Eliza, Eliza

I'm in the final sequence of the New Mexico book. It is getting simpler all the time. I just dropped thirty-five bucks on a book about the El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro but I went and wrote all 300 words of the vignette set during the Juan de Oñate expedition without it. Might want to read up on Lozen before I write her vignette, though.

I'm still on the fence about whether I will spring for editing, much less developmental edit, on this one. I have larger bread to fry.

Because I need to explore other stories. The four (soon to be five) Athena Fox books I want to think of as back catalog. Potential income and name recognition as I write new stuff.

I narrowed it down to three options for triage, but before I reach out to a professional, I reached out to one that plays a professional (and a human) on the internet. Hey, I had a chit courtesy of the subscription fee I already pay to ProWritingAid.

I trust it here because I'm not looking for value judgements and I'm ignoring the insincere praise; I'm looking for pattern recognition.

Without prompting, without the prod of knowing what I wanted to hear so it could regurgitate it back to me, the bot identified a genre. No, a sub-genre; "Archaeological Thriller," which is so new it still doesn't have a standard iconography.

I trust the AI less on whether the book I showed it checks the right boxes for that genre. It may be entirely ignoring the genre when it went on to talk about plot character and theme. But it produced a picture that works for me; of these books (or at least the first one) as sitting comfortably within the Thriller genre.

As an option within that genre I hadn't had clearly described to me until I found the Paul Tomlinson books, and hadn't really connected to the Archaeological Thriller sub-genre despite there being examples out there.

Paul Tomlinson calls this particular flavor the "Amateur on the run" thriller. 

It works, it has an audience, it is fairly straight-forward to stage for (that is, covers and keywords, advertising and blurbs).

This does leave open the question of whether the other books fit as well. The Athens book had almost the classic on-the-run profile. The Kyoto book could be considered a "wrong man" thriller, even if it dives early into more of an infiltration or even caper. But the Paris book is clearly treasure hunt, without the elements of pursuit, paranoia, or mistaken identity (although there are the elements that critic John Cawelti talks about; disguise, invisibility, and conspiracy). And the London book is essentially mystery, with Penny in the driver's seat for most of it.

I can't ignore how close I slide to cozy mystery, but there are both textual reasons (something I'll get into in a later post -- tentative title; "The Mystery as Post-Processual Archaeology") and stronger market reasons not to go there.

Penny and her journey is still the selling point, with the mystery being the excuse for it. She remains outsider to the cultures she encounters. She makes friends but largely fights alone. And the action is physical, much more in line with thriller (or urban fantasy) than the more cerebral process of detecting. Like Nancy Drew, she may be smart, but what she has aren't cases, but adventures.

So thriller is the right umbrella. Not cozy, not mystery, not history, not travel.

I am also feeling strongly that leaning on the dual role of Penny Bright/Athena Fox is not the right approach. Part of her hero's journey is becoming the mask, part of the wrong-man thriller is being mistaken for the mask, and there is much humor in the way the real world either echoes or fails to echo the kinds of situations a fictional archaeologist-adventurer would encounter. But this is better thought of not as theme, but as part of the character package, like Nero Wolfe and his orchids, or Bones and whatever uncatalogued neurodivergence she is supposed to have.

The iconography and other genre traits of Archaeological Thriller are still being formed. As evidenced by not a few writers choosing the term "archaeological adventure" or even "archaeological mystery" instead. The Amelia Peabody books are more genteel, and could certainly drift towards cozy mystery, but are still being staged as thrillers.

Where I want to and believe I should lean in my staging (advertising, blurbs, keywords, etc) is the amateur hero, finding surprising strengths within themselves. And, again within that particular thriller umbrella, exotic settings, unusual situations, masks and disguises, conspiracy and mystery, and being alone and often on the run, unsure of who they can trust and up against impossible odds.

I don't need to emphasize archaeology, history, or even the exotic settings (they are assumed to come with the meal). And I also see no good coming out of trying to emphasize the retro, or the idea of movie situations made real, or any of that.

What I am planning is a re-release. And there is an additional wrinkle.

I need to drop the cozy titles. I can get series/brand recognition through other elements than having "Fox" in every title. It was feeling like a stretch anyhow.

I checked with KDP and they are find with issuing new books under a different title, as long as there is a clear "previously published as..." in the description. Done this way, this would give me a chance to release five books on timed intervals. And possibly sweeten the pot with ARCs as well.

Developmental editing is still on the table. I will do another line edit, at least. There's enough small stuff even I have noticed to make it worthwhile.

Thrillers and archaeological thrillers, oddly, converge on titles. There is a strong tendency for the MacGuffin in the title, as well as something more conceptual. The only difference is that the archaeological thriller almost always has something clearly historical about one of the title elements.

Which again underlines how the archaeological thriller is a thriller. And once more helps me understand why this is a good brand fit; if anything, the Athena Fox stories are a better thriller fit than they are an archaeological thriller fit! (Since the latter trends strongly towards world-threatening artifacts and well-armed heroes, where the former can more easily support an everyman hero and a pure MacGuffin that never actually does anything.)

So thriller titles, basically. With, when possible, a historical name in there. I can get an "The X of Y" out of most of them pretty easily.

And covers. I do not understand what book covers are doing with the human figure now. We went through the floating heads phase. We did (and Urban Fantasy lingered) on the black-leather-against-burning-city look, somewhat aped for a while in the more protagonist-led military SF (swap out the black leather for power armor). There was the very small silhouette for a thankfully brief moment, now we seem to have the slightly larger back-to-the-camera silhouette. Still not an attractive look.

So leave that off. Thrillers, in particular, go for a conceptual cover and whether it is a one-shot hero or a series hero, they get identified not by having their mug on the cover but by having their name.

This leaves artifacts, settings, and symbology as the big cover elements. All generally with a dark thriller-esque look to the rest of it. Settings are more likely when there is something big and archaeological and easily recognizable, like the pyramid group in Cairo. After that, it stops being archaeological and more generic thriller cover, with modern city or exotic city being largely obscured with dramatic lighting.

I am not enamored of artifact titles or artifacts in the cover (and, yes, the AI had at least one to suggest for me). The dotted-line-on-a-map doesn't work for me now, either, because I don't believe in the retro thing as being a good approach.

But that doesn't mean I can't use graphics. And sometimes these graphics might be a map. Or have map-like elements. But this is what I'm getting out of the current (and not really there yet) cover design I have over at 100 Covers; graphics are cool for a thriller title, and I can go something more graphically interesting without losing the strong genre identification (and the thumbnail readability).

What I don't know now is the timing. I need to finish the current book. Not sure if I'm going to release "formerly titled The Early Fox" to eBook with nothing but the basic edit, or send that one through a longer pipeline first, or wait and save my money (developmental editing ain't cheap) for a book I feel more positive about.

New covers, I'm sure of. New titles, probably. At least some editing, certainly. But deeper editing? That's the triage, still, and to really decide I need to be talking to a human.

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...