I am a jelly donut

For a moment I thought I had made a break-through. For two days I struggled with the (fortunately mild) symptoms of COVID. Then I started to get some use out of my enforced isolation. Cranked through clean-up on the first two scenes of Part III of the Paris book and put over a thousand words down on the next.

And oops. It wasn't quite working. This is the process, though. Revision is usually necessary. Many writers begin by getting the whole thing down in an extremely rough draft, and once the whole shape is there on the page they can start whittling and adjusting and finding the real story that's in that rough mass.

Others try to hurry the process by working out as much basic structure as they can in outline. But they still end up with revisions. And then, occupying both spaces, the revise-as-you-go crowd has confidence in their grasp of what the overall shape will be (like the outliners) but is willing to cut now, tightening up the draft now rather than writing more chapters that will just end up on the floor.

A couple of days of struggling and something like thirty attempts to write just one simple conversation. Which I finally got this morning. And the final version was too short to be a full scene but with my understanding of the total structure I moved some stuff that needed to happen soon enough already and I put down almost a thousand words of brand-new scene.

In one morning.

The people who are actually writing for a living claim to crank out 2,000 words a day. Which is how they can get up to four books a year. That's leaving about a month for revisions, which doesn't strike me as plausible when those same people are claiming fifteen revisions and three rounds of beta readers. Basically, the number of words falling off the keyboard in any span of time isn't a good guide to how much book has gotten done.

I'm happy enough with scenes as a metric. I have cut scenes in the past. Moved them, created new ones, heavily revised them. But my draft, when finished, is the third or fourth draft and that's basically the book there. It isn't going to get a lot bigger or smaller and it isn't going to change radically.

Oh, yeah. And I needed a bit of "business" in the scene I just finished so I had Penny eat a millefeulle. That's my genius bonus for that scene. All along, she's been complaining about just how much this adventure keeps coming back to Napoleon. Guess what that particular pastry is called in America?

I also, sadly, could afford no more than a sentence on Loie Fuller. There are just so many amazing people, with such deep stories, in Paris in that period! Innovative dancer, inventor, lesbian -- her list of friends and admirers alone could fill a paragraph (start with Toulouse-Lautrec and end with Marie Curie!)

I knew Part III was going to be a bit unfocused but that's the struggle I am having. It was that damned chevaliers de sangreal scene that got me, once again. I rescued chunks of material from two different scenes in previous drafts, heavily revised and rewrote...and then decided this was the wrong place in the narrative to go on about the role of the Church in the history of Paris.

When I finally got straight what I was going to try to do, I'd realized I had to change half the previous scene and come up with a new conversation -- the one that took thirty drafts -- and now I've got to come up with something to fill the Carrousel du Louvre scene now that Catholic Conspiracies are (mostly) off the table again.

Oh, and the whole scene in the Paris Metro is getting booted downstream to the introduction to the parkour scene at La Defense. So at least I may get some use out of that material. 

I did, during this time of basically outline-as-you-go (or revising the outline, since I am not entirely without one) look at everything I could about the Sully Wing at the Louvre and put together a rough idea of how that scene is going to unfold. Oh, and I read the entire thing from top to bottom to see how it flowed.

Monday, I arrive back at work where six massive panels are waiting for a high-priority, high-profile rush job we only barely have time to finish on deadline. And my engineers phoned (emailed) wanting three more of their units built as well. I totally predicted this. I knew both these projects were going to arrive together and at the last minute.

I hadn't predicted that I'd be climbing out of five days wrestling with a bug. Next week is going to be...interesting.

NaNoCovWri

After all these years, finally had a positive antigen test. So off work for a couple of days. Maybe I can get some writing done?

Bring back those lazy crazy hazy days of Sumer

It might have worked better if Penny knew nothing about history.

I was trying to create a character who could believably pull off a lot of the Archaeologist Adventurer stunts; climb, jump, identify artifacts, read ancient manuscripts, navigate in Tokyo or Paris, Texas). So it made sense to have her know something about history, because that is the big intellectual one (the physical stuff...one can often hand-wave).

And I did the series in first person so she could explain what it was she was seeing without having to have a Boswell follow her around (I ended up creating a character for almost every book that she can talk to, anyhow). And it may have been a mistake. It means I set things up perfectly for the narrative to constantly geek out about history, filling every page with stuff that the reader might struggle with, or even decide is getting in the way of the story.

It might have worked better in third person. Intellectual characters sometimes work better that way. Instead of getting first-hand all this very detailed science, you are just getting the magic at the end, when the hero confidently declares the inscription is in Sumerian, or the light is from a pulsar, or the cabbie is actually a left-handed draftsman who bets on the horses.

Or I could have taken the history from her. Made her an outsider to the world she was walking into, learning the history and archaeology or whatever along with the reader. 

(Which I tried to do; I made a point of having the plot-important history delivered to her so the reader can get it, and can also see her learning it. And yes, I made it a running gag that whatever her knowledge of history, she'd inevitably focused on the wrong things and the plot-important stuff was as unknown to her as it was to the reader.)

It is tempting to think I could have just gone with her as an actor. As pretending the Indiana Jones thing without having any of the skills. But when I started writing, I hadn't realized how much I was going to lean on her acting background. Hell, when I started, she was a film student. The idea that she had spent a while not just in classes but on the stage, much less that she might identify as a theater bum...

The other drawback of the actor thing is she already is inclined to quote plays and sing songs from musicals at any excuse. Perhaps fortunately, copyright doesn't allow that to happen!

But, alas, I had set out to write stories specifically set in places I'd been, and involving history I was interested in, so no matter where I had gone with my protagonist or my narrator, I was going to end up with what some of my critics have been calling "too much stuff" in it.

***

Started another "Archaeological Thriller" on Kindle. Atlantis again (sigh). But it opened with Solon in Thais meeting an Egyptian priest who is (just barely!) believable as being there at the time.

But this was of course the Diego Salvatore the reluctant conquistador chapter; the guy who is in the story just to show the MacGuffin to the reader then get killed. When the story proper opens...they are doing a pretty convincing job of underwater archaeology, with amphorae, Minoan trade ware, and ox-hide ingots right there!

Worth noting that I pay a lot of attention to background building and info dumps and stuff like that in every book I read for pleasure. I am always trying to calibrate, making sure that when I write I know if I am doing less (as if!) or more (likely!) than published books. But it is quite difficult to actually judge this stuff and I am still not sure.

I ended up sort of simultaneously reading that, watching the not-very-good The Hunters, and playing part of Uncharted. And sure a lot of stuff is made that doesn't worry about getting history right. And it seems many of the audience don't care. But the book was on the NYT best-seller list (and Uncharted seemed to be doing decently on Hindu mythology and Indian history) so once again I'm led to believe that even something as out there as Atlantis is an easier sell if the author first gains the reader's confidence that they know their history.

Plus there's an element of fun in it. I've mentioned that more than one author of a neolithic story has had what is clearly the Amesbury Archer show up. In the Atlantis book I've been talking about, Fayum portraits and the Phaistos Disk show up and I'm not going to complain that the former are out-of-period. Because this is a shared in-joke, the author showing that they know the material that they are taking liberties with, and the reader sharing in knowing the thing, too.

***

I'm in low-confidence mode right now. Just finishing up the big "girl talk" bit I planned (Penny and the side character confidante of this book, Amelia, letting down their hair.) Which since Amelia is the Carolina Girl is me trotting out stereotypes of the South to go with the stereotypes of the French. And, yes, the only critique I've gotten so far on the book has been a comment that one of Huxley's lines sounded like the worst mock-period twee English garbage.

Yeah. I can't say I've ever gotten useful critiques. The only critical comments have been "That's shite," not a specific on what was wrong or a suggestion of what to do differently. Well, okay. There was one suggestion that I should provide a list of all the historical characters at the back of the book. That just struck me as a pointless exercise. If you didn't know who Miyamoto Mushashi is, how does it help to have his name listed a second time in an index you have to flip the pages to get to?

***

And I've given up on Starfield. It was mildly amusing in a Zen sort of way at times. There are days when grinding is all your mind can handle. I slowly came to appreciate the world they are trying to build. It just isn't carried out very well. They didn't hit the beats hard enough, and they didn't follow through.

Compare Horizon Zero Dawn. There isn't a story-game segregation, or a world-game segregation. Everything from the UI and menu design to the quest design to the combat design works within the world presented. Contrast with say my favorite whipping-girl, Tomb Raider 2013, in which your scared college student avatar flails away useless with a crappy bow during the cut scene, then you take over and proceed to murderize everyone with and ice axe then desecrate a few W.W.II corpses for the loot while you are at it.

Starfield takes those gaps and fills the experience with them. Todd Howard has been going on (and now he has apparently ChatGPT replying to Steam reviews for him) about how space is supposed to be lonely and some planets are bare.

As if. Pick a remote moon in the far reaches of the map. Land on a completely random location; this is in fact a procedurally generated unique bit of landscape. Three hundred feet away from your landing site is a struggling mining outpost, an abandoned mine, and a pirate base swarming with two hundred well-equipped pirates, and more ships flying in as you watch.

Every single time. (Oh, and it is the same base at that, copy-pasted right down to that one dead body with a flailing leg thanks to a terrain intersection).

Sixteen times the detail? Sixteen times the clutter. I will admit that the terrain out in those "empty" worlds can be very realistic. About Mass Effect: Andromeda realistic, though. Not Unreal Engine realistic. By comparison, Horizon Zero Dawn is a little more obviously computer generated.

But...HZD looks gorgeous. Those pixels are well-spent. And let us not even talk about the Starfield NPCs -- their graphical realism is about Fallout 4 level, but with some exceptions, their design is worse. There is the usual crop of idiots going around saying the problem is Starfield is "woke" so all their people are ethnic and ugly.

Um...the first people you meet in HZD are elderly, and Aloy the ginger is about the whitest person in the game. But oh my god those are some gorgeous people. In all their variety.

That, and they are fully animated. One assumes that Bethesda's excuse is that full RPG means too many lines for hand-animation (which is what Andromeda claimed for why so many people had tired faces). But over there, we've got Baldur's Gate 3 saying "Oh yeah? Hold my beer!"

The best I can figure is that they went like Andromeda did and wasted all their years of development trying to get full proceedural generation working. Then over the last six months of crunch tossed together a few hand-built locations and quests. And it feels like it. There's not even a full DLC of designed material in the game, and all of it looks rushed.

And I went back and replayed both main story and DLC for Horizon Zero Dawn.

He's here, the Phantom of the Opera

Finally, Part II of the Paris book is finished. Well, draft is finished. But I am a revise-as-you-go type and that puts me a lot closer to final draft than one might otherwise think.

A long tailing scene through the Palais Garnier, with musings on history, architecture, theater, and a whole bunch of stuff about Phantom.

Were I a better writer I might have been able to engage with the building more fully. Using the physical spaces and the various stories told in and of it as integral elements of the cat-and-mouse pursuit. I did sort of manage that when I did the big after-publication revision of the Japan book, making some semblance of one of those martial arts period piece chase scenes, jumping through windows and throwing straw baskets or whatever, out of what had been a stroll through the reproduction Edo-era town on the outskirts of Kyoto.

I didn't quite finish watching the 2011 Royal Albert Hall staged production of Phantom, or the 1925-1927 Lon Chany version, or for that matter reading the book. Much less Phantom of the Paradise, or any one of a hundred other adaptations of the story. Truth be told, I was doing long hours on another "unexpected emergency" project for the engineers at work. And what was playing through my earbuds to keep me awake was not Sir Andrew, but the MTV production of Legally Blonde.

***

Turns out I know someone who worked in that theater. At least he answered my ghost light question and whether the drops would be in or out. But still too many questions about the physical layout and none of the stuff I've found online is helping enough. Pretty much, every "behind the scenes at Palais Garnier" thing you find on a shallow search is either selling you, or telling you that someone sells, tickets for the guided tour.

Which I really should have taken while I was there. But no, I'm not going back to Paris to do research on a book only three people will ever read. So instead on to the Louvre, especially the Concourse mini-mall on the way to the lower entrance, parkour, La Defense, and the old belt railway (and some cataphiles...still on the fence about whether I will let Penny go into the catacombs on this trip.)

Tour de Paris

Had to work this weekend but actually felt pretty good Monday...over lunch at work, opened the file and wrote. A good hundred words. Whee! Do that for a year and I'd finish the novel.

I jest a little. The Palais Garnier chapter is at 1,700 words and no huge problems yet. Well, aside from the outline planning on this being an epic 4,000 word sequence. 

For no particular reason, though, I started thinking about what the book does as a tour of Paris. What hotspots does it hit and does it do anything interesting in them?

So here goes the current sequences (I use the term "sequences" as being a common idea or thread or location that may span several scenes or even chapters, or be concluded in just one or even part of one.)

A cafe at the place du tertre, and Penny meets a fellow tourist on her first day in Paris.

Penny looks for clues around Sacre-Coeur, atop the butte of Montmartre.

A stroll down Rue de Abesses, travel tips and beginning French, one of the Hector Guimard metro stations.

Back to place du tertre to meet a caricature artist, first of the "bohemians" who run a steampunk cabaret in modern Montmartre.

Musee d' Orsay, art and gossip about the Impressionists, and discussion of the Paris Exposition of 1900.

A (brief) stroll down the Champs Elysees and visit to the Arc de Triomphe, with Marianne (in the Phrygian cap), pointing the way to the next clue.

Morning workout running up the Rue Rivoli and past the old vineyards of Montmartre.

A visit to Shakespeare and Company, and the bouquinistes along the Seine.

A parkour chase across the Ile de le cite, followed by Parisian street food and a brief discussion of the Jewish community of Paris.

The Steampunk cabaret, with various popular songs being done in French...and German. Plus a "dual time" visit to the bateau-lavoir in the company of a young Picasso.

The Pompidou Center, Tintin (Herge was Belgian, though), and a long discussion on Rodin.

Another chase, starting in Gallery Vivienne.

A tailing scene through the projected landscapes of a Van Gogh multimedia show.

A talk with a "love picker" on Pont des Arts, about the love locks of Paris.

Another tailing scene through Palais Garnier, with a whole lot of stuff about the Phantom of the Opera.

***

And that's where I am. Projected, a steampunk photoshoot at the Arts et Metiers metro station, a parkour workout at La Defense, a description of the foyer at the ballet, a meeting with cataphiles along the route of the old Petite Ceinture and a run-in with some punks, details of what happened to Picasso's friend and why his Blue Period, a steampunk garden party and mock duel at Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, a midnight climb of Notre-Dame des Paris, a daytime visit to Notre-Dame du Travail, and a dinner at the Jules Verne cafe atop the Eiffel Tower.

So there's a few more hundred-word days left there.

Capital idea

I'm a good ways into the love locks scene, with one last big chapter to go to the end of Part II. Boy, has this one been a slog!

I also decided that I will send this to an editor after all. I'm not going to sell enough copies to pay for that, and I haven't the patience (see above!) to do developmental edits, but I want a line editor to go through the thing because I just can't deal with capitalization and, even more, italics.

Within the context of what I am doing some of these are arbitrary choices. As a for-instance, I am in this book italicizing sentences in French. As per the trend, if the entire sentence is in French the quotes are also italicized, otherwise, not.

But should I italicize names? Everyone knows the Louvre, so that probably shouldn't be. Something like the Ile de la Cité is actually a descriptive phrase as well as a name. As is anything that is a Rue or a Pont; should it be the Pont des Arts, because "pont" is the French word for bridge? It seems to make sense; that it would be the Eiffel Tower or le Tour Eiffel depending. But then is it properly Notre Dame, since that just means "Sacred Heart?" Or is it better that the familiar English Notre Dame isn't in italics, but Notre Dame de Paris when it is given in full form?

There's a bit early on when the character Bastien is speaking franglish; he is mixing actual French with English and English roots given French grammar (apparently that's a thing). So...which parts of that mess should be in italics?

Oh, and French capitalization rules are different, too. Of course.

I can at least get the French words correct by hiring a French reader. As painful an experience as that is likely to be. But the thought of trying to figure out consistency in such cases as whether I should italicize or quote or both something like, "You say 'bonjour' when you enter a place of business..."

In the Japan novel, my rather odd rule of thumb was that only proper Japanese got italics. If someone mentioned "sushi," that was just treated as an English word imported from Japanese. Even much of Aki's weaboo speak didn't get graced with italics, along with Penny's mixed attempts at it. Only a complete grammatical/idiomatic sentence from her got the full italics.

But all the little details of even if it should be the Eiffel Tower or the Eiffel tower are just too much for me to mess with. Sure I can look them up. But there's something on almost every page, and I'd just as soon to pay someone to worry about that. And fix the places where the italics or the intricacies of punctuation around quotations escape me.

I would very much love to somehow push through this one, and find some way to kick a few more out the door on a much shorter schedule.

(And, yes, the Love Locks scene is on the Pont des Arts. Largely because that's the bridge people think of if they've heard of love locks at all. And even though it is clear of them now, finding an excuse to stick some up anyhow is easier than going into the history of which bridges still have them...)

***

I've been reading a series about a very Mary-Sue character -- it is intentional on the writer's part, but only partially works -- and that's been giving me thoughts about larger-than-life characters. The Greeks didn't have the hangups we do, in that their heroes were larger, stronger, and probably related to a god, and that was just fine.

The first superheroes were also very much of a "faster better stronger" mold -- one of the innovations of Marvel was heroes that had problems and hang-ups and weaknesses, with perpetually broke hang-dog Peter Parker being the poster boy. And now we have come to where we often dislike the really skilled characters -- and when we get them, we demand that those skills have some logical reason for being.

One of the things critics express about the "Sue" characters is the opinion that they haven't earned their powers. But I can't help thinking that there is a hidden gender bias in there. The same swipe of a pen gives a character a black belt, a physics degree, six years in the Marines...but the readers question it more often when that character is female (doesn't help, of course, that the standard is usually hot, young female -- that is, not of the age and size and battered appearance that really should go with those years of getting those skills shown on the paperwork. Yet, this qualification is often waived for the men as well...)

A lot of what went into Penny was reaction on my part. I didn't want the standard female protagonist package, with or without the "strong" appended. So no handy martial arts background or surprisingly young doctorate degree, but she also isn't a shy loner, she gets along fine with cheerleaders, and her hair isn't perfect after a week in a cave.

Yet she is becoming a hero. Sure, an "ordinary man" hero, but in a semi-realistic universe (and trope-aware enough herself) to recognize that you stop being ordinary by the third Holy Grail you manage to dig up. So far, I've held back in that her superhuman ability is her almost autistic focus on whatever history the plot requires her to be knowledgable about.

(She's also able to pull of physical stunts that a self-described "ex dancer and climber of plastic rocks" shouldn't be able to pull off. And has stubborn endurance which is also way off the bell curve. But those are part of the standard "ordinary man" exception where one ticking atom bomb is enough to let thirty-something computer salesman who sometimes plays a bit of pick-up basketball somehow come up with the strength, determination, and sheer luck to beat up a renegade Green Beret.)

The main magic skill I've given her is language. She has an instinct that she isn't in control of. Which basically, at least up to this book, is given her the seasoned-world-traveller characteristic of being able to speak a little of whatever the local language is, without me having to defend her actually learning the damned thing. She's just a very finely tuned parrot; speaking the correct idiomatic phrase to get her through an interaction (with nearly flawless pronunciation), even as she has no idea what it is she said.

And none of that makes my job of how to treat language any easier.

Do Gogh On

Various projects -- and some work politics -- all hit at the same time. Precisely as predicted, of course. Had to fly to Burbank to take some measurements and got a chance to step inside the gates at Sony, at least. But head colds and flying are not good companions.

In any case, I'm finishing of the scene at the Van Gogh Experience. This is the scene that gives the lie to the idea that I just cram everything I know into each chapter (although I will admit that this book is less filtered than the others). My choice for this one is that my protagonist doesn't know much about the painter and doesn't get a chance to learn, either.

So there are a lot of Van Gogh paintings being projected on to the walls, and I am spending time staring at haystacks and cafes and lots and lots of sunflowers. But the narrator is unable to name any of them, much less place them in proper historical context.

About the only one I think I can get away with is to have a cross-fade that suggests that the sunflower was Vincent himself. But the tidbit that he painted scads of these things to decorate the room that Gaugin was more-or-less blackmailed into taking in shared digs at Arles -- an odd couple that would soon enough erupt in violence and the loss of an ear -- well, I can't share any of that.

I have enough name-drops and references and weird jokes anyhow. At some point Penny is across the cornfield (with crows) from the people she is tailing, in a spy-movie version of that one segment from Kurosawa's Dreams, and she remarks there's too much light and they are going to see her "coming through the rye."

That's the problem with spending so long writing. Not that I add new stuff at every pass. The process is different. It is that I take so long between writing sessions, when I write a couple of new paragraphs I've had days to think about the scene and the random ideas and associations and jokes and turns of phrase are just waiting in the wings. All of my re-write passes are about taking as much of that stuff as I can...back out.