Just watched Asterix at the Olympic Games. Not that funny, but very French. Gérard Depardieu as Obelix! Alain Delon nearly steals the show as Caesar; "Ave Moi." (French, with English subtitles only).
So I'm in the final round of revisions and approval on the cover. Files are otherwise uploaded. I think. I'm pretty depressed about writing in general and I hate this part of the slog -- all that trying to make sure I didn't mis-type the ISBN and that I have the latest revision of all the files uploaded, etc., etc.
Still have to crank through new covers for the previous two books. Current scheme is I do most of the painting and the basic layout then my cover artist rips into the files and makes them actually work.
***
This was a busy week at work. Following another couple of weeks of a lot of stuff. We aren't great with pre-planning; instead we just get a deadline and then go crazy. My hands are still covered in glue from yesterday (even acetone doesn't take it off.)
***
Spending a week having ProWritingAid telling me my grammar sucks and then explaining all my mistakes in terms I can't even understand -- that's depressing. The longer I go at this, the less I feel that I know. And the more I hate my own writing.
And if I can't even decide if I should continue trying, I'm hardly in a good place to figure out where is the best place I should be going if I do continue. So as a default, I'm brainstorming on the next book in the series. The Paris book.
I have sort of three boxes of things. One is stuff that could be fun or could work in that environment or otherwise intrigues me. I really liked the way Linnet's diary worked in the London book and I want to explore a slice of history from a close-up, personal view. But the mechanism of a set of letters is -- well, it is artificial, it's been overdone I think, and it isn't a style the series has done before. The diary I snuck in by artificially feeding it one page at a time to my cast, and then creating a situation where reading the day's entry out loud is something they did when they got together. Having something extraneous to the first-person narrator of the book is just too, um, outside the thrust of the narrative. I just don't see having letters home as working.
Pity, because the idea I was working on there was the experience of a young aristocrat seeing Paris, and then heading off to war.
Anyhow, that box has a lot of stuff that probably won't fit. Montmatre, Moulin Rouge, parcour, steampunk, Dan Brown, artistic interpretation of history, La Boheme... And some specific travel things like budget travel, like Paris Syndrome, like this being the one where she just can't get the language and gives up on that.
The second box is ideas I have about what I want to be doing with this series and in books of this series. I'd like each to talk about an archaeological subject -- often, the intersection of archaeology and society, as in antiquities trafficking, museum culture, repatriation, rescue archaeology, archaeological tourism... And each book to also have a slice of history. And of course have something that is unique to the place that story is set in and hopefully isn't something that's been done to death already.
The last box is reactions to the last book or books. Things I want to do differently. I still want an identifiable villain. I want Penny to have a plan. I want a plot to start on the first page instead of lurking as Penny plays tourist. I am getting tired of first person, and I'm tired of having Penny have the only character arc and I want to shift that role to some other character.
But around these three boxes is a larger box. I want to learn from what I did wrong and do a better job writing. I went through this with the last book and, well, I failed there. I had a couple of things I thought would help both the readability and how long it took to write.
First idea was to eschew the "Deep Dive." If I didn't try to get deeply into the lived experience of modern Japan, it would take less research time, right? Wrong. I already knew they stuff I was going to use. What took all the time was snags in the character journey; where Penny was going, where the series was going, and how best to present that to the reader.
Another was to skip dates and names and locations and as much as possible fill the text with description. Well, besides it turning out there are only so many ways you can say "narrow winding path between stone lanterns" it didn't help. The EVENTS -- the basic "get from point A to point B" required I go around naming and explaining shinkansen and ryokan and kabukicho and all that.
So I'm thinking about the first one. It seems so reasonable that I should read lots of French literature, watch French movies, try to understand the soul of the French. And I think it would be a funny bit if Penny read up this time and knows all sorts of French history -- just none of the history that's actually important to the story. But in this case, it might actually make for a shorter writing process if I do a very shallow, tourist-centric view of Paris.
And I am tempted to say description-as-a-filler didn't work, go for conversation. Except there was a ton of conversation in the last book. The Paris book might have a lot of conversation, though, that isn't doing plot dumps. So that would be new.
Or it could have a lot more events happening. Worth pondering on.
No comments:
Post a Comment