My Inari

 Way too much research. Also feeling frustrated at how slowly the plot is coming together, and the story doesn't quite feel "real" to me.

This is the problem of writing a series that progresses. If I had one solid Origin Story book, then the rest would be formula. Well, Penny Bright still hasn't quite morphed into Athena Fox. I mean, there's going to be conflict between these two parts of her experience. That's a constant for the series. Although I do want to move more towards it being inherent conflicts in the role, and less her conflict with taking on a role in the first place.

Plus the ninjas were maybe a mistake. I brought them out too early and too strong so now I've got to back-pedal because Penny is being too blasé about it. Both about how much ninjas aren't really running around Japan (well, they are, but that's another story), and how Penny isn't really being cool and collected about people jumping out at her with weapons in their hands (even if the weapons are weird fantasy weapons).

So basically she's having a small breakdown. That was a given -- I was aiming for that in this book already. But now I have to tell the reader without telling her because otherwise she's not coming across as, well, a real person.

So I've barely introduced the main cast, my protagonist is acting strange, the Japanese setting is still so alien all the narrator can say is, "It looked like some sort of..."  And no wonder I feel disconnected from the novel.

***

Finished the Turnbull book and there were a lot of things I hadn't known. Well, duh. That's why you do research. Better way to put it is that there were things I didn't expect I'd be learning. I wanted more about history and geography and he explained a lot more about ninja in contemporary culture, the religious connections, and...well all sorts of stuff there's no chance of fitting into the book.

I'm also reading a paper right now on Inari shrines and, hoo boy. Okay, here's a simple one. You'll hear in various places about the "Five Great Shrines." So go to one. Ask the head priest, "What's the other four?" You'll get a different answer at every shrine. As Karen Smythers puts it, "Even the regional variability is variable."

And I'm resisting now the urge to properly cite everything I write now, to academic standards.

I got the reminder email and I'm still paying JSTOR for a monthly membership. I went over there thinking about cancelling (I'd gotten it for my Bronze Age novel) but ran into several papers I wanted to read for my current book.

So I'm reading general background on the Genpai wars, the Imperial Treasures, magatama, the bubble economy... Seems like every scene is giving me questions I really want to answer, and they are deep questions too. Once again, doing top-level internet research pulls up forty identical copies of the same surface gloss. It is harder and harder these days to drill down to proper detail.

Citations, people, citations!

I pinned this story on knowing a bit about Kyoto, Ancient Astronaut stuff, rock climbing and fitness stuff. Even on the stuff I knew, though, I'm needing to know more. Frustrating stuff because all I need sometimes is a word or two in a description. But it isn't a description I can pass over.

When they drive up to the factory in Nara the workers are doing calisthenics. Which happens when, and does it still happen at Japanese companies, and what kinds of exercises? Where in Nara can I place this; are we looking at lake, river, mountain, forest, city...? It's just one word but I need the right word.

There's a reason I keep needing to take a break and sit back drinking beer and watching Bones. Although I really should be watching the six different programs on Japan I have lined up in my watchlist already...

Echo...co...co! But why...y...y..?

Part I is finished. Just under 20K. I've accepted that this basically ends the "traditional Japan" part of the story, or at least the tourist in traditional Japan. It will be back at the crux, but for now the rest of the story is going to be increasingly modern Japan, fancy high-tech stuff, plots that are largely divorced from the specifics of the setting and, basically, jumping the shark.

Not the only tough choice I've had to work through over the past few days. I've been wresting with how to present language and language difficulties. I'm at the "write an apology in the back matter of the book" stage on that. 

Refining my vision of the plot sort of following the three Imperial Regalia as a set of three red herrings, with the plot seemingly pointing at the implications of one only for the inconsistencies to finally re-direct.

And the nature of the cult. The next scene is the introduction to some of their buildings and operations so I really do have to nail down things now. They definitely have to collect artifacts, because that's how I get the plot to work.

But I still haven't decided how deep they are going into Ancient Aliens stuff. There's some good reasons to do it. There are also some good reasons to mine popular science fiction for cult terminology; lots of other cults do it. But at the same time I don't want to make them too silly. I want to respect what is actually going on in the New Religions of Japan. And I feel like I want to write a book that is really centered on Ancient Aliens stuff, possibly built around a Bro Adventure crew shooting a cable TV show. And maybe wrapped around a murder mystery which is only archaeology-adjacent.

And I even have a strong leaning towards two different and seemingly incompatible belief systems going on between two different founders of the thing. A dialogue if you will -- and my character gets into the middle of it. Which is sort of my dialog, too. Silver jumpsuits are a little too silly, but I'm not going to read fifteen books on esoteric Buddhism either.

Well, right now I'm trying to nail down the "factory" of the first visit. After looking around a bunch of maps I'm stealing the actual location of the Miho Museum for the cult headquarters and their own museum. I haven't quite decided if the factory for the first visit is elsewhere -- I'm thinking Nara at the moment, as I am attracted by the ancient Nara jades, but I'm finding it extremely difficult to pull up good information on the modern Japanese jade industry.

(It's all Myanmar, Myanmar, Myanmar. Which is true, but I ran across something about jade carving in Japan so even if it is just cottage workshop artisanal stuff, it does exist as an industry. Somewhere.)

And Godzilla is in the book now. Sort of.

(I also just watched The Octogon all the way through. Now I've started Enter the Ninja. All ninja, all the time!)

Bell, book, and candle

I love and hate discovery writing.

So I wrote the Giant Crab scene, and did Osaka Castle right up to when the ninja leaps out.

I needed something to hang the scene on. A way to set up the physical environment for the coming fight, and a way to justify this being Osaka-jo, as opposed to any other spot in Japan. And the fun answer was to have her do one of her lectures there.

Yeah, but Osaka Castle? Pretty much famous for getting burned down. Twice. And a few more rounds of destruction but it is the two big ones that matter here. Once at the death of Toyotomi Hideyori in the final act of the wars that brought the Tokugawa Shogunate into power. And once during the Meiji Restoration, and a key incident in the final defeat of the last Tokugawa.

The first period being something I'd already ended up with a history-drop on when I did some background of the ninja in history and myth. The second being a major visual at Toei Eigamura, from the Meiji part of the park right in front of the entrance hall, to the popularity of the shinsengumi.

Which means I've been setting up a ton of history bracketing the Isolation Years, the period of the Tokugawa Shogunate, when the archaeology that might actually come into play is around the Genpai Wars four hundred years earlier. Plus, you know, extremely early, kofun and "time of the gods" stuff.

While at work I listened to an otherwise not terribly good podcast on kusanagi no tsurugi, which had a couple of stories I hadn't run across before about the sword. I'd been planning to wave the idea of the sword as a red herring but concentrate on either the mirror or the jewel...but I'd already laid in stuff on the jewel with both a kofun tomb and a jade necklace on a minor character...

And half-way through that podcast I realized I wanted to do all three. To have the purpose of the cult be unclear in the unfolding web of games and masks and lies, but to have it consecutively appear to be about first the jewel, then the sword...and finally be revealed as the mirror.

Which means among other things Mishima is back on. The silver pavilion is in Kyoto. But more than that, all the stuff about the shinsengumi and the Tokugawa Shogunate and the shinsengumi can fit into a suspicious leaning towards militarism, with the cult's possible aims being connected to, well, the sorts of politics one of its real-world models is connected to.

Except it is all still a false trail. And so is the one that points towards the jewel, the yasakani no magatama. And all the stories from Amaterasu in the cave to the battle of Dan-no-ura to whatever men of former powerful clans or renegade priests are around in the present-day of the story, are all dropping hints that lead towards the final what-it-was-really-all-about.

It's gonna make my job harder. But I already needed to make some complicated skullduggery to fill out the middle of the novel. It also, though, may end up making it longer.

Makeup and Motorcycles

I finally got to the Mall Ninja scene. It's a mall -- a shopping mall called the Kyoto Porta, under the train station Gamera attacked that one time. And there's a ninja. I think I finally figured out what the Ninja Club is, even though I'm only half way through the Turnbull book. These guys are basically experimental archaeologists. They are nuts for ninja, smart enough to know the legend is largely bunk but unwilling to accept the possibly quite boring history. So they are seeing just how far you can push the envelope of the possible, both academically and practically. So basically Thor Heyerdal with shurikan.

Or at least that's the polite way of looking at it. The other way of looking at it is that these are obsessed otaku (if that isn't a tautology). Young and sure of themselves and willing to spend way much more time than is rational learning how to use a blowpipe and climbing claws.

The other reason for the mall is a soft introduction to Dr. Bronner's Pure-Castillian antiquities-trafficking end-of-the-world cult. Their product line is now officially called Genki and they make a very nice face cream.

Wikimedia CC, taken by Omegatron

And I almost wrote a bunch of paragraphs on makeup before I dialed it back. In any case, between seeing the Christmas lights, being tailed by a motorcycle, learning about Genki and getting another language lesson I've already burned 1,700 words. Bringing me to 15K and I'm still in Part I.

There's three scenes to go before Ichiro shows up to even come close to introducing the actual plot.

***

At the moment I'm regretting bringing in the ninja. Because I had to context them. I did so at Toei Eigamura but I could have done so a lot more organically. The story of the ninja basically begins in the Warring States period and got the most traction during the Tokugawa Shogunate. So explaining the ninja in any real way meant at least name-checking those. But due to the nature of the place, I also touched on the Meiji Restoration. And the thing is? The plot is largely going to hang on an event of the Genpei War, which is in a significantly earlier period. Plus it is looking like she might get a chance to visit a keyhole tomb, which is Kofun Period. 

I am trying very hard not to go into all this stuff and name everything. I took her phone away at the Kabuki theatre (actually, they block cell phones there), and didn't even let her have a program but I am getting very tired of "looked something like" and "might have been a sort of" circumlocutions. 

I'm still ending up with way too much Japanese. I've written myself into a bit of a corner here. She has an extremely good memory and there's only so much I can do a "he said something so fast I couldn't catch the words" or whatever. She is very much reaching out for whatever scraps of meaning she can get and that means I want full, idiomatic sentences to be in the text.

Here's one of the worst bits so far:

Hanae covered her mouth with one hand. “Kawaisō,” she said.

“Hey,” Aki told me. “I know that one. It means ‘pitiful.’”

“I thought I hung up on you,” I whispered back. “How do you say ‘shut up?’”

“You mean her, or me?” Aki giggled. “The only one I know is ‘Urusai yo!’”

“Urusai yo?” I echoed uncertainly.

Hanae paused. Just…paused.

“It’s my friend,” I pointed at my bluetooth. “She’s in Boston. She likes anime.”

“Sonna desu ka,” Hanae said in a tone of it all being very clear now.

Plus I'm reflecting that despite my many lectures on the subject, I really don't do character voices. I mean I should be finding distinct and unique speech patterns but I don't. I just throw a couple of verbal tics at it when I remember but otherwise everyone in the story sounds like me.

That's extra tough, considering one of the things I want to do with this is have Penny consciously trying to behave just a little more adult, to talk in a more professional and serious manner, and for that to slowly bleed into her narrative as well.

(Plus I'm backing of from the extremely choppy speech and all the lightning reverses of Hounds. )

***

I'm unhappy, too, with the rococo. But I guess that's just how I write. When I set up the first ninja scene the outline just said, "ninja attacks." Then I started thinking about what was a possible clever move. That led to a memory of the shakuhachi being used by traveling monks. And reading up on busking led me to "'Round Midnight." And by the time I'd gotten there I'd already come up with the Octogon gag and was going to do it there. And when I checked my maps it was just off the Gion-bashi, the bridge that RoBoHon had lectured James May about in one of the most-viewed clips from his show, and there was a statue of the founder of Kabuki right at the same place, and I'd figured out the song had been written by Thelonious Monk.

The Toei Eigamura scene went the same way. I watched several videos and took a stroll with Google maps (besides having, after all, been there myself) so the Meiji stuff, and the make up of the shops, and the ninja cafe, and then the costume rental led me to wakashu and setting that up made me do a whole bit about theatre geeks, and that set up something that let me involve her in the chanbara, and of course one of the activities I found on a video included a mirror maze...

So that ended up at 3.8K -- and there aren't even any ninja attacks.

The Kyoto Porta scene is done. Now on to Osaka!

Pigeons on the roof, aloof

9,000 words in 9 days, and it is time for a bath.

Well, actually. I wrote that scene too. Followed by the fancy dinner that gets served at a ryokan.  I'm going to have a lot of trouble backing Penny down to Budget Traveler again for the Paris novel (even if I didn't intend to send her to the Jules Verne Cafe).

Based on how things are moving, I'm going to come up short of my targets on the "Tourist in Old Kyoto" section, and the "Penny works out a bunch" section. Which means I really am going to need some complicated plotting when she actually crosses wits with the cult.

There's no real way to describe a wealth of detail. Take for instance this place:

A picture may be worth a thousand words but that isn't reversible. Not if you want words that aren't boring. In the current draft, I got 114 words out of them, and that included a brief comparison of Chinese and Japanese architectural styles. The entire shrine, complete with food stands and prayer bells and a bit of meditation, ran 1,200 words.

And then there's stuff like this:

Penny doesn't read Japanese, and she doesn't know Kabuki. So she can't give the names of anything she is looking at and that is entirely intentional. As I said in an earlier post, well, let me let Penny tell it:

“Minami-za,” she told me. “It is the Kabuki theatre in Kyoto. Stay on Shijo-dori and cross the Kamo-gawa on the Gion-bashi and it will be on your right.”

“Aki…” I said. It was starting to make sense. “Did you just say stay on Shijo Street and cross the Kamo River on the Gion Bridge to get to the Minami Theatre? Why not just say that?”

Which only underlines (ahem) why I'm not italicizing foreign language. In any part of the books. It would look really awkward, and then the lines get very blurry; do you italicize sushi? At what point does a word grow up to be a real boy?

So the latest problem I've been having is over English-speakers. The reality in Japan -- this was particularly my experience in Kyoto -- is that native fluency existed but many people I encountered were somewhat better in English than I was in Japanese. (Okay...make that a lot better). It really should be rendered that way in the book. 

Not necessarily spelling out the pronunciations (there's a whole discussion about that but basically modern thinking is that in the hands of almost all writers it detracts more than it adds flavor). But the grammatical errors and elisions should be there.

And I tried it. And immediately fell into a crazy wormhole because there are underlying ideas of Japanese grammar and Japanese language culture that would want to be expressed. Japanese is almost as dogmatic as German about word order, for instance. And I haven't even touched on the idea of politeness levels (largely because I'm saving it up for a later bit).

So you would expect confusion about the "particles" (as a Japanese would see it) like "The" and "And" and "Is" -- the desu-series doesn't quite translate the same. The usual answer to confusion over the nuances of connective words and verb endings is pidgin; to omit them all. But then add the obligatory politeness words on top...

And you end up with a sort of "We very sorry honorable Smith-san" that just grates. It makes it look like I am making fun of the culture. 

Well, there is the added layer to this linguistic turducken that is English as it is taught in Japanese schools. Which is rote-taught and bears about as much resemblance to English as she is spoke as phrasebook speech does to the actual language in question. (And, yes, native Japanese speakers have expressed their bemusement at certain usages that crop up in every tourist guide, comments along the line of, "Nobody actually says that!")

In a large way, phrasebook language and first lessons in language is more lies-to-children. Such as the advice you get starting out that Japanese words do not have accented syllables. Well, hell no. It actually does have tones, and if you get the tones really wrong the locals won't even be able to understand you (yes...personal experience this time).

Of course there's also the problem that I can't help but use any passing speaker as a mouthpiece to explain things to the reader. Even Hanae, who I had meant to be a woman of few English words (and too polite to speak up most of the time, at least until Penny began to understand her better), has been enlisted to explain things and, in an instant, morphed into the same Oxford Lecturer voice I always fall into.

Well, the chambara is next. I've been updating my online "examples of notes" page as I go, and the next scene to write is at Toei.

https://writingdownthesherds.wordpress.com/wedding-live-research/

Air Flute

 

Was sick today. Lay in bed and watched random videos. One of them was a recorder player who found an actually decent bass recorder for under a hundred euros. And that led me to a flautist comparing a couple of cheap flutes she had bought, one of them being my own Medini (in the same cute pink color, too -- she got it for a video).

And in the hands of a good concert flute player -- the tone was badly airy. Yeah. So it may not be the fault of my embouchure at all. It may be I am fighting against a cheap instrument.

Well, I only wanted flute for the additional tone colors. I can live with a breathy sounding one. I took it to work and the past couple of weeks I've been practicing with that and I've finally gotten some basic control and endurance on it and can make it through a tune.

Hi no youjin

Well, this proofs the idea of having boots-on-the-ground experience. So far all of the action of the story has been in a part of Kyoto I didn't really explore. But the ryokan is informed by the ryokan and minshuku I stayed at, all the way up to Hanae copying my own landlady with a fondly exasperated "Kawaisou!"

And the atmosphere of the hole-in-the-wall place Penny eats her first meal at is based on the feel and what (very) few details I could remember from my first meal in Kyoto.

Here's two bits, though; when she is falling asleep the first night she hears the cry of the volunteer fire wardens making their rounds. That's a detail I haven't seen in any of the research I've done from home. (In fact, it was extremely difficult to track down the actual phrase they were using). I knew about that because I'd been there. Just like I know that when you get downtown in Kyoto the crosswalk lights play a traditional and oddly minor-key sounding Japanese song. (Which song, I haven't tried to track down yet.)

I'm around 7K in draft now makes it a bit under 1/10 of the projected length of the novel. And taking a break because I'm at a place where I could drop 500-700 words on a Kabuki performance but I don't know if I should.

At this point I really don't know what is working. It feels rushed and like there's still too much nihongo in it although I went through and deleted a bunch again. It is so very hard to describe Japan in words. The look of the place, that is. And worse when I'm throwing so many contrasts at the reader.

I mean, I am very consciously starting her in the traditional part of Kyoto, putting her in a ryokan and staying away from department stores and pachinko and robots and even keeping her away from English speakers. 

But you still can't help but have an experience that veers all over the map. Sigh. If I was filming this, I'd just start the whole thing at Toei Eigamura and then only gradually allow anything modern in the picture.

***

Most of the reviews I traded for at Pubby have posted. One them got taken down again by Amazon. I think. I just remember the number being higher, then going away. I have just enough to balance out that damned 1-star now until it doesn't look fatally bad. On the other hand, two of the reviewers mentioned the "choppy" narrative and the third complained about typos.

I won't say there aren't any of the later, but these reviews are so brief and I don't have any way to contact them so I have no idea if he was running into slang, British spelling, or just plain unfamiliar words -- or if he really did hit a few of the ones I know are there and they bugged him. Or if he felt a need to say something -- he still gave me five stars.

Terrible thing about Pubby -- my review of THEM is no better than three stars -- is that the writer is asked to provide descriptive words, favorite scenes...a whole page of basically Cliff Notes to crib from so the reviewer doesn't even have to read the book. I think their system is slipshod. My last reviewer was required to purchase his own copy. According to Pubby, he did. According to my sale figures, nobody has done so in a month or more.

And there's a monthly fee for the service. I want to use the credits I've saved up to "splash" Wedding a little, but I don't see it even reaching first draft sooner than three months from now.

Well, at least I have all the scenes planned out -- research and all -- to get me through the next several chapters.

James May, Sumimasen

 I got a reading light, but the biggest chunks of research time I have is during mealtimes. So I've seen a lot more video than I have read books, so far.

The Kyoto sequence is really coming together. The more I research, the more I find things that are right there in higashiyama ward, that is, the part of town centered in the Gion or old geisha district (which in Kyoto are called geiko. Just because. More kansai-ben, like "okiini" for "arigato" (which I learned when I was in Kyoto myself, but had forgotten.)

And now I just read an article on kansai-ben and realized a language bit I did in chapter two is wrong. Unless Hanae isn't a Kyoto native, she wouldn't leave off the final vowel of "desu" or use "ikemasen." Although I really don't want to get into dialect on this story! I'm reluctant enough to have much language at all!

Anyhow. The ryokan I picked is a short walk to one of the major shrines, which also marks one end of the Gion "strip," which if you follow it across the Kamo river passes by the Takashiyama department store and ends up at Kyoto Station and the Kyoto Porta. Plus the oldest and most important Kabuki theatre is along that same general line.

But I'm still getting to the south west of Kyoto for the Toei Eigamura. Which, after I'd done so much chasing of links, I cued up one of the videos on my streaming watch list and...they did twenty minutes on the place and showed the inside of the costume rental and some of the stuff that happens before and after the chambara.

And possibly hit the bamboo forest of Arashiyama because it is right there. But I've also settled on Osaka for her third very busy day in Japan (not counting the evening she came in).

Because here comes a bit of a research failure. A method failure, that is. What I am doing these days is researching enough to get the general idea and to work out the bones of the plot. Then when I start drilling down to specific scenes, I go back to the research for the intensive stuff. I really like doing this during the actual writing instead of trying to get down to that level during outlining, because if I did it that way, I'd have to go back and find my place again in all the material three months later when I finally got to that scene. 

This way, everything is fresh. I've got windows open to half my stuff on Yasaka Shrine right now. I'm only bookmarking the things that I might need during re-writes. Or if I have a computer crash.

But...the plan said to start off at Atsuta Shrine, the place where Kusanagi is strongly rumored to be kept. And then have an episode at Osaka Castle.

Oops. I'd entirely forgotten I'd made two stops on the Shinkansen to Tokyo and Atsuta Shrine is a couple of hours away. It really doesn't work to have her go there (plus it is such a sprawling, all-day shrine). So I can't do that bit. Well, there's a central shrine in Tokyo that holds the other two important regalia...

Osaka also seems far...an hour and change itself. But I can get away with doing one. And here is where Bim, I mean Jim, comes in again. Because he reacted to Osaka as being a bit more dirty, boisterous, cosmopolitan city than polite Kyoto. And this is a contrast I want to do.

And it also turns out -- and I've only just started reading Turnbull, and not that Turnbull, but the recent one where he deconstructs the ninja myth a bit -- that Iga is really close to Kyoto as well. So I can do it. If I can find a place where I can stick not just ninja, but yamabushi...and snowmobiles.

Yeah, I still don't know what the "Ninja Club" is. And the first one is going to show up about three scenes from now.

***

And this is a lot of work for the "pure tourist" part of the book. I haven't done anything on plotting out the rest of it. Basically, part one is being a tourist. Part two is training. Part three is spy stuff. Part four is the final fight. As it were. And at this point, not only am I still quite vague on how exactly she's going to be working her way into the cult's secrets (or even what they are), I also don't know if describing doing some running in the woods and getting training on how to walk from the Takarazuka are going to fill out 20,000 words or if I'm going to fall terribly short.

Well, so far none of my reviewers have seemed to think the plots doddled around doing nothing when ninety percent of the books are just that kind of tourist activity and fluff. So I am relatively confident that I can blow 2-3000 words on having yakitori is going to be just fine. (In the current draft, the "look at the Yasaka Shrine" is almost exactly one thousand words.)

Call a Rabbit a Usagi

 Science Fiction writer James Blish once wrote crossly about the habit some writers had of showing an animal that looked like a rabbit, acted like a rabbit, in all important respects was a rabbit -- and calling it a "smeerp."

I can't think off-hand of a culture other than Japan that gets so much of this. Seems everyone that writes about it has to make sure you use ocha instead of tea, hashi for chopsticks...all the way out to using the Japanese spelling and pronunciation of English loan-words.

And, sure, I get it. The delights of language. More, it is easy to see why "katana" and "kimono" because whereas the literal meaning of the latter is "clothes" and the former is just a kind of sword it is worth making note of the distinctive kind of clothing and sword.

And for someone like me, well, it is fun that ocha is actually o-cha, that is, "Honorable tea" (honorifics are hard to translate directly into English) and the latter is derived from "bridge."

I guess I'm reacting to the way it just seems to be done so much that it has become cliche. Since I'm writing books full of cliche anyhow, I would like to skip some of them when I can!

***

The other problem is a problem for me and a worse problem for the reader. This is more fish-out-of-water stuff, but more specifically, the early chapters are all about Penny showing that she can confidently navigate a place where she doesn't know any of the language.

The kinds of situations I've set up, it seems too awkward to leave out all the actual speech, as in, "They spoke Japanese to me. I thought I caught the word for 'run', so I ran." The scenes scan better if I put the actual thing being said.

So first problem is that my Japanese is rusty, and was never that good to begin with. And to make the problem vastly worse, there is a huge gulf between technically correct -- whether phrasebook Japanese or Google Translate Japanese -- and correct idiomatic usage. A difference which would be instantly obvious to any reader who knows even as little as I know about Japanese.

(I'm reminded for some reason of a cute gag in Urusei Yatsura where foreign reporters are commenting on a race. The French one is yelling things like "Ou est le pencil! C'est sur la table!")

And of course in the end I muck up my perfectly good idiomatic phrases because I need them to be just at the edge of understandable; that certain words and forms are re-appearing. 

Well, there's always editing. I can always cut more of the Japanese out when I'm in revisions.

***

I got the opening to work and then I stopped for two or three days to work out Part I in more detail. Yeah, I'm stuck with it now. Each Athena Fox story starts with a prologue (in italics) which is Penny's show as broadcast. Then five parts, each with an amusing name of some sort, with part IV starting at the final pinch point of the third act in a three-act structure. I've sort of given up on amusing names for this one and the part names are word/concepts; Ryokan, Ganbatte, Kitsune, Makoto. (Or they might end up as Sumimasen, Yatta, Magatama, Honne. Nothing is drawn in ink, not yet.)

Part I is basically being a tourist in (mostly) the traditional parts of Kyoto, plus ninja. I looked at a bunch of stuff for Toei Eigamura. It took typing not just the Japanese name but the kanji into YouTube to pull up some videos from inside the activities. So the stuff there just got bigger and bigger and now I've got a long chapter where she not only looks at the Edo Village standing set of Toei Studio, but dresses up as a "Young Man"** from their costume options and is interacted with by the cast of the chambara exhibition, but also visits the "Ninja Maze" with a hall of mirrors like something out of a Bruce Lee movie (no, some Western tourists made that comment on their video). The only thing this bit lacks is "real" fake ninjas.

Instead the first ninja attack of the novel takes place at Kamogawa...err, bridge over the Kamo river in the East of Kyoto, not far from her ryokan, where a music major at Kyogei (err...Kyoto University) is sort-of busking on shakuhachi. In fact she's playing "Round Midnight." This is the weirdness research will lead you to. I had a question about busking in Kyoto and that led me to a blog where a first experience of shakuhachi was described as being similar to the thrill of hearing Coltrane, and I figured of course you could play that Dexter Gordon standard. Flipped on to YouTube and found someone doing just that and it sounded even cooler than I'd imagined. 

Ooh. And I just realized there's a pun lurking in all this. The people who famously wandered around playing shakuhachi are of course Zen monks. Well, Gordon didn't write that song. Of course not. Monk did. (Brother Thelonious, that is. And it's a pretty good beer, too.)

To finish off my research of the last few days, I already knew there was a crazy mall under Kyoto Station. They have some appropriate clothing shops and a health and beauty supply called Hikari and there was going to be a scene already -- originally at the massive Takashiyama depato...department store...getting clothes and makeup -- and the name is also perfect for her room at the ryokan (it looks nice in kanji) and it means "light," not "bright" but the connection is there if I want to use that, too. 

And it is plot-advancing. They have Genki stuff there, too; the healing bracelets and special creams made by one of the tendrils of Healthy Spirit. And yes I caught a "how to pack for Kyoto" on YouTube that at one moment was talking about recommended make-up supplies you could get locally and without the slightest break was going on about pain-reducing magnet stick-ons.

And of course there's ninja. Which means Penny needs a clever way to not get stabbed, again. Although there are at least two very good and reputable places to buy decent swords in Kyoto, and cheaper stuff is even easier to find, the maps of the Kyoto Porta don't show an appropriate shop there. There are, however, a pair of shops that are rather intriguing; one sells chopsticks. The other sells fans. Hrm. This requires more thought.

(The trouble with writing action scenes with Penny is that she's not supposed to be trained. Even Athena Fox isn't supposed to be a fighter. She's supposed to be able to talk her way out of trouble. The sword fight in the last book had some really big hand waves to make it possible to happen at all. Having her fight off ninja is even more problematic...in so many ways. Even if they are really poor ninja.)

** So there's a ridiculous bit to unpack here. I got lucky and the official site of the Toei Eigamura park has a list and pictures of all the costumes available to rent for an hour and stroll around the village set in. They are, naturally, gender-segregated. Guys have the choice of basically samurai or cops; shinsengumi, ronin, etc. Girls have the popular choices of geisha/maiko (make-up and wig available for an extra charge) and married or unmarried woman, all in typical kimono et al. Except. Down at the end is a woman with pink cherry-blossom pattern hakama and she has the two swords of a samurai stuck in her sash. She is identified in English as "Young Person" and that's not...wrong...but the Japanese word is also on the picture and that word is Wakashu.

Wakashu were boys. Boys of the samurai class who often dressed as women and who formed, err, friendships with older samurai. (And were also apparently much lusted after by women as well). Some academic papers describe this as 'The Third Gender of Edo."

So one wonders how much of this is understood, tacitly or not, among the people who rent the costumes, and how much it is made clear to people who aren't aware of that cultural tidbit. It looks like it is aimed at just being a way for the female tourist (Japanese or not) to get to wear a costume with swords included, and the chambara I watched (sorry, sorry, sword fight) the hero character was played by and was obviously meant to be seen as a female samurai.

But there is some really interesting gender role stuff going on here and for a novel that's going to include a dip into the famously cross-dressing Takarasuka Revue, quite the thing.

This is why we research.

They Call Alabama the Crimson Tide

 I've been thinking too much about writing. That's made it hard to actually write.

I've been answering questions on Quora. I've been reviewing books through Pubby. And I've drafted the first 3,000 words or so on A Fox's Wedding. At least twice.

Started using Scrivener's Snapshot function, too. Very nice. It is basically a Wayback Machine for your novel. Except it works on a document basis, so you can look at or revert one scene or chapter without touching the rest.

With each book in this series, I revisit what I'm trying to do with the character, and with the series itself. So there's been a lot of that. I'm also re-thinking a lot of what I have been doing and what I think I know about story-telling. Opening chapters are hard, anyhow, in that you are trying to set the style and mood and set up the conflicts and introduce the major players all at once.

And, basically, every choice you make in the opening chapters has repercussions that spread through the rest of the manuscript. I don't mind revising a bit to put the ducks properly in the row. But when you are still figuring out where the ducks are heading...

So one win for the light outlining mode. I completely stumbled on a great name for the Enka singer turned charismatic cult leader at the center of the novel. It is a name that gives him so much character it is making me rethink the rest of the people around him. One of those characters might get cut entirely. Well, maybe I can use him in another book.

And a quite different win for my insistence on going where the research leads. When I flew to Kyoto we landed at Osaka. Well, that airport is now called "Itami" and it only does domestic flights. The new Kansai International is the place; built in the middle of Osaka Bay. And I'm watching video right now of when Typhoon Jebi came through (about a month ago in story time). It threw a tanker against the skybridge, damaging it badly.

I could have hand-waved this and just flown into Osaka, or not even mentioned it. But showing the damage from Typhoon Jebi gives me a useful beat to the end-of-the-world message the cult is moving into (now officially called Healthy Spirit -- yes, in English, but also nicknamed the Genki. I wanted to call it Expanding Man but that didn't scan right in Japanese or in English.)

Got my sinuses tickled and it would tickle the rest of me if they didn't get around to clearing me to return to work until at least Tuesday. Even if it is unpaid vacation. My boss is in the same tried-to-get-tested-at-the-height-of-thanksgiving boat so there's not going to be a stink about that. I'm pretty determined Monday is a goner in any case.

Oh, and I got another hundred-dollar violin, swapped the chin-cello strings to that and now I have a silent violin to practice on again. And I can feel the improvements happening already. Still no silent bowing, but the vibrato is improving and the intonation is improving a lot.

Reading Rambo

 The biggest advantage to traditional publishing is you get someone else to do all of this. Meaning editing, cover design, advertising...and chasing reviews.

I've been working the Pubby carousel. As a side effect, I've been reading a lot of fiction. I always have trouble focusing on the research I'm supposed to be reading. I have samples of several books here on the shinshukyo -- that is, the New Religions of Japan, plus a few on UFO religions and a few cults that went famously bad (like Heaven's Gate). And a couple books on ninja, and papers on the Imperial Regalia and on magatama in general...

At least I picked my first Japan location. Found a nice ryokan in the Gion district of Kyoto, that even hosts a Maiko performance on weekends.

***

So the reviews have been helpful. One reviewer wasn't fond of the "six sticks of pocky" voice that Penny had during much of Hounds. I'm with him there; part of my goal in Wedding is for her to be forced to play a more reflective, assured person...and for some of that to rub off.

Reviewing has also been interesting. I've left long and detailed reviews, not just on the books I contracted via Pubby, but on several other books in my digital library. I read widely anyhow but what I've been reading via Pubby is a bit different.

Once again I am thinking there are two nations here. That is, down here at the "not as good as Sir Pterry or a popular as JKR." Which, actually, aren't bad exemplars. Wait, can you say "bad exemplar?" Isn't that like "slightly magnanimous?"

Anyhow! For the purpose of this mini-essay I'm going to call it right brain v. left brain. Not just the writers, but the ecology of the writer and the readership. The right-brainers are all about the emotional gratification. I see them working and learning on Quora, at Fanfic dot net, in the self-published glut at Amazon. Cliched situations and characters, well-worn furniture of your basic space opera or fantasy setting.

And they get strong support from their readership. And I'm not saying any of this is bad. Look, if four hundred years of itinerate poets could be telling and re-telling the same bronze age siege and make a living doing so... And there are "good" authors (I mean those get both mainstream success and are lauded for their craft), like Brian Sanderson, who came up this way.

Then there's this group that I suspect usually turned to mysteries in the past. Thoughtful, even cynical. Educated. Interested in the craft. In a word...older. The main complaint is that they have been thinking too hard and too long and it is hard to cut through to that living heart of story.

There's both types at Pubby but you can guess which I ended up selecting to read and review. And why these weren't fast skims that could be finished in a couple hours and left with a, "Loved it all, Kaylah and Wolf are meant for each other, loved the pink dragons...!"

Again I'm not being negative. That's dancing about architecture there. This is complaining that your haiku doesn't fit iambic pentameter. These are different art forms for different audiences.

***

So my goal...the second of my goals...among my many goals...is to avoid as much as possible the temptation of giving the Japanese names of everything. To take even further what I did in the Germany part of Knows and have Penny generally not knowing. And there's some deeper themes going on with her being in Old Kyoto but still encountering mostly rebuilds and recreations and revisioned history, plastic cast veggies at Toei's Edo-Machi and concrete castle in Osaka. And then being yanked away to go clubbing in Tokyo when not working out around glass and stainless steel.

But the discomfort, both fish-out-of-water but especially spy-undercover, hits hard in the first couple of scenes and one of the big reasons to give her a room at the ryokan is so she can stumble around in the pink toilet slippers getting soap in the tub and otherwise getting it completely wrong.

So I'm trying to keep the history at a low ebb, resist the temptation of using Japanese equivalents for everything and keep that to the words that are interesting or plot-significant -- but at the same time give in to a bit of Japan's Greatest Hits as far as maiko and kabuki and castles and onsen and...

Slowly my memories of Japan are returning. Not just the time I spent there, but all I absorbed through a lot of reading, a lot of watching daytime dramas and other Japanese movies and television, and a lot of studying the language (not that I got very far.) But there's a lot I want back before I feel comfortable depicting the places and culture.

Definitely, the Paris book would have been faster to write. (And there's a running gag in the Paris book. The underlying plot is what looks like clues to a Templar treasure, except Penny is quite sure all the Templar conspiracy theories are total shit. So there are many conversations of, "Then in 1250 Jacques de Molay secretly visited..." "I don't care." "...leaving the secret Templar sigil in the artwork of the famous..." "Not. Listening.")

Just found a new research trick, essential in this time of lockdowns and business failures. Using the Wayback Machine to roll back the website of a museum or hotel to pre-COVID days. 

Down to the pub

The review that Pubby claims was left for one of my books has yet to post at Amazon. The review I left, for a book I selected to review on Pubby four days later, already posted.

Well, since I have the credits, I requested another review. And also took on another myself. A cool little turn-of-the-century steampunk novel that grabbed me with the first page. Hey, since I was thinking of reading it already...

I have feelers out but at the moment I still have a kiss-of-death rating on Hounds. A single star that is going to ensure nobody else will read it, ever. Until I can get something in there to make it look better.

At least I've started blocking out scenes for Wedding. I always have trouble getting into these. When I'm not writing in Penny's voice she seems so distant and alien. I think once I start putting down scenes it is going to go quickly, though. More quickly than the last, I hope.

Meanwhile I'm reading. And reviewing.

And binge-watching Bones. Which is a bit of a master class in how to set up a situation and handle exposition. Just overall very nice work. Very smart, very efficient. The stories are dense without feeling rushed. They feel like they are unfolding at almost a relaxed pace but when you hit the end of an episode you feel like you just saw a novel's worth of material.

You know, that's the most irritating thing about Pubby. Not the weird site, not the reviews going missing. That what I really want to do with the books I'm encountering is sit down with the writer and show them other, possibly better ways they could present their story.

Those who can't do, teach.

(Actually, I have a whole thought going on now about right brain versus left brain books. That some books speak to the one and some to the other and that is why the techniques and the reader response are so different. It isn't just fanfic: I'm seeing on Amazon as well these books with poor story-telling technique but vocal fans. Something different is speaking to those fans. Something us left-brainers aren't doing.) 

Breaks

 My workplace is shuttered for the rest of the month. (We had a worker test positive.) It was going to be a short week anyhow, what with the holidays. And we're all getting tested.

With tap water and an overnight trickle charge I was able to get my old battery to start my car one last time. Then I drove to O'Reilly and put a new one in right at the curb. Other than that, though, I walked and I intend to keep walking.

I am feeling the change in my health. By the time the gyms open up again I might even be ready to go back. 

***

Walking is great for hashing out plots. I still don't know if I'm actually changing anything, or just rolling over what I already came up with until I can accept it. The basic premise for the next Athena Fox book is exactly what I put in the "next time..." blurb of the last book. One of Japan's "New Religions" collects archaeological artifacts and their charismatic leader has already noticed Athena Fox. An equally mysterious Japanese ministry tricks Penny into coming to Japan so they can use her to find out what the "Ascension" that is happening in only two weeks is all about (and if they are looking at another Heaven's Gate, or worse, an Aum Shinrikyo.)

So basically they want the actress. To play the role and to nod head around some of the worst excesses of pseudo-archaeology, Ancient Astronauts, triple DNA and all. So this is coming out of her "be an archaeologist or be an actress" choice from the last book, but to her dismay, she finds she's not a good enough actress, either. There's some hard work, including with the Takarazuka Revue, there. A contact which also informs and confuses her on not just gender roles and expectations in Japan but the uneasy relationship between the mask and the player.

She's also sadly out of shape. She recognizes that too, even as she recognizes that some of this is the mysterious and flamboyant Ichiro trying to shape her to his own ideals. So she's getting the chance to work out and get back in touch with her physical skills -- in of course spectacular Japanese scenery. And there's a minor note here with Bro Science and health woo; the cult is quite rich on the proceeds of get-healthy-quick charms and tonics.

And there's ninja. Of course there are. And her otaku friend Aki, on headset in Boston, giving her tips on Japanese culture that are drawn from anime and manga and are not always helpful. 

So this is basically character beats. It gets me a chance to do a soft introduction to some ideas of bad archaeology; the fixation on Artifact, and the Ancient Astronauts nonsense. What I don't like, is that this is little of the Japan I experienced and researched. There is little here of post-war Japan and less of ordinary lives, as in the process of presenting an attractive Athena Fox, Penny is hanging with the rich and upper class, doing clubs and parties and high-end tourist digs.

So it is kind of the James Bond view of an exotic locale. At least I can leverage some of my previous knowledge of rock climbing, workout culture, health woo, Japanese society and language. But it is also leaving me with an uncomfortable amount to learn about the New Religions, UFO cults, the history and the para-history of the Ninja, changes in the modern Japanese fitness landscape...

I've got a long reading list already. 

***

And to add to the reading list; I joined Pubby. Not sure yet if I am sticking with it. I got my first review there but it hasn't posted yet so I haven't been able to look at it.

I went through this on my first novel. While I was sending it out to publishers and waiting to hear back I wasn't able to let go. It stopped me from being able to write. In that case, it lasted almost ten years.

It has been a terrible struggle to keep writing while I am waiting to see if my Amazon numbers ever kick up and for readers to give me actual honest appraisal, both what I am doing wrong and what they like and would like to see more of. I can't trust the family and friends (well, unless they say something negative. That I trust!)

I need to throw more advertising on, as well as kick that third or even fourth book out there. But at the moment Fox and Hounds is still showing one single rating (not even a review, but a rating) of one star.

It looks terrible. With a single one-star, it looks like it isn't even a real book. I can't send anyone to that page, via advertising or anything else, because they will look at that rating and go away.

The best route I have right now is to not-really-trade reviews at Pubby. (They get around the Amazon restrictions on review trades by anonymizing a reviewer pool, and they get around the no-pay-for-reviews by the fact that you are only paying the host to be there. You earn "points" to allow your book to be made visible to other reviewers by turning in your own reviews.)

BTW, Amazon has modified their stance slightly. In the current FAQ, they answer "can friends and family leave reviews?" with the somewhat vague but heartening assurance that being friends, on social media or elsewhere, won't automatically get a review taken down. Elsewhere, they've indicated that for their purposes, "family" is defined as people sharing a household.

Pubby rotates a very small number of selections and there is no way to save anything. As far as I can tell, merely clicking on an entry commits you to reviewing it. And the only books that made me really itch to review (or to give the writer some helpful hints) required things I didn't know if I had or not...and couldn't find out unless I clicked!

My review of Pubby, in other words, is a terribly organized badly designed confusing mess.

And I really need to have more things that need to be read. I am itching to start putting scenes together.

***

Oh, and hashtag DisneyMustPay.

The character formerly known as "Prince," now known as "Prince" again.

 After going around in circles on it all week, that character is probably a member of the Japanese Royal Family.

Maybe.

See, following the surrender, what is called the Collateral Branches were trimmed off, de-nobled, leaving only the direct male line descendants of Emperor Taisho as actual nobility. Or in the Imperial succession. There are only a dozen actual nobility left in Japan, all of the Imperial Family -- so few, in fact, that it was seriously considered quite recently to change the rules and allow an Empress on the throne for what might be the first time since Himiko.

The official side branches from before 1947 have basically died off as well. So this isn't like some noble families, where you could find a bastard son hanging around in the fringes somewhere if you needed a character.

That's why I worked so long on it. Sure, there are powerful corporations (the daibutsu were also largely dismantled after the surrender, so there isn't that kind of direct connection to power noble in the past, powerful owner of a company today. This ain't Cyberpunk.) But an essentially secular and worse, corporate guy just doesn't hit some of the things I want to hit.

***

I've also been learning about the economic bubble, the central bank. And all sorts of weird class stuff is showing up although it is never quite neat about picking sides. The ninja grew out of poor farming communities trying to protect themselves. Among the legends surrounding the kitsune is the accusation of being a fox-friend; having an unfair advantage over your neighbors, which was generally economic, which ties pretty directly to merchant class and control of the rice...and Inari is goddess of rice and sake and of merchants, who are the ones who pay for all those vermillion torii gates around the Fushimi-Inari shrine.

And thinking in other directions. Kyoto has the Silver Pavilion and used to hold the Golden Pavilion, burned down by a man who became the protagonist of a book by Yukio Mishima, who became the protagonist of a movie...

***

And I am back and forth on the make-up of the cult, or even if I want to use the cult. The actual I.M. Pei designed Miho Museum has been described by several people in "Doctor Evil" terms, although as I mentioned before it is more an art appreciation society than a cult. But their avid collection of artifacts is exactly the kind of thing I need my cult to be doing in order to give Athena Fox a foot in the door...or rather, for Ichiro/Sanjiro (he might end up with an older brother) a terrible idea to make use of a certain actress he's seen in action...at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum.

I still haven't set any scenes. I still am not sure if there is a bunch of fancy parties and Yojimbo talking stuff or what the end game is. I'm not even sure I can fit that snowmobile in. But I am really fixed on the idea of her singing "Yuki no Shingun."

***

Now if I could just keep from having a total crisis and having to stop even thinking about the story for days on end...

And now I just found out about Nara Dreamland, which was abandoned in 2006 and demolished almost exactly two years before my story is set...

Or did I mention a big chunk of the action is in the Kyoto/Osaka/Nara triangle?

Rating Wars

 I got my first rating on Fox and Hounds. I also got my first 1-star rating. On Fox and Hounds. I await with mixed interest to see if there will be a review, or if it is just a drive-by.

As it only has the one at current, it really doesn't look good.

The Japan book is moving slowly. I've reached the stage of trying to marshal the material into scenes and groupings. My latest analogy is level design for games. In many games, one "zone" (which may be several different technical levels) will have a particular theme, decorative style, gameplay element to highlight, etc.

At the moment the only zone that is coming together for me is the action sequence leading up to the climax; somewhere in snow country, pretty much all reindeer games against hired security or similar. Outdoors and snow and snow-related stunts (including driving a snowmobile, for which I am willing to drop a few bucks and get out to Tahoe to "research.")

And this is also a bit of a psychotic break for Penny, with her separation from family over Christmas and the holidays and the cold weather and her sort-of-betrayal by Ichiro and overload of both over-commercial Christmas and being in a foreign land isolated by culture and language...anyhow, this is the "Here's your damned 'Christmas Cake'" sequence.

At least that's what I'm planning.

There is also something about Old Kyoto, the old Geisha district, staying at a Minshuku, visiting the Fushimi Inari shrine, trying on kimono...and I'm not sure how or if this ties into Osaka Castle, the Toei Studio Park, and what I'm currently calling the "Ninja Club."

And even more nebulous is the "Tokyo hotspots with the flamboyant Ichiro, and some sort of Oceans 11 thing."

***

Probably why I gave up trying to work last weekend and went back into Skyrim.

There is an exploit I'd been hearing about for a while. The first part is the there is a potion that buffs Restoration spells, but due to the way it works it also causes items and potions that improve skills to improve them more.

The second is the Enchanting/Alchemy carousel. You make a potion of Enhanced Enchanting, then enchant an amulet of Enhanced Alchemy.

Well. It turns out the latest patch fixed the exploit. Restoration no longer changes the skill enhancements. That means that even with maxed-out enchanting and alchemy, you get stuck around 17%. You can't make gear powerful enough to make a potion powerful enough to advance to the next percentage. Not with the highest normally achievable skills.

So there are various ways in the vanilla game; quest objects that apply a buff that can lift your skills above 100. 

Or you can use the console to artificially pop your skill levels up. And it turns out having a base skill of 200 is vastly more effective than any combination of gear and/or potions achievable without exploits or hacks.

So much for my Alchemist build. The best potions you can brew in vanilla game are vastly outpaced by the skills you were intending to buff with them. The nastiest poison is maybe 24 points of extra damage, and an early-game bow does that already (Imperial Bow 12 pts, steel arrow 12 pts.) And that's before stealth bonuses, or the regular bonuses of the Archery tree.

There is no easy way to build a character who has ordinary iron weapons and beginner skills and achieves necessary competence through the potions they brew.

On the flip side, though; once you are over the threshold (around 40%) the carousel works fine and you can end up making potions that increase your enchanting 10x base. At least that's where I stopped. The way the skill buffs work, though, by the time I could wear a diadem that let me make potions 10x stronger, I could take that same enchanting skill and make a weapon that delivered six hundred extra points of magical damage.

So not really balanced in favor of potion-making.

And also really unbalancing anyhow. I tried going out with my 600-damage bow and armor that was tank round proof and it was, well, boring. 

Although I do want to open up the game again, punch up some potions into the 1000x range, and see just what wacky side effects can ensue...

Click-through

 I've moved a small number of copies of Fox and Hounds. I have no way of knowing which are going to friends or family, other than that most of the friends and family I know don't read on the computer, so eBook sales are less likely to be them.

It is very difficult to trace through Amazon whether someone who saw an ad went on to buy a copy. But from both best-guesses of the above, and the click-through that Amazon thinks it has identified, my ratio of advertising cost to sales made is around 10:1

That's not in my favor.

I am still behind the power curve on this. Having two books in an associated series looks like it may be helping. I have more energy on Fox and Hounds and I don't think it is all advertising or something attractive about the cover. I think I can trace some of that to giving away the first book and people being interested enough to at least look at the second.

So I still want that third book. I am really thinking about pushing myself to get four out there before I take a break and do something different. Not that Sometimes a Fox is a good stopping place. It isn't even the place where I run out of cities (I still have Bangkok, plus the States and a little bit of Alaska.) If anything, A Fox's Wedding closes off the origin story.

***

On my third week of walking to work every day. Walked nine miles on Monday. Been feeling good; have been doing a full work week, too.

The timing is nice here. A chunk of A Fox's Wedding is going to be Penny getting back into shape after letting it slide for a bit too long. If I can continue feeling better -- or at least, well enough -- I might be able to get back to the gym and refresh my memory on rock climbing. And even better, get out to some snow and mess around with skis or dangerous machines that do things in snow (whatever the rental options are there). Because I'd love to have some direct experience to draw from.

***

The plotting is otherwise going slowly. I do want this to be a simpler book in general. Not a lot of history, less dialog, more focused in themes and plots. However, at the center needs to be some cleverness, meaning I need to do some more structured plotting about who told who and who thinks what when.

Oh, but I also have (minor) edit notes for Fox and Hounds, and I discovered that when you create a series on Amazon it wants a cover image (which it never prompted me for). And there's a way of putting the third book up as a pre-sale. So I've been haunting ShutterStock again.

n!

Fox and Hounds is currently ranked #6,000 in "War and military action fiction." I'm not sure how it got there. I'm quite sure I didn't pick that as a category. Perhaps putting "London Blitz" in the keywords was a mistake.

So what does that imply? Does that mean there is a book currently at rank #1 for selling 6,000 copies? Well, that's not the best assumption. If you sum the series of positive integers you end up with 12 million total copies sold. (6,000 + 5,9999 + 5,998...)

Not implausible, but more likely that Amazon has more grain available, by weighting copies sold by how recent they are, say. (And, actually, with the weighting that #1 book probably sold a hell of a lot more than 6,000 copies).

The talk around eBook circles is dropping a thousand bucks on placed ads, also reviewers, GoodReads presence, and the like. Actually, the best way to push an eBook is to have a strong social media presence, enough of one to make pre-sales and to generate a first-day buzz.

Another thing that apparently kicks even harder than reviews is editorial comments. (And for reviews, the number of them weights more than the ranking. The big boost for reviews is around 20, though; after that the gains are incremental). Chasing down commenters is even more difficult than chasing down reviewers, though. At least reviewers, there are aggregating services that plop willing reviewers in front of books desiring reviews. For a feee, of course. In social currency or in money.

As part of those social circles, booktubers are a growing thing. But it seems at this point -- well, certainly in circles that self-identify with that name -- to have gotten a little echo chamber. (You know, with all this echo chamber crap that's going on in the partisan rhetoric right now, does anyone still remember what an actual echo chamber was and how it worked? Didn't think so!)

Booktubers are starting to write books, which are getting reviewed by other booktubers. And like everything else on that corner of the eyeball-hungry internet, it thrives on controversy. Books that get talked about are books that have a reputation. Sometimes good; Andy Weird and Brandon Sanderson are getting talked up. More often not -- lots of frightening YA is getting talked about.

It is very critical commentary and I probably shouldn't be watching so much of that. Because my own confidence is...low.

And that's the problem with all these higher-pressure sale tactics. I am caught in the conundrum of not knowing if it is worth it. Are my books so shitty I'm not only not going to get sales, I'm going to make people hate me for convincing them to buy them? I need readers who can tell me if I'm screwing up and in what ways (and with luck those are ways I can fix). I'm unlikely to get those readers if I don't push. But I'm unwilling to push when I don't know.

Which means I find myself spending a weekend making weirder and weirder settlements in Fallout 4, watching Bones and Dorkness Rising on Amazon Prime...anything but write.

Although I did just download Aeon Timeline. Maybe that will work a little better towards working out the GAANT-chart like dependencies of the Kyoto plot.

A plot too late

The plot finally came together.

It isn't a great plot. But I think it lets me hit some beats that advance the character development and serve the goals of the series and tell a story that makes use of the Japanese setting.

So Kyoto is in it. Also Kusanagi, and Kitsune (mostly the Inara shrine.) And Kul..I mean cult. Although I'm dropping a lot of the UFO cult aspect. The Takarazuka is in it, as are mall ninjas. And there's a training montage, er, chapter (or two).

 Stuff I'm sort of drawing from and may or may not be folding in includes Speed Tribes, Memory Water, Roppongi, Geisha, the Silver Pavilion, Heaven's Gate, Graham Crackers, bro science, plastic rocks, magnet bracelets, minshuku, Miho Museum, Aberanbo Shogun, Lupin III, lies-to-children...

The big theme here is Authenticity, and that's also one of the archaeological themes; the other being Artifact. The history will be thin, and largely the meta-subject; the perceptions and use of history. The big historical perspective (and not that big) is post Black Ships; the modernization of Japan and their ongoing effort to keep something that is true while also adjusting to a changing world.

Already I have scenes in mind at the Toei (or is it Toho?) studios, the mountain shrine, a lighting ceremony (not quite the right time of year though), the old Geisha district of Kyoto, a quite wild climbing gym in Osaka, Osaka Castle, the Ginza...

So the next task is to start taking stuff out and connecting things and otherwise reducing.

Pity. I'm enjoying the walks to work, but this is no longer a time for pure brainstorming. This is time to get out the index cards and seeing how the scenes and settings and themes and plot points and so forth can be arranged.

***

Meanwhile I have no new reviews and only two purchases of the new book. And it is too early to put it on giveaway. If I had any confidence, I'd drop another hundred bucks on a review service (yes, it's legal). 

I've started running some theoretical math, though. Ran into a comment that someone else would make a book free for a month and give away a few thousand copies. And get one or two reviews back. But that made me think about the numbers. I was at #20 in Travel Adventure Fiction when the book was free. It has since dropped down to 1,300 (and Fox and Hounds gets no higher than rank 5,000).

Well I don't know everything that goes into the algorithm, although I do know it weighs the last 90 days of activity more strongly. But. Having 5,000 distinct ranks implies that, besides there being at least 5,000 books, that there are 5,000 calculable steps from one to the other.

Again, who knows what goes into the algorithm. It does suggest, though, that there are books that are selling 5,000 copies over that target period. 

Basically, at my current numbers, I'm not seated at the table yet. I'm not even doing enough business to be properly counted.

Thinning

The company I work for is doing well. But we did have to reconfigure a bit. As part of that, we're dumping literal warehouses full of older products we don't sell anymore, and the parts to make them. It hurts the soul to break up a perfectly good (but unsellable) unit for recycling, but that's how it goes.

Means there's been plenty of work. When things are really slow I take long lunches and leave early. This past month, I've been putting in full hours and the one thing that isn't getting thinner is my bank account. I have more in there than I can remember ever having.

I'm also walking to work every day that isn't blistering hot. And I'm feeling it. I don't know if I'm actually losing weight but I am feeling better overall.

I'm also trying to thin the next novel. That's the bad thing about being stuck on plotting. Or about writing slowly. You keep dreaming up bits that would be fun to do. You keep seeing connections and themes. And you keep running across new materials out in the world.

I did locate the cult-owned museum that formed the germ of the plot I'm hoping to go with. I'd run into it in one of the books and articles I'd read on the antiquities trafficking business but I couldn't remember the details until I went to the Trafficking website and finally tracked them down. 

Well, trafficking aside (and they have been good about returning items. Better than, say, the British Museum), I actually like this cult a lot. I mean I think they sound like lovely people and quite benign overall. And the museum is open to the public. But it is an IM Pei and dug into the side of a mountain and, yeah, it really is very Volcano Lair sounding. Plus, you know, "cult" (or technically New Religion.)

For this book the cult, whatever town they are near, and really all the significant organizations and people are going to be entirely fictional. But I am likely to copy details so wholesale the canny reader will be able to figure out what it was before I filed the serial numbers off. There's the "Happy Science" doomsday cult that...well let's just say Mark Twain's dictum about truth being stranger than fiction still holds. Those guys are wacky.

But anyhow. 

Still don't have a plot. Rethinking now if I'm really going to be able to have a proper villain. The next book is shaping up to have a rival; a archaeologist-adventurer that is precisely all the things Penny is trying not to be, from being Templar-obsessed to rather more destructive breaking-and-entering.

At the same time, though, much as it might be amusing to let the Japan adventure finally peter out into much ado about nothing, I do want at least something meaningful at stake. And what little plot I have begs that there be someone who is not just Up to No Good but clearly has the upper hand; who has money and power and crossing him is going to be really dangerous.

So at the moment I'm revisiting the archaeological themes. I'm not adamant about each book saying something about archaeology -- or, rather, the intersection between archaeology/history and the rest of the world -- but I'd like to. And there's so much I could get into in Japan.

I'm still playing with Ancient Astronauts but not sure this is the best book to get into that. Authenticity is a big one -- this is a book about masks and roles and the Japanese setting has some very amusing spins on historical authenticity, particularly with the Ship of Theseus Shinto shrines. 

The last is Artifact. I touched on it in the first book. This is the outsider view of archaeology being all about the Artifact, the one object that overturns history (or not). Again I touched on the loss of archaeological context, and the way flawed interpretations can be read into an isolated artifact.

But I also might get into the non-scientific values of such objects. Obviously they can be art objects, and they can have monetary value -- that was certainly in the Athens book. But they can also have spiritual and national/political significance. The Rosetta Stone is as much an object of pride to be possessed as it is a key to ancient languages. 

But again, I am wanting to do something in the American Southwest and that seems a natural place to get into repatriation of artifacts (as well as the concept of landscapes as a cultural heritage).

Still, it does give me the possibility of having one artifact that is being fought over by several people, which each expressing a different value for it; historical value, spiritual value, arcane power, political value.

Still isn't getting me any closer to, "We have to stop (bad guy) before he (does this thing)!"

Goedkoop koop is duur koop

I'd meant to wait until I had three books up before I tried this experiment but the latest book isn't moving -- and the book I have yet to write is moving very slowly.

So I put the eBook of The Fox Knows Many Things on free giveaway for the weekend and popped up an Amazon ad campaign over the same period.

Got 50 click-throughs at a cost to me of $100. That's out of 15,000 impressions so 1 out of every 300 people who had my cover pop up during their browsing for books said, "hrm" and took a closer look.

I'm using the stock Amazon ad. I think I'll cut this campaign short and start a new one with a customized ad instead and see if that changes the numbers. Still 1/300 ain't bad.

During the same period as those 50 click-throughs 25 people said "what the hell" and downloaded the book for free. This pushed my sub-category numbers as high as #16 (and broke 100 in Action Thriller).

The payoff is going to be if I get subscribers. If any of them go on to Fox and Hounds. Or leave a review, for that matter. My gut says that 1 in 10 to 1 in 20 will go from downloading the first to checking out the second. And the numbers seem to say that no more than 1/100 readers will review. Closer to 1/1000.

So here's what the numbers don't tell me. If anyone read to the end. If the downloaders even saw the ad. How many clicks there were on either book page. How many downloads of the free sample chapters took place.

Amazon is in the business of making money. They are happy to make money through authors, but they are also happy to make money from authors. They will release enough information for an author to have confidence the ad money is actually returning value. No more.

At the heart of this is that I want to know if I'm doing it right. If I'm doing anything that people actually enjoy, or if I am fooling myself and should stop (or at least, go back to fanfic.)

***

Despite my confidence being near rock bottom I'm slowly getting excited about A Fox's Wedding. I'm still having bad guy trouble, though. 

The cult at the center of the thing is morphing. For a bit there I was looking at an MLM -- basically the Cult of Amway. I think I've moved away from the UFO cult. The silver jumpsuits will have to wait for a different book. For a while there the conception was more a small group of friends, like the true story for most of the evolution of Heaven's Gate, or the structure of Theosophy groups before things got big and weird. 

That still has attraction but what I'm playing with now is something that I think lets me talk more about Japan and some of the massive social changes it has been through. And it is a direction I thought of while brushing my teeth -- with a new tube of Dr. Bronner's.

There are at least three people in my list of potential bad guys. I'm half tempted to do a reverse-Yojimbo plot in which my protagonist has to get really clever to keep them from killing each other. But I really want a full-up bad guy and that's proving really hard for me.

That's the weird way fiction works. All ideas, I guess. You start out inchoate, drifting between possibilities (or even drawing a blank entirely). Then some of the things you think of anchor themselves and start growing. They attract other ideas. At this point I'd have a hard time completely letting go of Mog, or the Prince and his two bodyguards. 

And I'm quite fixed that I'm going to have Ichiro, his friend the takaresienne, the ninja club, Aki on headset, and Hanae the landlady.

I've got way much material already. The problem is focusing down on what makes for the strongest story.

Beru-Bara....bwaa?

 I still haven't zeroed in on my villain's villainous plan. Or even his villainous self. So much for plotting from the core out.

My model for this part of the writing process now looks like intermittent gears.

An idea comes. Then I have to sit on it for a day or two until I can accept it.

Anyhow. There are several bits of Japanese pop culture which are starting to both be elements that are going to be in the story and are defining what I'm trying to do with the story.

Ken Matsudaira, in the jidaigeki that would not die. Seriously, the man has to be immortal or something.

And I was going to put in pictures of two more elements, but the world is ahead of me; someone has already combined them:

Yes...that is a Takarazuka Revue production of...Lupin III !

So I'm getting more excited about the book. My intention at this point is to explain little, to touch only lightly with the smallest number of words on any of the history or religious philosophy or cultural foibles. In fact, to have a lot less dialog than the last book. 

Mostly, it is going to be description and action. A lot of five-senses stuff. Among other things, my protagonist is going to do some training up. And if I work the timing right, I'll be getting back into exercise myself (I am walking to work every day I can and I swear I can already feel it helping).

In other news, the second book hasn't done much in sales.

Warning Clowns

And now I've invented a religion.

No fear -- I prefer writing science fiction. Or history-adjacent adventure, at least at present.

I was this close to dumping the entire UFO cult angle from the next book, but then I got thinking about silver jumpsuits and monorails and I just couldn't resist. You only write once, I guess.

This morning I was thinking about depictions of scientific savior organizations from 70's TV, like Ark II or Genesis II and...oops, that's exactly the right idea. In a moment I had the basic philosophy, and it is continuing to unfold in my mind. At this point my cult leader could talk for a couple of pages on it. If I let him.

Basically we're talking scientific humanist. Plus aliens. It is a progressive uplift idea that weaves together UFOs, the Garden of Eden, King Arthur, and of course modern malaise. So there's plenty of hooks around for them to be talking about and collecting artifacts from the past, especially the "greatest hits" model (the secret conspiracy always backed Napoleon. Never Wellington, and certainly not Corporal Smith.)

And they don't have a volcano but they do have some fancy gigs that lean entirely too far in the Ken Adams direction.

And I'm sticking with Genpei War for the bit of history. Even if it is an era I don't know much about and aren't that interested in. It is really post-opening Japan that interests me most, from Perry's Black Ships to the bubble collapse, but particularly the post-war period. But with this and the Blitz I run the risk of making the series look like it is all about World War II and other relatively modern history.

Now my biggest problems are two. How to winnow down the material and focus it in. And how to come up with a baddie and an objective that are strong and immediate and important.

(That's the speech-to-text again. I was making a note about warring clans. In a paragraph that included "samurai" twice. But that's par. I had dictated something like "With the samurai came the samurai codes and beliefs..." and speech-to-text caught the first one fine but decided to replace the second with "Same as me." It is illuminating as to how it works. The first pass is a best-guess for words. The next is a frequency check where it replaces uncommon words with words that are more likely to have been said or meant. Then the last pass cleans up the grammar -- or tries to. So "Samurai" became "Same as I" became "Same as me.")

But I am still intrigued by the idea of a story set in the Warning Clowns period. Or maybe it is a single soothsayer. "Beware the Ides of March" doesn't have the same ring coming from under that red nose...

senseless signs of history

 Finally uploaded to the Kindle store!

So now I just have to wait for the third beta reader. Next book, I think I will pay for editing. Not like I'm making a profit on this.

And after I'd downloaded the free sample to my own Kindle, I discovered an edit I know I'd made somehow reverted itself. Do I really want to go back through and check if all the edits from that session are still there? Sigh.

And such a pretty nose, too.

 My second beta reader had a great note. I went through two days of depression and then I figured out how to do it.

And once again, it seems my instincts were leading me there already. I'd quoted the Twelfth Doctor, from his regeneration scene. And then I continued on to write the scene I'd originally designed. So now I have a version that gives me so much more to work with in the next stories.

Assuming there are next stories. I'm sort of settled on Japan next, then the Paris one, but after that...see if the series is selling.

So I worked up the basic plot for the Japan one. It would work. It's sort of a Ten Little Character Actors plot meets Heaven's Gate. The cult, not the movie that bombed so badly.

But I don't like it. Basically, it isn't organic to the setting. There's a bunch of ideas I've been playing with and several I want to keep that are basically a tourist-level, high-living, view of Japan; shopping in the Ginza, not pounding mochi at a village festival. But I do want to engage with the culture both in general terms and with certain specifics (particularly the Takarazuka).

So back to the brainstorming.

Zwei Fuchse

 Rewrites done, two days of running it all through ProWritingAid again to check for any newly created grammatical errors, and uploaded.

Just before I pressed the "publish" button I heard from a beta reader who is almost finished and will have notes for me. Sigh.

Well, I still have to finish the revisions on the cover. But then it will be published and I'll finally be able to move on.

***

The stack of books for Japan has been growing. I've been reading Underground, which is a series of interviews by Haruki Murakami (yeah, that Haruki Murakami) of survivors of the Aum Shinrikyo attacks.

Found Contemporary Japan and a Lonely Planet guide to Tokyo at one of the book hutches I pass on my walks around the neighborhood. A History of Modern Japan (I heard an interview with the author via the BBC) and Gender Gymnastics have both arrived. Plus I intend to dip into Inside the Robot Kingdom, Behind the Mask, Japanese Mythology, and other books I have already on my shelves.

Plus I bought Come and Sleep (on the folklore of the kitsune) and have been reading Heaven's Gate on Kindle.

There's a growing list of topics which would be interesting to explore, but I still don't have a plot.

And another thing. A problem I've always had is that I like to create boxes. That is, a set of definitions or formats that will then be applied to a set of related creative works. There are things I would like to have in each Athena Fox story -- but I am working hard to let go of the idea that I must include them in each story.

So I'm trying to make it less a checklist and more a Chinese menu:

An archaeological concern. That is, some aspect of the intersections between science, preservation, and the rest of the world. In the last book, it was Development and the role of CRM. I'm not sure what this is in the Japan book.

A question about the character. The series is always dancing on the conflict between Penny and the role she plays, and the inherent contradictions in that role. This one I've got covered.

A historical question, particularly, one that has some controversy attached. The last book sort of missed that one; it was all about the London Blitz, but there wasn't much in the way of false history and there were certainly no UFOs. For Japan, I want to do the UFOs, but I don't know how to connect that back to actual (and interesting) history.

A place, particularly one I've been. There's always going to be a bit of travel exotica here, and it includes experiences -- urban exploration or Viking crafts or whatever.

And a couple things that seem to be showing up consistently:

Cosplay, or rather, a chance to dress up in period clothing. This one is not going to be period so much as kimono...very possibly an entire geisha do-up, as offered to tourists in Kyoto.

Social consciousness. I didn't really intend it, but Penny seems to have a habit of noticing urban poor and systemic racism and falling in with people who are on the fringe of their societies.

The deep dive. I didn't want to do this for the Japan book. I wanted to keep it out with tourist locations and hanging with the well-to-do, because hanging out with students or doing budget travel in Tokyo or worse yet getting out into the countryside is more work. Well...I'll see.

***

I'm set on the UFO cult as being central to this story, as well as the (overly) suave government man she romances and the takaresienne who delivers a much-needed sanity-check. I've even totally lost the notes on a real cult who collected (probably trafficked) antiquities and had a famous-architect museum that reads like a James Bond villain lair. But that doesn't matter because as much as I'm willing to name-check real organizations whatever is at the center of this plot is going to be entirely fictional.

I know it can let me talk about society and issues in contemporary Japan, and about the intersections of pop culture and conspiracy theories and mainstream science. But it doesn't seem really archaeological. Or historical. That might end up being the actual theme of the book; that the history is all Disney-fied and re-purposed, the castles poured concrete and the temples torn down every ten years, and all Penny gets to do is wear the hat and act like Indiana Jones without a legitimate excavation in sight.

But I'd really love to reverse that in the third half of the book (sorry, Bob and Ray) and have some actual archaeology going down. And that's what's giving me trouble,