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...
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