A hundred-word toast

Most weeks, all the substantial writing I get in happens over meals. Specifically, meals out. Well, I was finishing up one such and I did another Fermi estimation. You know that old saw about a picture being worth a thousand words? Well, from my count, a slice of toast is good for about a hundred.

I finally got through my revisions and up to the scene I'd left off on. Which I expanded, then completed. And tonight, somehow managed to create, from scratch, five hundred words of a brand new scene.

That's the way my method works right now. Actually, in the Galerie Vivienne scene just prior to the chase scene, I've got Amelia remarking that Penny's method seems to be to flail about randomly until she bumps into a clue. Penny retorts that she flails about randomly, annoying people and asking stupid questions...until she bumps into a clue.

It is pretty much a description of how The Doctor works. Or for that matter Dirk Gently. But it isn't just a British thing. Robert B. Parker's Spenser operated on the principle that if he annoyed enough people, someone would finally tell him something they shouldn't.

Penny isn't quite at the point where she has to survive having people sent to beat her up first, as seems to be the rule with Spenser. Her stories are always walking that fine line between being a somewhat believable universe, yet her never quite having really serious violence done to her, or having to deal out similar violence herself. The London book was in part showing that there was a line and it could be crossed if she wasn't both careful and lucky.

This book will have the "Apaches" scene (for some reason, that became the slang over a chunk of the belle epoque for a particular kind of violent petty criminal in the low parts of Paris.) But Penny is in just as much danger when she ends up free-climbing Notre Dame (on the night before the fire, as it happens).

I've always worked on an accretion model. It might be an iterative model. Most of it happens when I'm not actually writing, probably because it takes time and serendipity. I've been slowly working up to the Palais Garnier scene that finishes Part II and makes for the big Act II-III turn-around. Too early to start committing anything to paper, but I've been sort of bookmarking any potentially useful resources.

So a media critic (she's got a degree in it or something and does some amazing work) had something that popped up in my feed. I don't even know how I recognized it was about Phantom of the Opera. It was about the character of The Persian, and how infrequently he shows up in adaptations of the original novel. Which is bizarre, as he is not just an important character, but also quite probably the most moral character in the whole tale (Lecroix's Christine might or might not be as vapid as the usual, but his Raul is quite a bit less the selfless heroic leading man type.)

And that started a whole train of thought. Especially as Lindsey went on about fandom, or perhaps phandom.

And I toyed with that new thought and those new insights and it works. I have an uneasy relationship with Penny, still. Sometimes I am very sure what belongs in her character and what does not. Other times, I am uncomfortably aware of how much soft clay remains. When I'm actually writing the stories, the main leeway I have is not what she thinks, but when she gets around to thinking it. I can't keep her from having an opinion but I can tweak when she comes to it; that's my leeway to make the inner and outer plots track properly.

Anyhow, the more I looked at it, the more it seemed to work with her inner landscape. She wasn't -- quite -- a Phantom groupie, but it was a near thing. She understands the fandom and she knows the material.

This isn't what I'd originally planned. When I bumped into that video, my plan had been that she has a fairly quick thought about not being an Andrew Lloyd Weber fan but is still annoyed when Nathan Snow and his gang of "MBAs and fraternity assholes" start singing snatches of it. Like, this is her thing.

By the by, I came this close to having Hux sing a snatch of "A British Tar." But it works better with his style for him to drop a broad hint instead. Sigh. I'm doing this a bit myself and I don't know if it is legit homage/genius bonus for certain readers, or if I'm plagiarizing a cool line. The latest steal was during the chase -- heading down the long straight passage of Galerie Vivienne Penny remarks that "Parkour is wasted in cross-country."

So anyhow, I was already puzzling if I could have some Phantom back story while exploring the opera house, and I didn't see a way to do it. Well, now if Penny was at one point a total fangirl of Eric and so on, then she has an excuse. And I can still approach the original beat, just a little crosswise, with her being more mature and so over that now.

That's how they grow. The scene I just knocked out today, started yesterday with the idea that Amelia could be startled when Penny takes off after Jaques and later tells her she didn't expect her "to go all Batman."

And as I thought about it, Penny is still the reluctant hero and she's just gotten hurt and she snaps out something in reply.

And that gives me the argument I'd wanted to work in somewhere. Oh, but now I've got an injured Penny and Amelia walking away and...ooh, there's a chance for her to suddenly go all Southern self-sufficiency on Penny!

And with Amelia already stepping up to the sink with bandaids in her hands, another theme is waiting to hit it's next beat; the one about Penny keeping secrets.

And this is just the first draft. Thing are crazy at work -- both high-profile projects went back on the table, and at the same time (just as I'd predicted they would). It may be a few days before I can get back to finishing that scene.

By then, I expect to have another two or three layers to add in...

Up the hill

I'm coming close to finishing the last round of revisions. Perhaps this time I'll be able to push through to the end of Part II.

Probably not; there's three "chunks" to get through before the end. First, Penny tails the mysterious Nathan Frost through the Van Gogh experience. So a bit of the segment "Crows" from Kurosawa's Dreams, with the characters walking through the landscapes of Van Gogh's paintings, crossed with her attempts to build on what she learned in Japan to do the "social invisibility" trick that features in several of the Assassin's Creed games.

So yeah, my current playlist is a bunch of Waldemar videos and other stuff about Van Gogh.  Then there's a little scene where she talks to a lock-picking enthusiast who is pulling love locks off a bridge. There's maybe ten words about practical lock-picking in there (like me, Penny is going to have to be content with a city rake and simple padlocks) but a lot more philosophy, because this is Paris and sometimes there really is that stereotypical conversation about love and art.

Finishing off Part II with a midnight break-in at Palais Garnier. With a visit to Box 5, and a peek at the "lake" (actually a cistern) and don't worry...nothing at all with the chandelier.

Right now I'm cleaning up the Pompidou scene. That's the inside-out art museum:

That one is a marathon conversation about Hergé, en L'an 2000, and Rodin. Plus comic books, sculpture... And also the scene that made me go back to try to make the book look less like it was being some self-indulgent "let me just stop the action to let my characters info-dump everything I know about my hobby this week."

Which it never really is. Sure, I picked Montmarte and the Impressionists because I knew something about them. But this is much, much less "write what you know" and a lot more "write what you want to know." And the vast majority of what I've learned...isn't going in the book.

Still, you gotta fill the pages some time.

I picked the Galerie Vivienne because I was going to have a chase scene there:

But turns out that, like most of the covered passages of Paris, the map is far too simple (and the passage itself too narrow) for a good parkour chase. So they immediately take it outside and that leaves the gallery itself as sort of an appendage to the "real" scene.

Today I got through what my outline calls "Seven Against Paris." That's their favorite cafe at Place de Tertre, with Penny explaining why she's been trying to read the Agricola all book, Bastien finally reveals the steampunk comic book he's been working on, and Nathan drops by to all but tell her outright that he's the other person crawling around Paris looking for what he apparently thinks is the eighty tons of gold the Napoleon abandoned some where along the retreat of the Grande Armée from Moscow.

And then stopped for an hour but it was a productive hour. Every chapter that doesn't have one of the doggerel (actually, heroic couplet -- just not very good ones) that are the clues to the treasure has for an epigraph some random quote from Jonathan Huxley's book.

The last I decided not to go on a long hunt through the huge volume of available material (there are two appropriate movies, free to view, on Amazon Streaming alone!) and just did a quick mention-in-passing:

“…the luminous Lo Lo, her long dresses glowing in more colours than a Monet haystack…”

And yes, I really wanted to work in something about Marie Curie, but even though this introduces the first scene with the steampunk cabaret, it would just be a distraction. Save the Curie stuff for the next book!  

So Part II opens with Penny jogging along Rue Lepic. And I knew exactly what I wanted, but it took time to track down exactly what early automobiles had climbed that hill and in what context. Alas, although there were a bunch of auto races as an adjunct to the Summer Olympics of 1900 (held in conjunction with the Paris Exposition of that year) those were all taking place elsewhere.

I did however find several videos of people driving around in surviving Renault Voiterette -- and again, this wasn't like the longish scene I wrote that went inside the "Laundry Boat" itself and met Suzanne Valadon there -- err, not to mention Pablo Picasso!

Windows ME-chan

So there was a version of Windows that was, shall we say, worse than even the usual low bar. It just made such strange decisions in memory management and file management and people, well, hated it.

Until one artist came around with a way of looking at it that was a total 180. He created one of the first "chans," adorable mascot-type characters, dedicated to Windows ME. Instead of seeing it as deeply flawed and generally unliked software, he cast it as a well-meaning but klutzy little girl. "Oops, I dropped that file you were trying to save!"

I just got off a delightful hour on AT&T's web page, complete with two chat sessions. And it was hit or miss whether I actually completed the transaction. Trust? None. Belief that they know what they are doing? None. Belief I'll actually get reliable internet? Are you kidding?

But, somehow, I ended up doing that same 180. It was one of the last pages that came up, a page just so off both in intent and accomplishment from what it thought it was doing, but so very earnest with the flashy trying-too-hard graphics and web design...it suddenly came across as sort of endearing.

This isn't the evil empire anymore. This isn't Weyland-Yutani. This is their scrappy but doomed competitor in the Alien:Isolation lore, Seegson. Trying so hard but failing so very often.

(Consumer Reports aggregate of customer reviews has them at 1.1 out of 5. Obviously there's a lot of self-selection here...but 1.1?)

Seegson, busy selling a bug as a feature. No, it is a good thing that our androids look so crappy!

A Nuclear Age

Been pushing hard at writing pretty much any time I'm not sleeping, working, or eating (which seems to take up far too much of the day as it is.

Did unwind just a little with Satisfactory. Getting to the final deliverables on the Space Elevator is a leap up of at least a magnitude in the amount of automation necessary. But that's the tricky thing about Satisfactory. Once you are able to make enough miners and conveyor belts to get things moving...you run into a power crunch.

So time to get nuclear. This was my previous plant; the "Spider," located in the swamp along with my original aluminum facility:

A bit tangled in there. Also the goal of more than one last-minute dash across the map to figure out why my power plant had stopped generating power again.

So started a much larger facility in the spider-heaven of the Red Bamboo Forest. This was to be a self-contained 100% recycling nuclear power plant capable of running 24 reactors.

Well, sort of self-contained. Nuclear Power is late-game, so takes half the resources the map can deliver just to make the fuel rods. I sited the plant over a uranium node, with coal and limestone close enough to conveyor in. Reactors are water-hungry, though. I even lined the little creek under the building with water extractors:

But that wasn't nearly enough. More water was pumped out of the ground..from deep in a local ravine (where the silicon I also needed was located.)

Ah, the joys of headlift. An expensive Mark II water pump every forty meters...

But there's only so much conveyor belts can do. That, and the building was going to be big enough already once I added fuel reprocessing. So a sulfuric acid section at the massive refinery I'd started building a short rail trip away:

The was also a convenient transship point for quickwire from a new caterium facility built into the hillside above the "spider proof" tunnel for the sulfur trucks running out to the old turbo-fuel plant:

That's still only half the list, though. I needed various iron, steel, and copper products as well, and those weren't quite as close. So a brand new metal products plant almost under the new railway. Unfortunate location; I had cliff, lake, and a really nice bit of flower bed I didn't want to disrupt so I had to try and cram it up under the rail line somehow. Again this is a design feature; Satisfactory is always presenting you with choices for your architecture, tempting you away from just building floating slabs up in the air.

And in the end, at least I had a little more space to work with. Also made full use of a sub-floor for running the rat's-nest of piping. I haven't opened it up to the full 24 reactors, though. Just kicking along with six until I am sure I've worked out all the bugs...

(And as usual the architecture ended up taking back seat. Was going to make a cool control room/observation deck, and I wasted a bunch of time trying to do some cool curves on the rail entrance, but in the final crunch I just shoved machines where they would fit and hooked them up. 

Ninja....but why?

Trying out some new filaments in my Ender3. Well; I printed another part from work, and we were looking at options to add a gasket and I thought I should see what flexible (TPU) filament does.

I was too cheap for Ninjaflex, but (after the first attempt resulted in a jam) I was able to run off a test print in some TPU:

 

Found the file on Thingiverse. Plus, my phone needed one.

I also ran off a print strictly for "because" reasons (because the printer is there and it doesn't cost anything but a little filament to keep it running while I am doing something else):

Okay -- I did try out some clear filament for the rod thingy. Looks a little better in person. I printed almost entirely without support but between low printer settings and overhang/bridging failures there was more clean-up than I'd like on that print. But good to know that (relatively) larger prints aren't an impossible pain.

Satisfactory Design

I realized when putting together my laser enclosure that the game Satisfactory has changed how I look at projects. In the game, everything can be recycled; when you tear down part of a factory in order to build something better or different, you get all the original parts back. Eventually it changes how you think of construction and design; everything is temporary, with the only reason to keep a design (besides liking it) is because of the time and effort of dismantling, or the break in production that will ensue (can be a particular problem if you start rebuilding your power infrastructure).

And I found I was building not the best laser enclosure, but the one that would work for now; willing to tear it down and rebuild it later if necessary. Of course out here in the real world, wood that is cut to size and fastened with wood glue doesn't recycle quite so easily.

It isn't totally different from how I thought before. But before, I was doing iterative work; previous versions were previous versions; proof-of-concept builds, prototypes. What has changed is slightly more willingness to take this approach to the production model.

And it seems it has also gotten into the writing. I have been getting more and more able (and hence willing) to cut deeply into an already-written scene and splice and stitch something different out the pieces. Well, this just makes that more so. Possibly, enough more so that I'm making even less forward progress...

Tuk-tuk

I've been going out for dinner every night. It is the only way I can concentrate enough to get any writing done. At thirty bucks per scene this could be an expensive way to write a novel. But I need food anyhow, and since I don't look to be getting a proper vacation soon...

Often people trying to get into writing will ask where the ideas come from. The idea are everywhere and they grow; that's why fanfiction authors invented the name "Plot Bunnies." The problem is sitting down and writing them.

The problem I'm having with the Fox stories is that there's this weird gap between what the book is about and what the book is about. Sure, do an adventure involving the rumored Vikings in America, Kensington Runestone and all that. Roll it up with folk music circles and get Penny back behind a violin again. But that's the hook. What I seem to be having trouble with, is what are the scenes about? How am I filling the pages between the Inciting Incident and the final climax and resolution?

But it isn't even that I can't find business to fill the gaps. It is that it feels like gap fillers. Like stuffing. Never more so than in the Paris book, where I feel like I am just coming up with ways to waste time before I bring her home.

Oh yeah. And as for bunnies? I keep having them for things that would work great in an archeological thriller series that didn't try to be so serious about history. So here's the one that stuck its cute fuzzy nose out earlier today. I'd been thinking of ancient scripts and I was on Thingiverse looking for things to keep my newly rebuilt Ender3 busy (I'm also lasering away now...put a sign on my shop, finally!) Found a Phaistos Disk cookie cutter. And the description there talked about a rumor that it contains a geometric theorum (never heard that one before.)

The Phaistos Almagest. A mathematical secret lost to the ages, that... (and the rest writes itself).