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.
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