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)!"
I think I told you that in our 1930s "Pulp" campaign the referee dropped a couple of items into our hands that are clearly meant to be two of the three Japanese national regalia items (the "originals" being presumably lost at sea about 800 years ago or something). The thoughts of how, uh, irked the 1930s Japanese government would be about a bunch of random foreign yobbos hauling the items around in their luggage was very amusing. Nothing ever came of it -- none of us was ever struck blind, etc. Nothing ever came of it, and the items are presumably in our luggage lost in some other dimension.
ReplyDeleteThat account was very much in my thoughts. There's surprisingly little about the Jewel, but all the accounts I've read about the sword say in a surprisingly casual way that it was "found by divers and eventually returned," or not, and in any case "there were various duplicates."
ReplyDeleteThis gets close to the heart of what I want to do; that whatever is in the Atsuta Shrine, as long as nobody looks too closely it is as real as it needs to be. For all practical purposes every Emperor since 1185 could have been crowned over an empty box...
Yeah, one reason our characters in the Pulp game didn't really concern ourselves with it was the entire lack of documentation. The items were clearly meant by the referee to be part of the Imperial Japanese regalia ... but if you just find them in a box, well, no way to tell (unless ancient spirits start talking to you.
DeleteJust read an amusing novel in which a day trader with way too much money on his hands purchases a mysterious box discovered by SEALS on an exercise off Okinawa. It contains all three of the Regalia and they are treated with very little respect for most of the book; day trader is doing Star Wars Kid with Kusanagi and he is WEARING the magatama around the house.
DeleteAnd this is the hero of the story. He does eventually come around. Some. But there was very little historical detail there. Although he did read one of the prime sources (I recognized the details).
(Kusanagi was depicted as an Edo-period curved blade with scabbard. But it kind of needed to be to work with the action.)