So the experiment is still inconclusive. I'm getting a nice batch of Kindle Unlimited page reads but very few book purchases. I can image that having three books is helping, but I can't even be sure of that, much less whether they need to be in the same series.
And I'm reaching a bit of a crossroads. Despite ambitious travel plans, I want to take the series places I can't realistically spend the same amount of time exploring (either physically, as with Kyoto, or in books and other resources, as I did London). Plus, I want to move past neophyte traveler struggles and more into World Adventure territory -- more of a "jaunt to Berlin to track down the next lead" territory.
Underwater archaeology. Pre-Columbian. Archaeological tourism. Israel and the Holy Land. Dubai and the Emirates, even.
So anyhow. On the way back from work, I jotted down this note: "Tomb Raider style adventure, both in emotional idea and when possible in specific details, but without being insulting."
Insulting. That's the fun part there. Not mentioned in any of my advertising materials, because I don't see a way of doing it without sounding boring, and because none of my readers seem to care. I really am not seeing a groundswell there.
And there's something very specific about that. It isn't insulting to have weird science in an SF context. For some reason one can just roll with it. Perhaps because physics is generally on firmer ground/a higher pedestal? If your plot depends on and your characters go around explaining that stars are electric or the world is flat or the speed of light is just a foolish notion the reader will understand this is a position shared by cranks and idiots. They are willing -- under the right circumstances -- to accept it for the purpose of the story. They aren't going to agree with it.
But saying that history or archaeology or paleontology got it wrong? The reader is more likely to stroke their chin and say, "Sure, this Lost Kingdom in this book is fiction, but I totally believe there could be things like that."
Left unsaid is, "Because historians and archaeologists, etc., etc., are morons." I'm not even sure this is implicit, but there very much does seem to be an air of "those ivory-tower intellectuals, never letting us have any fun."
They obviously haven't met any archaeologists, who from the small spectrum I've encountered in podcasts and nonfiction books are totally willing to play with any idea, no matter how absurd.
Okay, sure, there is often an insult to real peoples, ancient or otherwise. Half the "vanished civilizations" mythologies are rather explicitly white. But it is quite hard to look at real Egypt or real Greece and say, "Ah, but of course none of those Greeks or Egyptians noticed the half-buried freeways of the greater civilization under their feet." Especially when you add the typical Ancient Aliens motif of myths and legends being the incoherent attempt of primitive people to describe perfectly ordinary flying machines and light bulbs.
All of this basically makes ancient people look stupid. And the modern peoples who still haven't noticed the gigantico UFO control tower buried in jungle just outside their quaint little village look stupid. Along with the Mainstream Scientists who never thought of looking up from their LiDAR scans to see what was in front of their noses (or more insultingly, closed ranks to preserve some Official Dogma against any idea that wasn't there already. Begging the question of who came up with that dogma in the first place and how much of a struggle they faced to get it accepted!)
So it isn't necessarily racist. It could be just generically insulting.
I also find it cheap, because the real world always provides stuff just too damned interesting and weird to be believable in a work of fiction. Making up some dudes in togas on a desert island making the dinner trays float around with their quartz crystals is, I feel, a hell of a lot less interesting than Cahokia, or the real Rapa Nui.
But as much as it is a passion with me, and a passion among several bloggers and podcasters who I follow (generally, academics), it isn't the sort of thing that people looking for a good genre adventure have in their search terms.
Which is a way of winding up to, well, a small compromise. I'm unwilling to right out ignore real history and to replace real places with the easy stock stereotypes (try reading, sometime, the story conference between Lucas, Spielberg, and Kasdan, and realize quickly that George knew nothing and cared for nothing outside of movies. Right there, he doesn't care if the next scene is in Arabia or Africa, it just has to be "some squalid village, you know the type...")
But I am willing to go for less depth in research. The way the numbers game works right now on Amazon, you have to be publishing a new book as quickly as possible. Once a month if you can manage it! Spending a year on a book...might as well not even bother publishing it there.
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