I am a jelly donut

For a moment I thought I had made a break-through. For two days I struggled with the (fortunately mild) symptoms of COVID. Then I started to get some use out of my enforced isolation. Cranked through clean-up on the first two scenes of Part III of the Paris book and put over a thousand words down on the next.

And oops. It wasn't quite working. This is the process, though. Revision is usually necessary. Many writers begin by getting the whole thing down in an extremely rough draft, and once the whole shape is there on the page they can start whittling and adjusting and finding the real story that's in that rough mass.

Others try to hurry the process by working out as much basic structure as they can in outline. But they still end up with revisions. And then, occupying both spaces, the revise-as-you-go crowd has confidence in their grasp of what the overall shape will be (like the outliners) but is willing to cut now, tightening up the draft now rather than writing more chapters that will just end up on the floor.

A couple of days of struggling and something like thirty attempts to write just one simple conversation. Which I finally got this morning. And the final version was too short to be a full scene but with my understanding of the total structure I moved some stuff that needed to happen soon enough already and I put down almost a thousand words of brand-new scene.

In one morning.

The people who are actually writing for a living claim to crank out 2,000 words a day. Which is how they can get up to four books a year. That's leaving about a month for revisions, which doesn't strike me as plausible when those same people are claiming fifteen revisions and three rounds of beta readers. Basically, the number of words falling off the keyboard in any span of time isn't a good guide to how much book has gotten done.

I'm happy enough with scenes as a metric. I have cut scenes in the past. Moved them, created new ones, heavily revised them. But my draft, when finished, is the third or fourth draft and that's basically the book there. It isn't going to get a lot bigger or smaller and it isn't going to change radically.

Oh, yeah. And I needed a bit of "business" in the scene I just finished so I had Penny eat a millefeulle. That's my genius bonus for that scene. All along, she's been complaining about just how much this adventure keeps coming back to Napoleon. Guess what that particular pastry is called in America?

I also, sadly, could afford no more than a sentence on Loie Fuller. There are just so many amazing people, with such deep stories, in Paris in that period! Innovative dancer, inventor, lesbian -- her list of friends and admirers alone could fill a paragraph (start with Toulouse-Lautrec and end with Marie Curie!)

I knew Part III was going to be a bit unfocused but that's the struggle I am having. It was that damned chevaliers de sangreal scene that got me, once again. I rescued chunks of material from two different scenes in previous drafts, heavily revised and rewrote...and then decided this was the wrong place in the narrative to go on about the role of the Church in the history of Paris.

When I finally got straight what I was going to try to do, I'd realized I had to change half the previous scene and come up with a new conversation -- the one that took thirty drafts -- and now I've got to come up with something to fill the Carrousel du Louvre scene now that Catholic Conspiracies are (mostly) off the table again.

Oh, and the whole scene in the Paris Metro is getting booted downstream to the introduction to the parkour scene at La Defense. So at least I may get some use out of that material. 

I did, during this time of basically outline-as-you-go (or revising the outline, since I am not entirely without one) look at everything I could about the Sully Wing at the Louvre and put together a rough idea of how that scene is going to unfold. Oh, and I read the entire thing from top to bottom to see how it flowed.

Monday, I arrive back at work where six massive panels are waiting for a high-priority, high-profile rush job we only barely have time to finish on deadline. And my engineers phoned (emailed) wanting three more of their units built as well. I totally predicted this. I knew both these projects were going to arrive together and at the last minute.

I hadn't predicted that I'd be climbing out of five days wrestling with a bug. Next week is going to be...interesting.

NaNoCovWri

After all these years, finally had a positive antigen test. So off work for a couple of days. Maybe I can get some writing done?

Bring back those lazy crazy hazy days of Sumer

It might have worked better if Penny knew nothing about history.

I was trying to create a character who could believably pull off a lot of the Archaeologist Adventurer stunts; climb, jump, identify artifacts, read ancient manuscripts, navigate in Tokyo or Paris, Texas). So it made sense to have her know something about history, because that is the big intellectual one (the physical stuff...one can often hand-wave).

And I did the series in first person so she could explain what it was she was seeing without having to have a Boswell follow her around (I ended up creating a character for almost every book that she can talk to, anyhow). And it may have been a mistake. It means I set things up perfectly for the narrative to constantly geek out about history, filling every page with stuff that the reader might struggle with, or even decide is getting in the way of the story.

It might have worked better in third person. Intellectual characters sometimes work better that way. Instead of getting first-hand all this very detailed science, you are just getting the magic at the end, when the hero confidently declares the inscription is in Sumerian, or the light is from a pulsar, or the cabbie is actually a left-handed draftsman who bets on the horses.

Or I could have taken the history from her. Made her an outsider to the world she was walking into, learning the history and archaeology or whatever along with the reader. 

(Which I tried to do; I made a point of having the plot-important history delivered to her so the reader can get it, and can also see her learning it. And yes, I made it a running gag that whatever her knowledge of history, she'd inevitably focused on the wrong things and the plot-important stuff was as unknown to her as it was to the reader.)

It is tempting to think I could have just gone with her as an actor. As pretending the Indiana Jones thing without having any of the skills. But when I started writing, I hadn't realized how much I was going to lean on her acting background. Hell, when I started, she was a film student. The idea that she had spent a while not just in classes but on the stage, much less that she might identify as a theater bum...

The other drawback of the actor thing is she already is inclined to quote plays and sing songs from musicals at any excuse. Perhaps fortunately, copyright doesn't allow that to happen!

But, alas, I had set out to write stories specifically set in places I'd been, and involving history I was interested in, so no matter where I had gone with my protagonist or my narrator, I was going to end up with what some of my critics have been calling "too much stuff" in it.

***

Started another "Archaeological Thriller" on Kindle. Atlantis again (sigh). But it opened with Solon in Thais meeting an Egyptian priest who is (just barely!) believable as being there at the time.

But this was of course the Diego Salvatore the reluctant conquistador chapter; the guy who is in the story just to show the MacGuffin to the reader then get killed. When the story proper opens...they are doing a pretty convincing job of underwater archaeology, with amphorae, Minoan trade ware, and ox-hide ingots right there!

Worth noting that I pay a lot of attention to background building and info dumps and stuff like that in every book I read for pleasure. I am always trying to calibrate, making sure that when I write I know if I am doing less (as if!) or more (likely!) than published books. But it is quite difficult to actually judge this stuff and I am still not sure.

I ended up sort of simultaneously reading that, watching the not-very-good The Hunters, and playing part of Uncharted. And sure a lot of stuff is made that doesn't worry about getting history right. And it seems many of the audience don't care. But the book was on the NYT best-seller list (and Uncharted seemed to be doing decently on Hindu mythology and Indian history) so once again I'm led to believe that even something as out there as Atlantis is an easier sell if the author first gains the reader's confidence that they know their history.

Plus there's an element of fun in it. I've mentioned that more than one author of a neolithic story has had what is clearly the Amesbury Archer show up. In the Atlantis book I've been talking about, Fayum portraits and the Phaistos Disk show up and I'm not going to complain that the former are out-of-period. Because this is a shared in-joke, the author showing that they know the material that they are taking liberties with, and the reader sharing in knowing the thing, too.

***

I'm in low-confidence mode right now. Just finishing up the big "girl talk" bit I planned (Penny and the side character confidante of this book, Amelia, letting down their hair.) Which since Amelia is the Carolina Girl is me trotting out stereotypes of the South to go with the stereotypes of the French. And, yes, the only critique I've gotten so far on the book has been a comment that one of Huxley's lines sounded like the worst mock-period twee English garbage.

Yeah. I can't say I've ever gotten useful critiques. The only critical comments have been "That's shite," not a specific on what was wrong or a suggestion of what to do differently. Well, okay. There was one suggestion that I should provide a list of all the historical characters at the back of the book. That just struck me as a pointless exercise. If you didn't know who Miyamoto Mushashi is, how does it help to have his name listed a second time in an index you have to flip the pages to get to?

***

And I've given up on Starfield. It was mildly amusing in a Zen sort of way at times. There are days when grinding is all your mind can handle. I slowly came to appreciate the world they are trying to build. It just isn't carried out very well. They didn't hit the beats hard enough, and they didn't follow through.

Compare Horizon Zero Dawn. There isn't a story-game segregation, or a world-game segregation. Everything from the UI and menu design to the quest design to the combat design works within the world presented. Contrast with say my favorite whipping-girl, Tomb Raider 2013, in which your scared college student avatar flails away useless with a crappy bow during the cut scene, then you take over and proceed to murderize everyone with and ice axe then desecrate a few W.W.II corpses for the loot while you are at it.

Starfield takes those gaps and fills the experience with them. Todd Howard has been going on (and now he has apparently ChatGPT replying to Steam reviews for him) about how space is supposed to be lonely and some planets are bare.

As if. Pick a remote moon in the far reaches of the map. Land on a completely random location; this is in fact a procedurally generated unique bit of landscape. Three hundred feet away from your landing site is a struggling mining outpost, an abandoned mine, and a pirate base swarming with two hundred well-equipped pirates, and more ships flying in as you watch.

Every single time. (Oh, and it is the same base at that, copy-pasted right down to that one dead body with a flailing leg thanks to a terrain intersection).

Sixteen times the detail? Sixteen times the clutter. I will admit that the terrain out in those "empty" worlds can be very realistic. About Mass Effect: Andromeda realistic, though. Not Unreal Engine realistic. By comparison, Horizon Zero Dawn is a little more obviously computer generated.

But...HZD looks gorgeous. Those pixels are well-spent. And let us not even talk about the Starfield NPCs -- their graphical realism is about Fallout 4 level, but with some exceptions, their design is worse. There is the usual crop of idiots going around saying the problem is Starfield is "woke" so all their people are ethnic and ugly.

Um...the first people you meet in HZD are elderly, and Aloy the ginger is about the whitest person in the game. But oh my god those are some gorgeous people. In all their variety.

That, and they are fully animated. One assumes that Bethesda's excuse is that full RPG means too many lines for hand-animation (which is what Andromeda claimed for why so many people had tired faces). But over there, we've got Baldur's Gate 3 saying "Oh yeah? Hold my beer!"

The best I can figure is that they went like Andromeda did and wasted all their years of development trying to get full proceedural generation working. Then over the last six months of crunch tossed together a few hand-built locations and quests. And it feels like it. There's not even a full DLC of designed material in the game, and all of it looks rushed.

And I went back and replayed both main story and DLC for Horizon Zero Dawn.

He's here, the Phantom of the Opera

Finally, Part II of the Paris book is finished. Well, draft is finished. But I am a revise-as-you-go type and that puts me a lot closer to final draft than one might otherwise think.

A long tailing scene through the Palais Garnier, with musings on history, architecture, theater, and a whole bunch of stuff about Phantom.

Were I a better writer I might have been able to engage with the building more fully. Using the physical spaces and the various stories told in and of it as integral elements of the cat-and-mouse pursuit. I did sort of manage that when I did the big after-publication revision of the Japan book, making some semblance of one of those martial arts period piece chase scenes, jumping through windows and throwing straw baskets or whatever, out of what had been a stroll through the reproduction Edo-era town on the outskirts of Kyoto.

I didn't quite finish watching the 2011 Royal Albert Hall staged production of Phantom, or the 1925-1927 Lon Chany version, or for that matter reading the book. Much less Phantom of the Paradise, or any one of a hundred other adaptations of the story. Truth be told, I was doing long hours on another "unexpected emergency" project for the engineers at work. And what was playing through my earbuds to keep me awake was not Sir Andrew, but the MTV production of Legally Blonde.

***

Turns out I know someone who worked in that theater. At least he answered my ghost light question and whether the drops would be in or out. But still too many questions about the physical layout and none of the stuff I've found online is helping enough. Pretty much, every "behind the scenes at Palais Garnier" thing you find on a shallow search is either selling you, or telling you that someone sells, tickets for the guided tour.

Which I really should have taken while I was there. But no, I'm not going back to Paris to do research on a book only three people will ever read. So instead on to the Louvre, especially the Concourse mini-mall on the way to the lower entrance, parkour, La Defense, and the old belt railway (and some cataphiles...still on the fence about whether I will let Penny go into the catacombs on this trip.)

Tour de Paris

Had to work this weekend but actually felt pretty good Monday...over lunch at work, opened the file and wrote. A good hundred words. Whee! Do that for a year and I'd finish the novel.

I jest a little. The Palais Garnier chapter is at 1,700 words and no huge problems yet. Well, aside from the outline planning on this being an epic 4,000 word sequence. 

For no particular reason, though, I started thinking about what the book does as a tour of Paris. What hotspots does it hit and does it do anything interesting in them?

So here goes the current sequences (I use the term "sequences" as being a common idea or thread or location that may span several scenes or even chapters, or be concluded in just one or even part of one.)

A cafe at the place du tertre, and Penny meets a fellow tourist on her first day in Paris.

Penny looks for clues around Sacre-Coeur, atop the butte of Montmartre.

A stroll down Rue de Abesses, travel tips and beginning French, one of the Hector Guimard metro stations.

Back to place du tertre to meet a caricature artist, first of the "bohemians" who run a steampunk cabaret in modern Montmartre.

Musee d' Orsay, art and gossip about the Impressionists, and discussion of the Paris Exposition of 1900.

A (brief) stroll down the Champs Elysees and visit to the Arc de Triomphe, with Marianne (in the Phrygian cap), pointing the way to the next clue.

Morning workout running up the Rue Rivoli and past the old vineyards of Montmartre.

A visit to Shakespeare and Company, and the bouquinistes along the Seine.

A parkour chase across the Ile de le cite, followed by Parisian street food and a brief discussion of the Jewish community of Paris.

The Steampunk cabaret, with various popular songs being done in French...and German. Plus a "dual time" visit to the bateau-lavoir in the company of a young Picasso.

The Pompidou Center, Tintin (Herge was Belgian, though), and a long discussion on Rodin.

Another chase, starting in Gallery Vivienne.

A tailing scene through the projected landscapes of a Van Gogh multimedia show.

A talk with a "love picker" on Pont des Arts, about the love locks of Paris.

Another tailing scene through Palais Garnier, with a whole lot of stuff about the Phantom of the Opera.

***

And that's where I am. Projected, a steampunk photoshoot at the Arts et Metiers metro station, a parkour workout at La Defense, a description of the foyer at the ballet, a meeting with cataphiles along the route of the old Petite Ceinture and a run-in with some punks, details of what happened to Picasso's friend and why his Blue Period, a steampunk garden party and mock duel at Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, a midnight climb of Notre-Dame des Paris, a daytime visit to Notre-Dame du Travail, and a dinner at the Jules Verne cafe atop the Eiffel Tower.

So there's a few more hundred-word days left there.

Capital idea

I'm a good ways into the love locks scene, with one last big chapter to go to the end of Part II. Boy, has this one been a slog!

I also decided that I will send this to an editor after all. I'm not going to sell enough copies to pay for that, and I haven't the patience (see above!) to do developmental edits, but I want a line editor to go through the thing because I just can't deal with capitalization and, even more, italics.

Within the context of what I am doing some of these are arbitrary choices. As a for-instance, I am in this book italicizing sentences in French. As per the trend, if the entire sentence is in French the quotes are also italicized, otherwise, not.

But should I italicize names? Everyone knows the Louvre, so that probably shouldn't be. Something like the Ile de la Cité is actually a descriptive phrase as well as a name. As is anything that is a Rue or a Pont; should it be the Pont des Arts, because "pont" is the French word for bridge? It seems to make sense; that it would be the Eiffel Tower or le Tour Eiffel depending. But then is it properly Notre Dame, since that just means "Sacred Heart?" Or is it better that the familiar English Notre Dame isn't in italics, but Notre Dame de Paris when it is given in full form?

There's a bit early on when the character Bastien is speaking franglish; he is mixing actual French with English and English roots given French grammar (apparently that's a thing). So...which parts of that mess should be in italics?

Oh, and French capitalization rules are different, too. Of course.

I can at least get the French words correct by hiring a French reader. As painful an experience as that is likely to be. But the thought of trying to figure out consistency in such cases as whether I should italicize or quote or both something like, "You say 'bonjour' when you enter a place of business..."

In the Japan novel, my rather odd rule of thumb was that only proper Japanese got italics. If someone mentioned "sushi," that was just treated as an English word imported from Japanese. Even much of Aki's weaboo speak didn't get graced with italics, along with Penny's mixed attempts at it. Only a complete grammatical/idiomatic sentence from her got the full italics.

But all the little details of even if it should be the Eiffel Tower or the Eiffel tower are just too much for me to mess with. Sure I can look them up. But there's something on almost every page, and I'd just as soon to pay someone to worry about that. And fix the places where the italics or the intricacies of punctuation around quotations escape me.

I would very much love to somehow push through this one, and find some way to kick a few more out the door on a much shorter schedule.

(And, yes, the Love Locks scene is on the Pont des Arts. Largely because that's the bridge people think of if they've heard of love locks at all. And even though it is clear of them now, finding an excuse to stick some up anyhow is easier than going into the history of which bridges still have them...)

***

I've been reading a series about a very Mary-Sue character -- it is intentional on the writer's part, but only partially works -- and that's been giving me thoughts about larger-than-life characters. The Greeks didn't have the hangups we do, in that their heroes were larger, stronger, and probably related to a god, and that was just fine.

The first superheroes were also very much of a "faster better stronger" mold -- one of the innovations of Marvel was heroes that had problems and hang-ups and weaknesses, with perpetually broke hang-dog Peter Parker being the poster boy. And now we have come to where we often dislike the really skilled characters -- and when we get them, we demand that those skills have some logical reason for being.

One of the things critics express about the "Sue" characters is the opinion that they haven't earned their powers. But I can't help thinking that there is a hidden gender bias in there. The same swipe of a pen gives a character a black belt, a physics degree, six years in the Marines...but the readers question it more often when that character is female (doesn't help, of course, that the standard is usually hot, young female -- that is, not of the age and size and battered appearance that really should go with those years of getting those skills shown on the paperwork. Yet, this qualification is often waived for the men as well...)

A lot of what went into Penny was reaction on my part. I didn't want the standard female protagonist package, with or without the "strong" appended. So no handy martial arts background or surprisingly young doctorate degree, but she also isn't a shy loner, she gets along fine with cheerleaders, and her hair isn't perfect after a week in a cave.

Yet she is becoming a hero. Sure, an "ordinary man" hero, but in a semi-realistic universe (and trope-aware enough herself) to recognize that you stop being ordinary by the third Holy Grail you manage to dig up. So far, I've held back in that her superhuman ability is her almost autistic focus on whatever history the plot requires her to be knowledgable about.

(She's also able to pull of physical stunts that a self-described "ex dancer and climber of plastic rocks" shouldn't be able to pull off. And has stubborn endurance which is also way off the bell curve. But those are part of the standard "ordinary man" exception where one ticking atom bomb is enough to let thirty-something computer salesman who sometimes plays a bit of pick-up basketball somehow come up with the strength, determination, and sheer luck to beat up a renegade Green Beret.)

The main magic skill I've given her is language. She has an instinct that she isn't in control of. Which basically, at least up to this book, is given her the seasoned-world-traveller characteristic of being able to speak a little of whatever the local language is, without me having to defend her actually learning the damned thing. She's just a very finely tuned parrot; speaking the correct idiomatic phrase to get her through an interaction (with nearly flawless pronunciation), even as she has no idea what it is she said.

And none of that makes my job of how to treat language any easier.

Do Gogh On

Various projects -- and some work politics -- all hit at the same time. Precisely as predicted, of course. Had to fly to Burbank to take some measurements and got a chance to step inside the gates at Sony, at least. But head colds and flying are not good companions.

In any case, I'm finishing of the scene at the Van Gogh Experience. This is the scene that gives the lie to the idea that I just cram everything I know into each chapter (although I will admit that this book is less filtered than the others). My choice for this one is that my protagonist doesn't know much about the painter and doesn't get a chance to learn, either.

So there are a lot of Van Gogh paintings being projected on to the walls, and I am spending time staring at haystacks and cafes and lots and lots of sunflowers. But the narrator is unable to name any of them, much less place them in proper historical context.

About the only one I think I can get away with is to have a cross-fade that suggests that the sunflower was Vincent himself. But the tidbit that he painted scads of these things to decorate the room that Gaugin was more-or-less blackmailed into taking in shared digs at Arles -- an odd couple that would soon enough erupt in violence and the loss of an ear -- well, I can't share any of that.

I have enough name-drops and references and weird jokes anyhow. At some point Penny is across the cornfield (with crows) from the people she is tailing, in a spy-movie version of that one segment from Kurosawa's Dreams, and she remarks there's too much light and they are going to see her "coming through the rye."

That's the problem with spending so long writing. Not that I add new stuff at every pass. The process is different. It is that I take so long between writing sessions, when I write a couple of new paragraphs I've had days to think about the scene and the random ideas and associations and jokes and turns of phrase are just waiting in the wings. All of my re-write passes are about taking as much of that stuff as I can...back out. 

Twenty Hours

There are some books in which the sample chapters are just so engaging you immediately buy the book...then find out the rest of the book does something different and not as interesting.

I've never encountered this in a game. Generally, you know in less than five minutes. (Of course, you rarely get a sample chapter, so you've bought the game already...)

Mostly. It can take a while to get into the core gameplay loop. In Horizon Zero Dawn you are introduced to most of the core concepts within twenty minutes of the (long!) opening cutscene. An important element is the "focus," however, and if you are really, enjoying exploration and listening to all the audio diaries it might take you forty minutes get to Aloy actually using the thing in-game.

Similarly, you don't get the bow and you certainly don't get the trick arrows until an hour into Tomb Raider 2013. But the thing is; whether it is the mostly-passive opening sequence of Bioshock or the extremely long cutscene that begins Horizon Zero Dawn or the big build-up -- you do character creation before you even start playing -- before you actually stride the corridors of the Normandy as Commander Shepard, you still know what kind of ride you are in for.

These games all have a style. There's a strong artistic vision that infuses all the design elements, from as big as skyboxes to as intimate as inventory screens. The music, the sound effects -- and when any element of play begins, the fluidity and intuitiveness of the controls.

I had trouble right out of the gate with Dragon Age, as I did not like the control system. It almost reminded me of the "tank" controls of original Tomb Raider.  Far Cry 3 also felt awkward. I just did not really feel in control of Jason Brody. But that's a me thing; that's a reaction some players will have, and some will not.

Just as the very strong design choices in some games just don't mesh with all players. When you give a whole game a distinct stamp, color, flavor, then some will like it and some will not.

What doesn't work is being bland. I can't think of any game I have really liked that had a bland approach. My favorite games have all had, over and above the game play, puzzles, dialogue, choices, voice acting, and of course graphics, an extremely distinctive style. You can't confuse Portal with anything else out there.

***

So every now and then a game comes along that the advise is not to judge it immediately but play for twenty hours. As I mentioned in my previous "review" (short take?) Starfield takes obscenely long to open up the rest of the game to you. 

Well, okay, the crafting, base building, and ship building are a bit of an appendage. They are to some one of the more attractive parts of the game, though, and they are behind a grindwall that's a good 10-20 hours thick.

Same goes for the main campaign. Considered skippable -- but one of the side quests that is well spoken of (Crucible) requires multiple hours of play just to clear the first barrier. You have to have a specific package of upgraded ship and upgraded skills (and some toughness, too) in order to even get the quest. 

It took me well over twenty hours to get to where I could start building my first outpost. I could have done ship building earlier, but really, not that much earlier. Plus, it took that long to get both the main campaign into an interesting place, and to be able to start pursuing the big side quests (like Mantis).

So, yes. As far as the play opportunities, as far as exploring that "core gameplay loop," I really did need to put twenty hours in.

Which pains me. It means there are some upper-level managers who are congratulating themselves on making a game good enough that most players do a good twenty hours, and none of them quality for a refund. The reality is that they've done such a bad job of staging this game, it really does require that kind of time.

The crafting system is ridiculously grindy, and it is linked in various ways to outpost building (and less so to ship construction but there are similar things going on there). The player just can't experience the game as written without exceeding the refund time.

But...and here's the big but...the five minute rule was still true.

It looks awful. It looks like shit and it runs like shit. The two are connected only in the dreams of the marketers; turn down the graphics and it still bugs out all over the place. Turn up the graphics to full settings -- and it still looks like a game from fifteen years ago.

Almost every part of this game is a regression. The NPCs are less alive, less animated, less realistic. The scenery is less interesting. There's less interactivity overall, really. This still has the Creation Engine stupid of playing long, long animations of your character sitting down, then awkwardly cutting to a different POV of them seated. Same for crafting. This still has the stuck-in-place, dead-eyed NPCs chanting the same stock lines at you without any sense that your input even matters. It is like being trapped in the animatronic Hall of Presidents for twenty hours.

And all the usual stuck on scenery, vanishing heads, and people mysteriously floating into the sky...that's all still there.

But even that doesn't matter. Because when all is said and done, it doesn't have the "it." The design is merely adequate. There's no strong flavor to it. No strong choices. Just...stuff. Generic music, generic assets, generic UI..

I take that back. The UI is regrettably ugly and dysfunctional. It looks and feels and works like the low bid for a mega-chain POS register. Endless unfriendly menus with poor text, poor tactile response, no clear and consistent UI system...

It feels absolutely random, for instance, whether you can click on a quest location and make the jump from there, or if you have to go to your ship, or if your ship pops into space over the planet and you have to navigate down to the surface with another click-and-loading screen. After dodging bigger enemies for hours by having one finger on the hyperdrive controls -- as the game itself, and the NPCs in the cockpit with me, all recommend -- I got killed while staring at a screen labeled "You can not fast travel in combat!"

There's no strong spirit to it. People don't love Portal because of the cutting-edge ambient lighting engine (although Portal 2 does look very, very nice). Or Bioshock because the environments are filled with intricately modeled clutter. They love that these games have a distinctive look and feel that draws you emotionally and aesthetically into their world.

And you can figure this out in five minutes. Seriously -- don't do the twenty hours. It doesn't really get any better. The same poor gameplay loop, the same broken balance, the same crashes, the same ugly graphics and lack of a great style; what you see in a tutorial in a mineshaft really is the game you are going to get.

Monkey!

I decided my Starfield  character would be an incarnation of Sun Wukong. I'd already decided this during character creation -- and it turned out to work quite well.

Bethesda games. You go around solving problems that have been there for decades. Going one-man army on the enemy that somehow has experienced Marine units pinned down. Doing errands and helping people and everyone is amazed at your exploits.

In Fallout 4 you get the reputation as the Vault Survivor (or you can even go around in costume as the Silver Shroud, but only a few people recognize it). In Skyrim you are the literal Dragonborn. So at least there's an in-game reason for you to be so heroically capable in that game. I was starting to have a sort of standard backstory for my Fallout 4 characters that basically the world had gone to shit and one competent person from the past could kick ass. Helped that I tended towards engineers; people who could make their own advanced weapons and elaborate settlements, which I hand-waved as me having had a pre-war education.

And in Starfield you pretty soon get alien powers. But it doesn't matter. You are already both scary competent and also the savior to pretty much every obsequiously thankful colonist out there.

So it worked being the Monkey King. Being a demi-god already, a legendary trickster and warrior, even if I did have to work my way to my first ship as a street rat in the cyberpunk city of Neon.

Incidentally, that's the most fun I've had in the game so far; going around playing with the gangs and corruption in Neon as an ex street rat. So basically a cut-rate Cyberpunk 77. Only with worse graphics, worse stories, worse missions, and much, much, much worse NPCs.

It helped a lot with suspension of disbelief. Why this penniless street kid and one-time Argos Consortium miner is suddenly beating up twenty-year veteran pirate captains. And why all those worshipful colonists are getting stars in their eyes whenever I offer to help out. Because I'm already a legendary hero. Reincarnated, maybe, but after the Journey to the West this shit is easy.

Did make for some weird moments around the alien artifact, though. The Constellation Group kept asking how I suddenly felt so different now that I had alien powers, and I'd shrug because, hey, I was already a supernatural being. Bethesda had not planned for those dialog options.

***

It is a basic problem with games. Somehow the entire Third Army can't move unless Private Jones can chuck a grenade through a window successfully. Sometimes it is acceptable in context. Commander Shepard is a highly. highly, highly trained soldier, top of her class, survivor of legendary battles. And hasn't figured out how to use a rifle, but never you mind. The Doom Marine, on the other hand, just is. It's his thing.

Aloy has her Focus and spent a lot of time learning its tricks -- so even when she runs into other Focus users, she is able to do things they can't. 2013's Lara Croft, on the other hand, is just a student. Even the movie gave her an athletic background. The game does handwave that Roth taught you how to shoot, but still, you should not be doing so well against experienced survivors. "She's just one girl!" ("This one girl is kicking our ass!")

The bigger problem is RPGs. And this is a game design problem. You need situations for the protagonist to solve. In the real world, there would still be problems occurring. There's always business for the long-runner detective show or whatever. But games are cast in bronze before you start playing. When you fix the current issues...there are no more.

And they have to be fixed, too. There has to be that moment when the thing is concluded and you collect XP. So that leaves late-game in a weird place where none of the NPCs have much to say to you (because you already did their quest), but the world hasn't really changed despite all of that (because quests can happen out of order and they can't design for every single option. In Just Cause 3, you can liberate the entire nation but the dictatorship still has cars full of soldiers patrolling around.)

Character AI, as exciting as it is, won't solve all of this. As already implemented (and only in third-party mods, oddly enough, not in any current release) it allows conversations to continue and the NPC to remember and refer back. And, eventually, to have their personality shaped (because that's already happening, but the trigger is actions, not unscripted dialogue). But this stays at a Sims sort of level, as AI is not the tool to create new scenarios, new quests.

Oh, sure, they've been trying. Bethesda has had ongoing open quests using their Radiant system for a while now...and it sucks. A good quest is sculpted, with unique options, locations, dialogue. Not "Another settlement needs your help."

At some point activity ceases. The world becomes static. Might as well go invest in the base building at that point...

Dragon or Draggin'

Bethesda is still searching for the right balance.

Skyrim starts with a slow five minutes, but there is this thing in Elder Scrolls games; you need to spend to first five minutes in a dungeon. Or in Skyrim's case, in a cart to your execution. The thing is, it doesn't put half the game behind a grind wall. You can go anywhere, and you can dip your toes in anything. At level one, you can use a sword or a bow or even magic, you can craft a potion or some new boots or even cook some stew.

Fallout 4 was, I believe, intended to give you a taste of future glory. Unlike Fallout 3 where there is a complete faction quest before you can get to powered armor, you can get your first suit at level 1. And a mini-gun. Which is in a place with several triggers to tempt you into wasting all of your ammunition on raiders so the spring-loaded deathclaw can twist your brand-new armor into wreckage in one epic hand-to-hand.

Starfield is generous in giving you your own ship barely ten minutes in. But, really, the game doesn't start getting fun until about twenty hours of play. It takes that much, well, grinding -- boring stupid grinding -- before you have any skills that make a difference. You aren't really doing an RPG, and you don't have a lot of options. The interesting quests are meat-gated away (you need to level up in order to tackle them), the random planet hopping turns up nothing of particular value or interest...plus of course this is late Bethesda RPG in which your responses to a quest-giver are either agree to do it, or agree but be sarcastic about it.

It simply isn't worth crafting, or collecting most of the materials you can collect, or exploring, because you don't have the skills to do anything with any of that. And those skills only come with a whole bunch of exceptionally grindy combat.

And you can't personalize your experience, because it doesn't matter if you want to be an assassin or a diplomat or a gadgeteer, you don't have any skills and won't be getting any for hours and every single enemy is dropping a leveled spray-and-pray gun for you to use instead.

About twenty hours of play. Less if you don't struggle against the railroading (always a decent recommendation for recent Bethesda games) and just follow the quest markers they throw in front of you. At that point you can start making some choices that feel worth making, and start having some skills other than "picking up gun off ground and holding down the trigger."

It isn't...good...yet. The quests are often frustratingly unfinished, stopping just when you've actually started to get involved. But you can finally survive getting out of the easy plains and into the wild where half-way interesting things to do are. It is still shallow, but I liked the Cydonia mining colony and sort-of-liked Neon and the Mantis quest is actually sort of fun.

Plus, at the end of it I expect to get a ship that might -- like the finally unlocked basic crafting skills -- make it worth doing some of the other activities the universe offers.

Sixteen Times the Elevators : Starfield

For some strange reason of poor optimization or stringent system limits, the original Mass Effect was "blessed" with ludicrously long elevator sequences in all the Citadel scenes. They were ostensibly hiding loading screens, as was the laborious "Scanning for pathogens" sequence whenever you entered the Normandy from dock-side.

Always one to make good bugs out of bad bugs, the team added some dialogue to Mass Effect 2 in which returning squadmates comment about all the lovely conversations they used to have while waiting for the elevators to get there. They also added an elevator to the Normandy itself.

Well, Starfield manages to get the worst of both worlds. It has extremely long door-opening animations, and ship-launch animations, and all sorts of other fill-the-time animations...but still has to stop on a blank screen to actually load the cell. No, worse than that; it stops on the still picture and spinning disk to load the transition scene. Then once the transition is done, it goes to a loading screen again.

This pretty much sums up the game, technically-wise. It obviously has a more hungry engine in it. The first advice in all the materials for lags and crashes is to turn down graphics quality. The requirements for storage, RAM, VRAM and GPU are huge.

And it looks like crap. I mean, it looks vastly worse than Andromeda, and that was an earlier game with less intensive graphical needs. It is barely better than Fallout 4 aside from some fancier lighting. But what really kills it is that all this horsepower is being used badly. All those CPU cycles are going to waste. Skyrim provides landscapes that feel more real and NPCs that are easier on the eye even though they are clearly a few generations back.

It has reached a sort of Uncanny Valley of graphics; the graphics are so "real" that they make the computer cry, but the result is less pleasing to the eye than what other teams achieved with, well, much less.

This is the most poorly optimized piece of garbage I have ever watched spin, and lag, and bug out, and even lock up. And, no; turning down graphics doesn't fix the bugginess or the lag (it does, oddly, make the game look a bit better!)

Not just graphics. The cells load agonizingly slow and have all sort of problems. But as bad as the optimization for running on a computer is, the optimization for the human experience is just as bad or worse.

The menu system is a nightmare. The space combat control schema is a cludge. Nothing is properly tutorialized. They've even managed to screw up maps. I am playing a couple of very large patches down the road, and I have to suspect that they patched around some of the loading-screen nightmare by giving you the option to launch into space without going through your cockpit at all. I suspect this largely because the design of when you can skip the various planet screens feels like a mish-mosh.

But then, so do the other menus. There's no feeling of a single design vision, as there was with the Mass Effect games (not that Mass Effect 1 was a winner for inventory screens, either).

And, ouch, the planets. For procedurally-generated planetscapes, they don't look bad. But there's little variation, little fractal scale. It is just rocks and trees, rocks and trees, out to the horizon. You don't get a sense of having gone anywhere, or having been anywhere, because no part of the map sticks out. There's no "follow the river into the ravine, then climb the hillside and on the other side of the glade..." There's just...more rocks and trees.

Which wouldn't be so bad...again, that's what Mass Effect 1 had to offer. But it also had the Mako (and smaller maps anyhow). The preset landing locations and quest locations are twenty minutes apart on the damned Starfield maps. Twenty minutes of walking. Through rocks and trees.

I am still playing. It is mildly diverting. But oh, boy, what a botch job of a game.

Time to Gogh

I went to the "Van Gogh Experience" when one of them (apparently there's at least three) was in my city. The sign for the restrooms said "If you need to Gogh..."

I did manage to make it through the revised Galerie Vivienne chase, and the brand-new aftermath scene I ended up adding. So now I'm in the middle of the Van Gogh scene...and I'm not ready.

I'm intentionally not having a lot about the artist and his life this time. There's some beats I want to hit, because they play to other themes. But I don't really need to talk about his time as an apprentice preacher, or the way he stayed in South London for a while. 

What I do need is for the exhibit to seem like it makes sense. For the paintings that are playing on the projection loop to at least pretend to tell a story about his life and career. So I need to understand a bit more than I do. I don't need factoids. I need a feeling for the flow of it. And also, a feeling for what parts of his life there are images from him that are memorable enough to people more used to "Starry Night" to at least sort of recall.

The trick about these exhibits is that they really are a lot of favorite hits. And they present a curated and perhaps sanitized vision. The one I saw, I don't remember a single one of his sketches of the miners of the Borinage, for instance. 

And I'm just now realizing I really have only three more of these "chunks" of art history to finish off the novel. There's a bit of the petite ceinture, and some more stuff about Picasso, but really there's three biggies left and this is one of them. The other two are both novelists, and buildings. The Paris Opera House through the lens of the long and strange history of dramatizations of Leroux's book, and Notre Dame de Paris through the (original) preservationist intent of Victor Hugo.

Just as well. The hot weather is over for the moment but I'm not feeling up for much more than watching movies about Van Gogh. And contemplating purchasing Cypberpunk 2077 or (a very, very distant second) Starfield.

A hundred-word toast

Most weeks, all the substantial writing I get in happens over meals. Specifically, meals out. Well, I was finishing up one such and I did another Fermi estimation. You know that old saw about a picture being worth a thousand words? Well, from my count, a slice of toast is good for about a hundred.

I finally got through my revisions and up to the scene I'd left off on. Which I expanded, then completed. And tonight, somehow managed to create, from scratch, five hundred words of a brand new scene.

That's the way my method works right now. Actually, in the Galerie Vivienne scene just prior to the chase scene, I've got Amelia remarking that Penny's method seems to be to flail about randomly until she bumps into a clue. Penny retorts that she flails about randomly, annoying people and asking stupid questions...until she bumps into a clue.

It is pretty much a description of how The Doctor works. Or for that matter Dirk Gently. But it isn't just a British thing. Robert B. Parker's Spenser operated on the principle that if he annoyed enough people, someone would finally tell him something they shouldn't.

Penny isn't quite at the point where she has to survive having people sent to beat her up first, as seems to be the rule with Spenser. Her stories are always walking that fine line between being a somewhat believable universe, yet her never quite having really serious violence done to her, or having to deal out similar violence herself. The London book was in part showing that there was a line and it could be crossed if she wasn't both careful and lucky.

This book will have the "Apaches" scene (for some reason, that became the slang over a chunk of the belle epoque for a particular kind of violent petty criminal in the low parts of Paris.) But Penny is in just as much danger when she ends up free-climbing Notre Dame (on the night before the fire, as it happens).

I've always worked on an accretion model. It might be an iterative model. Most of it happens when I'm not actually writing, probably because it takes time and serendipity. I've been slowly working up to the Palais Garnier scene that finishes Part II and makes for the big Act II-III turn-around. Too early to start committing anything to paper, but I've been sort of bookmarking any potentially useful resources.

So a media critic (she's got a degree in it or something and does some amazing work) had something that popped up in my feed. I don't even know how I recognized it was about Phantom of the Opera. It was about the character of The Persian, and how infrequently he shows up in adaptations of the original novel. Which is bizarre, as he is not just an important character, but also quite probably the most moral character in the whole tale (Lecroix's Christine might or might not be as vapid as the usual, but his Raul is quite a bit less the selfless heroic leading man type.)

And that started a whole train of thought. Especially as Lindsey went on about fandom, or perhaps phandom.

And I toyed with that new thought and those new insights and it works. I have an uneasy relationship with Penny, still. Sometimes I am very sure what belongs in her character and what does not. Other times, I am uncomfortably aware of how much soft clay remains. When I'm actually writing the stories, the main leeway I have is not what she thinks, but when she gets around to thinking it. I can't keep her from having an opinion but I can tweak when she comes to it; that's my leeway to make the inner and outer plots track properly.

Anyhow, the more I looked at it, the more it seemed to work with her inner landscape. She wasn't -- quite -- a Phantom groupie, but it was a near thing. She understands the fandom and she knows the material.

This isn't what I'd originally planned. When I bumped into that video, my plan had been that she has a fairly quick thought about not being an Andrew Lloyd Weber fan but is still annoyed when Nathan Snow and his gang of "MBAs and fraternity assholes" start singing snatches of it. Like, this is her thing.

By the by, I came this close to having Hux sing a snatch of "A British Tar." But it works better with his style for him to drop a broad hint instead. Sigh. I'm doing this a bit myself and I don't know if it is legit homage/genius bonus for certain readers, or if I'm plagiarizing a cool line. The latest steal was during the chase -- heading down the long straight passage of Galerie Vivienne Penny remarks that "Parkour is wasted in cross-country."

So anyhow, I was already puzzling if I could have some Phantom back story while exploring the opera house, and I didn't see a way to do it. Well, now if Penny was at one point a total fangirl of Eric and so on, then she has an excuse. And I can still approach the original beat, just a little crosswise, with her being more mature and so over that now.

That's how they grow. The scene I just knocked out today, started yesterday with the idea that Amelia could be startled when Penny takes off after Jaques and later tells her she didn't expect her "to go all Batman."

And as I thought about it, Penny is still the reluctant hero and she's just gotten hurt and she snaps out something in reply.

And that gives me the argument I'd wanted to work in somewhere. Oh, but now I've got an injured Penny and Amelia walking away and...ooh, there's a chance for her to suddenly go all Southern self-sufficiency on Penny!

And with Amelia already stepping up to the sink with bandaids in her hands, another theme is waiting to hit it's next beat; the one about Penny keeping secrets.

And this is just the first draft. Thing are crazy at work -- both high-profile projects went back on the table, and at the same time (just as I'd predicted they would). It may be a few days before I can get back to finishing that scene.

By then, I expect to have another two or three layers to add in...

Up the hill

I'm coming close to finishing the last round of revisions. Perhaps this time I'll be able to push through to the end of Part II.

Probably not; there's three "chunks" to get through before the end. First, Penny tails the mysterious Nathan Frost through the Van Gogh experience. So a bit of the segment "Crows" from Kurosawa's Dreams, with the characters walking through the landscapes of Van Gogh's paintings, crossed with her attempts to build on what she learned in Japan to do the "social invisibility" trick that features in several of the Assassin's Creed games.

So yeah, my current playlist is a bunch of Waldemar videos and other stuff about Van Gogh.  Then there's a little scene where she talks to a lock-picking enthusiast who is pulling love locks off a bridge. There's maybe ten words about practical lock-picking in there (like me, Penny is going to have to be content with a city rake and simple padlocks) but a lot more philosophy, because this is Paris and sometimes there really is that stereotypical conversation about love and art.

Finishing off Part II with a midnight break-in at Palais Garnier. With a visit to Box 5, and a peek at the "lake" (actually a cistern) and don't worry...nothing at all with the chandelier.

Right now I'm cleaning up the Pompidou scene. That's the inside-out art museum:

That one is a marathon conversation about Hergé, en L'an 2000, and Rodin. Plus comic books, sculpture... And also the scene that made me go back to try to make the book look less like it was being some self-indulgent "let me just stop the action to let my characters info-dump everything I know about my hobby this week."

Which it never really is. Sure, I picked Montmarte and the Impressionists because I knew something about them. But this is much, much less "write what you know" and a lot more "write what you want to know." And the vast majority of what I've learned...isn't going in the book.

Still, you gotta fill the pages some time.

I picked the Galerie Vivienne because I was going to have a chase scene there:

But turns out that, like most of the covered passages of Paris, the map is far too simple (and the passage itself too narrow) for a good parkour chase. So they immediately take it outside and that leaves the gallery itself as sort of an appendage to the "real" scene.

Today I got through what my outline calls "Seven Against Paris." That's their favorite cafe at Place de Tertre, with Penny explaining why she's been trying to read the Agricola all book, Bastien finally reveals the steampunk comic book he's been working on, and Nathan drops by to all but tell her outright that he's the other person crawling around Paris looking for what he apparently thinks is the eighty tons of gold the Napoleon abandoned some where along the retreat of the Grande Armée from Moscow.

And then stopped for an hour but it was a productive hour. Every chapter that doesn't have one of the doggerel (actually, heroic couplet -- just not very good ones) that are the clues to the treasure has for an epigraph some random quote from Jonathan Huxley's book.

The last I decided not to go on a long hunt through the huge volume of available material (there are two appropriate movies, free to view, on Amazon Streaming alone!) and just did a quick mention-in-passing:

“…the luminous Lo Lo, her long dresses glowing in more colours than a Monet haystack…”

And yes, I really wanted to work in something about Marie Curie, but even though this introduces the first scene with the steampunk cabaret, it would just be a distraction. Save the Curie stuff for the next book!  

So Part II opens with Penny jogging along Rue Lepic. And I knew exactly what I wanted, but it took time to track down exactly what early automobiles had climbed that hill and in what context. Alas, although there were a bunch of auto races as an adjunct to the Summer Olympics of 1900 (held in conjunction with the Paris Exposition of that year) those were all taking place elsewhere.

I did however find several videos of people driving around in surviving Renault Voiterette -- and again, this wasn't like the longish scene I wrote that went inside the "Laundry Boat" itself and met Suzanne Valadon there -- err, not to mention Pablo Picasso!

Windows ME-chan

So there was a version of Windows that was, shall we say, worse than even the usual low bar. It just made such strange decisions in memory management and file management and people, well, hated it.

Until one artist came around with a way of looking at it that was a total 180. He created one of the first "chans," adorable mascot-type characters, dedicated to Windows ME. Instead of seeing it as deeply flawed and generally unliked software, he cast it as a well-meaning but klutzy little girl. "Oops, I dropped that file you were trying to save!"

I just got off a delightful hour on AT&T's web page, complete with two chat sessions. And it was hit or miss whether I actually completed the transaction. Trust? None. Belief that they know what they are doing? None. Belief I'll actually get reliable internet? Are you kidding?

But, somehow, I ended up doing that same 180. It was one of the last pages that came up, a page just so off both in intent and accomplishment from what it thought it was doing, but so very earnest with the flashy trying-too-hard graphics and web design...it suddenly came across as sort of endearing.

This isn't the evil empire anymore. This isn't Weyland-Yutani. This is their scrappy but doomed competitor in the Alien:Isolation lore, Seegson. Trying so hard but failing so very often.

(Consumer Reports aggregate of customer reviews has them at 1.1 out of 5. Obviously there's a lot of self-selection here...but 1.1?)

Seegson, busy selling a bug as a feature. No, it is a good thing that our androids look so crappy!

A Nuclear Age

Been pushing hard at writing pretty much any time I'm not sleeping, working, or eating (which seems to take up far too much of the day as it is.

Did unwind just a little with Satisfactory. Getting to the final deliverables on the Space Elevator is a leap up of at least a magnitude in the amount of automation necessary. But that's the tricky thing about Satisfactory. Once you are able to make enough miners and conveyor belts to get things moving...you run into a power crunch.

So time to get nuclear. This was my previous plant; the "Spider," located in the swamp along with my original aluminum facility:

A bit tangled in there. Also the goal of more than one last-minute dash across the map to figure out why my power plant had stopped generating power again.

So started a much larger facility in the spider-heaven of the Red Bamboo Forest. This was to be a self-contained 100% recycling nuclear power plant capable of running 24 reactors.

Well, sort of self-contained. Nuclear Power is late-game, so takes half the resources the map can deliver just to make the fuel rods. I sited the plant over a uranium node, with coal and limestone close enough to conveyor in. Reactors are water-hungry, though. I even lined the little creek under the building with water extractors:

But that wasn't nearly enough. More water was pumped out of the ground..from deep in a local ravine (where the silicon I also needed was located.)

Ah, the joys of headlift. An expensive Mark II water pump every forty meters...

But there's only so much conveyor belts can do. That, and the building was going to be big enough already once I added fuel reprocessing. So a sulfuric acid section at the massive refinery I'd started building a short rail trip away:

The was also a convenient transship point for quickwire from a new caterium facility built into the hillside above the "spider proof" tunnel for the sulfur trucks running out to the old turbo-fuel plant:

That's still only half the list, though. I needed various iron, steel, and copper products as well, and those weren't quite as close. So a brand new metal products plant almost under the new railway. Unfortunate location; I had cliff, lake, and a really nice bit of flower bed I didn't want to disrupt so I had to try and cram it up under the rail line somehow. Again this is a design feature; Satisfactory is always presenting you with choices for your architecture, tempting you away from just building floating slabs up in the air.

And in the end, at least I had a little more space to work with. Also made full use of a sub-floor for running the rat's-nest of piping. I haven't opened it up to the full 24 reactors, though. Just kicking along with six until I am sure I've worked out all the bugs...

(And as usual the architecture ended up taking back seat. Was going to make a cool control room/observation deck, and I wasted a bunch of time trying to do some cool curves on the rail entrance, but in the final crunch I just shoved machines where they would fit and hooked them up. 

Ninja....but why?

Trying out some new filaments in my Ender3. Well; I printed another part from work, and we were looking at options to add a gasket and I thought I should see what flexible (TPU) filament does.

I was too cheap for Ninjaflex, but (after the first attempt resulted in a jam) I was able to run off a test print in some TPU:

 

Found the file on Thingiverse. Plus, my phone needed one.

I also ran off a print strictly for "because" reasons (because the printer is there and it doesn't cost anything but a little filament to keep it running while I am doing something else):

Okay -- I did try out some clear filament for the rod thingy. Looks a little better in person. I printed almost entirely without support but between low printer settings and overhang/bridging failures there was more clean-up than I'd like on that print. But good to know that (relatively) larger prints aren't an impossible pain.

Satisfactory Design

I realized when putting together my laser enclosure that the game Satisfactory has changed how I look at projects. In the game, everything can be recycled; when you tear down part of a factory in order to build something better or different, you get all the original parts back. Eventually it changes how you think of construction and design; everything is temporary, with the only reason to keep a design (besides liking it) is because of the time and effort of dismantling, or the break in production that will ensue (can be a particular problem if you start rebuilding your power infrastructure).

And I found I was building not the best laser enclosure, but the one that would work for now; willing to tear it down and rebuild it later if necessary. Of course out here in the real world, wood that is cut to size and fastened with wood glue doesn't recycle quite so easily.

It isn't totally different from how I thought before. But before, I was doing iterative work; previous versions were previous versions; proof-of-concept builds, prototypes. What has changed is slightly more willingness to take this approach to the production model.

And it seems it has also gotten into the writing. I have been getting more and more able (and hence willing) to cut deeply into an already-written scene and splice and stitch something different out the pieces. Well, this just makes that more so. Possibly, enough more so that I'm making even less forward progress...

Tuk-tuk

I've been going out for dinner every night. It is the only way I can concentrate enough to get any writing done. At thirty bucks per scene this could be an expensive way to write a novel. But I need food anyhow, and since I don't look to be getting a proper vacation soon...

Often people trying to get into writing will ask where the ideas come from. The idea are everywhere and they grow; that's why fanfiction authors invented the name "Plot Bunnies." The problem is sitting down and writing them.

The problem I'm having with the Fox stories is that there's this weird gap between what the book is about and what the book is about. Sure, do an adventure involving the rumored Vikings in America, Kensington Runestone and all that. Roll it up with folk music circles and get Penny back behind a violin again. But that's the hook. What I seem to be having trouble with, is what are the scenes about? How am I filling the pages between the Inciting Incident and the final climax and resolution?

But it isn't even that I can't find business to fill the gaps. It is that it feels like gap fillers. Like stuffing. Never more so than in the Paris book, where I feel like I am just coming up with ways to waste time before I bring her home.

Oh yeah. And as for bunnies? I keep having them for things that would work great in an archeological thriller series that didn't try to be so serious about history. So here's the one that stuck its cute fuzzy nose out earlier today. I'd been thinking of ancient scripts and I was on Thingiverse looking for things to keep my newly rebuilt Ender3 busy (I'm also lasering away now...put a sign on my shop, finally!) Found a Phaistos Disk cookie cutter. And the description there talked about a rumor that it contains a geometric theorum (never heard that one before.)

The Phaistos Almagest. A mathematical secret lost to the ages, that... (and the rest writes itself).

What a difference a denim makes

Amelia is working for me now. One change, and it is like she is a brand-new girl.

Of course there was knock-on effect. Penny talks about her media arts background in the first scene now, meaning she goes on about her show in the next, and by the time I hit the steps of Sacre-Couer there's a whole new thing about Huxley's book.

Which came easily. I'm making huge progress on this re-write, and I'm finally starting to enjoy the story I've got. And if it takes bribing myself with dinner for every bit of writing I get done, I'll take it.

How do you solve a problem like Amelia?

I got a little further on Sometimes a Fox before I had to stop for another from-the-top edit. With luck, though, this one will be less aggressive.

It was the character of Amelia that finally set it off. And you know what was the last straw? Olive trees.

Specifically, there was a triptych of prints of an olive grove we got back from one client at work and there was a new client interested in them. Except we were missing one. It finally came in a box with a return address from Epic Games (!) but my boss wasn't sure that was actually an olive tree. "I'm not a horticulturalist," he said.

The thought crossed my mind that my protagonist, Penny, should be able to recognize olive trees. Them being the Gift of Athena and all (and her spending time in Greece). In fact, she does, in the Japan adventure. But that train of thought was just leaving the station, and pretty soon it had the character Amelia from the latest book making a remark and...

That's when I decided I really needed to try again with her character.

I don't mind the banter. Really, I don't. I think I've been doing too much of it. I find it easy to write, but I don't know if my readers (all three of them) enjoy it as much as I do. Still, I'm willing to let this book go and try to fix it in the next one.

It is the idiot lectures.

They aren't really idiot lectures, in that much of what Amelia is info-dumping isn't essential to the story. It is what the story is about in the larger terms, of course; we're in Paris, experiencing Art, so we need to talk about it some.

But that's only one side of it. I don't like characters who seem to be only in the book so they can deliver exposition. I also don't like that Penny is spending most of the book waiting for clues to drop in her lap. She's basically just absorbing everything.

Sure, there should be some clues in this Paris treasure hunt she can't solve by brute force, and needs that off-the-wall inspiration, that weird chance happening that allows them to break through.

But I have whole sequences in which Penny has absolutely no idea how to proceed, and is just absorbing random Art and Paris stuff until a bible quote, a Degas sculpture and a colorful swear from Captain Haddock finally hands her the thread.

I want the conversations about art. But it has already been in my notes -- and I've started to apply it -- that these scenes are more about two characters talking about art then it is the substance of their conversation; it is the personalities, the emotional beats, the delights of sharing a cafe au lait in the mezzanine of a great art museum with a friend.

***

Anyhow, I gave her a jeans jacket. Amelia has been in a sundress since pretty much the first draft of her first scene, but it felt less and less in character. She is a neophyte tourist, and she is charming and soft-spoken, but the slightly granola-girl look isn't it.

She's a Carolina Girl. She's a proud Tarheel. And from -- a point later in the book -- from the tech capital, the very urban Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill "Triangle" area. So, sure, the Steel Magnolias thing is still there, but she's not playing shy and sweet and hiding her steel under that. She's the wholesome, friendly, girl-next-door -- with steel under that. With that country self-sufficiency and confidence.

Because none of this is about that character in abstraction, that character in some other book. It is about how she plays with the themes of the tourist experience, Paris Syndrome, Penny's way of doing a "deep dive" into the cultures she visits, etc.

And her need to define herself. She's accepted -- in Japan -- that she is a hero. Still and always a reluctant hero, but she has accepted that this happens to her and she is up for the challenge. But she doesn't know just what this means, especially in a real world that doesn't respect genre and fictional depictions of how things are supposed to go.

Which is really the point of Nathan Frost. He's the rival treasure hunter, only he is stuck in the real world. Adventure isn't happening for him because it really isn't that easy (if it was, a lot more people would be trying it). He's found the rare book with clues to lost gold but no, there's no gold at the end of that search.

***

Taking Amelia away from being the guest lecturer changes how Penny is approaching things. And, yes, as part of this edit pass I'm having her be more focused, less willing to just passively absorb facts and more worried about who stole the book, who this Nathan person is, and of course, what the next clue means.

I wonder if I'll have the book finished by the end of THIS year.

Glow of Accomplishment

The laser is up and running.

The main thing not done is the louvres over the air inlet, with a slot for dust filters. That's a HEPA filter on the top there under the salvaged power supply fans. And LED strips on the inside of the box, which are nicely visible through the blue-laser blocking orange acrylic. At last my eyes feel safe around this thing.

I want a second drag chain but I haven't figured out exactly how to place it. My Ender3 popped the Bowden Tube one time too many printing out the lower drag chain (which I designed myself in Fusion360) so I finally put a new Micro Swiss all-metal hot end with direct drive extruder on it.

Not bad for a week of feeling so sick I finally went to Kaiser to go get checked out. They were having drop-in vaccinations as well so I ended up with almost zero fluid balance; two shots in the left arm, five vials of blood out the right. And intense headache the next day.

Gas gas gas

I play Satisfactory to unwind. Seriously. It is nice to take a break from trying to clean, repair, and organize a shop and a home to trying to repair and organize...a whole alien colony.

First expanded my turbo fuel line (turbo fuel is an unlocked recipe that gives the stuff you refine from crude oil a bit more kick. Especially in the jetpack.) Created a refuel station in the Blueprinter, dropped a bunch around the map and assigned some trucks to run fuel out to keep them topped off.

Downside is, player-driven vehicles will top off their fuel tanks if they just drive past. The AI vehicles are coded (since Update 5) to only take as much in their tank as they calculate will get them to the next stop. Which means they are constantly running out of gas on some distant road and you have to go play AAA for them. So these aren't gas stations per se. They are drop-off stations for the fuel trucks.

Turbo fuel also stretches further in power generators. This is my most productive generator farm -- only eighteen generators, but they are all overclocked.

One of these days I'll finish decorating the outside of it. Meanwhile the Spider is my sole nuclear power plant. Well, the plant is in the lake. The Spider is all the zero-waste fuel reprocessing. It also sends some refined uranium to an outpost building of the Fort Hood facility:

Fort Hood was my "excuse to build shit." Since I wanted to explore more of the game world, and there are some dangerous creatures out there (damn those spiders!) I built a facility that entirely churns out explosives and ammunition. I could have gotten much crazier with it, but I limited myself to only the stuff I actually expected to use. That tower there is where the drones come in flying radioactive material to be fabricated into....nuclear hand grenades!

Also, the box canyon was a little bit too small for my needs.

There's a little boutique refinery setup, running fuel both for the turbo-rifle ammunition and for the TESS-A stations in this part of the world, smokeless powder, rubber and fabric to make filters for the gas mask (you go through filters fast.) Since there is no oil in that corner of the game world there's a long pipeline from the other major power generator facility.

That gets me everything but the gas grenades. Those require biomatter. You use leaves or branches, the same way you create biofuel for your early-game generators. Or you can use bodies. This rather sinister building recycles the corpses of alien creatures into more weapons to kill them with. And I'm telling you -- those spiders deserve it.

And, yes, the Minecraft like building assets means the game is biased towards Brutalist architecture. You can go in other directions, but it really does like large blocky concrete.

For this area, I also experimented with covered conveyor belts. They do look a bit neater...but they are a pain to set up and a nasty tangle inside. So not really worth it.

Fortunately there is no need to ever expand. There's only so much ammo I can use. The one thing I might do is blueprint some arms depots and assign a truck to go out there and keep them topped off with guns and knives...just in case.