Zero Hour

I've hit a place in the book where I both realize I don't have nearly enough understanding, and don't even know how to research it, and that I really don't care.

I'm just pushing through to the end. Penny has finally made it to Wentworth's ridiculous Zero Station, my one sop to realism that he may have repurposed an existing room  -- "Drainage or something," Penny guesses -- from the earlier station.

I had a nice collection of pictures of tunnel insides from the Northern Line Extension all ready, and I threw them on to my second monitor -- and they don't match. That took a bit of time, mostly staring at them (and watching another video of a TBM in action) before figuring out why they looked different.

While I was looking for explanation I stumbled upon the cutest narrow-gauge they had down there while the TBMs were still working.

So of course I had to put that in the story.

Did I mention how tired I am getting of Penny's vocal and narrative mannerisms? And here I'm facing a third book of them. So far my readership is some 90% older women who know my mom, but they are going out of their way to say how much they like the character so I guess I'm stuck with her for a while longer.

(Something about how she is heroic but realistic. I dunno.)

So I really had no idea how long the Tomb Crawl was going to run. And I wasn't padding it, exactly -- there's a wealth of material I barely touched. But I knew I wanted it to feel sufficiently epic. Well, from the moment she arrives at Kennington Green to the moment she realizes she's trapped in the Zero Station is four thousand words.

The plan is for another crawl, a crazier one through the Bazalgettian warrens currently containing the Effra, and onwards to a slightly-excavated Roman ruin. Haven't even decided what it is. I'd like a military outpost, because Wentworth has been going on and on about 300-type last stands.

***

And Japan is on. I still have qualms about where it sits in the overall character arc. It is in some ways too much, too soon. But I can play off those elements, make that part of the plot that having to suddenly be utterly convincing as the Famous World Adventurer, or falling head over heels in love, is indeed not what it seems and doesn't unfold the way you'd expect.

But, really, any qualms are outweighed by the ....oh.... anyhow, are outweighed by the fact that I could probably sit here and type the bulk of it with scenery descriptions and amusing misunderstandings and language fun without having to reach even as far as my own bookshelf.

And that's something I need right now. Even on this very productive day I've stopped multiple times to look up something, and that's not a good way to write. Worse, the sorts of things I'm looking up become a meal with way too much roughage in in. I need to write leaner -- even if I have no good idea right now what leaner looks like.

That "oh" in the middle of the paragraph above? That was me getting ready to type how I wanted something actually historical -- archaeology would be a bonus -- and then it hit me. As much as I don't want the reader to be facing pages of hard-to-memorize Japanese names, there is a historical but disputed business when Kusanagi was stolen by a rival clan. Or something. I forget the details, but there are reasons I want to use it...

Morns like these -- we parted

And, whoops, I may have just broken the law.

Or so Harvard wants people to think. Once again; Emily Dickinson may be long deceased but copyright may not be. Many of her poems were not published in her lifetime, but passed to family, some of whom sold them to Harvard, making them technically holders of a yet unexpired copyright.

The thing that surprises me here is not that it might be illegal to print your own book of her poems -- which I don't have argument with, as the university has been a steward for all these years, collecting and polishing. It is that academics aren't allowed to quote within literary analysis of her works and life. Not without written permission, at least.

Which would seem to me about as pure a case of fair use as is inscribed in the law.

And it took hours, crawling through resources that had been designed for academics with a lot of time on their hands to discuss minutiae of the poems, to find that this poem saw the light of day in 1891. So I think I am safe from any Harvard Lawyers on this one.

Of course there is one more wrinkle. There's always one more. As much as I might quibble with the substantiality, edited and revised versions may still fall under copyright. Fortunately Wikimedia keeps record of all published versions, and the lines I wanted to use are unchanged.

Have a butcher's

I'd take a day off work more often if I thought it would end in 2,000 words done and another chapter completed.

The list of "beats" I didn't manage to get in is getting longer than the list of random stuff I'm hoping to cut out when I go into re-writes. I wanted to explain more about Guy's unhappy life during the sword fight scene but it didn't quite happen. But I did get some tweaks in today that explain better how Penny is using the sword fight to taunt him into giving up useful information.

Yeah, that's the method a lot of writers use, according to an unscientific browsing of Quora answers. For each day's writing, re-read the previous day and do a little light editing. This is less about the editing and more about remembering exactly where you left off.

So this was the chapter with RAF slang, Cockney Rhyming Slang, Jackie Cochran and the Attagirls, and the strange life and career of Orde Wingate.

I was surprised at how fast it went.

Or, rather, the actual writing went fast. I spent the morning staring at the list of beats I was going to try to hit with no idea how I could line them up to best effect. I finally opened Scrapple and started dragging them around and sort of like building a molecule or solving a puzzle once I had three that hooked together the rest fell almost immediately into place.

And that's a great feeling. Pretty much high point of the day, though closing another chapter is a good one as well.

Also threw more of my reference materials up on my Wordpress site. It is still annoying but it works well enough for what I'm doing (and I'm surely doing far more than the traffic will ever warrant.)

I also ran into a book -- series rather -- at Amazon that was rather interesting. The description was of very rote space opera. There was a big typo right in the middle of the blurb, too. And almost fifty reviews, which were slanted heavily into the five-star range.

And I looked, and not only were a lot of these basically re-phrasing what was said in the blurb, they also all had certain grammatical/typographical errors that, at least to me, felt of a kind.

I can't swear this is a man gaming the system. He must be doing something right, though; he's in the top ten in more than one category!

Downloaded the sample to read. Hrm. Not formatted well, that's for sure. Workmanlike, at least. Isn't getting my interest though. I'll reserve a full opinion for now.

Cultured Villain

The sword-fight scene is finished. And that means Part III is finished.

I'm not entirely unhappy with it. Of course it was never going to live up to the potential of a petty crook gone nuts with one of those fancy fantasy swords and my Penny -- still in the costume she borrowed from a Pantomime theatre -- has to try to defend herself using half-remembered stage combat tricks...on the very stage of Shakespeare's Globe!

This book, too, takes the Nth hour turn to the weird. She was all about digging dirt and looking for a cheap room up until the last third. Then suddenly she's doing midnight rappels and other crazy business.

I'm also not entirely happy I'm now standing at 68K. I meant to hit 60K at the III-IV break, with the book finishing as short at 70-75K.

Also worked on my Wordpress site. Either they've changed something or I've figured it out because it became less annoying to put in text and add illustrations. That's one of the things I wanted to do. Really, it isn't going to accomplish much as an Author Site, but for my own amusement I wanted to put up some of the photographs and charts from planning this, these, well now three novels.

Writing Down the Sherds

Another of the random thoughts that came was how few women are in the London book. I mean that have speaking roles beyond "Here's your coffee." Really, only Sarah, Cynth, and Susan Morris. Jean Patrick (the professor from U. Leicester) is prominent in the first chapter but then drops out of the story. Cynth was only in there for the Battersea scenes but I think she made more of an impact on the story.

Well, there's forty things in the air for the final IWM London scene and I still haven't figured out the best order to get at them. It is another Traveling Salesman problem; there is no solution that optimally follows all paths without doubling back. According to my notes, we have to explain that Wentworth vanished, Linnet is going to Wanborough Manor, and Clarissa McDougal got her Lens from Mentor of Arisia (Linnet is a science fiction fan). Mick is going to talk some more about Zero Rooms and so forth, and explain who the heck Orde Wingate is, and if he has time left over he's going to attempt to explain some Cockney Rhyming Slang.

And, yeah, this is all essential to the plot! The plot is a web, a skein of connections. Penny went into this with a false choice between play-acting an archaeologist or being an archaeologist, and the division was made more artificial by the way she found herself working at a CRM firm (the boring end of commercial archaeology) and having fun in London with her friend Graham. So everything from Panto to the reenactors at IWM London has a part in describing the boundaries of this seeming choice.

Sigh.

Maybe the Japan novel will be simpler. Maybe I can finally figure out a way to plot that doesn't end up with these briar patches.

Another reason I'm not sweating things like paid editors, beta readers, Amazon reviews and author websites. I don't have confidence that my writing is worth it yet.

Oh, come on! How could I forget about Nyvoni Brent from the museum, Helen and Martha (who were kids at the time of the Blitz), and sure not-actually "Molly Malone" and the other one were only there for a scene but, right, should really be counting Linnet.

So, okay. There are some women in the book.

I was a teenage Beowulf

Finally into the fight scene. Just downloaded two books on stage fighting and already read one cover to cover (well...a lot of it was warm-up exercises so I skimmed it).

Once again there is so much wealth of things I can't put in the book or my critics will cry at me again. "Birdie" is one of those instant expert types (just add factino and stir). He's got a fancy "combat ready" sword from one of those Chinese companies but has no idea how to use it. Penny has had one class in stage combat, and she's ended up with a display sword with rat-tail tang. Graham is also in the scene and he's actually got HEMA background -- although he hasn't owned up to it yet.

And oh yes, we are starting in the Tiring-room at Shakespeare's Globe in Bankside. So there's props storage and a curtained alcove to stab your Polonius in and the stage is trapped and above the awning is the machinery for producing gods on cue. And the thatched roof with sprinklers in case another cannon shot gets loose.

Oh and just because that's never enough, "Birdie" (his name is Guy, he was calling himself Fawkes at the Battersea Power Station break-in, and another guy on that hack started calling him "Birdie" after, one presumes, the phoenix from Harry Potter) has a scouse accent which is he trying unsuccessfully to hide under the most up-town version of Estuary that doesn't slide all the way into Received Pronunciation.

At least this means no funny orthography. Although Penny does chose to remember that Tony, her Geordie foil, had called Guy a wanna-be "reet bobby dazzla."

So I had a bit of real luck on this. I asked on Quora and a very cool lady from Oxford explained a bit about the Globe backstage, and we shared a few theatre stories (and then I clicked on her profile and, oh, past president of an archaeological society? Whoah, I feel abashed.)

So I know more than enough about the Globe, stage fighting, and prop swords to drown my audience. The problem now is going to be sorting it and figuring out how much I can leave out.

All the time I was struggling with the second slot on my tenor trombone, I was thinking it might just be easier to switch. So I kept looking at alto and soprano trombones. The one advantage of the soprano is it slots exactly like a trumpet, so I wouldn't need to retrain my lips. Downside is it barely sounds like a trombone. There are some plastic altos that are really cute (and cheap) but they sound plastic.

And wouldn't you know. I'm starting to find the lip for the tenor. I still don't like the instrument. Trumpet is more satisfying.

But at least I'm not shopping for a new trombone. Oh, no. After the fuss with the contractor I ended up with the chin-cello hanging by my desk for "loading screen" practice. And I've realized I can really make use of that silent violin practice to improve my fingering.

So I want to switch that back to violin strings. And buy another electric to switch my octave strings to. So, yeah. There's always something in my Amazon shopping cart!

(That was an obscure post title. I'm pretty sure that was Book of Sequels. Anyhow, it promised plenty of "Saxon violence." I didn't manage to work in my continuing adventures with the Yahama Venova but, yes, sax is part of the picture of my growing stack of instruments.)

The quickest way to get to Harlem

Boy. A thousand words done this morning. It's barely lunch. I am just steam train. And that was with editing of the previous day's work, too.

Aladdin is still in at the moment. I might leave it to my beta readers. The competitors are Dick Wittington -- I did previously mention the Lord Mayor (he was having a big parade at the time) -- and Jack and the Beanstalk. I sort of like Wittington for being more obscure, but both are good Principal Boy roles and both are a rags-to-riches story which sort of vaguely tracks with other themes I have going on.

I did change the venue from Elephant and Castle to The Mudlarker and I'm going to add a storage locker proximate to the "under the London Bridge arches" original and future location of the Vauxhall Playhouse.

And I've done the last quoted excerpt from the diary. It was brutal. In that I had a dialog section within the diary, and since this isn't set out typographically with a scene break or italics this means quotes in quotes. I broke the rule of new paragraph per speaker last time I quoted from the diary, but that was what I had to do this time. And because of the rules of rolling quote, it looks like this:

“‘Rest. Recover,’ his mystery friend told him. ‘If you miss this war, there’s always another on the way.’ And without a change in his voice he turned to look up the stairs. ‘And I see you’ve already started training your own.’

“‘It isn’t like that. She’s a civilian.’

Yeah, my grammar checker is going to hate me. The mystery man with the Dick Tracey jaw is of course Orde Wingate. And once again a choice forced on me; I can't follow the proper last-names-only because then I'd have a Wentworth and a Wingate in the same conversation.

So Linnet is off to interview at Baker Street and in the final diary entry she'll reveal she is leaving for Bletchley Park or wherever. I've forgotten which of multiple addresses for SOE would be appropriate in early 1941. I've started looking stuff up while I get to it rather than try to keep track of it all now.

And another loss. I wanted to talk about pub names at some point and how a lot of the animal names "Red Lion," etc., whilst still rooted in heraldry and the partisan sympathies of publicans, are these days most often part of foreign-owned chains. Elephant and Castle being Canadian at present -- although I can't tell if they have any of the ones by that name in the UK.

All of this in aid of doing the title drop, of course. That, and I need to get around to pointing out that Vauxhall is or was quite plausibly Fox Hall. I had the thought today, too, of doing references to British children's books for the Part names. I already have two, you see. Well, time to see if I can't chase Fawkes back to his hole. Now that my intrepid pair knows who he is.

One slapstick sword fight coming up. I took today off work too. My boss is happy I'm taking some time off -- I was looking ragged, and things are as quiet as they are likely to get, and better yet, I have a bunch of vacation hours now and it looks to be many months before I'd be able to spend them in the proper way.

Perhaps by this weekend I'll finally have her exploring her first (approximate) tomb.

Loverly

2,000 words completed today. And there's an "oops" there -- I was aiming for as low as 70K but I am going to be crushing right up to that 80K by the time I get to the epilog.

Only 600 words was about Panto. I described the theatre a little more in the first draft, but before I'd finished the chapter I'd knocked out several descriptions that didn't need to be there.

And I never did explain what a Panto Horse is.

This whole sequence feels like it is pulling sideways, but then I've felt I've been pulled sideways since the dig ended. If I was the kind of person who could do a massive re-write, I'd try to work it so the dig ended suddenly and the very next day Penny went on her illegal entry back into it.

All along I've been trying to chart a course between getting too scattered, and being too on the nose. I just got done writing the beginning of a scene at the Elephant and Castle pub, which is in fact in Elephant and Castle and very close to the temporary spaces of the Southwark Playhouse. And then I found out there was a pub called the Mudlarker. Which would be perfect for a meeting with local metal detector people. And is right on the bank of the Thames near the New Globe. And, as it happens, near the previous and future home of the Playhouse; under London Bridge.

Could that be any more appropriate to the themes of underground and rivers and even the idea of theatre as a bit subversive?

I also should not have picked Aladdin as the show being done by the Lambeth Larks. I'd just thrown it out there during a much previous scene and didn't feel like going back. But there's cultural context that gets thrown into the mix. Plus the cross-gender casting doesn't really hold, not for modern productions anyhow (well, not for modern productions in general -- even Jack of the Beanstalk fame is probably played by a young man in modern productions). The sole grace is this is where Widow Twankey comes from but in the final scene I couldn't even put that in (plus the reader has probably completely forgotten that I referenced that character way back in Chapter One).

Well, I'll think about it. After I've reached the end of the book. There's themes and arcs I'm trying to weave and I don't know if they are going to work.

I think the other part of my discomfort is that all of this stuff, from the last working day of the dig to the sword fight at the Globe, is interstitial. Scenes that have to be there to wrap up certain plot lines and advance certain other plot lines but otherwise don't have an identity of their own.

I'm into the final Detectorist scene now. This was an arc that started back in Chapter One. Basically, local metal detector clubs got pissy, and she's meeting with them to tell them that as far as she knows archaeologists working on the Underground aren't blaming them for anything. But that's it. The entire outline for the current scene was, "She meets with them." It doesn't even matter what happens. Everything that plot line was supposed to do, has been done.

Except I ended up offloading some of my diary problems in this direction. I just couldn't organically work the diary stuff into anywhere else, so now I'm stuck with a scene where Penny is reading the diary to a group of strangers.

And this is the Diary day where we get Captain Wentworth's real name, and Orde Wingate stops in, and Linnet drops hints she's volunteering in the direction of SOE. Plus this is also where Wentworth tries and fails to communicate to Linnet how he feels tainted by the violence he partook in and the capacity for violence he discovered within himself, and Graham simultaneously tries to warn Penny that she is taking her arrow-dodging, bomb-daring "heroism" with too light an appreciation of the possible consequences.

The Panto stuff only has a tiny payoff in this book. It is another window to the dress-up character of the distaff Indiana Jones she's been playing at. And an excuse to talk about her flirtation with the role of the kind of hero that really only appears in fiction. Other ideas from this I intend to get into in the Japan book, where one of the main characters is a senior member of the Takarzuka Dance Troupe.

And I still have to struggle through the Old Globe scenes. Boy, there's suddenly a lot of theatre going on.

Oh and oops. I have one more reenactor scene to write before she finally starts her big Tomb Crawl.