So I try to get a little writing done at work. That didn’t work any better; at work, I’m “not” supposed to do it and that makes it too hard to concentrate.
Still in Chapter One. Or it might be Chapter Two; I write in Scenes, and I make the final decision where chapter breaks fall while I’m getting ready to compile.
But I got through the scene outside the Basilica of Sacre-Coeur. And I got through the scene at the Eglise de Saint-Pierre du Montmartre. And I’ve started the scene back outside Sacre-Coeur, on the wide steps leading all the way down the butte to the Parc Louise-Michel.
All I have now is for her to puzzle a bit over the next clue, read a bit of Huxley’s book, and start to realize just how much she struggles with trying to understand the context within which he is writing.
I’m re-formatting so the clues from Huxley’s book are presented as epigrams for my own chapter headings, and the full-length quotes from the body of his text are set out either in italics or, if Kindle supports it, a different font.
The next chapter will (probably) be the first flashback scene and I still haven’t decided how to handle those.
Yeah, yeah, I’m writing a dual-time novel with Proustian loop-the-loops. Oddly, though, it really is the most sensible way to tell this.
I did originally mean to take this full Tomb Raider, with sword fights on top of airplanes and so on, but I’m relatively happy to have what is more a light adventure-mystery with travel and history elements.
I’ve been reading a new series on Kindle. Young and somewhat naive academic travels to some picaresque location and runs into a historical mystery. The big difference is this writer has accepted you need to bend history a little. In this case, alchemy is real. The writer is a trained historian, though, and his stuff about Newton and the Great Fire and all certainly convince me. And the second book, which I’ve begun, begins with the final days of the Sun King (and, yes, in that book his protagonist gets to be fish-out-of-water in Paris and, one presumes, at least a little Versailles.)
So at least one other person thinks that a little history and a little fun with location (a big confrontation in the first book takes place under the dome of St Paul’s, and there’s some derring-do around the London Eye.) And do it without filling the place with bad stereotypes and history with alien magic and crystal skulls.
Anyhow. Sometimes a Fox is largely the recovery phase (in that scheme of action-recovery alternation of scenes) for the previous book, a relaxed time where Penny can reflect on what she has learned and how she has changed since she first boarded that flight to Athens.
This, wrapped in an exploration of how we understand history, with her struggles to be the proper academic historian she thinks she should be, the playfulness of the steampunk crowd, and the potentially harmful excesses the treasure hunt gets into.
Wrapped, of course, in a treasure hunt across Paris.
I don’t need all of this in the first chapters, but this is where I have to lay out for the audience that we are doing a treasure hunt, what it will look like, and excite them with it. And show them Penny finally growing into the mature and experienced traveler she was going to be. And seed the idea that there are other conflicts in play; the potential abuses of the treasure hunt, the difficulties in understanding writings from an earlier age, her mixed feelings about the adventures she seems fated to have, etc.
Which is why I’m several weeks and the sixth revision in on these dratted opening chapters.
Once I’ve got this story open, it should relax. I should be able to save a big chunk of my existing work, too, and I’ll be close to the 40% mark within a week or two.
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