This is going to be more rambling than usual. I don't have another big screen at the moment to save notes on, and I'm entertaining a pivot I probably won't do.
Magic.
There does exist a genre that crosses modern-day settings with historical puzzles, but the label is "Archaeological Thriller" and most of it is lots of shoot-outs and very little real history.
I can, however, come up with a list of books that totally geek out on history, going into more detail than I would dare. And have a more realistic (one could also say genteel) approach to action.
All of them are urban fantasy. The Ghosts of Paris series. The Trina Piper series. The Rivers of London series. Urban fantasies, perhaps even more than a certain strain of detective novels (Sam Spade, Travis McGee, Leaphorn and Chee), the city or location is almost a character. Sometimes actually is a character.
So there is an existing audience and genre, with an existing marketing language even.
This is a two-way street, as when you've sent a a character (who is already 2/5 on the way towards YA protagonist) to Athens and start talking up Greek Mythology, there is a big expectation that actual gods, or at least a bit of magic, is going to show up.
Related to that, there is the ride. We read slice-of-life (well, some people do) when we want to watch a protagonist worrying about making their mortgage. We read adventures and thrillers and mysteries to see a protagonist confront greater stakes.
And the more personal power they have, the bigger those stakes can be (without losing believability). Which is why I think complaining about "plot armor" is idiotic. It isn't that some character is too sugared, or that the bad guys are too incompetent, it is that the writer has failed to make a match-up between what one can accomplish and what the other can accomplish that interests the reader.
The plethora of ex-SEALS running around the more Michael Bay archaeological thrillers doesn't mean they have a cake walk. It just means they can have equally well-armed antagonists to play with. The same is true for magic. It always brings more trouble than it solves.
It also helps to avoid the Jessica Fletcher effect. The protagonist has a reason to be discovering all these dead bodies. And it isn't because they spent ten years earning their degree in forensic pathology, or becoming a black belt and five-times mixed martial arts champion, or whatever. No, they are still the same everyman nebbish they were, because magic (whether powers, artifact, destiny, or the book with all the secrets which might as well be one of the above) isn't something they earned but something that was dropped on them.
(An additional strength of magic is that it tends to play out again more magic. Against the supernatural, which in urban fantasy is more often than not under the Masquerade. So your protagonist can indeed by having running gun battles with exploding cars through the streets of Manhattan without the cops so much as blinking...just, the guns are wands and the cars are dragons, and nobody but good guy, bad guy, and the occasional unlucky bystander ever sees them.)
But really, that is all Doylist. More; the above are more about how to find the readership and make them happy. They say less about the internal story.
And in that lies most of my problems. First, despite what I said about magic being just a special sauce on top of an ordinary nebbie, it still feels to me that it makes the character itself special. It is one step along the way towards having unusual eyes and multi-colored hair.
And, while I have seen it done well, the most elegant magical explanation for what is actually going on interests me so much less than discovering the real processes of history, sociology, technology, etc. I write at least in part because I want to learn things. To learn why the Mayan society disintegrated -- not to make up some backstory about magic spells gone wrong (or visiting aliens).
Magic always feels less satisfying.
I am tempted to make a snap judgement that there's also no space to add magic to what I've already written. But this presupposes full-scale rewrites anyhow, and a given in the rewrites is knocking a hell of a lot of the history that's already there out of the picture. And reducing Penny's sugar a bit in the process, as she is no longer needed to pull a Stapleton and explain history things to the reader. At length.
There would also be space to lean in on something different, something that feels more organic. I never intended her to lean into theater and acting and especially '80s movies, and currently I feel like it takes up too much narrative space and is possibly annoying and/or off-putting. But as I said before, I could lean into this more. Make her less of an expert and lean into the comedy of instant expert ("I saw this in a movie once!")
And that is a kind of magic I can get behind.
Every work of fiction distorts the real world in some way. It creates a set of ground rules that the reader can either accept, or find something different to read. Nobody notices that everywhere Jessica Fletcher goes, dead bodies appear. No man with a gun will ever remember not to let Steven Seagal get within grabbing distance. There isn't a single red shirt who can do the job better than beaming down our entire command staff.
The baked-in assumption for the Athena Fox stories is that the universe itself keeps confusing Penny with the character she created. Somehow, situations that belong in a movie...keep happening to her. Well, the place I could use magic would be very subtle, and that is to have her notice it. Never to have control of the narrative or be able to weaponize it; only to take notice that this is how things work around her.
The problem is, it is almost impossible not to weaponize it. And as soon as it becomes recognized as a narrative tool, it starts warping the narrative away from what would be plausible to what would work in a movie. And the old trope of "if I saw this in a movie I wouldn't believe it!" is not a good look.
Better if it is tacitly understood by the reader but never accepted as a fact by anyone inside the narrative. It remains Doylist -- never Watsonian.
So I don't see a good way to add magic. I will say it is more compelling from a character angle if my protagonist never gains magical powers, if she is both aided and hindered by what magic is afoot so it is effectively neutral (or, rather, antagonistic in that it solves some problems while causing her bigger ones).
But to make it a properly magical setting, magic has to be active. It has to do something, not just be a random background note ("So here we are fighting grave robbers in Costa Rica. Plus, over in Switzerland there's some people bringing chocolate dolls to life.") And if the underpinning of the story is historical, historical mysteries and the processes of discovering history, then some of that history is the history of a world that has magic in it.
Okay, think on that for a moment. There are settings where magic is a known part of the world, and has been.
The downside for me is this means alternate history. And I can't help thinking, really, really alternate history. Or rather, alternate history the way it should really be. You added spell-swords and dragons to the Napoleonic wars and, no, you don't roll the clock forward and still find Churchill as First Sea Lord.
Hidden histories have the advantage in that most of history is the way we think it is. In fact, if the behind-the-scenes influence is subtle enough, it basically is the way it was. The best I ever came up with ("best" as in, allows me to write the story I was already writing) is that behind the scenes in the Athena Fox stories is a small group of immortals who as individuals accomplish a few things but nothing that couldn't be done by anyone else who didn't have intelligence, a willingness to take the long view, and a whole hell of a lot of saved-up power and influence.
(Basically, they woke up as immortal one morning, they either haven't learned how to duplicate it or haven't tried, and largely stayed as selfish and short-sighted as they had been born, working to feather their own nests with the advantage of being able to gain the experience and belongings of great age without the physical decrepitude. And their top goal is and remains "don't get found out.")
(And just because I hate the diminishment of real people of accomplishment by making them secretly wizards or aliens or something, they were rarely anyone famous. Besides, famous people are too visible.)
(There's also a mental pruning process they go through, because nobody can hold a hundred lifetimes of memories anyhow. So while they might have met Cleopatra, they really can't tell you much that isn't in the history books already.)
(All of this was on my mind when I wrote the Voicey McVoiceface scene in the London book. I left it because all the scene really needed was weird and mad and that all qualified.)
Oh, and let me revisit that Penny does have a few unnatural skills that would work just as well if outright named as magic. Perhaps better, as they are oblique enough not to be instantly recognized as the game-changer equivalent of being able to toss fireballs around. Her ability to mimic a language she doesn't yet understand, for instance. Or her ability (which she hasn't even noticed yet) to pick up physical skills with mostly a bit of observation. Okay; that one is a bit more powerful.
All in all, though, I think it would be easier to pivot in a different direction. Taking the writer out of the equation, they could be torn down and rebuilt with more of an emphasis on humor. Or with a more solidly worked-out mystery. Or as a romance. Or with more action.
Trouble is, there is a writer in the picture. Aside from the last, I don't think I could pull any of those off. And I'm not even sure about that one.
Well, time to drop a developmental editor on the problem and see what they have to say. Starting with the cheapest one I can find...ProWritingAid.
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