Will no one rid me of this turbulent archaeologist?

This is the scene where Penny gets religion.

Sort of. I had a draft that was a decent little scene, with a young priest who was modern and ecumenical and easy to talk to. But as much as all my notes are saying Penny isn't blaming herself for the fire, I think it is a stronger scene if this is more about her confronting her guilt.

Even if the larger point across these last scenes is her fully accepting that she won't always win and she won't always do the right thing, and what she is doing might not always look like archaeology, but it is a role she is peculiarly suited for.

Thing is, the two "church" scenes are also the scenes where there is a touch of the ineffable. Where things happen which can't quite get nailed down rationally. She and I believe in a rational universe and my rule for this series is "probably." But that doesn't mean there aren't frontiers and gray areas where the explanation isn't immediately obvious. And I've made a conscious choice to have that happen in each book.

So I'm putting that draft aside and trying again, with Penny in a lot more of a funk, and the priest a lot more mysterious and oblique.

Not helped by STILL being sick. Walking now...but can't even walk very far yet. Actual recovery is illusive.

MLA or APA?

I was just throwing a few notes about Eglise Notre-Dame-du-Travail (the "worker's church" in the 14th arrondissement) into the Scrivener folder so I could work on a scene over brunch. Comments and pictures drawn from Atlas Obscura, Parisian Fields, Sophie's blog, Wikipedia...

The thought crossed my head that I should at least jot down where I read something. Instead of just throwing a bookmark into the rather stuffed folder I have for this novel. Yeah; I was just looking back through those, too. There is a lot of stuff I've been looking up!

I got into several websites about architecture while I was working on the Notre-Dame de Paris chapter. Mostly regarding the gargoyles. Read more of Victor Hugo and a rather long sample (fortunately free, as the book itself is fourteen bucks for Kindle alone) from a very fascinating book about them.

And then there was trying to research one tiny important detail. Can you get to the roof from the high end of one of the flying buttresses?

It wasn't until after I'd written the scene that I got a detailed look of exactly how that bit of architecture is shaped -- in the context of a video shot by two guys who were in the process of climbing up it. Ah, the algorithm will be the death of me. No search was turning up what I needed. But the second or third time I watched a Simon Nogueira video showing off his building-climbing skills, the YouTube algo decided it was going to randomly flash these other guys at me.

I hate the algorithm. It is a lot like writing AI prompts. Ooh, here's a search result showing a picture of this obscure hand tool I've been looking for! Ah, but there's a cat in the picture as well. If I click it, I know which element is going to be weighted higher in the algorithm...

So, anyhow, there's four sequences left to the end of the book. I'm coming in slightly higher than estimated; the climax went 5K and I'm sitting at 70K now, with maybe 5K to finish off. And as much as I tried to decompress, this is still a very dense book, too.

Climbing back

Another trip to the ER. This time I was feeling stable enough to risk going by Uber. It hit me Sunday night and I was feeling so sick I didn't dare close my eyes. Waited it out until dawn, called the Kaiser advice nurse, and could have saved myself the call because it is never "take two aspirin and your regular doc will call you back in 2-3 weeks."

After the ER released me I was finally, fitfully, able to sleep. For seventeen hours. Which also made this morning's breakfast the first food I'd had in 36.

Still feel horrible. Doctors are out of ideas. I am not sure how many more times I can go through this before I just give up.

Oddly, though, I managed to crawl through a draft of the first Notre-Dame de Paris scene. Up to the moment Penny fires the steampunk grappling gun. The current plan is for her to end up on the tower of one of the flying buttresses, creep up the drain, not be able to reach the edge of the roof but instead take a leap of faith to the scaffold around the spire, navigate a bit of that scaffolding at the transept and admire Viollet-le-Duc's face on one of the saints surrounding it, then teeter her way along the very peak of the lead roof (probably made easier by the stuff the contractors had set up for their work restoring the roof) to the gallery of chimeras. And, yes, my latest book (The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame) finally gave me firm data on the location of le Stryge (left buttress, north tower) and the date on which he was installed.

(I wanted to know because I wanted to know what you can see from that corner. Good spot to look towards Sacre-Couer. And the Louvre, although that is a bit hard to pick out. Damn Haussmann and his rank upon rank of far-too-similar buildings!

I've been reading the Victor Hugo, and at least in the translation I'm reading he certainly does mention fabulous creatures in stone, even comparing Quasimodo to one such as he parkours his way around the rooftops (that was not just a Disney invention). But those were removed during the French Revolution; one of the acts of turning the place into a Temple of Reason was, even, replacing the actual gargoyles (water spouts) with "rational" (and, it turned out, not quite as functional) lead pipes. So Hugo never saw them. Viollet never saw them, and had only scanty record of them. Alas, it remains unclear who the precise designer was of le Stryge...but perhaps if I read the entire book I'll learn if he was a Victorian romantic invention, or (since Viollet was very much a student of the real Gothic historical architecture) had some basis in actual 15th-century beastiaries.

And, yes, this does play a part in the book. When Penny confronts the treasure hunters, she first has to convince them that Napoleon could have had no part in that particular bit of stonework, clue or no clue.

But this isn't going to be like the Opera Garnier chapter, which wove elements of Phantom of the Opera in its many, many versions. Hunchback plays second fiddle to what Hugo was really writing about (and why he hated giving Quasimodo star billing on the English-language title of his book). Architecture. "This will be the death of that." Restoration and preservation and medievalism and neo-gothic romanticism and the loss of human connection to modern buildings (as Hugo, and many others, saw it). And the impact of tourism and the way people are still trying to come to grips with Paris, both the modern city and the historical. Which includes the snares that led Nathan to where he is, and why Penny has to argue eloquently to, well, keep from being tossed off the top of the building along with le Stryge.

(Just as Amelie's mom is passing below, no doubt.....)

I am disappoint

You know this fellow?

Of course you do. That's Le Stryge. The most famous "gargoyle" on Notre-Dame de Paris. He's even in my book case (my father bought this one in Paris when he was there):

And he's all over the game model of Notre-Dame that appears in Assassin's Creed: Unity.

I transferred the game to my new Steam install from the back-up folder. Clicked through a dozen screens, filled out the new password request for Ubisoft's I-don't-know-why-it-is-even-there "connect" service, and finally got the game running. Which opened several episodes back before I had free run of Paris, and the save game system is probably the most useless, ill-conceived, and impossible to navigate one blessing any game I know.

So nothing to it but play through several highly annoying stealth sections around the Palace of Versailles until I could finally get back to the Ile de la Cité and climb the cathedral again.

And there he is. Le Stryge. On every single corner of both bell towers. On the real Notre-Dame (well, up until the fire, and presumably being restored to their rightful places soon if not already) he is just one of a whole menagerie of grotesques. In our universe, he was placed there under the orders of Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc -- in fact, he was the one to popularize chimères in ecclesiastic architecture -- and he in turn was inspired by Victor Hugo, and....do you get the sense that he shouldn't even be near Notre-Dame during the early days of the French Revolution?

Yes, the designers of the game knew that. There's a nifty nod, even; one of the saints surrounding the lower part of the spire (the predecessor of which was a tottering wooden thing that didn't last past 1792) is facing inwards. That would be Viollet-le-Duc himself, or at least his face on an Apostle.

At this point I was pleasantly surprised that the bells were actually coming from the bell towers, instead of issuing from some other location.

So it perhaps isn't, even after all that, the best reference. I've been looking at a lot of video because the stalwarts of Google Maps and web searches are only turning up post-fire images. And it is really, really hard to get anything that shows what the plausibly-navigable parts of the roof look like. I did get lucky enough to find a parkour video but since he was very much doing this illegally he had to take some quick shots then go home.

It is however the best thing I have to block out the scene. After all, many a stage director has made do with tape on the floor. I have a scheme that's just crazy enough to fit what I am trying to do with this book and the series; that due to poor aim with the grapple gun she ends up on one of the flying buttresses and has to crawl along the rain gutter. And then cap that off with walking along the peak of the lead roof from near the transept to where Le Stryge awaits.

Who was in the book already, at least in spirit; I asked a Fiverrrrrr artist for ideas and she really wanted to draw him...

(He is being used as the scene divider, the *** between scenes).

Dancing about architecture

Did I use that one already? I don't care.

"New Mombasa" sequence finished. Now finally into the climax of the book. And I'm gonna need to boot up Assassin's Creed Unity. When I was first plotting this, Google Maps was pulling up the pre-fire Notre Dame de Paris, and it was easy to find pictures from early 2019 with all the scaffolding from the roof work. Now, all my searches are pulling up post-fire -- and mostly about with the rebuild nearly finished.

I either pulled samples or took bookmarks of a few editorial-use-only from Shutterstock back then, so I should still have those. It isn't going to be an epic climb anyhow. There's really not much you can do without either being up on a nice pedestrian walkway already, or clinging to a bit of building you can't climb up from.

The epic is going to be in the emotional description. For which I hardly need to know what the building looks like at all.

Let's do the time dance again

First attempt at the "New Mombasa" chapter didn't work.

This is the last of what I am calling the "Proustian loops." I hadn't used flashbacks in this series before, and I'd rather not use them at all (well, really, use them ever...) but it seemed appropriate for this book, with the emphasis on memory and the way that one's impressions of Paris are always changing. The memoir -- the split time for this book -- is set in 1900 but it was written following the First World War, so it is consciously looking back with the understanding that those days were in the fin ds siecle, the tail of what had been the belle epoque.

(Like a lot of historical periods, the name and the understanding of the thing encapsulated in the name happens after it is all over. Even the Egyptian dynasties didn't start counting the things until at least five kings in.)

So what I'm doing here is revisiting a key moment in her Paris trip, but each time looking at it differently and drawing new conclusions about it. The last one, Penny put the lamp shade on by complaining she hadn't even gotten a madeleine out of it. This final one, I want her to be aware and in control, guiding the memory and consciously using it to understand better.

There are chapter epigrams which have a brief quote set out and attributed. Then there are the book passages, fully epistolary, framed with something like "I opened the book and read..." and placed out with white space and italic font.

And there are the inevitable fill-in bits. I find those annoying in 1POV. The first person narrator so much wants to present as that illusion of consciousness; the narration doesn't stop until they sleep. Doing the back-fill when you need to skip over something to compress time, and open on something new in media res can't help but feel awkward.

At least the cafe scenes -- I made the choice to have almost a running gag of the main cast always finding each other at this one cafe in the Place du Tertre -- I have the crutch of dialogue. "So what did you do this morning?"

And then the memories, which until this one were always framed; "I remembered that night..." and the first paragraph or so is in past perfect, until I can slip into "having" the experience (and a return to simple past) instead of recalling it. And then a wake-up after.

So this last one I was trying out a walking memory, where Penny could compare what she is seeing now with what she saw then. But it didn't work for me. The next try, I will let her choose the slip and go into simple past tense, but duck "back out" once or twice to her seeing the world around her in the present.

But I haven't quite worked out how I'm going to work her commentary, as she realizes what these memories are trying to tell her.

I did, however, open up some maps. The template for this is my own walk, but I started in the Marais and I did get somewhere around the Seine but I'm really not sure where I went. I do know the area around the Pompidou center seemed really familiar when I came back there later.

Penny is starting in Montmartre, near Abbesses station, then heading almost due South but cutting over (probably) before she hits the Louvre. And I was looking at the same map for where she is when she started this memory. Google Maps did actually cough up crepe stands when asked but I had to switch to street view to confirm they were actual stands, and not full-up restaurants with chairs and awnings.

I also shot off a sample paragraph for the French proofreader I am trying to hire.

Sunday in the Park with Hugo

I finished the monster 6.4 k-word chapter. At least close enough. Made a couple light editing passes but even though several story threads finish there I don't feel like I have to keep tinkering with this one to make the beats properly clear.

On to the "New Mombasa" chapter (a short one) then the big final chapter of the main story. Everything after that is epilogue and wrapping up. (It's going to be a long descending action because there's a visit to the Jules Verne Cafe, a cemetery atop the butte of Montmartre, and the "Workman's Church" of Notre Dame du Travail.)

I've got my cover, I've got my interior graphics -- Scrivener is still being an ass about properly formatting chapter epigraphs -- and I've started reaching out to French translators. So this book may finally be out of my COVID-length hair. Soon.

But doing a quick bit of reading up on night-time Paris. This is another scene that the essential is drawn from personal experience, but there are different beats Penny needs to get out of it. Oh, reminds me. I need to rip "Rain" (from Halo 3: ODST) so I can listen to it without annoying ads every thirty seconds. I have three computers on the desk now, as it is the old laptop I installed the ripper on and it isn't worth messing around with trying to get it onto the M2.

What time the trains stop running. What neighborhoods you can find the crepe stalls at. (Not the Marais. And that was an annoying search. Even on Duck Duck Go it was two pages of "what are the best crepes to buy?" before anyone even mentioned those ubiquitous examples of Parisian street food.)

One of the few good things about working this slow is that I already have most of the climax worked out. 

(I think I may make a point of hitting the Sunday "rush" every time. That cafe almost always has seats anyhow. But having to wait another twenty minutes for food gets even more writing done.)