Jolly Wizard

Still not writing. Found a heart for the Tiki book, though. It fits all the needs; it interests me, it offers some good challenges in story-telling, it connects to the world and theme in a way that integrates all three legs of this tripod. (Character, world, plot, that is.)

But it is also something I am probably not the right writer for.

When I dreamed up my protagonist, Rick was clearly an everyman, a stock hero protagonist type (not to be confused with Hiro Protagonist from Snowcrash). I toyed with the idea of making him protean; that others would read things on to him. Like the protagonist of a Bethesda game, who every single faction views as the perfect representative of all their faction stands for. Generally on first meeting.

There's this concept of the blank slate character, the Audience Surrogate. It is argued in game circles now but it goes back to fiction and the theory is that specifying as little as possible makes it easier for the reader to project themselves onto that character. This also became a go-to argument for why, somehow, the hero always ended up looking the same.

I don't believe it worked out like that in practice. I think the cis white make protagonist survives not because he represents a majority audience but because he is comfortably normal. He fades into the background like the word "said."

(Not a place for that lecture, but inexperienced writers reach for screamed, shrilled, cried, hooted, hissed until their dialogue sounds like it is happening at a zoo. Just use "said." It vanishes, like "a" or "the.")

In fact, so powerful is this default (so invisible, rather) I think it is actually bad advice to write your female, gay, asian, whatever character without keeping in mind they live in a world that probably notices -- one that also makes assumptions about the prevalence of cis white male as the "average human." (Just talk to a woman about the design of seat belts.)

If you leave that interaction out, you risk, like the old joke about the surgeon who can't operate on their own son, the brain of the reader going back to the default.

He's even a ginger on this one!

You also leave out story potential, and this is why I'm in that position. Tiki is already in a potentially uncomfortable place with exoticism, cultural appropriations and colonial legacy. I knew this going into it. And I knew that because of how I was structuring the nove,l and some of the stories I was trying to tell in it, my ISO900 Standard Protagonist (Space Opera) was going to include the standard Mighty Whitey as part of the package (along with the "aw shucks" heroism and the two-fisted approach to problem-solving).

That's not the only reason I want not to do that. It's not just white guilt. Primarily, it is because this uneasy relationship -- between the origins of tiki and the consumerist paradise being built with that as an element -- is the potential theme I am looking at to drive the story. And it becomes theme, world-building, and conflict when it is also character.

If Rick isn't white, he can personally interrogate these conflicts. He can already be involved with some of the plots without needing to drop in with his TARDIS and decide to get involved out of the plain goodness of his heart or just because he's having a boring day.

And it presents a more interesting version of that protean conceit, as well; the internal culture conflict, with various factions declaring him "one of them," even to the extent he feels distinctly uncomfortable pressed into that role.

Of course there I am, adding masks and role play into a book again. One that already has tropes to contend with. I'm re-inventing all the things that were giving me trouble with the Athena Fox stories.

Trick Pony

Still not writing. Had one of those rapid trains of thought today and put down notes on two stories in progress...but still not ready to write them. I am not feeling "blocked" (whatever writer's block really is). Perhaps a bit burnt out. Mostly, I just don't feel like, well, anything. Practicing music, cleaning house, playing games...none of it interests me. 

I am looking forward to weather that makes me less reluctant to get some walking and and perhaps more exercise than that. I seem to do better when I'm more physical, and I hope this will help with the not-exactly-depression, too.

Meanwhile I'm just randomly spinning wheels. Reading/watching a bunch of reviews to try and get some sense of what F&SF has been up to since I was last an active reader in the field. No firm conclusions -- but I am seeing there are a hell of a lot of people doing retro SF who are at least as familiar as I am with Norton and (Bertram) Chandler and "Doc" Smith et al. 

Messed around with StableDiffusion some more. Been trying a couple of different base models. I'm inpainting a bunch already -- the example I posted a while ago didn't work out quite as planned because it was pretty much there in the first pass. Most of the images I play around with are made in the inpainting and were very different in the first pass.

Still so lazy I'm using Paint3D (which Windows keeps reminding me will be deprecated for good with Windows 11...so much so, it won't even let me "open with..." any more, forcing me to open the ap first). But last time through, even with the exceptionally primitive tools (I bought Affinity Photo but it is loaded on the other machine) I was able to do a sketch stage instead of going straight for blobs of color. The "pencil" tool did the trick here. 

And I was very surprised when I found the anatomy coming back to me. The fingers remember, even if my brain had forgotten. Not that I was ever good or ever will be good, but is nice that all that time I spent trying to learn artistic anatomy wasn't entirely wasted.

In any case, each LoRA has things it is good at, and each LoRa has its own peccadillos, presumably through over-training on a limited image set. Use a LoRa for a cowboy hat and your character will turn into a red-head. Or dinosaurs will appear in the background. So inpainting is necessary, and switching the LoRAs, and since each checksum model has different LoRAs written to it, switching the base model as well. A lot of switching and clicking and waiting for things to load.

All in all, not a good system for someone who is by nature a tweaker. Too easy to get bogged down making the rounds with different combinations and different prompts, trying to bring the different parts of an image into agreement with each other...especially as AI keeps throwing up new ideas you hadn't thought of originally and get excited about following up, necessitating yet another round of changing everything else to fit...

***

Also made a connection between two bad "kinda wish I was writing that instead" ideas. I need a different term than Plot Bunnies. Plot Bunnies are when ideas breed. I guess I'll fall back on Shiny New Idea Syndrome.

I really think I wrote myself into a corner with Penny. Her strength as a character is that she is an everyman hero. But from the first book, I was jumping all sorts of hoops to get her up to full Adventure Archaeologist skill set. At least as much as a semi-realistic universe would permit. So she can climb rocks, identify artifacts...but is no martial artist and can barely say "Hello" in her seven languages.

The biggest mistake -- and I am tempted to re-write the Paris book just to take it out -- is letting her recognize that she might be a hero. She really does work better as feeling ordinary and being ever-surprised when she manages to carry off what even she calls "stupid stunts."

And her increasing knowledge in history and with travel in the contemporary world also take away something that was very handy; as a fish out of water, she can be as confused as the reader is by new places and new concepts.

In any case.

This whole imaginary conversation flashed into my head; say "Story" is happening to a pair of ordinary people, pushing them into stock roles. The guy so strongly rejected the Adventure Archaeologist thing it rebounded. Now he's got the delights of suddenly being able to read Babylonian Cuneiform (something he never had time to study). The gal is less happy, as she is turning into the Strong Female Character, the two-fisted hero to go with his (more frail) academic. She doesn't mind wearing black jeans and leather jacket now, and being able to beat people up is cool, but she has a great relationship with her sisters and extended family and is far too trope-aware that her character archetype doesn't have such things...

The best I can say is that understanding more clearly the thing I COULD write from these elements has clarified for me that I WONT write it. It bores me even more unutterably than the rest of my current life.

Theme and variations

Of course it can't be that simple. Yes, there is something missing in books I have written and books I plan to write. But I haven't properly identified that thing, and if I could, I might be able to find one that worked.

The idea of MICE is attractive...

 ...but can be misleading. These can be good analytical tools, but less useful in constructing a story because elements don't always fit neatly into the boxes we create.

There was an episode of Writing Excuses that had fun reconstructing "The Three Billy Goats Gruff" as primarily an Event story (three goats cross a bridge. There's a troll), a Character story (three goats want to cross a bridge -- the goats are our protagonists here), a Milieu story (there's a bridge with a troll under it), or an Idea story (um...don't take advice from your prey?)

This is a bit facile. The point is more the focus and the attention. If we start with the goat's longings for the meadow across the bridge, this clear goal, then we are telling a character story. If we start out depicting this setting, on the other hand...but what, then, is a scene-setting description? Or a prologue? Or a false protagonist? Or an early inciting incident?

My own star example is Jumanji: Into the Jungle; a character story (the kids gain insight and self-confidence) wrapped around a world story (they go to Jumanji) wrapped around an Event story (they fight to save the world of Jumanji).

***

It is more tempting to think in terms of a theme/idea/conceit/focus that runs through the book and underpins the action -- if possible, motivating it. Horizon Zero Dawn of course mates the player's experience with Aloy's experience in a number of ways, right down to the game mechanics -- the basic gameplay loop of killing machines for parts -- being at the basis of the world's economy, Aloy's progress through the game, and the reason why the world is so fucked at the moment (and will be so for at least one more game...Guerrilla hasn't said, but I'm personally thinking two!)

This is failing me as a tool for figuring out why I think some of the Athena Fox books worked and some didn't, though. The Japan book has the perhaps simple idea of Tatame vs. Honne; inside versus outside, private versus public, mask versus real feelings. This was not just internalized in the characters (Penny forced by the...okay, call it the Event of the story...to wear the mask and finding herself Becoming the Mask) but also in structure, with the rising action of part three being penetration ring by ring (quite literally) into the cult holding the secrets she is after.

Maybe it worked there because it was part of Becoming the Mask, and that was connected to the basic form of a spy/infiltration story. And that novel was schizoid anyhow as it really falls into five parts; an overly long prologue when the Event is just some weirdness in the background, the Training Montage which takes up most of Act II, the Tokyo sequence which is really an uneasy bridge between the training and the infiltration, the Infiltration of course, then the James Bond returns to Piz Gloria as Penny starts having high-speed snowmobile rides and fistfights with yakuza.

So what did I learn here? That either my analytical tools are no good, or the novel is too messy. Probably both.

Why do I think the Desert book is going to be any better? From outside it still looks like a mixed bag. Basically the heart is a somewhat difficult concept; the myth of the desert as an atomic wasteland. From one perspective -- the perspective Penny is introduced to as her car is stopped by one of the occasional White Sands Missile Range closures of I-70 -- is that this isn't really her America. This is military-industrial complex doing things somewhere deep in this inhospitable blasted plain.

And when she says something like that to one of the people investigating the dead body, that person snaps back with a "Try being us." "Us" being the neuvomexicanos who were once ranchers there before General Groves and others called Eminent Domain. But that's a bit of a sideline, as the desert lives and even flourishes (turns out being a closed-off military reservation is better than being farmland for some of the wildlife). And that in turn links to the idea of life -- in this case, specifically, the human species -- working their way from Lucy to a future in the stars if they don't manage to nuke themselves first (Drake Equation and Fermi Paradox).

Which brings us to nuclear secrets but these are old secrets and the key to unraveling the mystery has to do with loyalty and belonging...like the workers at Los Alamos, coming back to the mesa to sweep floors near where they once owned a house and land, but still proud to be a part of it (and probably more proud to be making a good living wage, at least by their standards).

That...seems like a mess. If you cast the net that large, draw a Venn Diagram with a pair of dividers the size of the Rio Grande, then you can fit the boxes around it. Even if it is hard to define whether this is a World or an Idea or what.

But...when I look at The Tiki Stars, I don't have something that both underlies the world-building and underlie the plot in the same way. And maybe that is key. Maybe Aloy showed the way.

Scattered Bones

Still reading that urban fantasy, with the second book set largely in the Paris Catacombs. And re-playing Horizon: Forbidden West. My new favorite toy is the Shredder Gauntlet. Bad name for what is basically Jai-ali with a motorized murderball. 

It isn't the DPS that makes it OP, I think. It is that it forces a faster, mid-range style of combat where you aren't frozen in place all the time looking down the sights of a bow. Means you dodge a lot of the incoming. (That, and I pushed elemental damage, with the elemental surge giving you better immunity than armor for enemy attacks.)

I am always looking at how people construct story. Playing Forbidden West through a second time without going after every single side quest has brought that story and the way it unfolds into sharper focus. I also re-read the last Athena Fox novel (my niece just got a copy and I wanted to see what she was in for). It still doesn't hold together.

But today over brunch it was like everything came into greater clarity. Okay, my "light" reading for my meal was a rather angry book on environmental racism, specifically "Nuclear New Mexico" versus indigenous and neuvomexicanos. 

That got me thinking where the bones for the plot on the next Athena Fox book were, and all of a sudden they were much easier to see and arrange. I'm seeing the through-lines differently, in a way that keeps the thematic elements but puts the focus on how they work in plot terms. And I'm finding it easier to be selective about which bones I use to construct the skeleton, and how to pare them down to the structure that matters.

Which the last book didn't have. It didn't have a strong skeleton, and that's a big reason why it took so long and so many re-writes; because I was searching for a structure to hold it together. And that's why the tiki book isn't happening for me.

The tiki book is, at this point, pure conceit. It is a serial. This happens, then that happens -- in an interesting background.

Which is true about a lot of games and yes this is where Forbidden West falls down a bit, compared to the original Horizon Zero Dawn. The first game was a master class in melding the gameplay with the story, the plot with the world-building. The second game it gets a little game-y. Not helped by adding more kinds of collectibles, Gauntlet Runs (nothing to do with the Shredder Gauntlet), Salvage Contracts, Rebel Camps, and even a mini-game (Machine Strike.)

As an aside, you know when something is a stupid add-on time-waster game mechanic to stretch out gaming time when NPCs keep bothering you to try it. Especially if their dialogue is ten times more stagey and forced than the usual quest-givers.

But more than that, I'll leave for if and when I decide to do a proper review of the game. Besides, as soon as this cold and rain lets up I'm back to walking. Don't want to end up like Ted Faro...

Come here Watson, I need you

About midway through the game Horizon: Forbidden West the character Sylens does something that appears on the surface so utterly stupid it feels out of character.

And immediately you are pushed into contemplating the Watsonian vs. Doylist question. Is there a in-world explanation for this baffling choice? Or is this something that was necessary for game purposes, necessary enough to supersede the lack of proper motivation?

Not that it really matters for that game. You can be as paranoid as you like, try to predict where the inevitable betrayal is coming from, but that betrayal is going to be on the other side of a cut scene -- you won't even be able to lay traps in preparation.

And, really, it doesn't matter so much in reading a book or watching a movie, either. That you know what is coming won't change the story that is presented. It will, however, change your experience of it. There is that perfect balance, sometimes referred to as "the expected surprise," when you can look forward to something happening with pleasurable anticipation and then get that jolt of satisfaction as it finally unfolds.

I say delicate balance because if you guess too early or too fully, then the revelation feels pointless when it finally happens. If you guess too late or not at all, there's less power in that key moment. The goal as an author is to ramp up the anticipation, whether it is a revelation or a long-overdue retribution, until it drops with the greatest possible impact.

Back to patterns. There's people (I've met several) who can watch a Perry Mason episode and know by the second reel who did it. There are two main strategies here. One is Watsonian; the desk clerk did it because nobody else would have had an excuse to open the cloakroom door after ten o'clock. The other is Doylist, but comes out of an instinct for structure. The murderer is the maid because she is the third suspect introduced, and the only suspect with a perfect alibi.

I'm calling this story patterns until and unless I find a better term. These are more than tropes or genre conventions. These are basic ways that story tends to get told, patterns that can be recognized.

And they are on a continuum. There are story patterns that come out of the needs of the media; such as recognizing a character will be important because he is being played by a well-known actor. And there are patterns that are part of the language of media and intended to be understood; like the soldier displaying a picture of his girlfriend. Story-telling shorthand, in other words; ways to inform the audience about the structural shape of the story without spelling it out.

The go from the near-universal expected to be grasped by all audiences, to the more subtle that require experience with that particular genre to read (those Perry Mason guessers were people who had seen a lot of episodes). So they aren't always read by all audiences. Not with equal ease.

***

That same day, I also started reading a new urban fantasy set in Paris. Almost immediately I had two Doylist realizations; the writer was not American. And the writer was also not French (turns out she's German born and now living in New Zealand). It was also pretty obvious the writer was female.

The European attitude is more subtle and harder to boil down to specific observations. It just didn't feel like the way an American author would approach it. The French thing was...it was a little too "look, here's the Eiffel Tower!" Things that were distinctly French and communicated that idea to the reader, but that aren't what a French person would think of as what was important to the story.

This one is a woman who can talk to ghosts (and unlike for Hotspur, the ghosts answer back). It opened in Pere Lachaise and I was already hooked. When it was revealed her day job was at the Pantheon...that's when I bought the book (the main action of the book, however, takes place in the Catacombs).

I was also admiring the experienced way the writer was building the story. The complications (the protagonist's relationship with her family, a suspicious cop, a veiled warning from Victor Hugo) were dropped at exactly the right places in page count and the rhythm of the story. This is another one of those expected surprises that come out of a well-established structure. You don't have to drop the complications -- you don't even have to have the body drop, or any of the other big ones -- but it is so satisfying to a reader when they are happening just when you anticipate they are going to happen.

It is like the experience of listening to music, when the chord sequence is pointing you towards a cadence that finally falls. After reaching all the way to the 9th or the needle tension of the dominant 7th, to finally drop back to the root. (Or to go somewhere completely different, if you are Sondheim...!)

***

I like reading the first book of a new series, but I think I like watching the opening of a television show even more. Because those guys are really, really good at the job. Introducing the world, the cast, the conflict. 

I got a few episodes into Continuum. There's a difference between an older series like Bonanza and a more recent series; the long form. Something like The Expanse doesn't have a status quo. You aren't expecting to find the same cast and the same situation. Take the Enterprise away and Star Trek stops being the same show, but take the Rosinante away and that story continues without a problem.

This means that, as in the self-contained form of the novel, questions are being continuously raised and answered. This also means that not all of the world-building is front-loaded, because those are some of the questions which are reserved to be answered slowly, as the series progresses.

***

It is good I am getting some reading done (and watching) because, since at least my nasty bout of COVID at least (and possibly since finishing the Paris book) I've been unable to write. Not at all.

More on that later.

Hugin and Munin were drones

Yes, that was actually said by someone. Ran into that "theory" at the APN (Archaeology Podcast Network), which I finally remembered to add back to my podcast feed.

I don't think I can pivot the Athena Fox stories. They've gone four volumes and given how slow I work, I'm not about to rewrite all of those from scratch. And, oddly, several of the comments I've gotten say that pivoting into more of an adventure/thriller direction is not what those commenters would want. A friend -- an American ex-pat I visited in Paris -- didn't know what to make of what she called the "James Bond" stuff in the last book. Good thing I didn't try her on the Japan one!

The books want to be mystery books spliced with travel books. They'd be better if they were less dense, and if I did rewrite from scratch, I'd make changes to my protagonist and her background to take it away from going quite so in-depth in culture and history.

Which would also be plausible with a bad idea I had just today.

The latest 'cast of Writing Excuses talked about opening a story with a thriller. Not necessarily a body drop; more like a Call to Action. I have known for a while, talked about on Quora, and made a conscious chose to start my first book with stakes. Only there weren't really stakes; Penny started the book with a goal, but the obstacle wasn't immediately obvious.

The other aspect that podcast got into is that this opening thing is usually a shaking of the status quo. It isn't "Here we are in a YA dystopia, things suck, we should do something about it." It is more like, "Here we are in a YA dystopia and oops -- the secret police are banging on the door." Meaning, we have joined the story at that moment where the characters literally can not go on as they have been.

Thing is, even starting with a body drop (as the New Mexico book will) is hardly the same as having the clear and present danger of a destructive force just uncovered and our heroes the only people in place to stop it. That is really so very much easier with fake history. Not just fake, but a particular kind of fake, where ancient aliens or items of power or a pharaoh's curse or whatever are, well, real.

Which I was loathe to do, which is why the Paris book never gets higher than the stakes of an idiot would-be treasure-hunter about to take a crowbar to one of the grotesques on Notre-Dame de Paris.

The bad idea is...what if they are real now?

As in, history is taught in that world the way it is taught in ours, and as with ours, it is largely correct. But something happened. A mad wizard did it (or in SF circles, Alien Space Bats). Now both versions are correct. Imhotep stacked a bunch of mastaba to invent pyramids. And Grey aliens beamed down to awe the puny humans with the ability to stack a bunch of rocks.

This way, we don't have to insult working historians. And our protagonists can declare their astonishment without looking like idiots who never noticed the actual suit of armor worn by King Arthur is on display in the White Tower.

But two big problems. One is on me. Not just that it is too easy to have the protagonists snark about how stupid the idea seems, but that it is very, very hard not to get dragged into all kinds of related story tropes.

There's a fun little two-book series by Seanan McGuire (Indexing) where fairy-tales are coming true in the real world. Warts and all; these are the Grimm versions indeed. But her hand-wave is like Sir Pterry's "Narrativium," where Story (as Seanan puts it) is an almost conscious and alive force that really wants the fairy tale to happen and to play out properly. So all the trophic elements happen -- weaponized by both the good guys and the bad guys, even.

Having a mystery thing happen and now Atlantis was real and divers can reach it is far too much temptation for a writer like me to have protagonists and others start reading the Evil Overlord list and weaponizing being genre-aware.

https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0763.html

The other is...

The really well-known pseudo-history and magical artifact and lost city stuff is, well, usually not good story. There's no internal consistency. Arthur above; even Mallory, combing every single Arthurian epic he could get his hands on and combining them into a coherent whole, was only somewhat successful at it.

As with conspiracy theories in general, the point is never about how Atlantis actually works and how it was hidden -- it is about how "mainstream science" are all poo-poo heads. The most common stuff is along the von Danieken ilk where it is a bunch of "you can't explain this!" thrown at a wall in hopes some will stick. There's no consistent through-line, no single underlying theory. 

(The Apollo Program deniers and the Creationists are so very much like this.)

Sometimes you do get a good story. If you are talking about the modern and specifically against-the-mainstream creations, the full phantasmagorical story of the land of Mu, for instance, has all the right cast of characters and geography and deep history and all of that.

As do older myths and legends, as inconsistent as they are.

There's pretty much shit-all for a well constructed story of how everybody managed to mislay a continent the size of Asia. 

Which suggests to me that the "suddenly all the myths are true" isn't a good way to construct a fictional universe that one can have adventures in. I think you need a spoof explanation for why many myths may have a basis in truth. Like the Stargate universe does.

The Adventure Continues

Horizon: Forbidden West went on sale during the massive and ongoing black-cyber-frimonday sales and I've started it. It looks gorgeous. But something has slipped in the character acting. Even compared to the pre-remastered Horizon Zero Dawn the characters feel less lifelike and less interesting.

A lot of this is intensity. Sun-King Avad is a bit of a dork in the original. He is young and inexperienced and doing his best. But the weight of his position gives him gravitas, he has charisma and he's hot. But above all that, there's intensity.

The HFW version he just comes across as a bit of a goof. Intensity is the same complaint with several other returning characters, even Varl (despite growing a beard). I've got a sneaking suspicion at the moment that this was intentional. That they told the voice actors to dial it down a little, possibly to make the later original characters look better.

***

Anyhow.

The thing about an adventure archaeologist character is that there are always ideas for them. Especially if you have already decided not to go the way of the greatest hits, because there's only a dozen big name artifacts and even fewer big-name locations to discover (and once you've done the Atlantis story, it is hard to top it with somewhere even more big important and magical.) There are, however, millions of ways a student archaeologist can get in trouble, even if they end up being more cozy murder mystery plots and the archaeology is tangential.

I know the things I don't like about the previous books, but I don't know how to pivot. Making a big pivot in a series is tough because unless you want to re-write all the early books, you are setting up for one audience then changing to a different audience. How can you introduce the new reader you are after when the first books aren't like that at all? And what about the readers that got interested in what was happening in the older books?

My version today of what went wrong is that the absurd detail and the way that detail is presented is baked in, and will be there as long as I continue with the format of throwing an inexperienced traveler into a new culture.

That's the biggest part of it. The first book was largely about Penny being overwhelmed, and gradually coming into confidence in navigating strange places. And I've kept that, at least as long as she is still going into places that are fully immersive; where she doesn't speak the language, where she is having to eat locally and sleep locally and otherwise deal with the unfamiliar culture 24-7. 

I backed off a little in the Paris book. There are several unusual things about the Paris book. She is largely in tourist areas and most of her conversations are with a fellow American. And her dip is less into modern Parisian culture and more into history -- and at that, it is art history, so further divorced from her Japanese experience of finding herself in a wooden room with tatami mat floors and going, "What am I supposed to be doing here?"

Thing is, I am also doing classic mysteries. My read is that the Cozy Mystery genre introduces a cast of characters with issues and that is the Gordian Knot that needs to be unravelled (cutting isn't usually allowed in those stories).

I don't know if there is a name or even a recognized genre, but I am writing mysteries where the place and the culture are the thing that has to be understood. The solution to the mystery in each of the Athena Fox books is reached through gaining a gestalt of a place and people. And the process of gaining that gestalt is through being a sponge. Learning everything she can because she doesn't know what the important stuff is yet.

Come to think, Asimov's Caves of Steel and some of Niven's Gil the Arm stories also hinge on grasping subtle elements of culture. Many is the case in those stories where someone says, "Belters don't do that because on a single-ship..."

This may change. The things that are at the top of my list right now for new Athena Fox stories have several that are a local sub-culture that can be experienced in small doses with a ready retreat back to the familiar. And Penny is gaining confidence and experience to where she isn't intended to be overwhelmed but instead has the tools to pick up what she needs and keep her cool.

***

So what's at the top of the list right now? I mean, I want to do underwater archaeology, and do the Holy Land, and visit Antarctica...but my list of plausible and might do them soonish is rather smaller.

The White Sands one. I've already backed off on trying to work in Old West stuff, or ghost towns, and I might have to put the UFO stuff further back in the mix. More and more, it is about that specific bit of geography and the various peoples that have inhabited it. Three in particular; the neuvomexicanos, who are connected to the pueblo -- mostly Tewa. The Los Alamos group. And the hominid who may have left footprints well before the Clovis peoples.

The Darien Gap one. Archaeological tourism, some mayincatec stuff (whatever seems appropriate) possibly the fake artifact trade, and a survival story.

The Minnesota Vikings one. Penny revisiting a different life-path by getting hooked up with folk music and Viking re-enactors, plus of course some pseudo-archaeology like the Kensington Runestone.

The one on a boat. The private yacht of a billionaire collector is in international waters and an eclectic group of feuding experts (and ringers and spies) are gathered to try and figure out which artifacts should be repatriated, and to whom. 

And last place is split between hanging with warbird fliers and the kind of WWII buffs who dance to big band music at the Hornet Museum, with of course an experimental flying machine unwisely named Icarus in the mix. Or, one about a brand-new science museum with a living exhibit on the space race and early visions of the future; L5 society, plus maybe work some Lustron Houses in there somehow.