Believe

Okay, not entirely bad. When I synched files on Saturday I'd just started the "Belloq" scene. Wrote the first draft that day. Did a complete rewrite of it today and now it is starting to look like a scene.

I don't have hard numbers on how many writers rewrite as they go. Some day it is a terrible idea. More have no problem with it but don't do it. I think it does require a certain level of understanding and confidence so you don't get bogged down in Oscar Wilde'ing your commas instead of finishing the whole draft.

After three books in the series, though, I have pretty good confidence in where I'm going to end up and what is going to stay through the final revision. So I can afford to rewrite a scene now, with the ending still 10,000 words away.

On the other hand, that's all for a thousand-word scene. Sure, I also revised the much shorter scene preceding it, and got a start at the following scene, and did several rounds of revisions tightening up the Apaches scene.

I had Penny doing a little sword play to show off but cut that to focus on this being parkour. That scene is now firmly part of a strong sub-thread of this book; Penny finally starting to trust her instincts. She's been telling herself her "stunts" are wild leaps of faith and she just keeps getting lucky, but of course she is more skilled than she's willing to admit. In the parkour scene is the first place where she gets a glimpse that she's actually been doing rational analysis of her skills and the odds each time. Well, most times. Other times it is just scream and leap. She'd make a good Kzinti.

These are two back-to-back scenes (all taking place at the same cafe table) that are turning out to be much harder than I had thought. On paper they looked simple. Unfortunately a lot of the big character arcs are in play here and that means I'm trying again and again to find just the right approach for them.

Today I got lucky. The breakfast place was jammed and after rewriting the "you and I are much alike" conversation I made good progress on the scene where Penny actually tells someone what she has been up to.

I sure hope the big Steampunk Garden Party won't be a nightmare. I almost feel like I should chart that one out but I'm just gonna try to wing it. At the current rate of progress, I'm over a month out on finishing the book.

Started filling out the KDP data. I do have to pick a firm date, though, if I want to upload that new cover. Because then it will be on pre-sale.

Saline Solution

I'm pouring electrolyte drinks down my throat. Pouring more saline rinse up my nose. Yesterday I spent in the emergency room getting two bags of Ringers through an IV.

My collapse may have been dehydration (having nasty sinus congestion/cold doesn't help any. Nor does existing SVT). Was probably coming my way since Friday, as the big UL inspection was a bit of a wash, too. We didn't flunk. We didn't get enough units built for the test. So we have to reschedule for a second visit by the inspector and that's gonna cost us 3,400 dollar more. Ouch.

Wasn't for lack of trying on my part. But I barely ate or drank that day, and was so zonked on Sunday I never even got around to eating breakfast or lunch. 

In any case I'm willing to try to experiment of better hydration (yeah; the chemistry panel they pulled out of the vein before they started pouring water in there had me in the yellow zone on three different electrolytes). So I'm pushing water, and also hitting fruit juice of various sorts. And this powdered electrolyte/salt stuff that, whoosh.

Oddly enough, not a lot of writing done. 

***

But it does turn out Hogwarts Legacy has replay value...

Belloq

It loomed large in my notes:

But the actual scene went fast. So fast, I finished and got through the first part of the "You and I are much alike" scene.

Which I'm refactoring. This is the art of shaping a proper climax. I'm constantly making little adjustments to bring the various pressures and themes and so forth so they reach their crests at the appropriate moments. Which means in this case I keep adjusting how Penny perceives her "rival" in the Parisian treasure hunt. Especially as this is the penultimate scene with him; the next scene he gets is the climax at Notre Dame des Paris.

(I just found out the creators of "Emily in Paris" meant for the title to be pronounced in the French fashion. So it rhymes. No, it doesn't make it any better.)

Almost at that climax. After "You and I" -- which is three different meetings lumped into a single chapter -- there's the Steampunk Garden Party with the Mummy's Kiss, then the final Proustian Loop as Penny walks to Notre Dame (the "New Mombasa" flashback). And then the epic climb of Notre Dame and the confrontation on the roof.

I suspect, actually, the climb won't be that epic. The architecture isn't that complicated, not that way. And yes, I climbed it in Assassins' Creed : Unity. Bought the game just for that. Besides, in the current day of the story, the scaffolding is still there.

***

Speaking of...

Took a day off to rest and recover and finished Hogwarts Legacy. Bit grindy to get to the end. You can't finish the school term until you are level 34, which in that game pretty much makes you a monster. Even if you skipped learned all three Unforgivable Curses. 

You don't actually level up from combat. Not really. You do it from challenges (and you get a lot more by collecting notebook pages or running errands for people you befriend in your travels). Combat is already a fairly nice rock-paper-scissors plus combos and can get very fast moving. A bit difficult without a controller, as you really need to be able to fire off at least three different spells, use protego, use dodge roll, and to be really effective, use some Ancient Magic too. And, yeah, more than once I was reaching for "2" to fire off a simple leviosa and instead hit the "G" for Ancient Magic Finishing Move.

The combos always work. But the fastest level advancing is if you do the suggested combo that is popping up on your display. So there's three wolves coming at you, you are trying to remember which finger is on confringo, and then you've got to read the tiny text that just came on telling you that for the next 30 seconds, you can complete a Challenge by using depulso on a wolf at exactly the right moment of his charge.

Which isn't even in one of your assigned spell slots, so go into menu, assign it, come back out, re-orient to where that wolf is, figure out if you need to dodge-roll his buddy first, and...

So it can take a bit of work leveling via combat.

And...there's not much of a payoff. When you finally hit 34 and get to take your OWLS, there's a cutscene of you and the other students sitting for your exams. No totals, no score, nothing. Not even (I am told via the message boards) anything if you get 100% completion. Then there's another cutscene where your House wins the cup for that academic year because there's always a 100-point Golden Snitch-type award for being the hero.

The only thing that seems to change is that the people who run out to congratulate you are from your house.

Yeah, not quite as much fun as, say, Horizon Zero Dawn, in which the people joining you for the final fight against the baddies include half the people you chose to help in side-quests (OR the Frozen Wilds DLC!) and all of them have dialogue, too.

The credits take thirty minutes to run. First time I have seen credits that display the entire text of the software license for each font used in the game...

I am not the iambic pentameter

I finally found a properly detailed map of la Petite Ceinture ca 1900. Yes, it does pass right across the northern part of Parc des Buttes Chaumont. But it doesn't go anywhere near the market of Les Halles so the clue is wrong.

Said clue is also 12 syllables per line. Which shouldn't bother me, since it utterly fails at holding the iamb anyhow.

Oddly, the following was sent in on the company-wide maintenance request form:

The leftmost bathroom has a leaky sink which leaves small puddles on the floor below

Dammit. Okay, the guy that sent it in as a musician, but still, I'm sure it was totally unconscious.

Oh, and la REcyclerie is a good choice for a bit of walkable rail and, in fact, the longest remaining tunnel on the old belt railway extends south from Buttes Chaumont (even if the park itself is a twenty minute walk from where I'm starting the scene.)

But...the Paris Catacombs are way down in the 14th arrondisement. The same place I tracked the other tunnel down leads me to believe that the famous mouse-hole being used by cataphiles for their illegal entry is right by Parc Montsouris. 

Ah, well. I have an easy fix for the scene...this is another mouse-hole, leading to something exciting to the urban explorers but not to her. She can still describe the catacombs if she wants to. Les Halles...I'm just gonna have to ignore. I have too many completed scenes already that I'd have to edit, and I'm trying to write now, not rewrite!

***

I know that's not iambic, more of a dactyl. Still wonderful especially for being unintentional.

***

I just this moment found out the correct term for those mouse holes. The cataphiles call them “châtières”

Tow not Shell

So I'm finally up to the "Apaches" sequence. Two key sequences left, maybe a dozen scenes, and I'll finally be done with this book.

Image Ophelia Holt

Up there is part of La Petite Ceinture, the "small belt" railway that circled Paris carrying freight from more-or-less the late 1850s (when several different independently operated rail lines were joined into a full loop) to the early 1950s, and passengers mostly at the turn of the century, from the 1880s and falling off rapidly after 1908 when the Metro began to take over.

The lines fell into that cursed gap where the city didn't own it and the railways weren't willing to give it up, meaning they were left largely abandoned until quite recently. The last decade has been the major sprucing up and repurposing of portions of the right-of-way (a brief small sections are still in active use by the RER) as city parks.

And then there's La Recyclerie. A sort of communal garden and recycling center and restaurant collected together in and around an old train station in Clignancourt. That's their terrace, above. It's very Whole Earth Catalog, Green Revolution, shabby-chic.

Really, all I needed was a place for my protagonist to be led down to the trackway, where she will see a bit of the old route, go into one of the tunnels, be shown (and decide against) the mouse-hole into one of the illegal sections of the Paris Catacombs, then on the way out be threatened by some street punks and finally (after failing through the rest of the book) get a parkour trick right while running away from them.

But. There's a bit of character stuff with the Carolina Girl, Amelia. Who turns out to be studying mechanical engineering at UNC (go to hell, Duke!) and around the climax of the book provides a bit of a Q Branch for Penny (mostly getting her in worse trouble than she would have on her own). I toyed with staging a visit to a hackerspace since these were some ideas about the communities of modern Paris I wanted to show.

Well, this isn't really it, but I can efficiently hit those notes with La Recyclerie. So that's why I chose to enter the tracks here (It is also...and this was not easy research!...close to the tunnel sections I think I want. Plus also passes through the corner of Parc des Buttes Chaumont, where the next big sequence is happening.

Image Lombana CC BY-SA 3.0

And it is a fun place all by itself and that's part of what I'm trying to do with this particular travel-oriented series; to find a few places that are less frequently mentioned and give the reader the experience of learning about them.

***

More and more, though, the process of writing is distressing me. I would like to think it is just a problem of first-person POV, but I think that just makes it more obvious.

We talk about "Show not tell." But ultimately everything is a "tell." It is all words on paper. With the possible exception of 3rd person omniscient, it is all filtered through the POV of a narrator, a character of the story (if not always in the story), who is telling you.

That's why I say first person just makes it more obvious. 

"There's a rocket ship on fire," the space-port guard pointed up.

I looked up into the sky. There was a rocket ship on fire.

Okay, unfair; this is all description. And "show not tell" is just as much about going to primary sources; instead of "it was cold" you write "he shivered." Which is still telling a thing, but it isn't telling "the" thing. So it is more of a direct experience. Even in the above, the absence of the filter of someone telling the narrator the thing makes the telling (by that same narrator) more immediate.

But here's the thing; in my current scene, I want to get across what I just said above about La Recyclerie. So...I can show the chickens, and the vegetable garden, heck, I could show kitchen slop being fed to the chickens. But there still needs to be a conclusion. Especially coming through the lens of a narrator who looked at this stuff for a reason. We don't just write every footstep and doorknob; we put in the details that are there to make a point. My protagonist "saw" this stuff -- mentioned it in the narrative -- because she is putting together the picture. And since we're getting her internal monolog and her learning and growth is part of the experience the book is delivering, we get to see her figuring out what it means.

So it inevitably follows that no matter how much I Show the chickens, at some point the narrative is going to Tell what they mean. 

I can leave some stuff out. I can set it up so the audience picks it up but my narrator never mentions it explicitly. I consider the latter part of the untrustworthy narrator routine, where the reader is intended to grasp something counter to what the narrator seems to be wanting to say. One specific thing I recall leaving out in the last chapter or two was the real nature of the meat market at the Foyer de la Danse. It just wasn't necessary for the story to go into the gory details.

Or, for that matter, that the "little bullfighter" is Picasso. 

Somehow, though, more and more it is starting to feel like nothing but empty words. Descriptions of things, shadows of things on the wall of the cave, not things themselves. Even in third person, even in a created environment (aka the settings of the upcoming steampunk book) where I can be much more selective about what I chose to show.

Just adding to the list of reasons I have trouble going back to the page. Even if I am writing up such a storm right now I actually have some real hope I might be finished by the end of the month.

Boring

And I was doing so well. Did a quick revision of "batman or superman" (which brought it up to 2,000 words) and got 400 words into the UX scene that leads off the whole "Apache" sequence.

And then found a better way to do it. I almost didn't do it. But every chapter has either one of the doggerel clues or (more frequently) some pithy quote from the same imaginary book. I danced around doing something with trains, or about the "little bullfighter" starting to sign his name as Picasso, but realized there was a better way to proceed.

I've been building up various plot threads throughout and the upcoming small climax is where several of them come together. Except I didn't build enough of them far enough, and I just don't want more "empty" scenes that don't have actual emotional beats happening in them. That's the big problem with this book, really. There's lots of material, but there isn't enough emotional plot, not enough confrontations, changes, other interactions. Just a sort of plodding discovery of each new step in a mystery that I gave away long ago isn't actually leading to anywhere.

Anyhow, the best way to bring in some of the material I want for the crux scenes (Apaches, the steampunk garden party, and the climb of Notre Dame de Paris) is to do one more dual-time narrative. To go into Huxley's voice and tell the full story of the death of Carles Casagemas.

And I probably should make sure that Huxley pére could have been wounded in Hartbeesfontein, but I can always look that up later. The date is just so very convenient, though...

***

And I just drafted the Casagemas scene. A mere four paragraphs. After all the reading up I did -- including some extremely detailed opinions on the inspirations behind his small but notable oevure, and a quite pungent review of the "Genius" series available on Prime -- I didn't find the need to say very much more about Carles, Genevieve, and the Hippodrome Cafe.

One of the things I say over and over when I am answering questions from novice writers over on Quora (I'm a novice myself, but at least a well-read one) is how much you don't know until you put it down on paper. Turns out I was able to put in much more about why Jonathan Huxley needs to return to England than I thought I would. And I also discovered I can lay in all that I really need about the Casagemas suicide without actually having to name Picasso.

It is probably terribly obvious. I'll have to be satisfied that I snuck Suzanne Valadon into a different scene and that's gonna take a sharper eye to spot. And I am so sorry there's just not the appropriate space for a little story going on about her and the kid that grew up as an Utrillo. 

Spam spam spam spam

On impulse looked at the "people who bought this also liked" for my second book, the one set in contemporary London with the dual-time narrative featuring the London Blitz.

So what gets associated with this? Crime thrillers, a few mysteries, a fair amount of historical fiction. A bit of W.W.II, some Roman...and a hell of a lot of Vikings.

Why Vikings? Only the algorithm knows. Increasingly, the algorithms (quite possibly, being driven into strange corners by intrusive SEO) are going crazy. Google search results, YouTube, all of them are returning stranger and stranger results.

Progressing slow but steady now on Sometimes a Fox even if I have to go back and rework an already-drafted scene after I realized there's story beats that have to happen there if they are going to happen at all. Well enough, in any case, I may indeed put it up for presale within the next couple of weeks.

The steampunk book should be next. Honestly, I'm a little tired of writing at the moment and may need a break. A different problem, though, is that every Athena Fox book leaves me wanting to have told the story differently, or told an entirely different story. A story set in the deserts of the American Southwest, with a straight-forward mystery -- even a proper body drop -- without all the language craziness and with, finally, a chance to do some actual archaeology again.

All I'm saying is The Early Fox might distract me from all the world-building I'll need for Blackdamp.

Assuming I have any brain cells left after dealing with a UL inspection and testing, and a whole bunch of reading about torque trying to bring us within ISO 9000 et al. And my shop is filled with engineers developing two new products, so there's that as well. And did I mention upcoming surgery...?

 

made three bucks

Someone has been reading the series on Kindle Unlimited. I'm tempted to throw the Paris book into pre-sales just so they know it is coming.

That's three bucks in page views for this month. I made more over the same period in an old set of meshes I have up on Renderosity. And significantly more than both in sticking to a steady 40 hour week...coming very close to clocking in and out exactly on the hour, even. We'll see how long I can keep that up.

But I'm still looking at several weeks to finish the book. Just completed the first draft of the "Batman v. Superman" scene. Which after a long look (and clean-up) of my outline got spliced with Amelia talking about the La Boheme love triangle she's gotten in the middle of. 

Since I reworked the themes, the Batman/Superman is more a running gag up to the climax than it is a theme. The Japan book was all about masks and I don't need to go over that ground again in the very next book. But it does provide a couple of amusing beats, including the last of the Proustian loops, the "New Mombasa" scene.

Yes, my outline would be impossible for anyone else to read. Very efficient, though; according to information theory, that's kind of how it works. 

I did stop briefly to make the final choice of UNC for Amelia, mostly so I could have her quote "I'm a tarheel born." And look up the best metals for making your own lock picks. And of course the confit de canard with pommes sautees -- which is on the 2024 menu for Cafe la Boheme de la Montmartre, even if I am very very much soft-peddling any connection to a real place with that name in, err, that same location. And locations for Parisian hackerspaces but none of the real ones were convenient for story purposes and I've pretty much decided I'm not going to do a visit.

I am sending Penny to 125 rue de Lafette, though. Unfortunately that did get mentioned by Umberto Eco -- it is that well known -- but oh well. I've got the Inverted Pyramid in the story already, so...

Dance magic dance

Got the results from the CT scan back. Never have I seen the word "opacity" repeated so often. The pain is still with me but the minutes I forget it are coming more often now.

Deep in the parkour training scene on Sometimes a Fox. Tired and unfocused and that leads too easily to running down more of those tantalizing tidbits Paris is so full of. Watching Fred Astaire now. Before that another dance on film, this one a 1908 from Edison featuring the Bowery equivalent of an Apache Dance.

That's an Apache there. You can tell by the cap and cravat. Pronounced "A-pasch" in French. It is odd just how much the dance attributed to them gets around. But an oddly appropriate side quest for me to go on, given how often Penny goes on about being a dancer.

Sometime during the week I was watching a video about the spiral pattern of the arrondissements over a late dinner, and discovered I'd completely screwed up a mention I'd made of the tax gates. At least that bit of narrative was a quick rewrite, but it made me conscious again of how much I don't know and how much I don't even realize I'm missing. So I've been trying to cram in a little more about the architecture and history of Paris, the layout and how you use the current metro, and, oh right, a few things about how the "southern accent" (US, this time) is changing.

And of course this isn't a training montage scene. I am actually not against Penny picking up some useful skill in far too short a time -- my main reluctance is having her become a skilled fighter whether this way, or more honestly. But this isn't going to end with Penny being a skilled traceur. The beat in the scene is her starting to accept the way she's mangled her flight-or-fight response into a place where, when she is frightened, it makes her charge right in. And this isn't a smart way to proceed.

But there will be one parkour payoff. One upcoming moment when she actually gets a parkour stunt right. That being the "Apaches" scene.

And the parkour scene is done. Minus inevitable edits. This brings me to the end of the detailed outline, which means I've got a bit of work organizing the remaining 20K of material to finish out the novel. I'm really wanting to build up the Steampunk Garden Party at Parc des Butte-Chaumont into a whole Agatha Christie of revealing conversations. No idea if I can pull it off. But aside from knowing I've got a "you and I are much alike" conversation with the rival treasure-hunter, a meeting with some cataphiles, Amelia gushing about her artist lover and Penny finally admitting that she might, sometimes, be a badass, I don't know how the stuff between finishing parkour and landing at the garden party plays out.

Broke my censor

Monday wasn't as bad as I feared.

Okay, sure, three projects did hit at once. And my head was still pounding. But at least it wasn't stabbing pain -- well, not most of the time -- and I still had a little leftover tylenol with codeine from a root canal.

Which kind of tells you how bad the pain had gotten.

I yelled at someone and there were a few times in the day I had to sit there and hold my head in both hands but for all of that...it was one of the more productive days I've had this year.

And so was today. Or at least I think it was. It could be that pain has knocked out my internal censor, and let me stop second-guessing and judging myself all the time. I certainly was acting productive, staying on my feet or on the computer all day instead of nursing a hot chocolate in the back of the shop as had been happening a bit too frequently of late.

Maybe I've just gotten angry and stubborn. I'm going to try like hell to put in full regular hours until and unless HR themselves tell me to take a sick day. And aside from being, well, in pain I'm feeling great!

Today was only four hundred words but the novel, too, seems to be benefitting from whatever this is. Maybe I actually am thinking more clearly than I have in a while, and solving the scenes I was getting hung up on, or maybe I'm just so impatient and sick I'm more willing to accept compromise, but whatever it is, there is actually the slightest faintest hope I might have a complete draft before April has vanished in the rear-view mirrors.

I can understand why so many artists sank into absinthe. Pretty sure acute sinus infection is not nearly as attractive. I would really rather this pain be gone. 

Before the dawn

Nasal polyps. Growths that form in the nasal cavities and as they grow, progressively block them. This means stuffy nose, stuffy head, post-nasal drip, sinus headaches. It also basically lowers the threshold of various histamine-type reactions, meaning it frequently leads to asthma and even to what is called NSAIDS Syndrome; a nasty allergic reaction to a whole family of anti-inflammatory drugs like aspirin.

(More technically, one of several similar problems rooted in a disregulation of several metabolic pathways. Named Samter's Triad when first discovered, the specific strong brochiorestriction reaction following intake of non-steroidal (corticosteroid) anti-inflammatory medications is given the lovely acronym NERD -- NSAIDs-exacerbated respiratory disease or aspirin-exacerbated... Anyhow, about .7 percent of population but upwards of 22% of long-term asthma sufferers.)

And all of this can cause sleep apnea, meaning drowsiness, lack of concentration, and once again, increased susceptibility to infection.

All of this is my excuse for why I didn't figure it out. Too many different symptoms pointing every which way. And Kaiser, like all HMOs, is very compartmentalized. Having a family doctor who is familiar with your history and trained as a GP doesn't come across as cost-effective in their books. So they have specialists. Very good specialists, but also overworked specialists. Making efficient use of them pushes the system towards targeting a specific complaint and focusing in on that.

I call it the Kragen's Auto Parts of health care. "Hi; I'd like to order a heart valve replacement for a 2009 male Caucasian..."

So I was just limping along with increasingly frequent sinus infections, sinus headaches, and poor sleeping. Until December when it suddenly got much, much worse. And I'd picked the wrong item from the Kaiser menu so there was months of following the plan to solve some completely different problem than the one I had before we could finally cross-step.

So now I'm finally scheduled for CT scan and seeing the surgeon and hopefully getting surgery scheduled as soon as possible. And my allergist, who has been doing "wait and see," will finally see about an aspirin challenge and otherwise doing something other than prescribing more and more medications that treat the growing symptoms of a different problem.

But.

I've missed so many hours due to nasty head colds and episodes of severe fatigue HR is getting ready to kick me. And if that happens I lose medical care. I need to keep struggling on and somehow get perfect attendance even as the symptoms get worse and worse -- and somehow schedule all these doctor's visits off the clock -- until I can get what I hope will turn things around and set the clocks back a few years to where I was properly productive.

Perfect timing, of course. Right now we are repurposing my shop, buying new equipment, and very possibly changing my role in the company. We have a new prototype all over the tables right now and as usual at this company, everything is do-it-now priorities.

And of course simultaneously we have UL testing on another product that I am de-facto project lead and (oh hell no) lead engineer. I have been poaching real engineers when I can but there's a lot of work and a lot of pressure.

If only this was happening a few months later. I am looking forward to these changes, but they are happening now just when the strength I need is weeks away.

But.

Acute sinusitis. A very nasty bug got into my frontal sinuses and there's little that can be done. Sinuses too blocked for it to properly drain, and by the same coin, rinses and vapor and all that crap can't get up there. Infections of this kind are usually viral so don't respond to antibiotics (I'm on one anyhow). Oh, and I can't even take pain killers.

Stabbing pain, so bad I am almost unable to sleep. Pain so bad I am squinting both eyes even as I type this. Since Thursday (and there's another two days for HR to complain about). And it just won't end.

Monday is going to be...delightful.

We are not smart

 

Right after posting, I realized the problem isn't that I am writing too slowly. It is that I spend so much time feeling too stupid to write.

Well, instead of trying to figure out how to write a smart story when I am dumb, why don't I set out to write a dumb story?

Like the Asgard approach, this is smarter than it seems at first. What I mean is, give myself permission by doing a story that by genre and style is fine with shoddy world-building, plots full of holes, paper-thin characters.

And I do have one I've been thinking about. This approach could possibly take care of some of the issues I had with the idea, even.

Par for the Course

I should not have been hanging out in the write-o-sphere. Too many nice discussions on Quora, videos on YouTube, stuff like that.

The scene I am on is a perfect place to step back from all lectures, all the time.

Already, I was picking this as a place to come down hard with five-senses, but that was for other reasons. Anyhow, this seems like a good scene to try to communicate thematic points without someone sitting down and talking about them -- and this include using the narrative voice of my protagonist.

How exactly do I get across concepts like dérive in a 2,000 word scene of French people running around an office park?

Oh, but that's not the worst.

In the great battle between Pantser and Outliner it is recognized by both that discovering and bringing out the themes of your book, as well as the essential conflicts, core character development, and related deep-structural elements, happens in rewrites. So no surprise; I am changing what is on the table and where I want to focus.

Originally, the internal conflict that drives Penny for this book was whether to take up the mantle of hero. Amelia came on board first as an ordinary tourist to act as a mirror, reflecting the way that Penny has grown from naive tourist to experienced world traveler (as much as she might protest). She was useful as someone who understood the arts and could turn inner monologue into dialogue. Still talking-heads lectures, but one step more in the direction of being actually interesting. With that in there, it was a natural step to let he be a comic book geek, at least enough to start throwing the hero label in Penny's direction.

But on reflection this didn't work. She just got done fighting yakuza and nearly dying in the snow to answer that one. And looking into the mirror of a goddess, which should really finish off any questions of appearance versus reality. At least for a while!

So where her conflict is, has been changing as I write. It was largely behind the several rewrites, of what has become a process so long I may end up with cork-covered walls and an absinthe addiction before it is over.

And when I hit the parkour scene, I realized my first take (she's physically afraid of the challenge) is defensible but doesn't advance the important themes.

So I'm trying to define the themes of the book, find ways of bringing them out in this scene, and do it without spelling anything out with talking heads and idiot lectures. Right. This may take a few more weekends!

Skip to my Louvre

The Conversation from Hell in now back in draft. And this weekend I plugged on through (against the trials and tribulations of new medications) to revise 1,300 words of Penny walking from the metro entrance to I.M. Pei's Inverter Pyramid in the Louvre Carousel.

Speaking of which. I am flipping back and fourth between French and English spelling in my notes, and in the text. Sometimes it is the Eiffel Tower, sometimes le Tour Eiffel.

(As a tower, it is "le." As "The Iron Lady" -- a frequent nickname -- it is "la." Aren't gendered languages fun?)

I'd probably use the French terms more often but Speech-to-Text throws fits at French. Or maybe it is just my French. Lately, with my exploding sinuses, it is throwing fits at everything, but it is still a good way to take notes on the fly. The scenes I just finished re-writing were not in speech-to-text. Or on the phone. I needed the real-estate of the mini and the two monitors connected to it for all the stuff I had to shuffle around or consult.

(Actually, whether I am getting faster at typing or what, I rarely cut-and-paste the material I am re-using. I drag over the bit of scene that has a new home, but then I re-type it, adjusting it to fit in with the flow of the current scene. For today's work, I could not find where I stuck the notes on religious buildings around Montmartre, but it made more sense for the scene to fly past that. But, oddly, I finally turned up something today that explained why there is still a martyrium in the area, after all the revolutions and gypsum mining and so on. It ain't the original.)

I am hopeful but rather less than sanguine that I might have a draft finished by April. Which would put it five years after the time the story takes place. And I don't know (and have stopped wanting to know) since I started.

I still need to revise the Egyptian Room scene, significantly. The Charles de Gaulle shouldn't take much editing; a big thing I've been doing is moving some "beats" around to give character and theme development better arcs, and there is some stuff in there that may need to be moved. And then I'll finally be in the parkour scene at La Defense where I left off for this last round of revisions.

I have dreams that the next Athena Fox story will take a different direction and, possibly, be easier. One problem I've had with this one is there isn't enough plot, and the plot beats unfold far too frequently in a "studying this artwork and knowing a weird detail about an Impressionist painter..." way. The Desert one should be able to have a lot more plot beats that are someone saying something incriminating or someone shooting bullets through a door. Hell, it may be the first story I write that has a proper Body Drop!

I won't need a Murder Wall to work that plot out, though. I will be doing a world book for Blackdamp, though. I finally realized that when I did a test draft of Alice's first scene (the first scene in the book) and I didn't know how many people there were in her class. So I'm going to ballpark the population figures and economies so I have some general grasp of things like, is there a whole street of goldworkers (or whatever appropriate cottage industry) or is there only enough work for one weird guy that does the stuff in his whatever-the-steampunk city-has equivalent of his garage.

And learn about Venus. Bought my first book already. I'm hoping I don't have to learn too much chemistry -- time consuming stuff, that -- but I am very afraid it will be far too important...

That book is looking to take a lot longer than April Next to write...

Put on...the mask!

I don't remember what movie that was. 1950's horror movie about a cursed, well, mask. At certain points the audience was instructed to put on their 3D glasses and...

Sometimes a Fox is crawling along. I've been ridiculously sick basically since Christmas (tested positive AGAIN for COVID) and I'm lucky to get an hour or two of clear thinking before my brain goes out again...in a week.

Made progress on the next book, though. Watched several movies and read a new urban fantasy series cover to cover and messed around with a few games but being sick and feeling stupid isn't exactly the time you finally sit down with War and Peace.

Whatever I bumped off of, I finally accepted I wasn't actually against having my cast running around in oxygen masks. And there's some fun possibilities if you stick with the CO2 atmosphere.

The biggest reason not to tinker with Venus is that it becomes too easy. Once you've added "A wizard did it" to explain why the air is breathable now (or any number of other things), it becomes just a little bit too transparent how the world is being constructed to permit the story being told. It may not be a slippery slope but it looks like a slippery slope.

So, no magical lost Earth technology or remarkable feat of terraformation or anything. Instead I'm going to more-or-less use the real planet. Just bend it a little, like steampunk bends friction and tolerance and energy densities because I'm sorry, a charcoal fire and brass gears does not make you a good helicopter.

That decision bumped into discoveries I made doing a trial sketch of the opening scene. It is a sort of graduation exercise and...how many people are actually in this class? Um. I think this is going to be old-fashioned world-building, where I sit down and work out some general population numbers and basic economies so the places feel internally consistent.

Which means I probably won't finish that book this year, either.

Macramé

That's my new writing term.

So when you've got an A plot and a B plot (for a full-length novel, at least that, and probably a C and D as well) they mostly run on parallel tracks. It allows, among other things, for you to provide that action-reaction; when a major turn has happened in the A plot, we switch to the B plot to allow the reader to digest what has just happened before we throw the next A plot event at them.

Those threads cross, and depending on how on-the-nose you want to plot things, they may end up in a crisis or revelation point at the same time in some bring-together scene.

And of course you have the other threads; character arcs, world-building tasks, development of theme. All of those are also running, more or less parallel, and when possible with their big developments staggered so the reader can pay attention to the personal crisis or the unveiling of the Big Bad or the new information about a side character in (relative) isolation.

And then there are the macramé scenes. Those are the scenes when multiple threads converge and connect. Those can be the most satisfying when you finally get them to work. But that "finally" in there? Yeah, that's the problem. These scenes can also be a total pain.

Yeah, that's where the book is now.

I'm throwing out all of my old calendar marks. One year since starting, one year since the previous book...all of that is gone now. But...the story is set in April, and maybe, just maybe, I can have it finished by then. 

I can not read the fiery letters

Time to mess around with engraving wood on the new laser. I wanted cedar or something but I had some thin walnut around so used that.

That is just one of the all singing, all-dancing coffee machines we have at work. Three kinds of beans, three powders (the hot chocolate is good), twenty recipes. And hot water.

I'm on the psycho-drug now and no side effects yet. Cross all sixteen fingers...

Well, was sick enough yesterday I called in and spent the day home from the factory...working on another factory. Couldn't concentrate well enough to straighten out the current scene in the book. Took a couple more test videos. May put something up soon. 

Underground

Struggling with what turned out to be a key scene in Part III of Sometimes a Fox. Could be another six months before it is finally edited and ready to publish. At least the cover art looks like it is finally working, or well enough. I've started revisiting my links on the UX community in Paris, cataphiles et al, while I work up plans for what exactly I want to have in there (besides the Petite Ceinture and 145 Rue Lafayette, one of the more famous "fake buildings" in Paris).

"Cleaning up" my current Satisfactory build is going slowly. Spent my last session starting a dedicated Smart Plating park (mine head, smelters, fab shop and truck station in separate buildings) to complete one more of the last Space Elevator deliverables. But mucked about the previous session because I couldn't figure out a clean way to hook the dedicated Circuit Board factory to the local Hyperloop station.

That seemed like a good excuse to experiment with taking it underground. Got killed a few times getting the trick working properly; you can clip through the terrain with a carefully placed hypertube, but you will promptly fall to your death below the world if you haven't prepared properly. A bit of excitement being marooned under the map, with a tiny bioconverter chugging away powering my only link back to the surface. Try not to delete the hypertube entrance!

Some people build all kinds of stuff under the map. I just made a cyberpunk-feel walkway, tube and conveyor belt, completely sealed off to preserve the illusion. I'm late enough in the game that even if all I need is a belt or a tube I can afford to build a whole decorated passageway -- even blueprint it up with railings and lights and signs and architectural details.

And my latest asthma medication did exactly what the last one did; made me sicker. I'm suffering it out without medication right now to see if I can tolerate it at all. Oddly enough, as unpleasant as mornings and evenings are, I'm sleeping well now...

That may change when I try the psycho-pills. I think I may try those out tomorrow.

The map, please

Tempted again to incorporate a map into my book covers. That or somewhere in the index or something. Geography ended up an important part of the story in so many of this series. In the London book, the relationship of the under-construction Northern Extension with the Kennington Loop, Kennington Park, Nine Elms, and the Battersea Power Station is important to the plot.

In the Kyoto book, it is a minor plot element but the physical layout of the Transcendence complex has much to do with the theme as well. In the Athens book, her epic flight back from just south of Frankfurt could also benefit from a map. And in the Paris book, several of Huxley's clues are based on the physical relationship of various elements of the Parisian landscape; following the "ribbon of steel" from Sacre-Coeur to the champs-elysees, or taking one particular avenue from the arc de triomphe to Hotel Biron.

But it seems a bit much to clutter the index and appendix with a map, way too much to have one in the frontispiece like this was a '90s epic fantasy book, and wasted effort to do the back cover as my intent was always to prioritize the ebook side.

Grappling with Cheese

I should stop using health as an excuse. Basically I feel so incompetent about writing it is hard to bend down back over that grindstone.

I realized while doing clean-up on the big parkour training scene at La Defense that I needed a lot more five-senses stuff. I'd been intending to go back with a "symphony of cheese" pass and add more detail about the foods, but this bit of a physical activity reminds me of the places where the Kyoto book really worked. And that was the very five-senses experiences of running and exercise.

And this should help decompress some as well. Part III has been dropping too many story beats without enough breathing space around them. Adding some "you are there" sensuality should give me some space to reflect on each beat, time for the reader to digest, before I move on.

I went through one scene and it was easy enough. I've still not learned how to write faster, but I have learned how to re-write much more easily. (And faster.)

A week of COVID. Two insane weeks of work without any recovery time, right up to the last working day of the year and delivering the big project just two days before. A week off for the holidays but I was so wrecked (and had a massive asthma attack Christmas Eve) I took another week sick, then only made it in for a day or two the week after that as well.

HR hates me now.

One thing that dragged me back to the shop was finally throwing together a prop for the new cover art. While I was recovering from sick/COVID/exhaustion I opened up PhotoShop, did the repaint for the figure on the fourth cover and sent that off to my cover artist. And came up with a new overall cover concept I'm at the moment pretty happy with. But I wanted a prop for the cover and I thought it would be more fun to build then to try to source in royalty-free images (or trust AI. Shudder.)

There was a tiny bit of project creep. I really should be using my laser for something, so I finally spent a little time in Fusion360 and Lightburn and, yeah, that new 20W head burns through 3/32 basswood like a laser through softwood.

I also tried to shave time by using glue and paint and plasti-dip as surface preparation rather than the usual round of Bondo spot putty and sandpaper. It didn't work; neither to save time, nor to get good surfaces. But since the final prop will be a few hundred pixels on the actual artwork, it hardly matters.

The bracket for the spool is laser-cut wood. Laser-cut EVA foam for the strap (which I had to dial down to 40% power!) Gears off Thingiverse (there's a very nice DXF/EPS gears creator online, but downloads of the models are on a subscription basis.) I did get fancy and the grapple is steel rod, bent with MAPP gas and brazed with my little micro-torch (MAPP/oxygen head). 

Some of the parts were found objects so I wasn't really able to come up with a design first and model it properly in CAD and break out the right parts from that. Instead I just had to push ahead building stuff I knew wasn't quite right and hoping it would work when I glued it all up. So; project management mistakes as well as surface prep mistakes. That's why we do these things; to learn how to do better.

(There's another thing that's always been part of my design work. I especially noticed it in sound design. And that is trying to find those quintessential cues or clues that the audience will be able to read and thus grasp what it is the design is trying to say. I think the grapple and reel shapes are defined enough here, with telling details like the ring with the knot tied to it, to communicate the "throws a grappling line out and then reels it in." In actual design, some kind of sling or harness is absolutely essential because you don't lift your body weight on a pistol grip. But for visual purposes that isn't on this prop.)

My Cabbages!

Finished the main campaign of Hogwarts Legacy. It didn't quite deliver. There seems to be a thing, though, with main campaigns being considered the weakest part of a game (Fallout 4, take a bow). I'm not sure this is true. It is true that side quests can take more risks as they can afford to have the player disengage and not follow through. The main campaign has to be a bit blah because it has to appeal to everyone.

(There also seems to be a thing, for the last decade's AAA games at least, for the last part of the Main Campaign to feel rushed, like the developers ran out of time and money when it came to finishing the game properly. But that might be that, according to Steam data, less than a quarter of all players finish the main campaign in any game.)

In the case of Hogwarts Legacy, the whole Ancient Magic thing was a bit meh. It was okay for a Macguffin, and Isadore's story was interesting, but giving it to the player character was a little too Chosen One for my taste. That, and the combat and magic systems were robust and complex enough; adding Ancient Magic to the mix was a complexity (and power) that wasn't really needed.

(There's a basic problem with the shooter paradigm. In a movie or book you can have a realistic -- that is, small -- number of opponents. To give time for the player to fully experience the game, they have to engage with multiple enemies. Multiple enemies begs the question of how the player character is surviving. This pushes towards power-ups; the player character becomes The Batman or the Doom Marine, gets powered armor...or Ancient Magic.)

This also really isn't a game about meaningful choices, for the most part. You get almost the same ending regardless of what dialogue options you choose. So in M.I.C.E. parlance, this is primarily a Milieu story. You can customize your appearance and pick your house, but that's internal role-play that has almost no functional effect on the game itself. The story is also equally split between the Big Event and the character going through a fairly ordinary Hogwarts school year; so again the I, C, and E aren't really what you came for.

So anyhow.

I'd gotten a fair way in with Richard Turpin, my Slytherin. Hadn't intended to pick Slytherin but the game has no pause feature for the long cutscenes and I'd been Sorted before I got back from the bathroom. Well, to be as accessible as possible, your House doesn't really force anything on you. Slytherins in this game are basically the way I'd intended to play Dick in the first place; willing to do what was necessary to save the Wizarding World from the Ancient Magic, but smart about it; study is good because knowledge is power. Being friendly gets you help from people, and in any case it almost never hurts you to be kind. And of course he lies like a rug because why would you give away information if you didn't have to?

But then I realized just how powerful you could get with Herbology. So I saved that game and started "Henny" the Hufflepuff. Who was shy, helpful, self-effacing, and really into magical plants and creatures.

It worked out wonderfully. First on the practical; yeah, it is tough to really gather enough mandrakes, venomous tentaculars and chinese chomping cabbages until several hours into the game, where you get the Room of Requirement and your own potting tables. There's a few tricks, like an early errand for Professor Garlick (everyone's favorite witch), or stealing that one from the shop, but also, what really pushes the things up to unstoppable are Traits (which don't unlock until somewhere around the first Ancient Magic Trial), and the ability to weave charms into your own clothes.

Which doesn't get unlocked until you start keeping your own menagerie and more on that later.

With the vegetative stats I got up to, my cabbages could take out a troll in six chomps or less. The Rookwood boss fight was a a little annoying until I finally figured out Ashwinders (dark wizards) were going to infinitely apparate in until I knocked Rookwood's HP down. I was operating on the theory of clear the space of minor combatants first.

Was doing pretty well, but eventually slipped. Back from the last save, I prioritized him and it was over in two minutes.

Mostly because his second appearance, with even more Dark Wizards of even higher levels supporting him for what was going to be a properly epic fight, he zigged when he should have zagged and apparated right on top of four of my cabbages. The battle was over before he'd had a chance to make his opening speech. I had the same thing in the final dragon fight. Was getting my ass kicked -- I had not brought along nearly enough healing potion and there were too many mandatory/unavoidable damage cases -- until he finally LANDED.

Cue the cabbages.

The biggest problem I had with them is that once I cleared a room full of spiders by rolling a few down the ramp that is supposed to dump you into the middle of the combat arena. Something bugged out in the game and it kept insisting I had to defeat the enemies before moving on to the dialogue. Had to restart from a save point. Take out most of the spiders from safely outside the arena, then drop down to do the last few personally so the game would accept that I'd won the battle.

But combat aside; this was totally the Hogwarts experience I wanted. The Hufflepuff dorm was lovely, and I went straight for the various Beasts quests. Poppy Sweeting is even more fun than Natsai Onai, and I found her side quest more entertaining. The most graceful lovely bit of a game that really goes out of its way to give you those lovely bits (and the Hufflepuff common room is darling) is the vivariums you get. Magical pocket dimensions where your creatures can frolic safe from poachers and everything else. So really this plays very well as a Magical Creatures game, where you pay a lot more attention to petting nifflers and hanging out in a potting shed than you do to whatever the goblins are getting up to.

(I basically ignored the Sebastian side quests. Henny felt sorry for him and his sister, but he -- like the Weasley kid -- came on too strong with the charm and the bad-boy vibe and she found it off-putting.)

And my little Hufflepuff ended up with a character arc. She didn't want combat and she didn't trust or like Ancient Magic, but she was loyal and helpful and that put her in situations where she had to shoot fireballs at people (or chomp them with cabbages). And she discovered she was surprisingly good at it, and (due to the Gear system of the game) even started dressing the part as an Adventurer.

After finally stopping Rangok and sealing up the Ancient Magic, she consciously got back into quiet, un self-assuming student robes, hung out with friends in the Hufflepuff common room, and basically tried to get back to the Hogwarts year she'd been expecting and wanting. Not fighting goblins in underground caverns, but learning herbs.

So on last analysis, the game was worth the money, and there's some replay potential. There's a base-building mechanic (because of course there is) but the functionality is too limited without a lot of questing after random side errands. So, technically, you can spend time dressing up your Room of requirement and the attached vivariums, or picking your outfit (there is an entire system for wand handles. Which have no effect in play and are basically invisible for most of the game).

For role playing, you can play a little more towards the unhelpful and mercenary side but the former just closes you off from potentially lucrative side quests, and the latter makes no functional difference in how people treat you.

(Example; if you are sent to retrieve a diary, come back and chose the lower dialogue option of "I'm gonna keep it unless you fork up more cash" the quest-giver will just say, "But of course! You've earned it!" and be the same thankful person. You can throw classmates across the room, brazenly break into locked chests and steal everything -- RPG standard there -- and even use the Unforgivable Curses without the slightest change in how anyone looks at you.)

There are a couple of different options at the ends of quests you can explore, and there is specific material for each House in just one spot; how you find the Map Room. For a Hufflepuff, that mission takes you to...Azkaban!

And as my cabbage play-through showed, you can concentrate your combat skills in one area or another. Since you can't progress through the main quest without learning everything (with the exception of the Unforgivable Curses, which are a Sebastian Sallow side quest or three) this boils down to what you actually do in combat -- and in what Traits you weave into your clothing. Which are also random drops, but since this part of the crafting system is mostly optional, you don't have to follow it.

(The Cabbage-Wielder build; at least two items with Herbology or Fangs trait, plus Medium potting tables and fertilizer. Spend the rest on Protego and Ederus potion to keep yourself alive while the cabbages get to work. And the double-cabbages Talent is in the Room of Requirement pool -- level 16, if I'm not mistaken, and given how long it is before you get the loom, you are basically at level 16 and through at least the first Ancient Magic Trial before you can really go to town with this build).

I will duck in long enough to watch the final cut scenes, and maybe take my graphorn out for a run, but I'm pretty much satisfied with my buck. I don't care to listen through un-skippable dialogue a third time and it is probably back to Satisfactory for me.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Store Them

 It was a tossup between Cyberpunk 2077 and Hogwarts Legacy and as much as I admired the character work and story and immersion of the former, it wasn't a world I particularly wanted to hang out in.

Hogwarts, on the other hand. This is a media property, but Warner really put some love into the IP. I think it went beyond just trying to keep the customer happy -- they are sure to know and respect that a whole bunch of people want to hang out in Harry Potter land, even if Warner would just as soon they pay at the gate for the live Wizarding World experience. And there is just a little bit in the game of making sure that they are playing nice with the movie-watching, wand-buying, full tour to Burbank crowd.

But past that, this is a game that works.

Which is funny. Really, this is generations in on game design. There are quite elaborate chains of mechanics; you collect robes and other clothing items that are functionally armor, increasing your combat stats, and you can trade those in for money when you upgrade. Which means you run out of inventory slots. So there are the Merlin Challenges to increase the inventory slots. Which in turn require new Spells to complete, and those spells are taught for a price that may include things like raising (totally unrelated) botanicals...

Which means functionally there's a lot of the same grind as in Starfield. The difference, the weird difference, is that this time it is fun.

The stuff is fun to do, that's a big one. More fun than anything in Starfield (the space combat is okay, but the basic combat is a boring slog through endless bullet-sponge AI without enough intelligence to use a pencil). But more than that, it looks great, and the sound and music are great, and there's lore that's interesting. So you don't feel like you are sitting there spamming the "fire bullets" button.

Fights by the middle game of Hogwarts are complicated and fast-moving, with ever-changing and quickly evolving situations. A very good rock-paper-scissor mix, even if there are a few killer aps.

Chinese Chomping Cabbages. Besides being absurdly strong if you spend all your available upgrades on improving them -- plus dedicate all of your greenhouse to raising the things -- there are situations where you can manipulate the enemy AI. If they see you, they converge in full combat mode. If they are getting nibbled to death by vegetables they flail about, sometimes getting killed without even getting a shot in.

That is, if you stand just out of range and roll a few cabbages that way.

The game puts a lot of emphasis on raising "beasts." I think. There's links between main story progression and side stories, and I'm not sure -- even aside from gear upgrades -- you can get through the main story without progressing some of the "beasts" storylines. Which are sort of two not always related ones; fighting poachers with Poppy Sweeting and Natsai Onai (the latter, like Sebastian Sallow, appears to have mandatory main-campaign missions). And raising your own.

See, you can do it ethically -- because you aren't trying to support a family, you just need a few feathers and hairs to weave into your own school clothes for the mojo they give, so waiting until the frolicking creature drops a few naturally is enough for you.

And you have up to three magical vivariums, pocket dimensions in which your pets can frolick without predators or other threats. Which are the loveliest level designs in the game, and that is saying a lot. This game really, really spends those pixels well.

It is what I am doing now while I wait for paint to dry on my new prop and my brain cells to recover after fighting my way through another scene in the never-ending Paris novel.

The Quick Brown Fox

It was more than interesting. I came out of COVID to hit 12 hour days straight through the weekend. I made the truck just barely in time, and when HR fell short (again!) I ended up making my flight and hotel reservations at the very last minute and out of my own pocket, too.

Not exactly a proper recovery period.

Got to LA and got the install finished that I've been sweating about since, oh, February. All my gambles and improvisations seem to have paid off, and the client was happy. And I collapsed. Barely dragged in to the last work day of the year to turn in my receipts.

I had to take an extra week off work to recover. I might even want another one; as I've finally started feeling human again I've dug into long put-off projects. Talked to my long-suffering cover artist and made up a new scheme I really like. Working my way through all the covers to see if that idea works, then on to do the repaint to make the stock image model look properly on-model to my cover girl.

(Who isn't exactly Penny, any more than the incidents or settings are literal. I'm smarter than that. Covers are to sell an idea, not to be a document of what is inside.)

Which means I've been coming to grips with the latest iteration of PhotoShop, which has made some large changes to the workspace and has also added some crazy new tools. I find it annoying how much they are overselling their new Generative Fill, for instance -- rather like those annoying Grammerly ads -- but, sheesh, the Firefly AI is insane!

Thing that it misses, though, is what I can do in my Stable Diffusion workflow (which I only do for personal use...so far. There's some gray areas, well, more like turgid smelly gray-green areas, in the use of AI tools within the workflow of producing commercial art.) What I can do in Stable Diffusion is drop a few blobs of paint -- seriously, the most low-rent comes-with-Windows pixel-pusher program -- and tell Stable Diffusion what it is supposed to be seeing.

It is an interesting insight into the mind of the machine as you try to predict how it is going to read the blobs. There's that balance between having the artistic eye to know how things actually look, especially in the gross scale; not like a child's drawing of a bicycle that has cranks and handlebars and spokes but they are sort of all over the place in different places and scales. More like a Picasso bull, where the essence of the animal, attitude and all, is captured in a couple of triangle.

And against knowing what the training material contains (remembering things like celebrities and fashion are going to be over-represented in the training data), and the psychology of the people who did the training and what words they chose for the prompts.

In any case, PhotoShop and Firefly haven't yet given that aspect; where you can tell it to look at the underlying material, select how much to keep what is there and how much to pay attention to the prompts instead. Plus the variety of Control Nets, which provide another layer of dial-in selectivity as to detecting poses or contours or whatever. PhotoShop is drifting too much in the Apple Computer mode, which sadly with the increasing power (and the almost inevitable lack of transparency that comes with tools that are too esoteric in their mathematics but rather more importantly, grown via genetic algorithms and similar) is presented in a black-box manner where what it will do is what the designers presume most people want it to do. Which is right enough of the time to make the software spectacular, but when you happen to want something that lies outside those limits...

So anyhow. I stopped off to make this post as I was finally visiting Adobe's font library, which comes with the whole Creative Commons pay-every-month license that is the only way to have PhotoShop these days.

***

Oh, yeah. And while I was very sick, I couldn't even think straight enough to follow the plot of a movie. But I could hang out in the Zen-like experience of Satisfactory. My current world is starting to look half-way nice and I may make a quick tour video some day.

One more thing on the list of "god, I need a couple months off work to handle all this!"

Well, that and not being so sick I can't even sleep...