A whiff of grapeshot

I've been binge-watching Warehouse 13. In a recent episode, the historian (and general polymath) Artie describes the power of a missing artifact (a violin once belonging to Napoleon) as capable of making "13 Vendémiaire look like a garden party." 

If I had watched the episode four days earlier, I wouldn't have gotten the reference.

So on the good side of the ledger, means I am slowly getting more informed. The kind of historical research I am doing is so focused on a specific time and place, though, it leaves huge gaps. If Artie had made a similar comment on Frederick the Great it would have gone right over my head.

And the few readers who have commented on my books keep going on about how much I've researched. They seem equally split about whether this is good or bad, but I think all of them would agree that the books would be better if they were simpler.

Which, more and more, I am seeing as a problem of process and not something I can easily change. My feeling now is that not having time to write is a big part of the problem. As the man said, he would have written a shorter letter but didn't have time. I have too much off-line time in which I can think about plot and do research and too little unobstructed time to push words.

I've been trying. The last two weeks, I've been trying extra hard to write directly following work, or even take some me time during work, pulling out my portable keyboard and trying to write. And it isn't happening.

But then, I've been wrestling with a stomach bug -- it took me two days just to build a trestle table in the shop. So I'm not doing anything well. (And today is likely a wash as it is family day).

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I wasn't intending to do a true dual-time in the current book. But I've reached enough material where I would feel comfortable setting a scene in Montmartre in 1900. Not, probably, in the "voice" of Major Huxley, though. I think I will skip actual excerpts from his memoirs and have Penny synopsize him for the reader.

Which was how I handled about half of the Blitz Diary material in the London book.

***

And as much as I want to try something else... In hopes that it is the subject/genre that isn't attracting readers, not my own inability to write... Well, nothing else is interesting me as much. I like exploring a place and society and creating one from scratch a la SF&F isn't interesting me as much. Heck, when I was doing a bunch of SF, my societies were basically borrowing from real societies I knew (or thought I knew!) something about.

And Penny is a really good choice for this. She's really not that complex a character, but what she is, is an actress, a cosplayer, an avid historian, and someone who throws themselves into the center of things. And that strange space she exists in between the (semi) serious student and still-inexperienced traveler, and the Athena Fox persona she portrays, means she can chameleon-like adapt not just to the setting but to the kind of story being told.

I can write a serious dig with her, or an over-the-top thriller, or a comedy. Whatever seems to make the most interesting combination with a place/history/whatever that also interests me.