentences the narrative will present them in translation convention; as English, but in italics.

With the "funny foreigner" words, though. "Bonjour," I said. "Have you seen this man?" I continued in French. 

The treasure hunt doesn't have enough weight. It is also broken up wrong, but I can fix a bunch of that. Some of what I've been doing is figuring out how much each "revisit" can or needs to reveal, and thus how many there will be, and I am comfortable now kicking some stuff down the road to later chapters. So that will open up some space.

The trick I tried in the Japan book was what I called "generic" descriptions. That is, trying to capture some of the lushness of the scenery, but doing it as much as possible in general-use words without using a lot of Japanese terms. Or other specialist vocabulary.

I can't do the same here because I already took excess French off the table. And the "weight" isn't in things like lists, anyhow. Not for this book. This paragraph, for instance, doesn't bother me:

“I came for the art,” she said, meeting my gaze squarely. “They all came here, Matisse and Utrillo, Manet and Monet and Gaugin and Picasso —he had a room at the Bateau-Lavoir but they all came to the clubs; the Lapin Agile, the Chat Noir where Satie played the piano, and Toulouse-Lautrec had a reserved seat at the Moulin Rouge.”

But this one does:

Time to take it inside. I did have to wait in a short line, and I made a donation, but soon enough I was in a quiet, airy little church, well-lit through stained glass windows. I squinted. Very new looking stained glass. The one nearest me looked almost modern art. They couldn’t be any older than, say, early 20^th century. The altar was ornate inlay and even newer than that, but the nave was flanked by a couple of columns, craggy in black basalt and with Merovingian capitals. I knew what these were. “The old Roman temple, or bits of it,” I said quietly. “Like I said, this church has a history.”

And I haven't quite figured out why. Somehow a list of artworks or artists or even kinds of cheese just floats by as a "look, lots of fun detail over there." But this description of a church is too much. Maybe because it is asking the reader to pay attention. Maybe because it doesn't come together in any one theme. It just feels like stuff, stuff the poor reader will try to memorize.

And maybe I am standing too close to it still, but it also feels way too much like the writer did all this research and is going to fit it in the text somehow. So that's the direction I'm going; I'm going to cut everything that isn't the bit about the Roman columns. I'm going to cut as much Napoleon as I can manage, and probably Loyola and even why they call it Abesses.

After all, if I leave it a mystery (to Penny) why Hux put "Elysian Fields" in one of his clues, I can leave out all the La Boheme stuff as a "genius bonus" to the reader.

Love's Labored Locks

 I am finally over the hump and writing away. Still not a lot of words down on paper. 16,000 words into Sometimes a Fox but that's up to a quarter of the (shorter than usual) target length.

Things are going smoother and mostly faster. Mostly because these are longer scenes by nature. I've done all the really difficult scene-setting work so now I can relax a little with longer, more contemplative scenes. Or indulgent action scenes. Today I completed the draft of the Shakespeare and Company/Bouquinistes scene, at least up to where the Parkour guy takes off with Huxley's book.

But that's also the part that is going to cause slow-downs here and there. The next scene is the first Parkour scene. My method these days is to research enough to know that a plot sequence is going to work. Then when I actually hit the scenes in question, open up the books to get the details right. I think this is a smarter method; I don't have so many notes to try to wade through, or broken links, or things I ran into in the research and wanted to use but can't track down again when it comes time to write the scene.

So this slowdown is parkour. The next scene is at the steampunk cabaret show. Then a scene at the Pompidou. I'm faking it on that one; I'm doing the Herge exhibit that was there back when I visited Paris, and borrowing the "En l'an 2000" illustrations from the Bibliotech for an exhibit that never existed in the real world.

I was also tempted to change the locks. See, the "love locks" that began to infest Paris starting around 2008 were a particular problem at the Pont des Arts. This is a small pedestrian bridge built by Napoleon, then rebuilt after a collapse a few decades ago to be a nearly precise duplicate. And it had these exposed railings that people began to hang padlocks on as an expression of eternal love or something.

Forty five tons of the things. Eventually a railing collapsed and the city put its foot down. In 2014 they stuck up a bunch of plywood, and by 2018 (I have video evidence) sheets of glass prevent more locks from being added anywhere but a couple of the lamp posts.

And it is so tempting to just slide the clock a little and pretend the locks are still there as of the period of my story.

Uranium Fever

Part I of Sometimes a Fox is finally in draft. There's a bit of highlighter and other mark-up but not enough to keep me from pressing on to Part II.

The heavy lifting is largely done. Actually, that is also the way I've chosen to tell this particular story. The major ideas get introduced in the early chapters, but then the narrative re-visits them, expanding on and finding different way to interpret them. So I've got all the basic structure and I know more-or-less how this story is getting told. And I've done the tougher parts of the research, if for no other reason than that I really can't make major changes from this point out, no matter what my new research discovers.

Tried an experiment today; dashed off most of a new scene over brunch at a local place, not worrying overmuch about getting the specifics right. After all, I was away at a café working on a smart phone and checking references is a lot tougher.

But, sigh, I do need the map before I can finish it.

***

I'm far enough here I'm shopping for a cover artist. Tough to find. The process I ended up with on the last covers was more-or-less that I'd generate the basic idea and I'd do the detail work of repainting the stock photography. That's a bit of labor and it is hard to pay a cover artist to take that part on; as usual there is that tension between art and economics and most of the artists I've worked with had long since learned how to suppress any artistic instincts that led towards an increased workload.

This gets so structured, so five-and-dime it isn't unusual for them to have set charges for how many figures, how many stock photographs, that sort of thing. And the rest of the process is also that regulated; THEY will come up with the design, you get exactly three rounds of revisions, and you get as part of the fee a 3d rendering of a fake book. Why, I don't know. I keep telling them not to bother but...

***

And as much as I want to write something different, and soon, I have also settled on what will be Penny's next adventure:

Penny is finally on a dig again; in New Mexico, looking for what might be the oldest evidence for human habitation in the Americas.

Or it might be aliens, or so a persistent group of conspiracy theorists believe. Plus the dig is at White Sands, under the watchful eye of the Air Force. 

Things were already complicated before their dig uncovered human bones. Now an old conspiracy is about to be uncovered and more than one silent killer haunts the dig. There’s a new light in the desert and the burning sands of the Jornada del Muerto are waiting for a new victim…

***

And, yeah, I'm coming up on needing another break to recharge soon. I've been rather tempted lately to play a bit with the concepts of settlements and do a Fallout 4 run that is all about a shell-shocked pre-war survivor struggling to gather together refugees and fortify an old gas station against the Raiders that infest the Commonwealth.

(Actually, I'd be doing Red Rocket, but that's the idea...)

Pyramid Head

One of the big things I was doing in the revision was make the Treasure Hunt actually work; make it feel to the reader like we really are doing the Dan Brown thing, finding hidden secrets across Paris.

Putting Sacre-Coeur in really opens up the problem of religion in France, but that was too much for those opening scenes. Had to shift that later. The next actual step on the puzzle is a clue discovered at Musée d'Orsay, but to get there I needed a filler scene first. So added a trip to the Louvre (which turns out to be closed).

Okay, so the Abbesses Station is right in the part of Montmartre Penny is staying in (in fact, she's staying at the same hotel I was staying in). It is the deepest station in Paris, with a long winding staircase. So, sure, I could do a little scene there, include a neighborhood stroll, and I could bring up the idea of the underground world, catacombs and sewers and crypts. And I could move the bit about the Martyrdom of St. Denis being used by Loyola to basically found the Jesuits to this scene, instead.

Because at this point I've shown the treasure hunt the way it would be in one of those films, and now I can afford to have Penny pull aside the curtain and admit she's putting it on for her YouTube show. And I had her straight-up saying killer albinos was going too far.

Turns out that spiral stair at Abbesses Station (which also has one of the original Hector Guimard entrances) is decorated with photographs of Sacre-Coeur. So that works great!

A look at the metro map and the new station for the Louvre dumps out in an underground mall, the Carousel du Louvre. And I had to look for a while before I figured out that there are actually two I.M. Pei pyramids there. The one pointing up, in the courtyard, and an upside-down one used as a skylight over the center of that underground shopping center (and the second Louvre entrance).

The clue that led her to the Louvre was something about Ozymandias, so setting it at a pyramid is perfect, and I planted the new scene at the Inverted Pyramid and I started looking up a few more details...and what do I discover?

Such is writing.

I'm working on the d'Orsay scene now, and they have a lot of Berthe Morisot there. Both as a model (Renoit and Manet) and as a painter (none of her sculpture has survived). But I'd already been convinced that I was going to have to get into the lives of the women at some point; the models/girlfriends/financial supporters who played such an important part in the lives of the artists of the belle epoque.

Getting drafty

That is a ridiculous amount of progress for one day. Maybe, just maybe, I've finally made that breakthrough. Sometimes a Fox is standing at 6.5 thousand words right now...and I'm not even afraid of some of the big set-piece scenes that are coming up.

One of the cool things Scrivener does is allow you to take snapshots on a per-file basis.  These can be thrown back into the window at any moment or you can revert completely.

I had to seriously rethink and practically re-write from scratch pretty much everything post-prologue. This three day weekend was a gift from the gods. There's no way I could do this on an iPhone. I needed access to all that revision history, and my notes, and with Scrivener's ability to do split-screens and tear-offs I could fill all of my double monitor setup with words.

I ended up doing some crazy stuff with POV.

First off, I have the Hux-cam stuff I was sure I needed. And it is working; I quoted him whole for one section, but then I had mere excerpts interlaced with commentary and synopsis. Sort of what I did with Linnet's diary -- and if I do any more dual-time novels I'm going to need to break it up with some other way of showing the other time.

Second, I have Penny sort of doing flashbacks, but I've followed the rule I've used before; that it begins in past perfect, moves to past simple, then has an explicit transition back to the "current" past of the main narrative.

"I had walked..."

"I walked..."

"I walked some more..."

"I rubbed my legs, reminded of how sore I'd been after all that walking."

Then the POV stuff. So every book in this series opens with a snippet from Penny's show, done in third person in the "over the shoulder" version (no immersion.) For this book, I opened the first scene describing one of my major secondary characters in third person and only three paragraphs later mentioned my protagonist -- in third person, as if from the immersive POV of the secondary character.

Then revealed that it had been First Person all along. There were hints; there was a touch of narrative voice and an admission early on that the narrator was guessing, not actually knowing what Amelia was thinking.

But this still wasn't enough fun. I wanted to try to present the idea of this treasure hunt amid the artworks and monuments of Paris, to play it straight and make it fun, and showing Penny fiddling with the camera all the time was too distancing.

So I told it in straight first-person but that First Person narrator is being conscious of what it looks like. She is thinking in camera angles. She admits only once in the sequence that she is recording. Basically, this is presented as if you are watching a movie with a good POV, that makes you see and experience what the protagonist is seeing without calling attention to the artifice of the camera.

And then after a chapter break, I pull the curtain aside. For the scene at Sacre-Coeur Penny is now noticing the camera. The mechanics of what she is doing are made clear.

Through all of this, I had to hold my new priorities; to limit backstory and exposition as much as possible, to keep the fun of the visit and keep the treasure hunt as real as possible. So a ton of stuff was getting moved around (hence all those open windows).

And since I am all about flow, I pretty much opened up the description or dialogue I was borrowing from, and typed a fresh one that flowed better in the new scene I was creating.

Basically, I retyped 6.5 thousand words of novel. In a couple day's work.

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.