950,000

There's a variation of that "thousand hours of practice" going around, designed for writers; that you need to write a million words of shit first.

So I was going to do a giveaway or promotion or something for Fox and Hounds and decided I couldn't stand the cover any more. Tried Fiverrrr once more and got offered a very simple tinkering that actually seems to solve several of the problems I had.

While I was doing that, I went ahead and hired someone to do a light developmental edit pass on the first book. Since that is the jump-on point for the entire series anyhow (and I really should have thought of this before I went and gave away a bunch of copies on Goodreads).

Incidentally, it is hard to tell from the raw numbers but people are removing the book from their "want to read" list and the "reading it now" number is going up and down and this might mean people are reading it. Or at least opening it, then giving up after a few pages. A new reader claims to be reading the second book in the series now but according to KDP there's been no purchases recently.

In any case! I re-read The Fox Knows Many Things, all the way through in one day. Every time I re-read I see something new, but this time my big, big impression was...

I must have started writing at the 950,000 word mark.

Because it starts weak. It is not well written. It starts to crawl up about half-way through Germany, is getting better through Italy, spikes upwards again when she is in Athens and finally turns into a half-way decent book over 2/3 of the way through, meeting locals through her new friends Biro and "Achilles" and getting caught up in one of the Prespa Agreement riots.

And it also seems pretty much un-editable. There's some small stuff I can do. I have a huge list of small stuff, both for this book and for A Fox's Wedding (for instance, the Geek Anthem scene in Akiba, change "Ode to Joy" to English. Yes, it is sung there in German and there's a very cool historical reason for it but since I had no time to put that reason in the book, it is better to lie a little about reality and make it a better experience for the reader.)

I thought I had some easy cuts; cut the Stoa museum scene with Océane, cut the spinnaker scene on the Wayfarer, etc. But those turn out to be only a few hundred words and there's insufficient benefit to pacing in taking them out. I wish I could red-pencil half of the White Supremacist stuff because it plays better hinted at then belabored, but that's a lot of work that could be better spent writing a different book.

***

Oh, yeah. By checking out a new book from Jason Colavito I somehow jiggled the algorithm and Amazon has gone and told me that consciously retro -- and just a little bit Sad Puppy -- SF is a popular flavor this week. Possibly not with readers. But I am far from the first author to think about it.

You know that theory that it isn't Great Men, but that there is something floating in the zeitgeist that means this was the moment for Fauvism to arrive or Natural Selection to be proposed? Yeah, this is what it feels like to be the other guys who were just starting to think about the speed of light when a certain patent clerk beat them to it.

Entry to Miami

Okay, I'm getting depressed about writing. I just may not have it in me to write what people want to read. Not that doubts are exactly unfamiliar to the artist -- the reading I'm doing about the artists of the belle epoque certainly underlines that! -- but as they say (in another context), they laughed at Bozo the Clown, too.

But in my random search this for background noise while I try to get some work done anyhow I stumbled on a collection of the big scenic pans from the James Bond series. Many of these are tourist-brochure shots, many are in the playgrounds of the well-to-do (seriously, there are a lot of upscale ski lodges there).

But they also are lush romantic compositions from Barry, Newman, Hamlisch, showing the wonder and thrill of these striking, often exotic landscapes. And that's reminding me what I was stumbling towards in the Athena Fox series.

I am trying to get to all these amazing places, and have adventures in them with fast chases in hot cars and sword fights in unlikely places and all that fun...and still be sort of having something to do with the real world, if I can.

And at the moment I can't think of a better vehicle to write those stories.

Looking Backwards

Of course a novel evolves during the planning stage. That's part of what planning is for. Development, testing, iteration.

What is both fun and as often depressing is to look back at your original idea. I set out to play the same game Umberto Eco did in Foucault's Pendulum: a story in which someone makes up a conspiracy theory then to their dismay find other people are taking it seriously.

More to the point, I thought that what I was going to do was draw on the various conspiracy theories I'd encountered over the years to spin a yarn of Templars or Illuminati or whatever. I was sure I could make up lots of complicated plots from whole cloth very quickly.

This fell apart with the first draft of a scene. Because it turns out what I need is the mechanics of it; the specific clues that need to be puzzled out in order to construct the proper pastiche. The hit point in this kind of "follow the clues to the hidden treasure" puzzle aren't, "It was Templars all along!" They are more like, "The numbers along the edge of this painting are a street address for the next clue!"

That part is going a lot more slowly. There's actually a recent change I made that is going to help things along, though. I was going to make up clues based on the random stuff I know about the Impressionists. Well, my original timing put me into the Post-Impressionists, Fauvists, too.

But I've been listening to a podcast series on Napoleon (no, not the other two, although III does figure in some of the history I want to name-drop), and working along in a book on The Twilight of the Belle Epoque and getting more and more sure I wanted a slightly earlier slice of history. And then I was tracing some stuff of the history of the Palais Garnier or something and realized there was another exposition that is possibly even better for my purposes.

The 1889 one. Which lacks the aeroplanes and the speedy Renaults but otherwise is much more in the middle of Steampunk as well as closer to the Commune and, well, a lot of other stuff that fits better. Particularly the Impressionists. Sarah Bernhardt and Victor Hugo are both soldiering on...Victor is back in Paris, at least for a little, and Sarah might even have both legs left.

But so far as for puzzles, I have little. An uncompleted one about Monet's Water Lillies, and some guff about the Temple of Mars. 

And I keep going back and forth about whether I'm going to include the Church of St. Pierre.

Windows Update

The laptop repairs were good...everything except the new optical drive, which still doesn't accept disks. But I have a USB drive for those rare CDs so that's not really an issue. More RAM, clean filters, new heatsink compound, and new battery.

The new video card in the gaming PC lasted a day. Well, actually, the card was fine. Ran great, I shut it down after a few hours, next day it didn't start.

Still have the original ailing HD in there so grabbed a Windows boot drive...nope. Disconnected everything SATA and pulled the RAM, too. Nope; not even a chime. Swapped the power supply. Nope. Okay, I'd been thinking about it anyhow; stuck in a new mobo. Still an I5, still an H97 but slightly different layout so it was a bit of fun trying to figuring out some of the hookups.

And it started with no problem at all -- everything worked the first try. That's a bit scary!

Booted it a couple of times and still no errors. Still tempted to can the old HD and do a better job of migrating the OS to the small SSD (I picked up a cheap terrabyte SSD to store all the Steam files on).

I tried out several game and so far I haven't had to dial down the settings from ultra everything. Well, maybe just a few little ones (like weapons fragments in Fallout 4, which at high levels can bring any machine to its knees.)

But of course...I'm just not that interested in playing anything at the moment. So the PC sits, repaired but ignored.

But was it a good read?

Too early to tell yet if my GoodReads investment was worth it. I'm pushing hard at leaving reviews and (shorter, pithier) blog posts over there. Haven't dipped into the forums yet; I'm afraid of the time sink that could turn into.

So a thousand people turned up and a hundred of them walked away with a copy. According to the stats, though, only five people are currently reading. Not that GoodRead tracks; this is entirely the choice of the readers.

For whatever reason, my numbers kicked up briefly over on Amazon:

Yeah, Amazon is assigning those categories, not me. Anyhow, must be a slow week.

I am still struggling with the way I've foolishly fallen between genres. It makes it so much tougher to market. I wish I was working on The Tiki Stars. Now there's a title that tells you exactly where the book falls! (Rollicking retro-future space opera, if you had to ask.)

And I keep getting tempted to find a cover artist and have them go over my covers to make them look more professional. Except I had such poor luck trying to get that happen before. Even if I decide that the problem was that I wasn't spending enough, the artists with a higher price tag also seem to be organized differently; they really want you to tell them your genre and then leave them alone to do whatever it is they chose to do.

(Except the same tyranny of menus is there, too; pick one, two, or three stock photographs. Pick one or two fonts. And for the same fixed fee we'll provide 3d renderings of what a book looks like...who the hell uses those, I ask?)

That, and if I'm spending money, maybe I should get a hand-drawn Cozy Mystery cover, or a map-and-trinket Travel Adventure cover, or a Glowing Artifact archaeology-thriller cover...

Winter is Leaving

I hadn't cut my hair since COVID, and I have a bowed lyre. To me, that means make a cover with video for the Game of Thrones title theme.

In December, it was too cold on the weekend to practice (the heater in the "studio" doesn't work well). It finally started to warm up just enough...for me to find out I couldn't quite play the parts in tempo.

Finally, it is warm enough to practice in the studio, and I can play the parts in tempo. But now the sun stays out too late for me to set up my green screen and still make it home in time for dinner.

And I've got writing to do.

Well, at least I could record some of the parts today? Oh, turns out that even after I've fixed the tuning, and gotten them in tempo and on the metronome, I just don't sound that good. More practice is needed.

It may be winter again before I finally record this thing. And by then, I will almost certainly have cut my hair. 

Ten-to-One odds

Not me, fortunately. Apparently my arteries are all good. So it's "just" a heart rhythm problem. And I get to get Borg'd up for a week now with a new monitor.

I'm slowly figuring out how Goodreads works. Ran a giveaway and had over a thousand entries! Unfortunately, I only had one hundred copies set aside (and you can't edit a giveaway after you've started it).

Maybe that got my confidence up. Or the walking I've been doing (now that I know it is safe...well, safer than my cardiologist was inferring). Finally pushed through that killer first scene and I'm moving ahead with the latest novel. I've written, um, 1/70th of it.

The research has reached the point where it is starting to reinforce. I am after all focusing largely on Montmartre during the belle epoque, so sure, the Lapin Agile, Gil's insouciant rabbit, run by Aristide of the famed slouch hat and red scarf, the "laundry boat" where Picasso painted, and so forth, are starting to become familiar.

There's a darling strange film I may go through again when I've absorbed more of this. Dilili in Paris, a 2018 hybrid animation in which a Kanak girl from New Caledonia meets a whole spectrum of Parisian characters and turn-of-the-century settings, before taking a strange turn into the unmasking of a peculiar and nasty cult hiding in the catacombs.

Dilili has so many, many of these figures...put it this way; the title character is introduced to a bunch of artists hanging out at the studio of one, and no names are given in that scene; just each man or woman seen for long enough to say "bonjour" in front of a famous work of theirs. And I'm there going..."Is that Matisse? Oh, okay, this one's a Gaugin: I'd recognize that anywhere..."

The same for the setting...a quick shot of the facade of the Palais Garnier and I only figured that out because they find Emma Calve singing in a motorized (steampunk-ish) swan boat in the lake under the opera house...