I'm working on a plotting problem.
That's not really a good description, though. I find myself once again reaching for more precise terminology. There's plot and there's plot. There's drama and there's drama.
Okay, the later. You could say that a light-saber duel over a lava pool is more "dramatic" than a guy buying soap. Of course "dramatic" is contextual. Some people are heartily bored by light-sabers. And buying soap may be part of an intense and moving odyssey...just ask Leopold Bloom. But "dramatic" in the sense of emotionally stirring is only one meaning; the word also is made to serve the workmanlike function of turning incident into narrative. I might need to talk about the dramatic arc, or even how to dramatize an incident or a theme or a character attribute, and at no time be implicitly saying I am trying to put more action or emotion into it.
Plot, too. In my mind there are at least two major parts of plot. There's the mechanics of where they went and what they did there. And there's the reason -- the writer's reason -- for why they went there and why they did the thing they did there. In the former are problems that can be solved with a map. In the latter are problems of pacing and structure that need, well, other tools.
Sometimes the two are separable. "We rode to the next town" can be the action under the emotional arc (fleeing the Shire), the dramatic purpose of the scene itself (the midnight ride of Paul Revere), or a mere setting detail placed beneath the real purpose of the narrative (and along the way each of us told stories).
At other times they are more tightly bound. And that's where I am now; one of those "interesting" plotting problems where the greater themes and character arcs and the basic look and feel of the novel are all being examined simultaneous to trying to solve a mechanical issue of who knew what when and did what with it.
Not to reveal too much too early but I'm struggling with an archaeological dig in Germany and some looted Greek antiquities are involved. My first idea was that this is a laundering scheme. It might still be one step in a triangulation, but Germany has recently tightened up its antiquities laws and in any case few nations are happy to have people sell what they dig up. So if the purpose was the laundry, getting near an active dig is the last thing you want to do.
So...is this a clandestine dig, and/or are they being wink-wink nudge-nudge about the trafficking the site is enabling? Or more along the lines of "Cool discoveries, eh? Well, by sheer coincidence, I happen to own a small gallery in London where some similar -- but entirely legal, I assure you -- items can be obtained."
Who is the dig for? The big artifact sales are largely done with private contact between major dealers and the curators at museums, through their social circles. The smaller traffic, though...that's a bit more plausible. But given the context -- a dig that in the eyes of some is demonstrating a clear connection between Germany and Greece during the Greek Dark Ages -- are the illegal sales here selling the sizzle or selling the steak? Are these "Look at this beautiful pot" or are they "Look at this ugly pot that proves something mainstream archaeology is trying to hide?"
I don't really know. I'm in a yarn tangle, viewing Venn diagrams distorted through more than three dimensions, trying to balance what is believable, what tells the story of actual trafficking, what advances the character arcs and the overall story arc, and what is dramatic in the "light-saber duel over the lava pool" sense.
This is a really tough spot in the plot for the novel because this is what I've been calling the Yamatai moment. What Campbell called the Abyss, the belly of the beast. A place where my character, who has been up to this point rather bemusedly falling down the rabbit hole, suddenly hits dirt and it is nasty mud with all kinds of sharp pointy rocks in it. Basically, this is when shit turns real.
All the themes of not just this book but the projected series are showing up in this one small spot. And I'm early enough in the development process (I plan to be doing a fair amount of Discovery Writing) there's not much that isn't up for grabs. Even Germany is largely there because I've had boots on the ground and don't have to rely exclusively on Wikipedia to describe it. (Yes, there are themes a German site advances, but I'm on the fence about whether it in the end helps or hinders my various purposes).
About the only thing I can't change is that these are stolen Greek antiquities. Because if I change that so much of the structure goes away I might as well start a different book.
Thursday, November 15, 2018
Saturday, November 10, 2018
wait just a minotaur...
I'm watching a TV show that is not known for its historical accuracy. After "Athens, 3000 BC" flashes up we see some guys in ragged tunics underground, fleeing from what appears to be a minotaur. Present day, the characters discuss the well-known myth of the roll of golden thread (the what?) and the less well-known myth (yes, they got that part right!) of the "key to the labyrinth."
But it is when they bring out a medallion and confidently identify it as being made of a white marble only found on Crete that I couldn't take any more. Labyrinth in neolithic Athens, no problem. But the only distinctly Cretan marble I've been able to turn up in my own research is a silvery grey. If you are looking for a famous white marble, you want Paros, in the Cyclades. Well, at least the minotaur carving looked vaguely appropriate to neolithic cycladic art.
Yeah, for someone who is in the middle of plotting a book that is actually designed to be under-researched, I sure do get hung up on details that don't matter.
(Speaking of: my core reading list for THIS project is Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey, The Medici Conspiracy (about antiquities trafficking), and -- as soon as I can stomach the $17 price tag -- Donna Zuckerberg's Not All Dead White Men.)
Later on they claim Daedalus was scared of water and so wouldn't have gone to Crete. So at least they remembered something of the traditional myths. No explanation as to how Minos ended up in the wrong town, or why Daedalus could apparently write decent modern Greek (3,000 BC being a wee bit early for the Phoenician alphabet to take hold, much less the miniscule!) Or why the show just can not say the word "labyrinth." It is always referred to as a maze.
But it is when they bring out a medallion and confidently identify it as being made of a white marble only found on Crete that I couldn't take any more. Labyrinth in neolithic Athens, no problem. But the only distinctly Cretan marble I've been able to turn up in my own research is a silvery grey. If you are looking for a famous white marble, you want Paros, in the Cyclades. Well, at least the minotaur carving looked vaguely appropriate to neolithic cycladic art.
Yeah, for someone who is in the middle of plotting a book that is actually designed to be under-researched, I sure do get hung up on details that don't matter.
(Speaking of: my core reading list for THIS project is Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey, The Medici Conspiracy (about antiquities trafficking), and -- as soon as I can stomach the $17 price tag -- Donna Zuckerberg's Not All Dead White Men.)
Later on they claim Daedalus was scared of water and so wouldn't have gone to Crete. So at least they remembered something of the traditional myths. No explanation as to how Minos ended up in the wrong town, or why Daedalus could apparently write decent modern Greek (3,000 BC being a wee bit early for the Phoenician alphabet to take hold, much less the miniscule!) Or why the show just can not say the word "labyrinth." It is always referred to as a maze.
Digital Nomad
I've travelled before. Paris, London, Tokyo, Berlin. (And a bit beyond those capitals; Kyoto, city of a thousand shrines; the Rhine Tal and a train to Salzburg; the forest -- and boulders! -- of Fontainebleau; down the Thames to Greenwich...)
I pack light. I write everything in a little notebook, all the directions and hotel addresses and travel dates I'm going to need to know.
This time, though, I made a change. A big one.
I didn't pack a map.
On previous trips I've packed around a camera and even a laptop, plus a paperback book or two, and a travel guide or two. I did have a camera in my bag but this time everything, from journal to light reading to, yes, the map was in my hip pocket.
Yeah. iPhone. I got permission from IT for roaming and up to a gig of data. I loaded up with a tourist guide and a couple of books (including a copy of that great new translation of The Odyssey). I made sure I had plenty of space for pictures.
Also picked up a folding keyboard which made it so vastly much easier to take lengthly notes on the road.
In the column of "That worked fairly well" the GPS was a boon from the gods. The streets in the Greek cities I was exploring never ran in the same direction for more than a handful of meters, were narrow enough to block all possible landmarks from their confines, and street signs were often hard to come by. Not that they helped. Maybe if I had been forced to read street signs I would have eventually gotten the hang of written Greek, but most of it remained "egg nog, egg nog" to me.
Not helped by the inconsistent romanization. On a bus schedule I had, the "Heraklion" route went from "Iraklion." On a pair of street signs I found, you were either entering "Tylissos" or "Tylisos." Even "Chania" was sometimes "Hania." Yeah...I recommend learning your Greek alphabet because that's a wee bit more consistent (there, the problem is that the characters are simplified and substituted in very odd ways on the electronic signs inside and around public transit, meaning it's not enough just to know it; you need to be comfortable with it.)
Also, between Apple's "Map" ap and Google Maps, fire roads and trails were all wrong and coverage of even major museums was spotty. Nor could either ap really handle public transit or even figure out a driving route that didn't put you going down a public dock. Or a walking route that didn't put you on the highway.
The digital bubble worries me here. I don't mean the way you might be wandering around with your eyes on the GPS direction widget instead of, you know, traffic. I mean that even in my home town, close to the heart of Silicon Valley, restaurants and shops I know damn well exist aren't listed on the Maps ap. It was worse in Heraklion, where I could find the local Gap store but not a knitting supply store that way.
So. For pictures, the phone was good enough. Most of what I was taking was museum exhibits anyhow. I wasn't trying to make pretty pictures, I was documenting what I found so I would be able to look it up later.
Okay, mostly.
In the column of "needs work," I had aps for the companies where I had reserved hotels and purchased flights, but those aps rarely told me what I needed to know. The only time one was of any use at all was to display the address of a hotel in proper Greek for my cab driver, but the ap insisted on truncating the address and could not be convinced to scroll or re-scale.
There was an odd experience at the Agora (around the foot of the Acropolis); a bunch of people had some kind of pre-printed ticket that was scanned through easily, but the rest of us were blocked from entry because the credit card reader was down (for some reason that meant cash was off limits as well. Or the staff was so focused on one problem they didn't want to take time to do the other). That actually worked out well for me in the end because I barely had time to get to the Acropolis then out to meet my ferry after all.
Every experience at a clerk or boarding agent, though, no ap or printout was needed or wanted. Just my name and my passport. Just as well. My experience with e-tickets is every single one has a different ap, and all those aps are bloatware, a drag on your data, and possible spyware to boot.
The nadir had to be the Pireaus-to-Iraklion ferry; there you take a printout of your receipt (you must have this) to the ferry company's office in town where they print you an official boarding pass (sometimes for a small charge). Not terribly efficient. Or obvious.
I brought a power adaptor and a battery pack good for up to two full charges.
That's the first thing you notice about doing everything with a smart phone. I don't know if it is the GPS (and running two different map aps at the same time) or all the photographs but battery charge goes like that. I ended up spending significant time with the phone in one pocket and the battery pack in another, trickling in more juice as I walked.
This is something the primary manufacturers haven't quite gotten yet. Apple continues to make their gear smaller and thinner, but as the customers are using their devices more continually and at higher consumption rates (brighter screens, streaming videos, flashlight aps) those internal batteries are no longer sufficient to get through a day. Charging stations are springing up. There's a new version of Wardriving out there as people search out unguarded outlets in coffee shops and other places. I changed seats on the ferry to hog an outlet I found on the floor there (eventually I gave it up to someone else after I had enough charge to hold me).
And of course battery packs, battery packs everywhere.
Other odd follow-on effects. Payphones are long gone, of course. But clocks in public spaces are also on the way out. It is odd to be in an airport and not be able to find a single clock anywhere. Not even on the departures board is there a time display. Which is pretty stupid if you think about it. Sure, everyone has a smart phone (supposedly) and those automatically synch to local time...but only if they get a signal! When you are changing time zones, you are also roaming, and possibly out of coverage for the frequency range of your phone, which means no automatic updates.
So all in all, it worked, but I'm not giving up on the old ways completely. A little notebook with everything important copied to it is still the most important thing you can pack.
This time, though, I made a change. A big one.
I didn't pack a map.
On previous trips I've packed around a camera and even a laptop, plus a paperback book or two, and a travel guide or two. I did have a camera in my bag but this time everything, from journal to light reading to, yes, the map was in my hip pocket.
Yeah. iPhone. I got permission from IT for roaming and up to a gig of data. I loaded up with a tourist guide and a couple of books (including a copy of that great new translation of The Odyssey). I made sure I had plenty of space for pictures.
Also picked up a folding keyboard which made it so vastly much easier to take lengthly notes on the road.
In the column of "That worked fairly well" the GPS was a boon from the gods. The streets in the Greek cities I was exploring never ran in the same direction for more than a handful of meters, were narrow enough to block all possible landmarks from their confines, and street signs were often hard to come by. Not that they helped. Maybe if I had been forced to read street signs I would have eventually gotten the hang of written Greek, but most of it remained "egg nog, egg nog" to me.
Not helped by the inconsistent romanization. On a bus schedule I had, the "Heraklion" route went from "Iraklion." On a pair of street signs I found, you were either entering "Tylissos" or "Tylisos." Even "Chania" was sometimes "Hania." Yeah...I recommend learning your Greek alphabet because that's a wee bit more consistent (there, the problem is that the characters are simplified and substituted in very odd ways on the electronic signs inside and around public transit, meaning it's not enough just to know it; you need to be comfortable with it.)
Also, between Apple's "Map" ap and Google Maps, fire roads and trails were all wrong and coverage of even major museums was spotty. Nor could either ap really handle public transit or even figure out a driving route that didn't put you going down a public dock. Or a walking route that didn't put you on the highway.
The digital bubble worries me here. I don't mean the way you might be wandering around with your eyes on the GPS direction widget instead of, you know, traffic. I mean that even in my home town, close to the heart of Silicon Valley, restaurants and shops I know damn well exist aren't listed on the Maps ap. It was worse in Heraklion, where I could find the local Gap store but not a knitting supply store that way.
So. For pictures, the phone was good enough. Most of what I was taking was museum exhibits anyhow. I wasn't trying to make pretty pictures, I was documenting what I found so I would be able to look it up later.
Okay, mostly.
In the column of "needs work," I had aps for the companies where I had reserved hotels and purchased flights, but those aps rarely told me what I needed to know. The only time one was of any use at all was to display the address of a hotel in proper Greek for my cab driver, but the ap insisted on truncating the address and could not be convinced to scroll or re-scale.
There was an odd experience at the Agora (around the foot of the Acropolis); a bunch of people had some kind of pre-printed ticket that was scanned through easily, but the rest of us were blocked from entry because the credit card reader was down (for some reason that meant cash was off limits as well. Or the staff was so focused on one problem they didn't want to take time to do the other). That actually worked out well for me in the end because I barely had time to get to the Acropolis then out to meet my ferry after all.
Every experience at a clerk or boarding agent, though, no ap or printout was needed or wanted. Just my name and my passport. Just as well. My experience with e-tickets is every single one has a different ap, and all those aps are bloatware, a drag on your data, and possible spyware to boot.
The nadir had to be the Pireaus-to-Iraklion ferry; there you take a printout of your receipt (you must have this) to the ferry company's office in town where they print you an official boarding pass (sometimes for a small charge). Not terribly efficient. Or obvious.
I brought a power adaptor and a battery pack good for up to two full charges.
That's the first thing you notice about doing everything with a smart phone. I don't know if it is the GPS (and running two different map aps at the same time) or all the photographs but battery charge goes like that. I ended up spending significant time with the phone in one pocket and the battery pack in another, trickling in more juice as I walked.
This is something the primary manufacturers haven't quite gotten yet. Apple continues to make their gear smaller and thinner, but as the customers are using their devices more continually and at higher consumption rates (brighter screens, streaming videos, flashlight aps) those internal batteries are no longer sufficient to get through a day. Charging stations are springing up. There's a new version of Wardriving out there as people search out unguarded outlets in coffee shops and other places. I changed seats on the ferry to hog an outlet I found on the floor there (eventually I gave it up to someone else after I had enough charge to hold me).
And of course battery packs, battery packs everywhere.
Other odd follow-on effects. Payphones are long gone, of course. But clocks in public spaces are also on the way out. It is odd to be in an airport and not be able to find a single clock anywhere. Not even on the departures board is there a time display. Which is pretty stupid if you think about it. Sure, everyone has a smart phone (supposedly) and those automatically synch to local time...but only if they get a signal! When you are changing time zones, you are also roaming, and possibly out of coverage for the frequency range of your phone, which means no automatic updates.
So all in all, it worked, but I'm not giving up on the old ways completely. A little notebook with everything important copied to it is still the most important thing you can pack.
Wednesday, November 7, 2018
Molop Labs
Ah, drat.
There's a problem with doing hasty, incomplete research: there are still real people at the other end of it.
The Dorians led me to Golden Dawn (not the Hermetic Order, but the one with seats in the Greek Parliament), back to Metaxas of the apocryphally Laconic "Ohi!"and off with Alexander the Pretty Durned Competent to Macedonian Nationalism...and passing through some rather familiar territory along the way, white marble statues and Ovid as a PUA and all that rot.
I don't want to be insulting political parties or whole people. As tempting as it is to have the Conspiracy of Fire Nuclei show up to toss a few bombs when the action has flagged, how is that different from having random Apache show up to shoot arrows at the heroes in some schlock Western? At least make some effort to get it right and be balanced in how you describe it.
Right. You are going to give offense no matter how careful you are, because there's always someone who wants to accept it. Is this, though; is mischaracterizing a movement or stereotyping a people, in the same class as getting the history or science wrong?
I do believe there exists the idea of a higher standard, and that is for reproducibility. My star example there being CPR; if you are going to show CPR in a work, get it right. Because as unlikely as the chain of events might be, what you wrote might be what someone uses in a real life-or-death situation.
On a lesser scale, I like to get directions and addresses correct because I have personal experience and the recounted experience of friends of navigating by what they read in a work of fiction. Now, I'm not saying you'd better make sure the A Train is the quickest way to get to Harlem, but it doesn't take that long to get the right road...or put in clues that the building in question is thoroughly fictional.
It sort of goes with the territory that in a cheap adventure people (individuals, organizations, crowds, entire cultures) are going to be variously incompetent and emotional. Entire villages will spontaneously grab pitchforks and torches to follow the hero after a monster, and two-dollar hoods will empty their guns at Superman (before throwing them, of course).
Perhaps the trick is to be even-handed in one's insults; that everyone comes off badly. Just make sure, if you want to be really fair about it, you include the hero...
There's a problem with doing hasty, incomplete research: there are still real people at the other end of it.
The Dorians led me to Golden Dawn (not the Hermetic Order, but the one with seats in the Greek Parliament), back to Metaxas of the apocryphally Laconic "Ohi!"and off with Alexander the Pretty Durned Competent to Macedonian Nationalism...and passing through some rather familiar territory along the way, white marble statues and Ovid as a PUA and all that rot.
I don't want to be insulting political parties or whole people. As tempting as it is to have the Conspiracy of Fire Nuclei show up to toss a few bombs when the action has flagged, how is that different from having random Apache show up to shoot arrows at the heroes in some schlock Western? At least make some effort to get it right and be balanced in how you describe it.
Right. You are going to give offense no matter how careful you are, because there's always someone who wants to accept it. Is this, though; is mischaracterizing a movement or stereotyping a people, in the same class as getting the history or science wrong?
I do believe there exists the idea of a higher standard, and that is for reproducibility. My star example there being CPR; if you are going to show CPR in a work, get it right. Because as unlikely as the chain of events might be, what you wrote might be what someone uses in a real life-or-death situation.
On a lesser scale, I like to get directions and addresses correct because I have personal experience and the recounted experience of friends of navigating by what they read in a work of fiction. Now, I'm not saying you'd better make sure the A Train is the quickest way to get to Harlem, but it doesn't take that long to get the right road...or put in clues that the building in question is thoroughly fictional.
It sort of goes with the territory that in a cheap adventure people (individuals, organizations, crowds, entire cultures) are going to be variously incompetent and emotional. Entire villages will spontaneously grab pitchforks and torches to follow the hero after a monster, and two-dollar hoods will empty their guns at Superman (before throwing them, of course).
Perhaps the trick is to be even-handed in one's insults; that everyone comes off badly. Just make sure, if you want to be really fair about it, you include the hero...
Tuesday, November 6, 2018
Owl Really?
Yeah, so much for no research.
I kinda like the new idea. The new, simple, fast, cheap, no research idea that can be finished and on Amazon in 6-8 months idea.
But...reading right now a book on the Medici Conspiracy (no, not that family...a much later antiquities smuggling ring), and about the (grr!) "Dorian Invasion" and a wee bit about Aristotle (no, not that one; the one that hung out with Callas and married Jackie).
Still, this is probably not going to be in-depth and since I'm using a contemporary setting a lot of the smaller details are a Google Maps browse away.
The plot as it is right now leverages my interest in the Bronze Age, my recent trip to Athens, less recent travel experiences in Germany, and a vague familiarity with YouTube monetizing, the German language, and various strands of pseudo-history. Oh, yes. And my protagonist has a theater background, which I'll try hard not to make into the Junior Woodchuck Guidebook of the series.
What's it about? Fun. Adventure and travel and a bit of history. And about becoming the mask, on various sides of the experience; the fun of pulling off an impersonation, the lingering chill of impostor syndrome, and of course the way a role can change you. And I'll try not to get too preachy about archaeology and the endemic problem of looting.
And I haven't decided yet about the gods. Or Atlantis. I'm going to cheat, at least in the first one. I'm going to do that thing I said I hate; a supernatural element that appears in such a way as to be totally deniable.
Now on to the place where at least one previous novel died; the outline. Does the plot stretch to a proper page count? I should know in a day or two -- by the end of the week I should know if I have a "go."
I kinda like the new idea. The new, simple, fast, cheap, no research idea that can be finished and on Amazon in 6-8 months idea.
But...reading right now a book on the Medici Conspiracy (no, not that family...a much later antiquities smuggling ring), and about the (grr!) "Dorian Invasion" and a wee bit about Aristotle (no, not that one; the one that hung out with Callas and married Jackie).
Still, this is probably not going to be in-depth and since I'm using a contemporary setting a lot of the smaller details are a Google Maps browse away.
The plot as it is right now leverages my interest in the Bronze Age, my recent trip to Athens, less recent travel experiences in Germany, and a vague familiarity with YouTube monetizing, the German language, and various strands of pseudo-history. Oh, yes. And my protagonist has a theater background, which I'll try hard not to make into the Junior Woodchuck Guidebook of the series.
What's it about? Fun. Adventure and travel and a bit of history. And about becoming the mask, on various sides of the experience; the fun of pulling off an impersonation, the lingering chill of impostor syndrome, and of course the way a role can change you. And I'll try not to get too preachy about archaeology and the endemic problem of looting.
And I haven't decided yet about the gods. Or Atlantis. I'm going to cheat, at least in the first one. I'm going to do that thing I said I hate; a supernatural element that appears in such a way as to be totally deniable.
Now on to the place where at least one previous novel died; the outline. Does the plot stretch to a proper page count? I should know in a day or two -- by the end of the week I should know if I have a "go."
Sunday, November 4, 2018
Sesshu and the Fish
There's this story about a master sumi-e painter. I can't remember where I read it or who the figure was. Basically, he agrees to do a painting of a fish for a local merchant to hang in his store. Two years pass, with the merchant becoming increasingly agitated. Finally he demands his fish or the return of his money. The painter wordlessly takes down a sheet of fresh washi, mixes the ink, then one stroke, two, three, and there's a koi so lifelike it seems to leap from the page.
"That took you ten seconds," the merchant complains. "Why did I have to wait two years?"
"That's how long it took me to learn how to do it in ten seconds," the artist replies.
A lot of my projects are like that. A lot of projects are like that, period. For all I talk about iteration and the freedom to fail and so on, what sometimes feels like half the time spent on a project is time I spend planning. No, more than planning; pre-planning, parameterizing -- trying to figure out what the actual project goals are and how I'm going to approach it.
As a contrast, my Sutton Hoo lyre took two afternoons to put together. It seemed an adequate parameterization to build "something fast and cheap out of available materials," and it seemed likely to serve useful goals. (It did.)
I'm in that horrible lingering pre-planning stage on most of the things I really want to do at the moment. And that's bad, because it is heavy lifting to try to hold an entire proposed project in the palm of your hand, then jump upwards to examine the box it is in. And maybe the box that box is in.
It is the kind of concentrated thinking I can only do for an hour or two before I burn out. The time that is really bad is when I don't have anything exciting enough that's in the "mindless sanding" phase that I can work on after I burn out. And I'm still back-braining the thing, so I don't even have the concentration left to do general research. Heck, I have trouble even getting a good practice session in on my collection of instruments.
(If for no other reason than the back-brain project will bubble over on the back burner, forcing me to drop everything else and jot down a few more notes and sketches).
The "Crete" novel is feeling too daunting again. Every page is going to have something I have to research, or verify, or borrow, or create. And so much of the research I've done so far has just made things more complicated. If my weaver was at Pylos she might be at the palace, but she's at Knossos, which had a different system. So I have to depict both the ruined palace of Knossos and the village (very probably Tylissos) where she is staying the rest of the year. And yeah she comes from a Peak Sanctuary and will return and it is just too tempting not to try to show an actual ceremony. And that's just the opening chapters!
So I've broken out Scrivener to try again to see if there's something I could write that's simpler, faster, cheaper. Something to get some writing done while I'm still slogging at trying to plan out the Big, Serious Novel.
I picked up a bunch of Kindle books to take traveling -- mostly non-fiction of course -- but that led me down new routes and new explorations and I'm still finding new caches of stuff that's...well let's just say it isn't quite Barbara Hambly. And I'm not just talking historical accuracy or depth of research. Fiction is more than that. Fiction is not a Wikipedia article. You've got to be able to handle description and POV and dialog and pacing and all that. And, seriously, I'm seeing a lot of writers that need help there.
But again if that were all there was, some of the fanfic I've been reading would have millions of views and all the reviews they'd ever want at fanfic.net. There's obviously other things, possibly intangible things, that makes a book a good read.
All of this is a bit beside the point, though. As much as I try to chart around the basic issues I have with historical fiction, they are still there. I've spent all my useful thinking hours this weekend hammering at the latest germ of an idea and I still don't know if it is workable.
The idea of the Adventure Archaeologist (as TVTropes calls it) is potent and rich in possibilities and has been generating stories since at least the Victorian Age (arguably, from as far back as New Kingdom Egypt, if you take the Tale of Setna as an example). It also is inherently problematic, from both a realism point of view and the implicit insult to working academics and to cultures past and present.
Of course, one can argue that two out of three thrillers similarly insult law enforcement and entire foreign nations (depending on the details). Too often the hero is an everyman who wouldn't even be in that position if the entire infrastructure of society hadn't utterly failed him, and who proceeds to succeed in a way that throws into further question the competence of everyone else around him.
Amateur detective stories and lost world stories are both unlikely, and Adventure Archaeologist stories are generally both; the one person who does what the academic mainstream can't seem to do, and in the process discovers something global satellite coverage should have revealed decades ago.
But that's an old, old rant.
I have the bones of something that doesn't violate my sensibilities and would be fun to write. Not to give away too much at the moment but I do love fish-out-of-water situations, out-of-context problems, and orthogonal solutions.
Or at least I did have an idea until the Greek Gods showed up. They would be so much fun and add so much story potential that now that I've thought of them I'm loathe to leave them out. But they break at least one of the conceits I started with...and I have yet to figure out how they work.
There is this exhibit at the Lawrence Hall of Science, simulating using a cyclotron to infer details of atomic structure. It's a sort of pinball machine with a blank disk hiding the central target. You have to observe how the balls are deflected to try to figure out the shape of the hidden object. Well, that's basically where I am right now; shooting different approaches at the core idea and trying to get a better idea of its basic shape.
And every now and then taking another big step back to ask; is this still something that is cheap, fast, and fun?
"That took you ten seconds," the merchant complains. "Why did I have to wait two years?"
"That's how long it took me to learn how to do it in ten seconds," the artist replies.
A lot of my projects are like that. A lot of projects are like that, period. For all I talk about iteration and the freedom to fail and so on, what sometimes feels like half the time spent on a project is time I spend planning. No, more than planning; pre-planning, parameterizing -- trying to figure out what the actual project goals are and how I'm going to approach it.
As a contrast, my Sutton Hoo lyre took two afternoons to put together. It seemed an adequate parameterization to build "something fast and cheap out of available materials," and it seemed likely to serve useful goals. (It did.)
I'm in that horrible lingering pre-planning stage on most of the things I really want to do at the moment. And that's bad, because it is heavy lifting to try to hold an entire proposed project in the palm of your hand, then jump upwards to examine the box it is in. And maybe the box that box is in.
It is the kind of concentrated thinking I can only do for an hour or two before I burn out. The time that is really bad is when I don't have anything exciting enough that's in the "mindless sanding" phase that I can work on after I burn out. And I'm still back-braining the thing, so I don't even have the concentration left to do general research. Heck, I have trouble even getting a good practice session in on my collection of instruments.
(If for no other reason than the back-brain project will bubble over on the back burner, forcing me to drop everything else and jot down a few more notes and sketches).
The "Crete" novel is feeling too daunting again. Every page is going to have something I have to research, or verify, or borrow, or create. And so much of the research I've done so far has just made things more complicated. If my weaver was at Pylos she might be at the palace, but she's at Knossos, which had a different system. So I have to depict both the ruined palace of Knossos and the village (very probably Tylissos) where she is staying the rest of the year. And yeah she comes from a Peak Sanctuary and will return and it is just too tempting not to try to show an actual ceremony. And that's just the opening chapters!
So I've broken out Scrivener to try again to see if there's something I could write that's simpler, faster, cheaper. Something to get some writing done while I'm still slogging at trying to plan out the Big, Serious Novel.
I picked up a bunch of Kindle books to take traveling -- mostly non-fiction of course -- but that led me down new routes and new explorations and I'm still finding new caches of stuff that's...well let's just say it isn't quite Barbara Hambly. And I'm not just talking historical accuracy or depth of research. Fiction is more than that. Fiction is not a Wikipedia article. You've got to be able to handle description and POV and dialog and pacing and all that. And, seriously, I'm seeing a lot of writers that need help there.
But again if that were all there was, some of the fanfic I've been reading would have millions of views and all the reviews they'd ever want at fanfic.net. There's obviously other things, possibly intangible things, that makes a book a good read.
All of this is a bit beside the point, though. As much as I try to chart around the basic issues I have with historical fiction, they are still there. I've spent all my useful thinking hours this weekend hammering at the latest germ of an idea and I still don't know if it is workable.
The idea of the Adventure Archaeologist (as TVTropes calls it) is potent and rich in possibilities and has been generating stories since at least the Victorian Age (arguably, from as far back as New Kingdom Egypt, if you take the Tale of Setna as an example). It also is inherently problematic, from both a realism point of view and the implicit insult to working academics and to cultures past and present.
Of course, one can argue that two out of three thrillers similarly insult law enforcement and entire foreign nations (depending on the details). Too often the hero is an everyman who wouldn't even be in that position if the entire infrastructure of society hadn't utterly failed him, and who proceeds to succeed in a way that throws into further question the competence of everyone else around him.
Amateur detective stories and lost world stories are both unlikely, and Adventure Archaeologist stories are generally both; the one person who does what the academic mainstream can't seem to do, and in the process discovers something global satellite coverage should have revealed decades ago.
But that's an old, old rant.
I have the bones of something that doesn't violate my sensibilities and would be fun to write. Not to give away too much at the moment but I do love fish-out-of-water situations, out-of-context problems, and orthogonal solutions.
Or at least I did have an idea until the Greek Gods showed up. They would be so much fun and add so much story potential that now that I've thought of them I'm loathe to leave them out. But they break at least one of the conceits I started with...and I have yet to figure out how they work.
There is this exhibit at the Lawrence Hall of Science, simulating using a cyclotron to infer details of atomic structure. It's a sort of pinball machine with a blank disk hiding the central target. You have to observe how the balls are deflected to try to figure out the shape of the hidden object. Well, that's basically where I am right now; shooting different approaches at the core idea and trying to get a better idea of its basic shape.
And every now and then taking another big step back to ask; is this still something that is cheap, fast, and fun?
Thursday, November 1, 2018
Always coming home
Odysseus had the right of it. Hang out with the swineherd for a while. Scope out the place and see what your friends and co-workers are up to safe behind the anonymity of a disguise. It is tough re-shifting your priorities back to job and friends, especially when you've been out on your own adventuring.
Travel gives you perspective. Hell of it is, the first thing I noticed is how filthy my place is at the moment. That's now shot up to the top of the priority list, and not just dusting but the big repairs I've been putting off, like re-doing some plaster, hanging new blinds, etc.
And the novel? Yes I learned things. I could say I am ready now...I gathered enough of what was important to me so I could start writing actual scenes.
But I have new perspective there, too. I saw a lot, I thought a lot. I crossed the Aegean with a copy of The Odyssey in my hand. I strolled the hills and listened to the goats and walked the stones of Minoan buildings.
It has become oddly much less clear where the demarkations are between Minoan, Mycenaean, Iron Age and Classical Greece are. Seeing so many of the artifacts close-up this way illuminates the similarities and connections as much as it illuminates the differences and changes. There are continuities of language and religion and material culture.
It is these continuities archaeologists are forced to use to expand upon the material they are able to gather. We don't know anything of Mycenaean religious practices, for instance, but there are familiar names which appear and we do know something of how the later Greeks worshipped the gods with those appellations.
And this is particularly true for the writer of fiction, who can not just turn the camera away from those parts of the scene that are inconvenient, inconclusive, or entirely impossible to verify with ground data.
More, there is a dark reflection of this; just as the historian has to borrow from the better-known to fill in the gaps of our knowledge, the writer is moved to borrow from what is better known to the reader in order to smooth their entry into the world of the story.
The place where this has currently become an impossible snarl for me is that many people have written many kinds of stories within this setting. Within the past few days I've been reading a vigorous and insightful new translation of Homer, browsing (with the filter of yet another language to bear with, as it is in French) a children's book of The Odyssey with the cutest illustrations, and sample chapters of a book that re-tells The Illiad from the point of view of the women of Troy (Euripides got there first), and of yet another Lara Croft clone that purports to be about an artifact from late Bronze Age Crete. Oh, yes; and reading way too many attempts by way too many museums to batter a public-friendly description into two hundred words or less.
And it should be obvious to everybody but getting it right (even if it were possible to get it all right) has little to do with making it readable. Or getting it to sell.
I made this argument myself before I set off. As I alluded to above, if look and feel is important to me, then I am ready, now, to reproduce the smells and sounds of the landscape of modern Crete (and only a few academics will know or care that not all the fauna I describe is properly contemporary). If getting that gut punch of five-senses description and strong characters and conflict and a little action is what is important (as I believe it is) then being sloppy with the research is okay. Being intentionally "sloppy" with the research is even better (that is, borrowing from what we can know, such as worship practices of 1st century Greece and Rome, or horticulture of the Christian age, but using details that came from life and thus carry that ineffable aura of veracity).
And so, yeah, research generated new questions. And some of those have sent me back to the top of the stack; what am I trying to write, and who for?
Travel gives you perspective. Hell of it is, the first thing I noticed is how filthy my place is at the moment. That's now shot up to the top of the priority list, and not just dusting but the big repairs I've been putting off, like re-doing some plaster, hanging new blinds, etc.
And the novel? Yes I learned things. I could say I am ready now...I gathered enough of what was important to me so I could start writing actual scenes.
But I have new perspective there, too. I saw a lot, I thought a lot. I crossed the Aegean with a copy of The Odyssey in my hand. I strolled the hills and listened to the goats and walked the stones of Minoan buildings.
It has become oddly much less clear where the demarkations are between Minoan, Mycenaean, Iron Age and Classical Greece are. Seeing so many of the artifacts close-up this way illuminates the similarities and connections as much as it illuminates the differences and changes. There are continuities of language and religion and material culture.
It is these continuities archaeologists are forced to use to expand upon the material they are able to gather. We don't know anything of Mycenaean religious practices, for instance, but there are familiar names which appear and we do know something of how the later Greeks worshipped the gods with those appellations.
And this is particularly true for the writer of fiction, who can not just turn the camera away from those parts of the scene that are inconvenient, inconclusive, or entirely impossible to verify with ground data.
More, there is a dark reflection of this; just as the historian has to borrow from the better-known to fill in the gaps of our knowledge, the writer is moved to borrow from what is better known to the reader in order to smooth their entry into the world of the story.
The place where this has currently become an impossible snarl for me is that many people have written many kinds of stories within this setting. Within the past few days I've been reading a vigorous and insightful new translation of Homer, browsing (with the filter of yet another language to bear with, as it is in French) a children's book of The Odyssey with the cutest illustrations, and sample chapters of a book that re-tells The Illiad from the point of view of the women of Troy (Euripides got there first), and of yet another Lara Croft clone that purports to be about an artifact from late Bronze Age Crete. Oh, yes; and reading way too many attempts by way too many museums to batter a public-friendly description into two hundred words or less.
And it should be obvious to everybody but getting it right (even if it were possible to get it all right) has little to do with making it readable. Or getting it to sell.
I made this argument myself before I set off. As I alluded to above, if look and feel is important to me, then I am ready, now, to reproduce the smells and sounds of the landscape of modern Crete (and only a few academics will know or care that not all the fauna I describe is properly contemporary). If getting that gut punch of five-senses description and strong characters and conflict and a little action is what is important (as I believe it is) then being sloppy with the research is okay. Being intentionally "sloppy" with the research is even better (that is, borrowing from what we can know, such as worship practices of 1st century Greece and Rome, or horticulture of the Christian age, but using details that came from life and thus carry that ineffable aura of veracity).
And so, yeah, research generated new questions. And some of those have sent me back to the top of the stack; what am I trying to write, and who for?
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