Research fun

The Concho hat band is Navajo. Probably adopted from Spanish settlers, but not quite the right cultural signals for my Tewa man who hangs out with Mescalero Apache. In any case, the traditional Concho are silver. So doesn't work for the plot point of getting neutron activation of iron that put out characteristic gamma radiation NEST was able to detect.

I was also rewriting the "Jennifer Beale" bit again and needed an action verb of Penny "something something" before she goes through the door of the Blake's Lotaburger on White Sands Blvd. Well, turns out they don't have an awning.

Thank you, Google Street View's almost-hidden "show me earlier dates" function. When I visited, they had roll-up glass. And, according to the photographs, that glass extended over the original patio, making the entire eating area enclosed.

That happened in 2022. In 2021, there was a patio with metal tables, no awning, a slight overhang of the blue roof. In 2015, the roof was red, the tables concrete, and they had built-in parasols. 2013 and earlier, the roof is white!

Well, I think I can get away with a blue roof and a patio for a story set in early 2019. Good thing, 'cause a previous scene my characters were sitting outside.

It happened a second time. Just as I finished the above revision with a "walked through the patio," sitting at my own favorite eatery...."What a Feeling" came over the radio.

Right, so the next pivot is Penny is an itinerant bass player who travels America with a Hofner over her shoulder and quotes incessantly from top-of-the-charts 1980 rock hits...

Bippity Boppity

This is going to be more rambling than usual. I don't have another big screen at the moment to save notes on, and I'm entertaining a pivot I probably won't do.

Magic.

(Ron is The Handsome One.)

There does exist a genre that crosses modern-day settings with historical puzzles, but the label is "Archaeological Thriller" and most of it is lots of shoot-outs and very little real history. 

(Not singling out this book. I haven't even read this one.)

I can, however, come up with a list of books that totally geek out on history, going into more detail than I would dare. And have a more realistic (one could also say genteel) approach to action.

All of them are urban fantasy. The Ghosts of Paris series. The Trina Piper series. The Rivers of London series. Urban fantasies, perhaps even more than a certain strain of detective novels (Sam Spade, Travis McGee, Leaphorn and Chee), the city or location is almost a character. Sometimes actually is a character.

So there is an existing audience and genre, with an existing marketing language even. 

This is a two-way street, as when you've sent a a character (who is already 2/5 on the way towards YA protagonist) to Athens and start talking up Greek Mythology, there is a big expectation that actual gods, or at least a bit of magic, is going to show up.

Related to that, there is the ride. We read slice-of-life (well, some people do) when we want to watch a protagonist worrying about making their mortgage. We read adventures and thrillers and mysteries to see a protagonist confront greater stakes.

And the more personal power they have, the bigger those stakes can be (without losing believability). Which is why I think complaining about "plot armor" is idiotic. It isn't that some character is too sugared, or that the bad guys are too incompetent, it is that the writer has failed to make a match-up between what one can accomplish and what the other can accomplish that interests the reader.

The plethora of ex-SEALS running around the more Michael Bay archaeological thrillers doesn't mean they have a cake walk. It just means they can have equally well-armed antagonists to play with. The same is true for magic. It always brings more trouble than it solves.

(Cool; a ring of invisibility!)

It also helps to avoid the Jessica Fletcher effect. The protagonist has a reason to be discovering all these dead bodies. And it isn't because they spent ten years earning their degree in forensic pathology, or becoming a black belt and five-times mixed martial arts champion, or whatever. No, they are still the same everyman nebbish they were, because magic (whether powers, artifact, destiny, or the book with all the secrets which might as well be one of the above) isn't something they earned but something that was dropped on them.

(An additional strength of magic is that it tends to play out again more magic. Against the supernatural, which in urban fantasy is more often than not under the Masquerade. So your protagonist can indeed by having running gun battles with exploding cars through the streets of Manhattan without the cops so much as blinking...just, the guns are wands and the cars are dragons, and nobody but good guy, bad guy, and the occasional unlucky bystander ever sees them.)

But really, that is all Doylist. More; the above are more about how to find the readership and make them happy. They say less about the internal story.

And in that lies most of my problems. First, despite what I said about magic being just a special sauce on top of an ordinary nebbie, it still feels to me that it makes the character itself special. It is one step along the way towards having unusual eyes and multi-colored hair.

And, while I have seen it done well, the most elegant magical explanation for what is actually going on interests me so much less than discovering the real processes of history, sociology, technology, etc. I write at least in part because I want to learn things. To learn why the Mayan society disintegrated -- not to make up some backstory about magic spells gone wrong (or visiting aliens).

Magic always feels less satisfying.

I am tempted to make a snap judgement that there's also no space to add magic to what I've already written. But this presupposes full-scale rewrites anyhow, and a given in the rewrites is knocking a hell of a lot of the history that's already there out of the picture. And reducing Penny's sugar a bit in the process, as she is no longer needed to pull a Stapleton and explain history things to the reader. At length.

So there would be space to put magic in the picture. In some way.

There would also be space to lean in on something different, something that feels more organic. I never intended her to lean into theater and acting and especially '80s movies, and currently I feel like it takes up too much narrative space and is possibly annoying and/or off-putting. But as I said before, I could lean into this more. Make her less of an expert and lean into the comedy of instant expert ("I saw this in a movie once!")

And that is a kind of magic I can get behind.

Every work of fiction distorts the real world in some way. It creates a set of ground rules that the reader can either accept, or find something different to read. Nobody notices that everywhere Jessica Fletcher goes, dead bodies appear. No man with a gun will ever remember not to let Steven Seagal get within grabbing distance. There isn't a single red shirt who can do the job better than beaming down our entire command staff.

The baked-in assumption for the Athena Fox stories is that the universe itself keeps confusing Penny with the character she created. Somehow, situations that belong in a movie...keep happening to her. Well, the place I could use magic would be very subtle, and that is to have her notice it. Never to have control of the narrative or be able to weaponize it; only to take notice that this is how things work around her.

(In this series, the narrative is a real and malevolent force. It wants fairy tales to come to life, and it doesn't care who gets hurt in the process.)

The problem is, it is almost impossible not to weaponize it. And as soon as it becomes recognized as a narrative tool, it starts warping the narrative away from what would be plausible to what would work in a movie. And the old trope of "if I saw this in a movie I wouldn't believe it!" is not a good look.

Better if it is tacitly understood by the reader but never accepted as a fact by anyone inside the narrative. It remains Doylist -- never Watsonian.

So I don't see a good way to add magic. I will say it is more compelling from a character angle if my protagonist never gains magical powers, if she is both aided and hindered by what magic is afoot so it is effectively neutral (or, rather, antagonistic in that it solves some problems while causing her bigger ones).

But to make it a properly magical setting, magic has to be active. It has to do something, not just be a random background note ("So here we are fighting grave robbers in Costa Rica. Plus, over in Switzerland there's some people bringing chocolate dolls to life.") And if the underpinning of the story is historical, historical mysteries and the processes of discovering history, then some of that history is the history of a world that has magic in it.

Okay, think on that for a moment. There are settings where magic is a known part of the world, and has been.

The downside for me is this means alternate history. And I can't help thinking, really, really alternate history. Or rather, alternate history the way it should really be. You added spell-swords and dragons to the Napoleonic wars and, no, you don't roll the clock forward and still find Churchill as First Sea Lord.

Hidden histories have the advantage in that most of history is the way we think it is. In fact, if the behind-the-scenes influence is subtle enough, it basically is the way it was. The best I ever came up with ("best" as in, allows me to write the story I was already writing) is that behind the scenes in the Athena Fox stories is a small group of immortals who as individuals accomplish a few things but nothing that couldn't be done by anyone else who didn't have intelligence, a willingness to take the long view, and a whole hell of a lot of saved-up power and influence.

(Basically, they woke up as immortal one morning, they either haven't learned how to duplicate it or haven't tried, and largely stayed as selfish and short-sighted as they had been born, working to feather their own nests with the advantage of being able to gain the experience and belongings of great age without the physical decrepitude. And their top goal is and remains "don't get found out.")

(And just because I hate the diminishment of real people of accomplishment by making them secretly wizards or aliens or something, they were rarely anyone famous. Besides, famous people are too visible.)

(There's also a mental pruning process they go through, because nobody can hold a hundred lifetimes of memories anyhow. So while they might have met Cleopatra, they really can't tell you much that isn't in the history books already.)

(All of this was on my mind when I wrote the Voicey McVoiceface scene in the London book. I left it because all the scene really needed was weird and mad and that all qualified.)

(They've just met Cleopatra.)

Oh, and let me revisit that Penny does have a few unnatural skills that would work just as well if outright named as magic. Perhaps better, as they are oblique enough not to be instantly recognized as the game-changer equivalent of being able to toss fireballs around. Her ability to mimic a language she doesn't yet understand, for instance. Or her ability (which she hasn't even noticed yet) to pick up physical skills with mostly a bit of observation. Okay; that one is a bit more powerful.

All in all, though, I think it would be easier to pivot in a different direction. Taking the writer out of the equation, they could be torn down and rebuilt with more of an emphasis on humor. Or with a more solidly worked-out mystery. Or as a romance. Or with more action.

Trouble is, there is a writer in the picture. Aside from the last, I don't think I could pull any of those off. And I'm not even sure about that one.

Well, time to drop a developmental editor on the problem and see what they have to say. Starting with the cheapest one I can find...ProWritingAid.

Temple or Temple?

I'm doing the pivot. I'm going to finish The Early Fox as quickly as I can, and leave that series behind while I do something different.

That does involve getting a cheap cover (as long as most of my productive hours are still being used up by my day job, getting it done for me costs less of the more important resource).

And for that, I need a blurb. So I did some re-reading on constructing a decent blurb. Which lead me to look for what similar books had been doing, and what is my genre anyhow? And that led me to GoodReads and a list of all the books they dropped into the pile of combining archaeology and mystery/adventure.

Fascinating the different ways archaeology, or in most cases, an archaeologist as protagonist, gets turned into the premise of a story. But studying these ways also underlines the underlying paradox. To wit; it is almost never archaeology that matters.

When it is there, it is a bit aside from using the archaeology of classical Greece. The stories that come closest to using archaeology as a discipline are doing forensic anthropology. But, really, I think you'd get the same mechanical effect if you had a forensic engineer as hero. (I say "mechanical," because even if said engineer is at a crash site, it isn't quite the same frisson as discovering a person's life and the manner of their death through the marks on their bones.)

And even if the career path of the protagonist is a little more archaeological, it still comes down to being an excuse for a body drop. And after that, all the identification of pre-Columbian pot-throwing techniques has damn-all to do with tracking the killer. So the books tend to play out a lot more like; "Here we were investigating an 8th-century monastery --" And everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked.

The ones that do keep something that is only a few steps removed from archaeology in the actual plot at hand is when what is going on falls under the shroud of biblical archaeology. As in, basically, the Judeo-Christian god is real, religious artifacts have scientific meaning and religious writings (from the right religion, of course) can be dissected for plot-important information.

It should be no surprise that these often cross paths with horror. But then, horror, almost always supernatural horror, is also a typical thriller premise to spring from the depths of a shovel test pit.

And then there are those stories where what matters is the thing being dug up. If there is engagement with the living patterns or material culture or beliefs of the peoples being explored, it is of utility to the plot only in the getting to the magic sword or pot of gold. There is rarely the process of learning how this particular past culture worked. It is more of looking up how this past culture worked (say, how they wrote "use secret button to open door" in their glyphs) in order to get to the artifact de jour.

As a sideline, notice Indiana Jones is never wrong? Sure, he gets details wrong, but what is presented in that sort of adventure is a very classroom idea of history. There is one true history, and our heroes already know it. Indiana Jones never discovers anything new about the cultures he engages with. Even if he has to hit the books, it is to find the truth that is already known and already written down. There's never a disagreement about the name of the god they worshipped -- only if that god was actually an alien from the planet Zarkon.

Again the overtly religious ones come ahead; in few other stories does the history itself matter, not as a path to grab the death ray or stop the zombie plague, but as a thing that matters to contemporary people. Perhaps more than it should; Dan Brown has basically built an industry on the idea that people will panic and governments will fall if it became known that Jesus had sex. 

I live for finding a story in which other para-histories are what people are getting knifed by albino monks for. I saw one book in the GoodReads list where Macedonian Nationalists were running around in the parade of people chasing our heroes, but it would be too much to hope for the Skopje brigade there. 

So that's the primary trio; mysteries about a body dug up with all sorts of luscious small-town secrets buried with it, action-packed-action in which archaeology dug up a McGuffin and the story is about people shooting other people to get their hands on it, and stories in which various people with shaky faiths get to ponder on how their particular god is actually real and important to their lives. While possibly getting shot at a lot.

Somewhere out there is a book where the body of Mary is dug up and with it all sorts of tawdry small-town secrets of ancient Judea but anyhow...

There is a minority which are more like travel adventures to one of the big archaeological tourism locations; Egypt, the Yucatán, Crete. Which usually end up being towards the cozy mystery side and the body drop might not even be at the dig site. And some stories are romances, with or without reincarnation or time travel.

I did get one useful lesson out of this. If a blurb says, "For those who love Dan Brown..." you can be sure the thing is terrible. And this is even properly additive. A book that name-drops six better-known authors...

The other thing I found is some definitions of cozy. And the Athena Fox series ain't it. As with many things, there's some flexibility. A cozy shouldn't have sex or violence (but some books cross that border). More importantly, they are set within a restricted social circle (often a small town) and the amateur detective is someone in position to interact with most of this people on a social level (such as, they own a tea shop). Now, Penny may indeed do the thing of solving the mystery through understanding the social psychology at play -- it is very much a thing I've been doing -- but she is also distinctly outsider. It's the anthropologist version of the cozy, where the outsider has learned enough of the culture they are visiting in order to write papers about it (and hope they aren't being spoofed as badly as Margaret Mead).

And several of my sources argue that the cozy is dependent on the body in the vicar's garden. That there is a social norm that is violated by this death, and the book ends with the neighborhood returned to sociability.

Rather the opposite of either the thriller (especially the gothic style), where that genteel society is shown to be a sham and is torn apart by the discovery of the body, or the noir detective, where greater society is sick and the actions of the detective bring some of the ever-present corruption to light.

Not a theme I was consciously working. Penny is playing within the power structures for the resolutions of all of her adventures, even if during all of them she showed great sympathy for those outside. The New Mexico book comes closer to breaking her trust in law enforcement, as she isn't sure how high the conspiracy runs.

(Her making a deal with the devil is a practical matter. For me. If you are going to be doing all the crazy stunts a hero gets up to, it really helps to know people in high places who can make the consequences go away during the victory celebration.)

For all these reasons, "Cozy Mystery" is a bad fit. Once again I wish I hadn't taken the titles I did. I am growing in my liking for something a bit like; The Gift of Athena, The Zero Room, The Mirror of Amaterasu, The Treasure of Montmartre. And as usual one book misses, but I'm sure given enough time I could come up with a conceptual title for the New Mexico adventure.

So far, the only thing I have to hand to the cover designer is a list of things that won't work, or that I'm tired of and don't want.

I haven't completely let go of the map idea. But there's problems. Too busy. Makes it look too much like travel fiction or sailing stories (and for older maps, historical fiction). And out of step with the current design trends (or so say the sources I looked at).

So more of a bold graphical treatment, possibly downplaying the map and using the idea of "there's a map" inside a composition. The retro look of the logo and Adventure fonts are also out of step, plus take things too much in the direction of pulp adventure, when these are too philosophical, cerebral (cough) boring for that to be an honest branding.

Still tempted by the idea of a single image of map or globe or something, a cluttered table with photograph or chart or folded map and some basic tools of the trade on it. And then mostly color-grade it to fit the different books.

Once again, there's an odd man out. The London book could do very nicely with a graphical treatment of my modified Northern Line Express done in something just similar enough to TfL's tube map not to get sued. The others don't suggest something quite as obvious and graphically interesting. 

Really, for what I am hoping for The Early Fox (not a hell of a lot), I could throw an ersatz Remington or Russell under whatever cheap font is free, crap it out in Canva and call it good enough. I mean, I'm not even intending to do a print run on this one.

Retry, Repair, Re-install?

My ComfyUI install borked after the last mandatory update (mandatory? Yeah...it's getting like Windows). Once again probably would have been smarter to leave it dead but that's not what this entry is about anyhow.

I want new covers for my books. I need a cover for the upcoming one anyhow. 

Except seems half-assed to do new covers without doing rebranding. Maybe rebranding could help them find their readership.

Except that seems a lot of fancying-up when the text is the same thing it was. So really they should be at least edited, even a properly developmental edit and beta readers and now we're at hundreds of hours of work, which with my current job and health is looking at a year or more.

And they might be shit anyhow. Either just something that isn't wanted in today's market, or just plain not good enough writing to be worth publishing at all.

And even that option; letting go of those books, writing something new, may be just wasted effort because maybe I'm just not a good enough artist to do anything that anyone can enjoy.

And no, another decade of practice isn't going to fix that, because I've had decades already to get to where I am (or am not) and I don't have many decades left.

I'm ready for reboot. Trash the save file. Maybe this life will be better on the next play-through. 

Dragon Attack

I don't remember clicking on anything. Not so much as a video, or a thread at Quora. But suddenly all of my feeds are pushing Dungeons&Dragons. All the YouTube ads are for scenario books and monster manuals. It's weird.

I was also re-reading the current book-in-progress while listening to a random playlist and some James Bond came on about the time I hit the run-her-off-the-road scene.

And it made me think I really want to write a story with more of that action-packed action. But even the tiki book doesn't feel like that sort of action. I mean, brawls and gunfights, dogfights in rocket ships and all that, it has. Maybe it doesn't feel the same because it is an invented sci-fi setting. 

Oh, yeah, and had that adrenal thing again. Friday night was bad. I think I'm pulling out of it. Still, with the new meds, that worst is a whole lot less bad than it was.

However, got damn-all written. Some nice clean-up, but I'm still on the same scene now that I was last Saturday. 

The Power of Hate

I am still working on the same scene from Sunday. Damn work-life balance. Time to think about retiring.

Okay; I did go back and revise the Atlas scene to try and focus the emotional arc and make more of a coherent mini-crisis out of it. And expanded and revised the Apocalypse Log.

And hit a plot question in the scene I'm on; I couldn't figure out why this Apache writer of westerns she meets with in Cloudcroft wouldn't mention the guy who is gonna turn out to be the murderer. That's a bigger clue than I wanted, but it ain't like the whole conversation can't just be about his hat.

I'm not good about writing red herrings.

Really, I never set out to write mysteries. Turns out it is baked in to the basic premise. I wanted to do adventure (archaeological adventure but anyhow) but with real history and real archaeology. And mostly an urban setting, meaning this is a lot less human-against-nature and more human-against-human.

Being realistic about history and science bled into being realistic about how the world works, and how the world works is; if you have bad guys running around with gun in hand a hell of a lot of cops show up. Have a murder or some other big crime, and some very careful police work and forensics gets into the picture. And even if they don't have time to solve it properly (or at all), that sort of attention does a really good job of shutting out the amateur.

So the best crimes are those where not only does nobody know who dunnit, they don't even know what was done, or even if anything was done. And that means neither does my protagonist. Instead of being a "The Zebra Killer has struck for the thirteenth time -- we need to find him and stop him!" it is more the Isaac Asimov quote about the usual sound of scientific discovery; not "Aha!" but "That's odd..."

Which plays hob with having a driving plot, ticking time bomb, or for that matter having villains nice and visible and easy to hate.

I'd be failing there anyhow. Not only have I consistently failed in creating villains to properly dislike, I also have been failing in having people dislike my protagonist. I mean, that is her method. She talks people around, gets them to like her, finds ways that cooperation is more effective. She's a regular Power of Love shoujo heroine.

Making me want to work with the Blue universe. Because there I could have a protagonist who isn't being supported, who is actively being blocked, even, both by actual bad guys and by people who are technically on their side of the great game.

Didn't finish the book

Just finished Part III and there's only 15K or so left in the novel. But also, there's 15K of word-smithing and the final act of the novel and there's only two days left of the holiday vacation.

Some vacation, when it was cold and raining and everything was closed. Why can't we have that time off in spring instead?

I was starting to really crank. Got up to around a thousand words a day over the last few days. Part of that, though, is that a lot of things changed from outline to the actual scenes, and the choices that made sense for the "Duel" scene, Atlas, and the War Zone were all choices that simplified the scenes, took out the need for more research, and made the things shorter as well.

I'd been intending an epic climb back out of the silo. But as I wrote the scene, the emotional crux and the important story beat had already happened and I didn't need this for the story. And it didn't feel important enough to spend another day or two writing it, so I skipped over it. 

(I have enough trouble finding enough to say about driving down a road through flat empty desert. Spending enough pages on climbing up rusty steel in the dark to make the scene feel properly epic? I don't feel up to it. How much can you write "right foot up, then left hand up?" I don't even enjoy playing it that much, in the increasingly obligatory "Uncharted" sequences.)

That may have been a mistake. In the War Zone, dealing with the place in any detail went too far aside from the main thrust of the plot and brought up too many directions I couldn't afford to go, so I ended up just doing a very surface-level depiction. No long conversations about the economic woes and the drug epidemic. Nothing at all about the sunny side of the neighborhood, the people living their lives there (increasingly, behind security gates); no attempt at a balanced or nuanced depiction.

Which also got rid of any need for a scene with "Michael Rennie" as he warns her not to go there, or cops with a similar warning, or a local who argues for a more nuanced view. Instead I could have a fairly simple asshole who gets right to the point, show it all from a single point of view, hand Penny the next clue and letting her move on to the next stage of the plot.

I think that was the right choice. I am much less sure about how the beats worked out in the Atlas scene, and that's why I think that instead of pushing through to get as much as I can of the Bar at the End of the Universe sequence written before vacation ends, I should back off and do some higher-level planning again.

When I wrote the first book of the series, I wrote a mid-act turn-around as an essential part of the structure. This is not uncommon. If you chose to sort the story beats into three boxes and call them "acts," there are two big changes of direction in the narrative occurring at the act breaks.

Act I introduces the elements of the story (setting, story, conflict). Act II can be said to begin when the protagonist first acts. This is when the problem is now clearly stated, and the cast begins to attack it. In the more Campbellian schemes, this is when the hero leaves their village and sets out into the world (or "enters the underworld" in Campbell's terms).

Act II is the middle of a paragraph or the middle of a symphony. It is where the themes are explored. Lots of "stuff" happens but the conflict does not get resolved. Saggy middle syndrome is baked in to the very structure of the story.

The II-III act change is when things change. What the protagonists were trying to do isn't working and they have to do something different. In more of a martial story, the bad guys have been attack, attack, with the heroes on the back foot, and II-III is when they come up with a plan to take the fight to them.

But then there's the strange one. There's a nadir, when the protagonist falls and everything looks hopeless. Then something happens (often a resolution of some other plot arc) and from here to the end of the story is the rising action and climax.

Which is why it usually (or something like this) happens in the middle of the act. Because you can't have the heroes only winning for all of Act III; that would be boring.

The place I went with many of the Athena Fox stories is that this crux, coming out of this nadir, is when Penny becomes most Penny. Sometimes pure Athena Fox, sometimes her own peculiar spin, it is the moment where she stops trying to win the stupid way, and commits to winning her way. It is the Darkwing Duck moment ("let's get dangerous") -- and that show followed that model quite closely.

I already knew going into Part III that I'd messed it up. Way back in the early outline, she would have gone a little crazy when Lon was found dead, have the "Footloose" clash at Blake's Lotaburger, and over the long long drive to WIPP do a bunch of soul-searching and be back in a place of sanity when she arrived. But I couldn't make the sequence of clues or even the geography work with her also visiting one of the Atlas-F sites near Roswell, much less my late-game decision to throw in Albuquerque's "War Zone."

(I was doing some clean-up at my favorite brunch place yesterday. Five minutes after a re-wrote the Jennifer Beale namedrop, "What a Feeling" came on their radio. Laughed out loud.)

So I've sort of scattered all the emotional beats and any act-like turn-around Penny could have across the entire act. And I feel like I could tighten it and make something where she really is bringing together the pieces and coming out of it stronger and more ready to finish the adventure.

At least there's no more long drives to write.

(An actual game on Steam. I'd get it -- four bucks -- but it is a dead game now, abandoned by the independent developer).