Is this just fantasy?

One year to first draft was the plan. Six months for basic research and outlining.

After four months I'm relatively certain that the original ideas either don't fit the real history or would be too difficult to pull off. That's as close as I've come to outlining the plot.

I looked at trends and genre classifications and what I've brought home from that is largely what I went in with; that there exists a contract with the reader, expectations that the book should try and fulfill. But I don't know what these might be.

I've followed a few attractive leads but I can't even say I've decided they are dead ends. It would be amusing to treat my Mycenaean mercenary as a displaced Homeric hero, applying classical Greek ideals to a rather different situation, for instance. And it is still a problem for research and a risk of going astray from what I really want to achieve.

Last week it was sort of historo-cultural thinking. The purpose of the book might be exploring the Bronze Age Collapse and trying to discover the reasons for it. And or the nature of the mysterious Sea Peoples. Trouble is, the locals don't know they are living in a Collapse. And the Sea Peoples? One of the things that makes them so frustratingly mysterious to us is the way period references strongly suggest that they were so well known there wasn't any reason to go into detail about them!

The Medinet Habu inscriptions aren't, "mysterious raiders from the sea!" they are more like, "goddamn, it's those guys again."

This week I'm thinking in terms of the Quest novel, which tends towards travelogue. With the point being if I can identify cool places to see, cool peoples to visit, cool things to do I might be able to arrange those like islands and then fill in around them as necessary.

Unfortunately it's a small list so far. I'd like to play barrow wights and looted weapons in a Tholos tomb. I'd like to do a little North by Northwest with some Hatti chariots against my protagonists. I really do want to see some of New Kingdom Egypt despite it being a real pain to do in so many ways.

And there's three other things that keep growing detail as I think about them, even as two of them may be impossible to fit into a reasonable plot. There's a confrontation with a god -- worse, a sort of sister of Eris, a being that even the other Greek gods are scared of. But I can't really make it work, and as I work on the rest of the story it seems more and more out of place with the rest. There's the Trojan War. I'm really liking it as something more than a move by some loot-hungry Mycenae, more a plot and counter-plot between Hittite and Kaska and others over the Luwian territories, with Mycenae on both sides of the fight. Leading to a small-scale anabasis as following the sack of Troy one band of warriors has to struggle their way down the coast through increasingly unfriendly territories (especially if they are just beating the Philistine/Sea Peoples en route).

The big problem with this one is the timing. Specifically, information timing. There are things I want the Egyptian scribe and eventual "head" of the party to learn in sequence. And I also want to develop the understanding of the reader about the collapse. And, to, give them a chance to experience the glories of the palatial age before it all starts coming apart at the seams.

And lastly there's the scene on the boat. Probably pirate, possibly more organized raider (aka Sea Peoples -- whatever that means!) With the Scribe and the Cretan girl acting out tropes of classical-era comedy (the drunken master, the clever slave) to keep the pirates entertained, whilst the exhausted mercenaries watch their dangerous game and try not to get involved, and a seemingly harmless Phoenician watches with too-astute eyes and is in turn studiously ignored by the pirates...

In the end, I think the road to my plot is going to look like the road to the Bronze Age Collapse. No single cause is sufficient. Instead it is a combination of things.

I put 150,000 words of fanfiction down playing in an attempted splice of the worlds of Stargate and Tomb Raider.  I learned there the joys of research and the joys of history, and how to very efficiently turn raw research into prose. I also decided I am not fond of compressed text and info-dumps and that reaction, too, will get folded into what I do in this new novel.

From the same source, from spending so much time (via extensive podcasts) in the company of working archaeologists, comes a renewed intent to be honest to real history. Fortunately the Bronze Age Collapse is not a terribly fertile ground for the science wars. We really don't know a lot of key details. That sort of takes the sting out of telling a story where it was the fault of zombies. Or the Sea People were all Deep Ones.

Somewhere along there, though, I realized that watching a city burn on the horizon is no way to understand and experience the history. Fortunately, the idea of wandering sword-swinging heroes who pass by on their way to their own goals (whether selfish or world-saving), doesn't on examination match up with most actual examples. Even in an open-world RPG the characters get involved. They go into a community, pick sides in a local conflict, learn and become in turn part of the story there.

Which does mean, though, my inchoate thoughts of viewing Ugarit from a distance or Mycenae merely as ruins is not going to work. I really do have to get down into those places and cultures. And that's gonna take a lot more research than I had hoped to have to undertake.

Because it has become increasingly clear. As much as I have tried to seek out the most opinionated, polemic works, the worst I have found are still reluctant to commit. The Peleset have been identified by many with the Philistines, and they appear to have settled near modern-day Palestine, but the language is unknown, the origin unknown, the influence and/or connection to Mycenae unknown, and plenty of writers reject the whole thing anyhow.

So for me to say this is how this town looks, this is what they speak, this is who invaded them, and so forth, I need to be familiar with at least some number of the various primary sources and other texts used by the people who are currently theorizing about them. I can not, for this book, take whatever is up that day on Wikipedia and run with it as "good enough." I have to be historian myself, and come up with my own hypothesis.