Murder most fowl

Sold three copies of The Early Fox. Probably. Two are almost certainly to people I don't know. That brought it up to the low 6,000 in "mystery series" on Kindle, which is sobering: not for my low sales, but for how many books are doing worse.

I still want to do the Bill Bixby arc but I don't know if it would sell or even why I want to do it. The series really is a better fit towards mystery-adventures set in exotic locations (if you think of Southwark as exotic!) that have a strong focus on history and archaeology.

That's the biggest problem I have going into A Fox's Sleep. But I have one that's bugging me more.

I want that classic small town with Bad Things going on under the surface. But that very archetype seems to require that these be something other than an ethically dubious restoration of an old building or some kind of white collar crime. In fact, I don't think it even works if there are drugs being smuggled or there's missing loot from an armored car robbery.

It seems to require that there be blood.

That is, that there is real hurt being done to people right there. Violence. And that's a bad mix with the contract with the reader that I've been operating under. Not quite Nancy Drew rules but close. The reader can feel safe my protagonist and narrator isn't going to get kidnapped and tortured, and when someone tries to kill her, they won't make it as simple, ruthless, and effective as a cartel hit.

And, in general, she doesn't play in those leagues or on that field. She's not a skilled fighter, she doesn't get caught up in the justice system. She's, basically, not adventuring anywhere that the bad guys aren't playing with kid gloves. She can get by with acting skills and luck.

These are degrees of shading, not hard rules -- but such is the contract with the reader. One can tell within a page or two of the cover if one is reading a Miss Marple or a Jack Reacher. 

I think I can fix the contract with the reader by putting some blood in the very first chapter. A spoiler warning in prose form.

And... since starting this post, I got it. I have the bones now. The coal mine, the data mining, the corruption, a string of murders. Trouble with the law, the classic suspect-in-the-murder routine. And the Bell Witch, too.

I still don't know if it fits the series.

All Systems Blue is creeping along. No, I haven't finished the first chapter yet. I've given Sinclair her first line of dialog but it was wrong and that version is in the circular file now.

I'm slowly closing in on what kind of story it is and how I am telling it. Starting in social circumstances was the right move. Pushing it further is even better. I know, it sounds like a lot of work for an opening scene. But it isn't an opening scene. I might even cut this scene. What it is, is the test scene. The proof of concept for the whole book. The character, the world, the style and approach.

I did some rough math. Given the plot chunks I've got in mind and arranging them along the story arc and target word count, I could afford to burn 10K of prose before I even get to the Robinsonade. The examples I've been reading from various SF settings have leisurely beginnings (plot-wise, that is) with heavy world-building. There is nothing that flies against the usual standards in spending that many pages just playing with the ship she starts on as they go about business as usual.

However, I'm trying to be less dense on the info-dump, concentrating on plot-important information and delivering as much of it as I can contextually. It is hard especially in the opening paragraphs, as you want to ground the reader as quickly as possible so you can get them involved in the story. Thus a hell of a lot of going back and forth in my various drafts.

And that sort of contextual delivery (show not tell) has issues for some readers. Some people don't know how to read SF. They don't realize it is exactly the same as reading a mystery; you are taking the surface narrative and looking inside, forming your own theories about why the barber in Margrave doesn't seem to be concerned about the lack of customers, or why the bereft widow hiring the PI isn't wearing a wedding band.

Or why the clocks are striking thirteen, or why there is a salt water tap, or why the word used to describe an opening door was "irised."

Some readers really hate hitting an unfamiliar word or name and will stop dead until the author provides them with a dictionary or encyclopedia entry. So I'm having to think about those, too. Give them enough in baldly stated and defined "This is a starship and it is in space" so they at least have some sense of what is going on.

Between that, and the contractors banging on the walls, no wonder I've gotten a bunch of reading done instead.

Running the floor heater

I've been playing a little Warhammer 40K : Space Marine II, watching The Sarah Conner Chronicles, and dabbling some more in AI video. There's no ranking here; these are all whatever I happen to be doing when I'm feeling too brain-fogged to get creative work done.

The new novel is crawling along.

So, the entertainment yesterday was doing some re-posing the hard way.

I realized I'd fallen into the tall duck problem; people and other humanoids are tall and thin, the more efficient image format is wide and short. I'd done a lot of renders that were wrong-side up and that had several problems.

So get those characters to sit down or something. If I was paying tokens to a service I'd just do a "Claude, make the character sit down."

But no, I'm staving off boredom between cleaning chores and doom-scrolling by doing this offline. And the look of the characters and setting was specific, which is always a problem with AI. Take, for instance, "space armor." Seen all over visual SF. Try to prompt it with those words, you get medieval plate sneaking in. Tell it "no, more like the Mandalorian," you get a Boba Fett helmet. It will always cleave to the familiar, to the common meaning.

(A big pain for fashion or period clothing as much of this stuff is phrases formed from common words, like pillbox hat, pixie cut, or leg-of-mutton sleeve. Or is a technical term the AI doesn't recognize, like aguilette.)

So the "pipeline," such that it was, was first to take a previous video that had the character in it. Rip that with a simple frame extractor I put together from the parts box. Save an appropriate frame. Seed a new video render with that frame (image-to-video) and try to find a prompt (and a few camera control LORA or similar) that would change the pose or move the character. ("Character sits down. Camera orbits to their left.")

Do the pull-frame routine again and export that to a paint program for some basic clean-up (paint out the elephant that strolled into the render, and fix the Sam Brown that turned into a Klingon sash half-way through).

Run that through image-to-image for inpainting. Which, given the space armor thing above, requires multiple incompatible LORA; this one will fix the details of the NASA-punk background, but this one puts the stripes back on the zebra-man. Multiple rounds of inpainting and cycles through hand painting until it is back on model and upscaled sufficiently.

Now render new video -- and wrestle with the AI again that doesn't get why everyone is sitting down when all the fashion shows and talking head news programs and etc. it was trained on had everyone standing up. (Also an issue in the inpainting stages. Especially faces; the AI loses the ability to recognize faces if they tilt too far off the usual axis.)

The biggest issue in all this -- or possibly the bonus, if you are trying to while away some mental downtime -- is that when the AI drifts, it either goes into, or more likely suggests, an interesting alternative. Instead of one render, you end up with branching forks, multiple renders going in different directions. At all stages of the game; it truly is geometric.

The novel crawls along because I'm still working out how I want to tell it. SF really does rely on telling, because it is too inefficient to show everything. But an immersive narration introduces a problem; why is the character telling themselves what they already know? It's like a one-person version of "As you know, Bob."

When I was working with Penny, a big part of her thing is making connections. All sorts of crazy connections. So if I needed her to talk about Clovis Points, I could show her a fir tree or a straw hat and she'd get there. It took a bit more pushing to get her to recap what she'd been doing for the last couple of days, but really all it took was putting the right thing in her environment to jar the story out of her.

Cadet Sinclair is third-person and doing free indirect speech so there's already a blur between narrative voice and internal voice. But I'm still too wary both of "As you know, Bob" and the lure of the info-dump to want the narrative to go all out on explaining the world.

Anyhow. I'd been trying out different approaches for opening by looking at the giant negative space wedgie (an exotic star) that is both the sciencey-sounding handwave for a lot that is going on, and thematically an eldritch thing. And whether I really do want to explain that much about the thing now, or offload to later scenes.

But turns out there was a different issue. Thematically, Sinclair is part of a society that could be cordially described as "better than the alternatives." Her experience is being in a system, under orders (explicitly, now, as a young officer). Introducing her as a free agent who can stare at a vidwall and have lots of thoughts about the science and tech and social implications of the setting was... not right.

So I've got her entering in a group of crew, and all the rest are heading straight for the bar, and her only look at Oberon is cut short. And that works better.

Now I just have to deal with creating and introducing a bunch of crew while they are embarrassing themselves striding around going "look at us, we got posted to the frontier" and then get cut down by a more experienced merchant crew who has actually been.

Which means, yes, many many many chances not just for "...internal combustion engines had spark plugs, Keri knew, and telephones used to be used to make calls..." but way much "You should know, Bob..."

Voorwerp

I realize I'd been moping. I was going to write a cranky blog entry about not having a character for my new space opera -- when said character finally came together. Cue a mad burst of energy, cleaning house and cooking at home, even.

That is, I think I solved the character issue. I have yet to actually write her. That is, doing something other than looking out a window.

I went back to work on the opening scene. Got  sidetracked into reading about strange astronomical objects, and it turns out there are several things out there which are well known for being green. And one of them glows for no good reason (the prime theory for Voorwerpjes is that they are a quasar ionization echo. As in, a very bright but short-lived object shot them the hell full of energy but is no longer bright and visible itself.  Since these things are "the size of a small galaxy" there's at least 20,000 years to play with in the timing there.

Oh, and there's evidence for "dark matter highways." Related from Atomic Rockets, who are even more writer-friendly these days, so much so that for every possibly plausible bit of science, there's some wild hypothesis that probably isn't going to prove out, but could make a heck of a story.

Anyhow.

That rant would have been about another stupid choice. Like thinking writing an archaeological adventure would be a quick-and-easy book (well -- I did finish in a year). I wanted to do something with used furniture so I didn't get bogged down in world-building and research. So, probably space opera. And I've always sort of wanted to do a Horatio-esque. My trunk novel has a young crew person on an interstellar "shop truck" -- even if her career goes in rather different directions.

Maybe it is just the vibe. Too much Star Trek in my formative years; that comfy split-level bridge, the uniforms, the wonderful toys.

In any case, the field has moved on. Space Opera is no longer a pejorative. The near-future or otherwise Gernsbackian SF has become consciously deconstructive, even played for irony, as that lunar colony (and those jet packs) never quite arrived in the real world.

Still, SF is still more about the world, the science, the tech, and less about the character. Even in the most unabashed Planetary Romance the setting and costumes and fun details are more important than nuanced character or rigorous plot.

Not that I'm exactly ace at the latter two myself. The Athena Fox stories had bare-bones plots and just enough fun character stuff to keep it from being entirely travelogue/history lecture.

Look, I see plenty of stuff out there -- the comfort food of long-runner space opera series -- that didn't sweat the science. But they are still offering to the reader something creative in the world. Maybe too much so; I almost feel I am seeing writers trying too hard with fantastical settings that are just a little too fantastical to quite grasp.

Anyhow. 71,500 words of notes in the Scrivener folder. I just finished breaking out the more germane stuff and the actual useful notes on the Klathi (the primary alien antagonists of the first book) is a mere 1,500.

That is because I use my notes Socratically. I argue stuff out in them, circling around ideas. That bit about "finally" understanding the character? I took down that note three times previous before it finally landed.

Not an efficient method, I think. Not much of a point of using Obsidian to jot it all down, either. Because the core concepts are stuff I remember now. I've never really needed to consult my notes on a character, not for how they behave. Besides, half the fun of these various aliens is how they bounce off each other, and that can't be efficiently notated in a system that compartmentalizes them.

Sigh. I still have to crunch through a bunch of different references and nail down the positions, job titles, and ranks. I got this close to Blue finally meeting the crew of "Tammie," but is that guy really called Chief Jenkins? (It isn't just a name thing that I could use a placeholder while I get through a rough draft. I'm past that point now. What I need is the underlying organization of the ship because half of what happens in the next few scenes is based on that.)

Affinity

Got back into Affinity Photo, tweaked the cover for Early Fox (swapped the fat sans-serif Impact for a slightly slimmer but still thriller-coded Babas Neue) and threw together a wrap-around so I could put the paperback up. My second go-to for beta readers changed over to a required sign-in while I was in the middle of filling out the application, blanking the form and booting me out and now it won't even recognize my email.

I had rehearsal and costume parade to deal with, so I put off fixing that. Besides, the book ain't selling, and I'm more interested in working on the next.

No longer opening with my cadet doing maintenance. I thought it was a good way to get some attitude from her, sink some character beats, and establish that systems (and engineering, and some science) are going to matter in this book and there might be more than expected.

But it was way too much for an opening scene and I couldn't find a way to trim it down and keep the bit. And besides, it didn't fit the M.I.C.E. The new opening is at Threshold Station, on a few hours pass before T4M (Ln) leaves for the Frontier. With a bar and a fistfight because what else are you going to do with a bunch of young crew?

As an aside, I'm unsure exactly what I'm calling people generically. "Spacers" just sounds weird to me these days. "Sailors" might still work in a wet navy that hasn't seen a sail outside of the Academy, but it is pushing things the way "Marine" doesn't ("Marine" and "Navy" seem to have gotten well-enough established in SF they don't even need to append "Space" to them).

As of this moment, though, Keri is a cadet, the lads are mostly Ordinaries with a few more experienced Ratings here and there, and there's a Senior Technician and a Chief Petty Officer getting named, as well as the Third Officer (who is also ship's engineer -- T4M isn't a big ship). And no, I still haven't done the work of figuring out who holds what position, what ranks they have, and all that.

Another thing I'm trying out in practice as I write this test chapter.

I'm still feeling out how my protagonist talks and acts. At least she isn't the narrator this time, but I am choosing, unlike Andre Norton (I've been re-reading her lately) to use free indirect speech. That means whether a bit of background or tech gets explained in narration is largely a character decision. Fortunately Keri (like Penny) thinks about this stuff a lot, so it isn't out of character for her to muse on some of the workings of the universe.

But it still means I'm playing the game of demonstrating when I can, giving clues when I can't, and breaking the fourth wall to explain only when it is absolutely necessary. And that's only one of the many things I have to contemplate whenever I hit the name of a thing.

Does it sound too technical, this early in the story? The M.I.C.E. I spoke of is that I want to start with presenting the concept of the world; the colonies expanding in a ring, the dendritic network growing from Oberon. Then get into character, as Keri is supposed to carry the story. The clash with Cyrus and Atlas Metals Amalgamated is just the driver of the plot, not the point of the book. For that and just for general reasons I want to keep the tech to a dull roar and not go all "this is how a space station works" for multiple pages.

And I'm trying to balance a bit of whimsy/mythology/magic in the naming, and a hint of the scary frontier of knowledge of things that glow green and rip holes in space, without losing the grounded SF feel. It ain't gonna be hard SF, but...

This sort of thing; test chapters, sketches, character interviews and the like, are like story-boarding. You are trying out ideas that you will flesh out properly later, because actually using them in text on the ground is superior to sitting inside an instantiation of Obsidian or Google Docs doing world-building.

Not that I haven't been taking a lot of notes. Within the week I came up with Dren-shock (when a Dren is hurt, physically or emotionally, to such an extent that personality dissolves and is lost to the Drenoi). And many new questions about exactly what do you do about law enforcement when you are outside the space that Amber, or one of the closely-allied polities, directly controls? Oh, and the thought that at least until recently, only the Merchant Fleet operated starships within Amber space (Amber is the original colony launched from the sphere of influence around Sol to the new and exciting star cluster around Oberon and the hot blue stars that form the Fairy Ring).

Fortunately I've five history-adjacent mysteries that have built up my resistance against wanting to include everything. Even the busy world-builder has nothing on profligate creativity of the real world.

The Art of Forgetting

I've a light design due by the end of the month and I barely remember the steps. I'm hoping that as I start attending rehearsals and so forth it will come back to me.

Also feeling stuck in plotting on two different books. Familiar feeling, though. The second worst part of planning a book (the worst being having made those decisions, then realizing half-way through that they don't quite work, and having to re-plot in the middle of the book. That kept me up for over a month on The Early Fox).

The next Athena Fox book, A Fox's Sleep, is set in a mining town in Colorado. But right now, what it really wants to do is be another dual-time narrative, with the modern-day including Penny crossing paths with local law enforcement, Jim Rockford style (small town law enforcement -- a subject I know so very, very little about). And the other being the experiences of a boy who either works in or adjacent to a coal mine around the (rather long) period of strikes and subsequent violence.

That's a ton of research and that's not something I want right now. For the book, the smartest thing to do is sit down with another half-dozen books like the one I just finished (Death in the Pit: The Ludlow Massacre and the Birth of American Labor Rights), and not even think about plotting until that is done. But I really want to charge into writing itself.

For the space opera, first-book-in-a-series All Systems Blue, I still haven't nailed down how character and theme work together. What I want is a Horatio-esque; not just the career progression of a young officer against the background of military action (In Space!!) but a character that carries the book(s). Someone with an approach that is distinctive enough that when the big moment comes, the reader will nod and say, "Yup, that's our gal."

In the interest of getting it written this decade, I am sticking with the framework of getting more-or-less marooned on a mining world after an alien attack, having her "in a cave with a box of scraps" moment but only so far in that her cobbled-together hardware eventually gets her back to her ship. And then she gets dumped on "Legations" world, a place with a big city full of different aliens with trading outposts and embassies and all that who are about to get attacked by those same guys from the beginning...

Oh, and I've been working on new blurbs (aka, Amazon descriptions) for all five of the Athena Fox stories. And cover art continues. I'm happy enough with The Early Fox (a minimalist regional-mystery flavor New Mexico landscape and your basic sans-serif -- which I kerned myself, out of brute force and ignorance, not any particular training or skill).

I am not doing so well with new covers for #1 through #4. The one thing I'm sure of is I want to make them look current, and like mysteries with adventure/thriller elements. I'm giving up on the retro-pulp/Republic Serial stuff, or trying to push the Romancing the Stone role/reality confusion. Maybe there is such a market, maybe the right approach might reach them, but even then the stock photo model stuff isn't looking right in today's market.

There may be a reason I feel like the biggest thing I've accomplished over the past week or so is binge-watching multiple seasons of the Rodney McCay Show... aka Stargate:Atlantis

A reach

Last week, was watching the new season of Reacher, and old episodes of Supernatural, and both shows went to Philadelphia.

Well, I was in the City of Cheesesteak Love this weekend. Drank at McGillis, ran up the Rocky Steps. Thinking of setting a story there.

I sure as heck couldn’t do worse than those two. Sure, I get Vancouver Doubling, but this is a case where just throwing in an establishing shot of the William Penn statue atop City Hall doesn’t do it.

Edit: Episode 5, they finally have some scenes that look like they were filmed in Philly. And, okay, it messes up the essay, but Reacher actually did pretty well in some sequences in the opening episode, and elsewhere, that were definitely that city.

Okay, I was mostly in Central City; stayed in Rittenhouse and the job was just up from the Delaware waterfront. And there are generic glass blocks in those districts, and newer buildings.

But like Paris, or the City of London (aka, the part with the old Chris Wren streets), it is a town with a very specific stamp of architectural style. Especially when you add the more creative skyscrapers (the older ones, especially, have enough Art Deco and bas reliefs to be at home in Gotham City), you know at a glance what town you are in. No mistaking it for New York or Chicago or Boston.

Architecture is only part. The one thing you don’t seem to do is hear that Philly accent (the best sample I found was a recording on the crosswalk button). They do love that cheesesteak though.

(Also breaking the mold, Chicago locals aren’t fond of “Chi-town,“ and you had better not refer to San Francisco as "Frisco," but the vocals in Philadelphia are fine with “Philly.")

They are friendly, with their own multiculturalism. More permeable than San Francisco (which tends to lock into neighborhoods like a really small patchwork quilt), less comfortable than Oakland (the tensions are easier to find).

And maybe it is just the current fad, but their approach to history has a distinct shading. Okay, I haven’t been back to Beantown in a while but my memory is the only thing there’s more of than Dunkin’ Donuts are the “Paul Revere once had breakfast here” plaques. Same with the DC area. 

In Philly, there’s context. I’m surprised a certain politician hasn’t sent his goons over to demand a few plaques torn down. They’d be at it a while, though. There are quite old and established monuments right in the tourist part of town that celebrate not the flag-toting boosterism of the American Revolution but the hard (and constant) job of creating and upholding democracy.

The context was always there. On the Olympia, displays on the naval victories of the Philippines campaign did not shy from the atrocities committed, or the profits made by United Fruit. This isn’t just inside museums, either. It’s all over the streets.

Oh, and yeah. I was viewing all these exhibits on the tangled weave of human rights, corporate profits, and the struggles of a young nation to define itself and how things were supposed to work, and my light reading for the trip was a book on the Ludlow Massacre.

So I’m taking notes on, I guess you could call it three books now. 

Spending what felt like the larger part of the trip enmeshed in the travel technology gave me some thoughts for Blue. An exhibit on the post revolutionary war China trade at the Independence Seaport Museum gave me some fun thoughts about trade activity on the frontier. And there were some possible parallels, even, with the naval battles against Barbary pirates. 

Keri Sinclair is still up in a J-tube trying to fix a circuit, and her world is changing by the hour. It is what is supposed to be happening at this point in writing the book, but I am getting real impatient to start cranking out chapters.

When she gets out of that tube, she's got a visit to still-unnamed-station in her future. This is at least a big transship station. Might be shipyards and stuff too. Not sure yet. The one thing I'm pretty sure of is Oberon is visible from there. Whether Oberon is visible from anywhere else, I don't know yet. Strange stars are... strange. That scene is growing bigger and bigger. A failure of her skills as an officer. More about the relationship between her and the ranking enlisted in the power room. Probably a brawl. Probably drinking, too. 

Less progress on the other two. I've named the coalfield wars adventure A Fox's Sleep. That part of it (that Penny is trying to keep a low profile) is likely to be the least of it. I've sort of settled on a data center, I want to explore the way that the more obvious social control of the company store et al were polished up by Rockefeller and his cronies until they are subtler (and often harder to fight). 

And archaeologically, it is about protecting a site and applying for it to be on the Registry. What I want is for a boy that died during one contested event to be a sort of town mascot, and for his story to be used by two sides of a political fight. They don't want fresh archaeology done because they have gotten good at spinning it the way it is.

Oh, and the Bell Witch. Maybe.

Thing is, the specifics of the Ludlow Massacre are so fascinating. I don't want to change anything about it. I binge-read several Lincoln Child/Douglas Preston books recently as well (hey, they are mystery-thrillers with a strong regional flavor. Exactly the market I'm aiming for now). One featured the Roswell incident and stayed within the (updated) facts -- such as Project Mogul. Another left New Mexico for a Donner Party story that, again, stayed pretty close to the truth.

But then there was one with a party of hikers in New Mexico going mad and running out of their tents near-naked into the snow and I am ashamed I got a full chapter in before realizing this was the Dyatlov Pass incident. Okay, the writers did manage to tie it to a couple of fun bits of New Mexico history in the end, but there are more and more places where they chose to change the facts to make a better story.

And it still bugs me. I've had to do it, I'll do it again, but it bugs me.

It's like putting the Chicago "El" in a story set in Philadelphia.

Talking to machines

The cover came back. Instead of tweaking what was a nearly-finished design, she moved everything around and ran AI on the remains. New Mexico turned into Cabo (one white sand is like another, to AI). I did a soft confront on her using AI to communicate with me, and she returned a soft admission. 

I am very, very tired of getting nothing from cover designers but more ideas I can play with. I'm back to making my own.

And I'm stuck on Early Fox because one of her ideas was so good I really want to see if I can make it work.

The space opera goes as expected. I'm okay with the first scenes taking a while. Now I'm into the tech density question; how much world-building here, how much in the entire book. It should go faster after this. It is space opera, after all. Whereas classic SF is (supposed to be) about the ideas and/or the technical execution, space opera is towards the adventure side of things. Less technical explanation, more fisticuffs.

Mostly.

That's my new fear. I've been stopping every sentence to look up stuff. It is nice that I sort of know my way around tech, so most of the stuff I've been dreaming up, like nanofoam fire suppressants, is already something somebody is writing up papers on and putting them in NASA Tech Briefs or JSTOR.

But as much as I mean for Blue to spend most of the book running around with a blaster in one hand, the plot I've constructed for book one (and the parts of her character that make her different and interesting) require there be a spanner in the other. There's a Robinsonade happening; the first third of the book absolutely will take some looking stuff up.

And in the last of my nowhere plans for nobody, I checked out one of the forks of LTX 2.3. Those are on confused legal ground. The original is free but there are restrictions -- in fact there are safety rails built into the model (which I generally consider a good thing).

So far the model I have been messing with is more accurate in some places, seems to generate somewhat less animated animation, and might be slightly faster. I have yet to get into the huge number of nodes that can give more control.

People are already using this stuff commercially. A lot of the energy towards staying on-model, and tightly controlling the timing and camera moves, is coming from people doing product showcases. I don't know if these are being used internally or going out on cheaper advertising slots, but this is happening. And some band videos as well.

So it ain't just dancing cats. Whether this is good or bad...