Too much?

My cover came back with revisions. And the same mistake was still there. I'm not talking something subtle like the wrong cacti or architecture that is clearly Guadalajara, not Taos. I'm talking a full coastline.

So I sent them a Power Point.

I'm going to stop going to the cover mills and hire an artist direct next time. Still want to redesign, possibly rename -- and that comes with having to re-write, because KDP might get cranky otherwise.

***

Oh, and I was slowly building the info on KDP. Kindleprenuar has a nice little web widget that will let you drape your book description in Amazon-approved HTML. They are rather restrictive as to what they allow and how it needs to be done.

Of course, being the age this is, there was a "spice this up with AI" button on the page. I tried it. This is actually, in my opinion, one of the things AI is best for; to recognize the trends you are stumbling around the edges of, and give you a funhouse mirror version of them so you can be reminded of what they look like. It is an expensive, power-intensive, possibly immoral way of drawing a circle around what you hit so you can recognize the barn you and others have been aiming at.

Here's the "call to action" it ended with:

For fans of fast-paced thrillers and strong female leads, "Footprints in the Sand" is a must-read. If you enjoyed books like "The Da Vinci Code" or "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"...

Hilarious. About as on-target as my current cover artist, though.

The final chapter

Another week, and weekend, of not a lot accomplished. Some of those stupid little plot wrinkles to work out for the last chapter. Every time I thought I had it, something else came up; "Where did he put the horse trailer? Why didn't the police take the computer? Why didn't he reload?" 

Put on some '80s music and did the third revision of the Dynel scene, the scene I hadn't realized I wanted. I think it is going to work now, along with the second (or is that third?) revision of the scene with the cop. Neither of those had been in my outline, by the by.

Oh, yeah, and Charlie Bauer and the German expats who were leaving Alamogordo (the German Air Force training center at Holloman AFB closed the year of the story) came to life briefly, then went away again. Giving Dynel's bully a name a backstory and an excuse was too much apologizing for his behavior and it took away from her. And this added scene is the one where she finally gets her own voice.

I'm going to need even more concentration for the next sequence. The "thrice-dug grave" worked with a fairly simple revision (Penny was being too flippant, and her former digging buddies were too at ease with her new focus). But now I've got a showdown with "Major Bob." One of those scenes where I have to balance an emotional outbreak, frustration and failure, against actually getting some useful plot information.

That, and I had to go back again and clarify who exactly knew what about what had been secretly removed from where. It may be a MacGuffin and some of it will never be revealed to the reader, but I sorta need to know so what happens looks like it happened for a reason.

And once I've gotten through the final chase and confrontation I still need to go back for some clean-up. The nuke museum scene might end up simpler. I may not need to touch on NERVA engines there at all (it also might be too early). And there's two other places I could hit MAD; if nothing else, Technical Sergeant Johansen could explain all about it within the Lambda Logs. That sequence talks about it at length.

About the only thing I'm sure of for that scene is Penny needs to see the game boxes and bobblehead because ever since the museum, every time she finds herself in a ruined and radioactive facility she's been cracking jokes about "the little blue guy."

I was about to say something about how important Dynel's scene is here, since there are so very few female characters in the book. Intentional. I didn't want Penny to have anyone she could lean on or confide in. I wanted her isolated.

Really, there's Dynel -- who only talks in this last snippet of a scene -- and Mary Cartwright. Except that Mary's aunt has a scene and there's a conversation. And a server at the Pueblo Kitchen has a few lines. And there's a saleswoman at a fleet rental company Penny calls at one point.

And then there's Senior Airman Sanchez. She's got two scenes, with lots of lines. 

So, no. Dynel isn't "the only other woman in the book."

World of Bunnies

So here I am, watching Supernatural. Or playing Satisfactory. Or messing around with ComfyUI. And sure, sometimes it is because I'm tired, sick, or my BP is 188/107, I've a splitting headache, and I don't want to do anything until it goes down again.

But seriously, I bet I would be writing a lot more if I was getting paid for it. That sense of accomplishment is only half there when nobody is reading and nobody is commenting. Makes me feel like Jeremy Hillery Boob, making nowhere plans for nobody. Of course if I got paid, it would be work. But I kinda need work.

Anyhow.

The new idea is still fighting with the original idea for which one I write first. "Blue," and Tiki Stars. Oddly enough, both of them are "Old Earth," where Earth isn't a factor in the story, being far away from the action. In Tiki I had the idea that the back story would change from episode to episode; Earth would usually be out of the equation, but the why would change. At least in Blue, Earth's fate is a known thing. They are just on the other side of an expensive wormhole. Oh, and the Venus story I was playing around with, Earth is clearly in the sky. When you can see it through the clouds. What they don't know is why it went radio silent and the ships stopped coming (they theorize a lot).

Also in both, these are somewhat Outer Worlds shaped commercial empires. Tiki is out in the colonies where various companies are so strong entire planets are basically Company Towns. Blue, it is more like a mercantile empire, a technically democratic bureaucracy that strongly supports trade, expansion, and other business interests. Which is natural, as they started as a for-profit colony.

Oh, yeah, the bunny for the day. As I was taking a walk, I passed a place called the "Dessert Cafe," which is fancy ice-cream thing, and two actual cafes name-dropping "Marrakesh" and "Nomad."

So, taking a page from the sadly-undersold Cozy Fantasy genre, a cool coffee-and-pastry place in an eclectic trade town at a crossroads along a Silk Road of sorts, in the middle of a fantastical desert, on a lost colony world that is slowly rebuilding and is currently at a schizo-tech vaguely early Renaissance period with empires both growing and long-gone, and remnants of a long and terrible interstellar war including the alien survivors who are now integrating into the human society of this backwater world.

I am so not writing it.

That's the thing about the writing mind. Ideas are easy. Taming them is hard.

***

Got another thousand words done on Early Fox. And I feel like I'm shorting the relationships. Like the end of the Dynel arc. I know what happened. I have pictures in my mind of the strange uncomfortable but almost sweet relationship between her and Charlie after the whole "Footloose" scene. But I didn't have the space to go into that, not when the focus is Penny and her story is figuring out a mystery.

With some angst on the side, of course.

That tips the scales towards Blue, because that's a framework that could support a lot of angst. I mean, interpersonal stuff. Because it is a Hornblower-esque, young person joins the (merchant) navy and grows in responsibility through various adventures.

The tiki story is more vibe, but mostly, it is modern pulp so there's a lot of action. The pacing of pulp doesn't seem like it will leave room for long quirky romantic conversations.

Dean Drive

 

Finally got the cop scene written. And now Dynel has dialogue. A scene, even. Probably not her real name, though. "Dynel" is another Penny coinage. She was struck by the bright artificial color of the girl's hair. Just like she saw a resemblance (she'd just seen a poster for The Day the Earth Stood Still) between a guy she'd just met and the actor Michael Rennie. (She also gets the lyrics to "Science Fiction Double Feature" wrong, but that's good; lyrics are copyright.

She also keeps making cracks about "them good ol' boys" after she fancied a resemblance between one of the two archaeologists out of the Gault Site in Texas and one of the Dukes of Hazard. Good thing I hadn't seen Supernatural until this weekend; I might have named them Dean and Sam. Still the wrong state; those boys are from Kansas.

That one is totally one of those road shows, like Route 66 or Knight Rider; differing from those "every day a different small town somewhere in America" of X-Files or Bones or The Fugitive or so many other shows by the '67 Impala that is pretty much a third character.

Penny only has a rental pickup, which is going to get wrecked four scenes from now. But at least she made it on to Route 66. The Winchesters, though, have better taste in music. So far she's made reference to "Hotel California," "Luckenbach, Texas," "Wichita Lineman," "Secret Agent Man," "Sixteen Tons," "Hard Knock Life," "The Sky is Crying," "We Work the Black Seam," "Il Triello," "Tequila Sunrise," "Ghost Riders in the Sky," and oblique reference to "What a Feeling."

Jack Reacher, for all his faults, has much better musical taste.

Beelions and Beelions

I'm in the home stretch on The Early Fox and I've got a cover on order but...it isn't the adventure in a contemporary setting I started to write. Not now. The world has changed so much, and so fast, it's now nostalgia.

It would be safer to write science fiction.

The Tiki Stars feels closest to launch, I've got borrowed books, themed decorations ready to set up, and I am looking forward to third person for a change.

And a created world, meaning I can be selective in detail.

But the more I think about the "Blue" concept (and the more I want to write that -- damn you, Shiny New Idea Syndrome!) the more I realize that Tiki Stars is basically warm-up exercise for a full on Constructed World story.

And that, as comparatively simple as that world might be, I still need to do the exercise.

Worldbuilding.

I have only hazy ideas as it didn't seem that necessary for retro-pulp. There's stuff I have in mind, but it isn't particularly fleshed out, not yet. The colony wars. What exactly the status is of the company worlds (even assuming that's really a thing). Oh, and a bit of the tech. Sigh.

Oh, and speaking of a changing world. One of the concepts that's been building for "Blue" just got echoed by a writer over a the Scalziblog. A commercial empire (he's talking Venice, I was using United Fruit) finds themselves in the midst of all-up naval warfare (err...) and has to change the way they do things.

Anyhow, I've been thinking of all kinds of interesting ethnographic stuff for the multitude of species in the "Blue" universe. There will be a bit of biological determinism and a bit of Jared Diamond-ism but the key idea is that all of these models and theories can be useful but are not complete. And when humans have found themselves in a multi-system environment filled with existing species with their already-existing relationships, those small bits of getting it wrong can get exciting, fast.

The Drenoi, for instance, who lack the illusion of continuity of consciousness and thus recognize different aspects of their lives as different individuals with their own names, financial affairs, and criminal status, and who find attempts at "joinder" insulting and basically in really bad taste (plus of course lacking in all common sense). Or the "Corsairs." They also only have an exonym, because to them life is sorted into "us" and "prey." Their language can't functionally handle "intelligent species that isn't us" as the basic definition of "intelligent species" is "us." 

A thing I realized is that for them and for others the social forms and their understanding of the ways of other species will evolve, sometimes radically. For the latter, they are capable of quite complex relationships with various "prey," some of which come close enough to be mistaken for "trade" or "diplomacy."

And our humans are also doing this; coming in with a sort of corporate structure, plus independent operators (prospectors, explorers, traders, who all have more direct experience at the start of the game) plus remnants of the Terran Empire professional navy (this group of colonies got economically abandoned as ferrying goods across the long-jump wormhole wasn't paying off for either, and their connection to that distant empire has gotten thinner and thinner). And everyone is re-evaluating and adapting, sometimes in wild leaps into the unknown.

So you can see why this is exciting. Among other things, problems for the protagonists practically write themselves. Because the way I want this to play out is a lot of rough-and-tumble, practically space opera, with crash-landings and hostile locals and pirate raids and crazy schemes and all the rest of it.

Just got to finish with Penny. Have her talking with the cops now (the scene I dreamed up at the last minute, that has been a real bear to get to work properly). Then the "bar at the end of the universe" (part of the conversation goes positively Stapletonian, starting with Ray Cats and working its way well past the final variable of the Drake Equation), the thrice-dug grave, a confrontation at Lon's trailer and the chase across the Jornada to end up at the Trinity monument.

And as I'm sitting at 65K, it looks like Egtved Girl isn't going to make the cut. The final chase is going to be simpler than I thought.

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.