Revisions on The Early Fox are going so very slowly. It isn't a lot of fun to go back again to a thirty-page document on everything you got wrong, then try to figure out how to get it right. I keep having to take a break, both because this takes a lot of concentration, and because it takes a lot of emotional stamina.
No closer to starting the next book, then. Which I still think should be SF. But wading around in Penny's adventures, spending a big chunk of the day with her narrative and working in her voice, I can't help but want to see her in another one.
I have three images right now. Or call them fragments of scenes. There's a novel drifting somewhere between them, but one that still lacks a central plot.
A dying tech billionaire, a man with strange ideas about transhumanism. He wants to do a thing that sounds on the surface insane -- something about "mental renewal" or regeneration -- but after long conversations and some other things she has learned, Penny supports him.
Penny's friend Amelia, the American comic-book fan she met in Paris. Several phone calls over the course of the book, with Amelia exploring her own peculiar comic-book like theory of what has really been going on behind the scenes through Penny's adventures.
Penny serving at a consciously retro diner. That is, it wears a futurist '50s dress, chrome and rocket ships, but is actually serving soy beef patties and smart drinks -- expensive ones, too. And she's not here because she needs work; she's here to investigate something scary that's happening behind the Happy Days mask.
What ties it together is something that looks a lot like a data center; a tech center, an industrial park, served by a company town which is a utopian designed community. Yes, with all the failings of that paternalistic approach that have been well-known for about a hundred years now.
You know, Elon Musk actually built one? Yeah. We really don't learn from the past, do we.
BTW... the town in Texas has a tiki bar, too.
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