Oppytunity

I decided a while ago I'd take a trip to research the next Athena Fox story. I'm almost out of places I've visited and I'd want to write a novel around. Bangkok was too short (less than three days) for me to really have a good sense for the place, and Berlin was just long enough ago that there's gonna be a lot of changes in that city.

Of course San Francisco is right next door.

Well...turns out the only open house this year for the Trinity site is October 18th. That's...pretty soon!

And I haven't nailed down nearly enough for that story.

This one has a big problem for me. One of my goals for the Athena Fox series was to do real history. To not fake it up with Atlantis and whatnot. Well, this story is getting into real history, even if it is fairly recent history.

The fossilized footprints at White Sands. Real discovery, real archaeologists. And my brain went immediately to, well, the rest of White Sands. I really wanted to construct a plot around the SLAMM project -- the nuclear-powered cruise missile -- even if that was mostly at the Nevada Test Site. Still, that's also real people and real history.

If it is wrong to pretend that somehow historians never noticed Atlantis, or that Napoleon was hiding fifty tons of purloined gold behind a series of elaborate clues, then isn't it just as wrong to have the wrong people and the wrong motives digging at White Sands, and especially wrong to have nefarious nuclear hijinks going on somewhere south of Albuquerque?

(I mean, besides the real stuff Kerr-McGee was getting up to...and let's not even on some of what was committed on tribal lands and against the Diné.)

Even a disclaimer isn't enough. Even having a totally unrelated excavation that just happens to be in a similar area isn't working for me. Because that may not be lying about history, but it does cross a line where the world of the series is truly fictional.

So far, I've just had a few fictional buildings which were deniably fictional (I can't swear there isn't an Irish Pub called something a lot like "The Harp that Once..." in the Battersea area). Oh, and an Elon Musk stand-in called "Jameson." But he's only been mentioned in passing as existing in Penny's world and being well-known as the same kind of tech-bro.

So I kind of don't want a fake version. And I kind of don't want the real version. It's a problem!

(Be a great trip anyhow...have to rent a car anyhow to get through Stallion Gate, but I'd really want to get out to Roswell while I'm at it. And Shiprock. I can leave Blackwater Draw alone, though. And it is probably a good idea to skip Trementina Base!)

(Also tempting, though, to just put the story around Jackass Flats to begin with, and make the biggest detour in the direction of Goodsprings instead.......)

Oh yes, we both reached for the blaster

I'm slogging along in the tiki book. (Also went and purchased Ritual of the Savage because it really is a well-written mystery novel). I have enough of the beats for the first sequence to be properly tiki-adjacent, and I have become comfortable with not sustaining that particular focus in the other sections.

On the other hand, the more I work on the monster-on-a-ship section of the book, the more it turns into Alien. Even without the cassette futurism. And the mining and jungle adventure and "SHADO" sections...? But as much fun and informative as iterative outlining is, I need to press on and draft the first sequence and really find out how this universe works.

Sigh.

The trouble is, more and more I understand how I am driven in writing not by cute concepts or even the basics of story, but by a different thing. The theme thing. You could call it "message" but that's too heavy-handed.

There's stuff I want to talk about in the next Athena Fox story. I'm not going to bring any insights, I don't have a big philosophical point to make, but it interests me and drives me to want to write that story. And the tiki book just doesn't have that thing.

Okay, sure, there's a bit of a riff on invented cultures v. appropriation, and an argument for leisure as a goal to itself. And the real tiki as of the second or third revival here has an element of urban archaeology which is mildly intriguing. I'm getting some of this by presenting an invented origin of tiki in this alternate world, in much the same way "Donn Beach" invented himself and the story of how he came to open the Beachcomber.

The Early Fox, though!

Purpose. That's what that one is about. All the way down to the selfish gene, Lucy crossing the savanna with child on her hip. An archeologist who has found a nihilism so deep that even suicide is too much trouble. The aging DOE guy who will hold to his purpose of keeping his atomic secret until he dies. The first humans to migrate into the Americas and the possibility of the last humans if it turns out Fermi asked the load-bearing question and we experience the Great Filter ourselves. And Penny, still trying to find hers.  

Really, what hope do mixed drinks with little umbrellas have against that?

Tiki-Adjacent

That's the phrase used in tiki forums. There's no official literature, so instead there is literature that is considered "adjacent."

Primarily, pulp noir. Well, tiki is in large part a drinking culture, so it sort of makes sense to go towards those infamously hard-drinking low-rent PIs. But there does seem to be a peculiar resonance with Black Mask type stories, post-war Americana and filled with sweltering heat, bottle blondes, murder and copious drinking.

As the author of the crime novel Ritual of the Savage (to be confused with the Lex Baxter album of the same name) notes, the idea of "Tiki Noir" is a recognized sub-culture. The connections between pulp detective fiction and tiki seem well established now.

Ritual of the Savage also very much touches on what Crime Reads calls "Nuclear Noir," as exemplified in book and especially film Kiss Me Deadly. I guess it makes sense in terms of 1950s Americana but there is some peculiar connection here to Cold War fears and radioactive dreams.

But what else are you going to do? It is largely a visual style. It isn't really Polynesia (and the food is Chinese, the music has a Latin beat, and the drinks are rum based). So you sort of can watch Elvis movies, South Pacific, the right Gidget movie or maybe some Hawaii 5-Oh, but this doesn't really speak to a writing genre or style.

Or at least, not a specific one. You are left hunting for the appearance of tiki elements in something like an old Brady Bunch episode.

***

I'm having a different style problem, though. I've outlined the first sequence, and I'm to the point where I'm trying to figure out the look and feel of the tech. And more than that; the approach. There's a style in some consciously retro SF to belabor certain descriptions. Sure, that was seen in some works so it makes a useful signifier, but the good authors were avoiding it and that I think is the more important thing. Story, that is. Style has to take second place to clarity of story.

Just, we are so far along the trail of retro-retro pastiche...we recognize intentional mimicry of things that are mimicking things. And I do have to think the same thing was going on in later Roman comedies, with things that were intended to remind the audience of other playwrights, who were doing those things to remind their audience of the Greeks...

When you mix this in with SF (or fantasy) you've got worse problems. The experience of reading F&SF is all about figuring out how this particular world works, what this particular author is doing, and how well they are doing it.

Especially SF; a lot of authors now don't know their science, and are equally unfamiliar with what used to be thought of as the foundational works. So if they drop a "psionic" in the mix you don't know immediately if they are referencing Campbell or Cronenberg, or for that matter, if they think the stuff is real.

The reader is, in short, extrapolating and filling in the gaps, and if you leave it too long, they will construct a world that has nothing to do with the one you are trying to present. (There's an amusing series now on bookTok where the presenter is reading the first page of a fantasy book and trying to form the picture of the protagonist in her mind. "Wait, pirates? Oh, hold on, let me change that," and switch to a different actor in completely different costume...)

I could have hit this in a dozen places. I hit it where my outline suggested the good guys switch some labels on a cargo manifest so the wrong crates get loaded.

Which...are they holding up readers and scanning the digital labels? Doesn't that imply a whole wireless infrastructure as well, which has obvious knock-on to things like personal communication, electronic banking.....?

If you try to scoot around it, just suggesting this is something electronic, then you are letting the reader imagine too widely and two minutes later when the bad guys jump them, the cry of "Why don't they just call 911!" is heard.

But if you nail it down...well, besides taking away options, you are creating a whole bunch of other knock-ons.

And worst; this is one of those places where the style, whether post-war or atom punk or cassette futurism or what have you is given a chance to appear. So you kind of do want to break the rules just a little and go into slightly more detail than many of the actual period writers would. Because you aren't a period writer. You are writing for a modern audience who has a lot more background in all the ways other writers -- and the real world -- has come up with in solving those problems.

You are talking to a reader who has met bar codes and RFID, carbon paper and floppy disks in their lives or in history, and all sorts of tricorders and PADDs and sonic screwdrivers they have seen in fiction.

Which means on the one hand you can suggest something they've seen in the world or in other media very, very efficiently. "Blaster" is now such an established term of art there's no need to go into the extra words of "plasma" or "atomic" or however you are justifying "pistol-sized weapon of scientific destruction." But at the same time, you have to be very careful the reader didn't just imagine a red-headed jedi -- instead of your blonde with a totally unrelated kind of laser sword.

What the smeerp

Language. Always fun in SF.

I was writing a test paragraph in my head, feeling out what are the elements I want to stress in this book, and how to bring them to the reader. The heat, the beach, palm trees...shit.

Always a problem. SF and fantasy has long wrestled with the question of what you do when the creature in question fulfills the role of chicken in your fantasy medieval village, but clearly can't be a chicken because this is some other land with purple trees and elves taking out the garbage.

Calling it a "chicken" invites the Luke Skywalker response above.

Calling it a "smeerp" invites the Blishian disdain. And then there's the half-arsed of "pseudo-chicken" that ends up satisfying nobody. Besides, the further you get away from naming it as a chicken, the more work you have to do to explain that this is a small not terribly smart farm animal bred for meat and eggs.

(Or "space-eggs," if you must.)

I've been reading a light space opera series lately (it was mostly free) and the author has chosen to give the idea of linguistic drift over time by changing the spelling of relatively common words. That confused me at first; there was a creatively spelled version of "coffee" that had the flavor of being a brand name. First chapters are always fun because this is when the reader is trying to figure out what kind of world this is (and what kind of writer) and I wondered if she was going for a The Space Merchants kind of super-consumerist society.

But no, it is just drift. The really odd thing is that the author italicized them.

And, sigh, I get it. Because if you just left "Donut" as "Donot" then the reader (especially that particular cranky kind of reader who loves getting aggravated by what they consider laziness around language) would decide this was instead just really, really poor proofreading and throw the book over the shoulder of disdain.

Italicizing is a signal to the reader from the writer, a sort of "STET" in typography, telling them it is supposed to be that way. Which means, of course, it is also Doylist, external to the world, and after the lesson is absorbed, can pull the reader out of the text.

Dark Side of the Rainbow

Roughed out the basic plan for The Tiki Stars. Over the past few weeks I've been finding the underlying plots and themes that tie together what is currently planned as four sections.

Still feeling tired. Took a break with a space opera on Kindle/Prime. Julia Huni, the Trianna Moore series, four books for the price (free!) of one.

And the parallels! Book one is a station-side adventure that orients the reader to the universe and gets the basic world-building done. Book two is nefarious plotting and corporate skullduggery. Book three, trouble on a passenger cruise. And book four adventure in the jungle. Sort of. (It is planet-side.)

And what do the notes say for my new book? Part one is world-building and establishing the ground rules with a sort of South Seas-flavored adventure mostly around the space port of a tropical island. Second part is asteroid miners, golden age rockets and space suits with rivets and a touch of Space Western. Third sequence is in two parts; a man-v-alien monster thing (with some cassette futurism elements) then takes a turn into glossy Space-Age Bachelor Pad world with a SHADO-like organization of alien hunters. Part four is jungle adventure; revolutionaries, poachers, and a lost temple in a volcano.

But really that's the easy stuff. I got to plot all this adventure. I realized yesterday I need to drop an exotic and dangerous local life form into whatever is going on in my little Smuggler's Cove. And all I've got for a plot at the moment is reason for a fist fight in a bar. And I have even less plotted towards whatever is going on with struggling mining companies and claim jumpers and whatever else is happening in the next one. Of four.

Yeah, probably not the smartest book for me, especially if I want to write fast. I realized half way through the Paris book I don't even really need to plot Athena Fox stories that far ahead. Just have the frame, because when I'm actually producing text I basically dream up a thing, open the maps to find a good place to do the thing, and that's when I actually need the research close at hand.

My notes are, "Penny does something clever here" or, more likely, "They talk, he tricks the secret out of her," or "She chases after the guy but he does parkour and gets away." I don't bother figuring out the details until I'm writing the actual scene.

See, those books are very linear plots. They are almost Plot Coupon books; Penny blunders around learning lots of stuff that mostly doesn't matter, with a guy coming through the door with a gun every now and then just to keep the adrenaline moving. Then at the climax, she Hercule Poirots the clues and announces the solution (without, thankfully, a full drawing-room scene).

Doing a tighter plot...that's new to me. And for all I've been worrying about underlying themes and the difference between what works in a museum exhibit (they had some cool period consumer sound stuff at MOMA last weekend...basically, cassettes!) and what works on the page, that is just the spices on top. The meat of this thing is the mechanics of who gets the drop on who. And why.

Fortunately, the models I am emulating were basically written at a run as well, with the author having just as little idea how he was going to have his hero win the fight THIS time...

Without Reason

Mystery bug hit again. I was really hoping the surgery would stop that happening. It did make it easier and I'll be back to work tomorrow. Today, I am trying to catch up. Installed Reaper and Shotcut on the M2. And realized I do not have the patience to edit audio. Or video.

It's funny. I put models up on Shapeways and people seemed to like them. Put Poser content up at Rendo and people bought (not a lot, but some). Did replica props and people wanted them. But the one thing I've wanted to do since forever is write, and nobody seems to want the books.

I read, a lot. A long list of authors on Amazon that I know aren't that good or that famous. And they have decent sales numbers. Nothing spectacular, but if I had those figures, I'd leave my day job and have more time for writing.

So what is different? Grammar? I'm not seeing a huge difference (but then, I am trusting my own eyes, and computer checks. And I just don't go insane about grammar or spelling, personally. I know some people do. Some people will see a single word and throw the book across the room with a scream. I don't.)

Plotting? Character? Emotion? Description? Am I falling short somewhere in the art of story-telling? Is there something I don't even notice when it isn't there?

Or is this visibility? Advertising, volume (most of these people have multiple books in multiple series) social media presence?

***

Possible data. A family member really loved the "relationship with Amelia." I had never planned this. I wasn't really intending to write anything other than a typical friendship. Originally, in fact, Amelia was sort of a one-scene wonder. She was there to be the neophyte tourist that Penny could see her past self in, and compare to where she was today.

I'd gotten all the way to the first Louvre scene when I realized it wasn't working to have Penny know all this stuff about art, not in addition to history. So the both of us went back to Amelia and gave her that job.

Then, as I worked, I understood that the (small) character arc Penny has for this one is accepting that she actually makes a pretty good hero. That meant getting her to finally talk about the stuff she'd been doing (she keeps it so under wraps she doesn't even tell herself, or the reader). So I got her to chose to open up to Amelia.

And that's what this reader was seeing. The trust. So is this the kind of thing I should have been doing more of all along, and why my books aren't getting attention? Probably not. But it is very tempting to think of oneself as perhaps being socially naive, and not noticing when the kind of grit of real people in real relationships is missing from a book -- whether yours or someone else's.

Oh, and by sheer coincidence I ended up watching a bit of first season Xena. Where the relationship between Xena and Gabriella is absolutely key.

***

In any case, I re-learned a bit of Reaper, picked up the basics of Affinity Photo, and re-acquainted with Shotcut as well. I lost access to the room I was shooting the video in, so never really finished making the clips I wanted. But I figured I could just splice in some stills and call it good enough for viking.

 

Q2Q

While I was on Hackaday, having just completed a visit to check out a Gameport adapter project, I followed a link to a laser safety and radiological clean-up guy. Local, too. I did an archive binge on his blog and down in the last pages there were some comments on the mindset of a Q clearance.

Which was exactly the mindset I had been thinking of for the bad guy in Penny's upcoming desert adventure. It is something some of my father's friends had -- they were in similar circles, and I can't even swear that some of them might not have had that clearance.

The important part here is that the access may lapse but the clearance never leaves. As Phil explains it, most things have to be classified Secret, and that classification only lasts if regularly renewed. Nuclear weapons, and a few related things, are born classified, and that classification lasts unless specifically removed. According to Phil, when you've been DOE long enough to know about stuff most of us don't know about, you are capable of having thoughts which are inherently classified.

So basically exactly what I was after (and what I had observed); a lifetime of keeping those secrets, no matter how long ago the Cold War or how long you'd been a civilian. You didn't talk about that stuff. You didn't talk about your experiences, lest you accidentally reveal something.

A weird loyalty born out of how the job worked, what kind of people were in it. And I understand that part, too, and not from the Army. But then, this blogger has also spent a year at McMurdo and that's another set of highly-skilled people doing something that most people don't want to hear the details of, trapped together in a very small space under a lot of pressure. Heck...a theater tech can relate, if only in a small way. It isn't that strange a mental state.

So, dammit, stuff keeps showing up for the desert book. Despite that series not selling well enough to justify making that my life's work. (I don't care about the money -- I just want people to read it!)

It is possible that I could game Amazon's algorithms a little better. The key to a series is that a new book has a boosted ranking on Amazon, and if it is part of a series, the entire series gets a bit of that boost (plus, of course, if you have done your work properly the prospective reader can always click back through and discover your back catalog).

There's a slight risk that the book that is most visible is later in the series, meaning you have to choose between being friendly to readers who jump on in the middle, or take the chance that they will click through and read fast enough so you get the kick anyhow. (Because you might pay per click when you are using Amazon ads, but your ranking is based on actual sales).

Thing is, that boost phase is short. The only way to benefit is to keep the time between releases short. Really short. Like under a month, now (Amazon is always tweaking the algorithm, and they've progressively shortened the happy hour since people first discovered it).

And I don't think I could kick anything out in a month. Not even if I could afford to quit my day job.

Go go Gadget

Writing is a process of accumulating. Like a bit of dust falling through a supersaturated cloud, when you have a germ of a story it just starts collecting stuff from the environment around you.

My intended quick-and-dirty, write it in six months retro SF book has been collecting slowly. The cloud layer over there is sparse. Ran into a nice Reddit thread on Cassette Futurism, I've got lots of History of Tiki popping up in my feed, but...

The book I am trying to put off (the last book in the series moved ONE electronic copy. And as far as I can tell every print copy went to family or friends) is, however, sitting in an atmospheric river. Right now I just stumbled into a whole bunch of stuff about the locals who got irradiated in the Trinity test. I was thinking a lot about setting the climax there anyhow.

That's the thing, though. The magnet for the retro-SF novel is a weak one. That's most of it, right there; "retro SF adventure." I don't feel I have much to say or much to explore.

The Athena Fox story I'm trying not to get too involved with yet (or perhaps ever?) is measured in tesla. NAGPRA, indigenous archaeology (ran into a book that was briefly free on Kindle and snagged that right away). And the original seed is the still controversial pre-pre-Clovis footprints in White Sands. The Anthropocene (which as of when the novel is set hadn't been shot down by geology yet). And then there's the Drake Equation...

See, each Athena Fox story more-or-less has a location, an aspect of modern archaeology, and a slice of history. The slice for this one is Olaf Stapleton sized; the human race itself, from the first humans to cross into the Americas, to the Fermi Paradox and the possibility that we might be ending our own species some day (it looked a hell of a lot more likely to some in the early Atomic Age). And in typical Athena Fox style, brought into the plot, with a Persistence Hunter chase scene across the desert and a climax at the Trinity site.

And, yeah, this is...I don't know what you call it, but there's probably a term like "Pathetic Fallacy" that contains some of the same dismissive air. Maybe I'll waste the rest of today web-crawling in search of that. I wonder if the Turkey City Lexicon has anything?

That, and finish reading the nukee and laser-guy blog I discovered via Hackaday while looking for adapters...

The Chromium Dream

World-building on a retro-SF universe for a new novel. It is intended to be Earth -- or rather Earth was a part of that history -- but my intent is to down-pedal that.

Still, no matter how unspecific I am, it doesn't change that probably space flight happened while electronics were still primitive and people still smoked. So you could call it alternate history. I'm just shying away from the idea of making it a specific moment or specific cause.

No alien space bats. No "Italy won the second world war" stuff, at least, not as the reason everything looks very different by the time we get to 2001. And it isn't really keyed off the sudden discovery of cheap nuclear fusion or a Dean Drive or something.

Basically, space flight is just...cheaper. Energetically I mean. By a factor of maybe four. And, yes, there is (relatively cheap) FTL that also blows conservation of practically everything out the window. But, for whatever reason, this didn't make history as we know it unrecognizable (or anything else, for that matter; you do not go toying with gravitational constant or inertia or whatever it is you did to allow a one-man flitter with a tank of "Rocket Fuel" to do SSTO and still have plenty left to jaunt off the Mars for a dry martini).

And, no, I'm not intending too much in the way of other scientific violations. You will still need a helmet to breathe in space, even if -- again, somehow -- space radiation isn't as much of an issue as it should. All those clear lexan helmets give us is a manly Space Tan. 

My intent is for Earth to be in the background, mentioned glancingly but not often, and even then, somewhat inconsistently. And as is the rule for your basic Rocky Jones adventure, nobody is getting Atomic Rocket deep with what exactly is the ISP of "Rocket fuel." It is just space trucking, things working like familiar cargo ships and pickup trucks In Space. 

***

Oh, and I mentioned to a friend at work I was tempted to mount a throttle quadrant or something on my desk so I could play-act Rocket Jockey while I was getting into the mood. A few days later he popped up with an old Wingman and after a dive into such places as the Internet Wayback Machine and the always-spicy Hackaday I found a project on github complete with a BOM with Digikey parts numbers, a PCB already loaded in the community area of OSHpark (a fabhouse I'd used before) and even the STL for a housing at Thingiverse. This DB-15 to USB adaptor already has a profile for this stick in the software and it is an Arduino family device.

Which all made me so nostalgic I went and opened my old accounts and ordered the parts. And I don't even need a flight controller.