133 words written this morning, on the brand new Kamogawa scene. And I'm changing my mind once again and putting Fushimi Inari Taisha back in Part II.
No, I don't drown the readers with all these foreign words. It is like technical lingo; it is efficient. Not that I just use terms I'd never dare put in the book to communicate to myself in my various notes. I also use references nobody but me would ever get.
And maybe not even then! I was eating lunch at my desk at work yesterday and I saw "M2m Stargate" scribbled on a pad. Obviously my handwriting, but what the heck...oh. This was a note I took during a YouTube video about how so many television and movie themes can be described as two chords and an interval. A major chord, go up two steps, play a minor...that sequence dominates the title theme of the movie Stargate.
So the scene I'm working on, in my notes is "Angler fish dance." Which is a Girls und Panzer reference, and I'm almost certainly not going to take anything from it. Just; the idea of the scene right now is Penny is still on her crash exercise program to try to get buff enough to feel competent dealing with the crazy "Fitness Cult" (more of a self-improvement/UFO cult). So she's jogging on the banks of the Kamo river in Kyoto. Stops to catch her breath near some musicians out with traditional instruments and finds herself dancing along. Then Natsumi, the shopgirl she met at Kyoto Porta, passes by with friends and Penny plays the gaijin card in calling out to her then bullying her -- and her friends -- into dancing along.
So there's stuff about socialization and about Penny's increasing confidence in using her personality to push other people. And about how Kyoto -- and Japan -- relates to the traditional elements of their past in a constant fusion of old and new. And I want to drop in the senpai/kohei because that could be part of the relationship of Deacon and Ojiisan, the showman and the mystic who formed Transcendence.
The current (ever-changing) plan is to follow this with the trip to the Inari Shrine and give this more focus. I've gone back and forth so many times on this. I feel like there are still too many "walk around a temple or shrine" scenes packed into the first half of the book, but moving it to Part III creates all sorts of other problems. At least this way I get to put the idea of "boundary creatures" in there, which she will be using to react to the "Hikikomori Night" scene, and it also means I can have Yuki explain about the kitsune...it isn't completely natural to put it in her scenes but there really are no better ways to do it.
Man. Have I got too many women in this? Or just too many characters? The guys who show up enough to be considered characters are Ichiro Yamada (of course), Jiro Takeuchi, Masao Otami/Deacon Blue, Saito/Ojiisan, Ishikawa Goemon (XIV), Doctor Noh, and Beni (who is back to just his two short scenes at the studio park).
The women are Aki-on-headset, Hanae, Natsumi, Yuki, Suki (hey, if Beni gets billing...), Kei/Sukeban Deka. Actually, the problem isn't there are so many of them. It is that Hanae and Natsumi are the only quiet/traditional types; Hanae with her soft spoken manner and hidden strengths, Natsumi with her hand-wringing shyness. Suki is brazen and outspoken, Yuki is an otokoyaku with the Takarazuka (hrm..there's a Steve problem here...might need to change her to Yukari), and Kei is of course cosplaying a juvenile delinquent with a razor-honed yo-yo.
Right. 133 words and in two hours I'm going off to a high-tech Van Gough exhibit. After the last two weeks, though, my work won't complain if I want to use some of my accrued vacation hours...
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