Hey, batter batter!

And now I'm excited again.

That's a crop from a brochure produced for the current redevelopment; officially begun in 2012 but wouldn't have opened this year even without the virus.

I cranked out 1,400 words of the Battersea Power Station excursion yesterday. Add 1,700 words for the UXB scene and that's a good weekend's work. Feels nice. I was still hot and feeling drained today -- I'm hoping it isn't mild/asymptomatic virus because I haven't been self-quarantining. But I'm hoping to get through the scene with the death-defying abseil stunt.

I do need a light rewrite or two. The "animals" is still happening on the coaling jetty but the framing is different. And it is so good to finally meet Guy (the closest thing I have to a pure antagonist in this book).

Just for my peace of mind, nobody on the Battersea hack has a regional dialect. Or an unusual way of speaking, even. There's only four of them and they are never coming back and Cynth is doing most of the talking anyhow so I am fine with just having a bunch of dialog tags here.

And the luck for this evening: I decided I really wanted to know which was Station A and which Station B. It took a bit of searching -- search results clogged up with far too many articles about the various redevelopment schemes -- but the one I finally found gave me the older Station on the West. And since the infiltration starts from the East, that means they will have to cross No-Man's Land (and, yes, real urban explorers gave it that name).

***

The thing that's worrying me more is, yes, that is a real redevelopment. A consortium of Malaysian developers, and several big names signed on for shop space and office space, including Apple Computers.

The big word around trademark questions is "Don't mess with the mouse." Well, I'm not sure I'd want to mess with Apple, either. Charlie Stross did, though. He had his character talk about "the cult of Jobs" in one book, and blame "a level-III glamour" on his purchase of what he identified in narrative as a Jesus-Phone. Which he booby-trapped, leading to a bad guy being magic-enhanced electrocuted by the ear buds, dancing in place with the wires white-hot before turning into a blackened corpse.

But then, Stross can afford lawyers.



My current rule of thumb is, if I am going to mention a real business it should be treated neutrally at worst. In fact, I just edited a line I had written about the fish & chips you can buy in the museum cafe at IWM London; from "They weren't good," to "They were better than I'd expected." Okay, honestly, museum food? Despite that particular cafe going out of its way to strive for and claim a higher standard. But it didn't harm the scene for the chips to be actually good.

The point is, during the Battersea hack I'm going to be saying some mean things about SP Setia and Sime Darby. And this is where I have to fall back on the second line of defense; it ain't libel if it's true. There should be a certain protection for opinion of characters and author, especially if it falls well within what a review or opinion piece might say.

Yeah, great time to realize that. The London Field School, the Lambeth Larks, two pubs, several shops and a few social clubs are all fictional. However, I'm also not just mentioning, but actually doing things in or with Transport for London, Crossrail, the Northern Line Extension, IWM London, The New Globe Theatre, the Trafalgar art project, Bradgate Park, the University of Leicester, The Foundry, The India Club, Potter's Field, Highgate Cemetery, Doctor Who, James Bond, Time Team, Detectorists, Dad's Army...

And Battersea Power Station.

I guess this is another bright line problem. Parts of this are historical fiction. Sure, the Nine Elms Shelter is fictional, but I am staying within what is reasonable for the place and time and I am very much getting the details right about the "ladder" shelter at Kennington Park or the Balham Station disaster.

And it is in part still travel fiction, so yes Trafalgar Square and the Tower of London and Black Cabs and, yes, fish & chips should be right.

So it just feels weird and wrong to have events suddenly happening at Chelsea Power Station and The Museum of the War and Bushby-on-Thames and The Wooden O, just because I might have a sword fight happen on the premises or say something mean about the fish & chips.

Rough Sleeping

Isn't that an amazing map? And it turns out, that strip through Limehouse and Ratcliff is still there on modern maps, except now it includes more of the Isle of Dogs.

But, alas, I really can't follow this up the way I want to. I know there are options beyond hotels and hostels and Air BnB. There are worlds, intersecting worlds of shared rentals and sleeping rough and shelters and St. Mungos and crashing at a friend's.

I'd love to write that book. I'd love to write the book in which the diary of the shopgirl (who is sleeping rough on a railway platform herself) is presented in full-page excerpts.

But that's too much work. Plus I think it might be the wrong kind of book. When you get right down to it, being hungry and having uncomfortable living spaces isn't the story of my heroine, it is a temporary obstacle. She doesn't do without because archaeology really doesn't pay that well and life is hard for everyone. She'll do without because she's lost in the desert while searching for the Golden Orb of Somebody.

The intersect with the past in this one is entirely filtered. It is through study and discovery and exhibits, not through direct experience. As much as in some other book I might have my protagonist re-live the experience of someone in the past (or just set the damn book in that period in the first place), the closest Penny is coming is with a little dress-up and some museum displays.

Besides, her poverty problem is artificial and temporary. She has her plane tickets. She has friends she can borrow from. She most certainly has people she could crash with. The only reason I've got her, in the chapter I'm working on now, taking the tube down to Brixton to look at a poor neighborhood with council estates and all that is to ramp up the pressure on her while I work around to the climax of the book.

Plus I need the page count.

So don't look for a deep look into the realities of being poor in London. This is just going to be enough surface impressions to sell emotional arcs of the story. Nothing on the practicalities of the hostel circuit. Just a bit of dirt and grime and the experience of riding the tube.

Boudicea

So I thought about turning Helen and Amy (the two TBM's) around and having them dig towards Battersea. Also thought about renaming them so I could make some remark about barbarians advancing on Londinium.

But I'm willing to go with history. The main things I have to change is to delay the work at the actual Battersea Power Station -- which is very close to but not contiguous with the Battersea Power Station Station (according to sources TfL is already making roundels which read merely "station," but I know some wag is going to stick a superscript "2" on the ones they can reach.)

And of course the original Nine Elms station is being rehabbed to serve a new line...which is probably lower and may be even across the railways or something.

And since I've got so much detail on Kennington Green, now, I'm using the real thing and because of the delays on the Northern Line Extension, I might even be able to use it as it was historically. To the best of my ability to narrow it down, the current (as of today) Google "satellite" image is within a month or two of when my story is technically set! The street view varies, with some of it being before the Acoustic Shed was taken down.

The main difference here is not only is the real Kennington Green very small, the archaeology was completed in June of 2015 and there was nothing of archaeological significance found. Basically, it was Kennington Common, along with the somewhat more fruitful Kennington Park. The only "structure" recorded is a pond, with a ditch running to Vauxhall Creek, and the residents filled it in sometime after 1790.

I'm thinking strongly of giving them some dead space inside the hoarding but outside the acoustical shed, where they can find damn-all but at least train on methods. I presume the Field School had a better idea, but whatever plans they may have made change when they get a chance to work at the old Nine Elms platform.

I still might slow down Amy and Helen, though. In our world they broke through in 19 Nov 2017, but it would give the story an extra kick if I delayed them by exactly one year.

***

In any case Kennington really works for me. I was going to explore part of the neighborhood anyhow because returning character Graham lives there and is going to put Penny up for a week or two. The neighborhood is a crazy-quilt mix of gangs and violence and cricket players and retirees and some extremely expensive housing and it is a gay mecca. So pretty much everything. All sorts of odd history, too.

And oh yeah. Within a year of the story, the police chased down a guy who was carrying what they called a "notched machete" (the picture looks like something from the stupid part of the Museum Replicas catalog) and someone fired a crossbow bolt at the pitch of the Oval during a match.

But besides being colorful, it is experiencing the same forces...a kind of gentrification, really...that is hitting along the entire Northern Line extension. The same forces that are gutting the Battersea Power Station and ripping down the New Covent Garden Flower Market in order to put up million-dollar condos with a mere piffle of low-income housing added to the mix (guaranteed 6.5% but they've changed it at least once already. Pray we do not change it further).

What any of this has to do with archaeology I'm damned if I know. But it is pretty much a success of once again throwing my would-be archaeologist into a situation where historical preservation is just one chip in an ongoing struggle.

A dog's breakfast

Campfire has a new version out. They are being very nice in letting people use the trial version free until the end of April. And they do seem very nice, well-meaning people.

I still quit without bothering to save. I still have my original problem, which is that it is proscriptive. As such, I find it too limiting. I wanted to try to block out my timeline. I started that, then poked into character arcs to see if that would help. Can't start an arc without a character -- well, that lets out the thematic arcs I wanted to chart, or the arc of "what have we figured out in the ongoing mystery." Started a character anyhow, and got stuck again on the "must have A first name and A last name."

Well, damn good thing no Russian novelists are using this, eh? Or to go from the sublime to... well, James Fenimore Cooper, whose "Deerslayer" carries more names than he carries bullets.

Scrapple bothers me in that you can't resize the boxes and even changing the color is a bit kludgy.  There's no useful variation in lines and they can't be labeled, either. But it is enough for now.

***

Spent yesterday planning out Part II of the London book. Part I came in at 8.7 K which is a little light, but on successive re-reads it doesn't feel overwhelming for the reader. Not too many descriptions or facts, very little strange dialects to wade through (much, much less than I expected). A few too many characters, though.

And today...was both curse and, eventually, blessing when it came to nailing down some details.

This is why we do research. Every time one door closes, another opens, as my old Gaffer said. Great guy but terrible cabinet-maker. Anyhow!

There already is a Herne Hill station. It's above-ground, but in any case the actual neighborhood is a bit in the wrong place. I might still use it but there's a bigger problem. See, the construction work at Battersea Power Station is part and parcel of the Northern Line extension off the Kennington Loop.

And a look at the real map and it doesn't make sense to put a station where it crosses the Victoria Line. It really does want to be close to New Covent Garden Market. And, oh yeah, Battersea Power Station Station (yes, really) is pretty much right on site, and the giant shaft and construction lots and etc. were there before the subway got very far because that's where they lowered the TBMs from).

So does this mean I can't have a scene at the deserted power station? And what about the supposed rehab of Nine Elms (the old historical, which is UNDER New Covent Garden Market)?

My plotting doesn't even like the....oh, boy. As I was typing this I saw the answer. It is a doozy. I thought about a low-key infiltration off a surface entrance. Well, the actual Northern Line Extension is deep as heck. It runs under the Victoria Line. But since I'm already sneaking into Battersea, seems like I could revisit and actually get into the tunnels that way...

Anyhow. I was worried about the scale of construction and the high profile of the project, but it works. Not in the "we're working on a little subway thing in the middle of a somewhat down-market suburban area" I'd originally envisioned, but in other ways. Ways that work in to the themes I've been building into this thing all along. I just need to juggle stuff to make them work.

So that's been my morning. Reading articles, watching videos of the construction, reading pdf's of archaeology/geology in the area.

And, well...still haven't narrowed down on what it is the London Field School is offering to their students before they start digging at Nine Elms. I'm close, though. There was a glassworks in Lambeth...somewhere...and a cemetery discovered in the work on the New Covent...that place.

And I think I have it. Pity I already talked about skeletons, but I can have them working in ground that is past the Victorian layer, with the good stuff already out of the hole but at least some stratification to identify as they see if there is...oops, yet another document...an old Roman road.

And, oh. Nine Elms itself is the name of a road that ran from York House (in Lambeth, a bit West of the Imperial War Museum) to Vauxhall. Presumably, back when it actually had a Vaux Hall.

M25 to Potter's Bar

I'm starting slowly to get a sense of London geography. There are so very many districts, and each of course has their own character.

The Imperial War Museum stands at the edge of Elephant and Castle, Kennington sort of southwest of it, then Lambeth, cross the Thames at Lambeth Bridge and you are in Westminster...

So far I'm still not regretting stopping research where I did. I did have to read up on pubs, and more about Crossrail, but I knew where to stop and I was able to get another thousand words down. I'm at 8K with two short scenes left and that's not too far off the target for Part I of 4. (the middle two are the long ones).

And I'm not being as much a stickler. I'm not naming the hotel. I am naming the pub, but it doesn't exist. I've already dealt with having to move the Tower Bridge knife attack back a year, delay the real-world construction at Battersea by 2-4 years, and move Diana back a week and upgrade her to a full North Sea Storm with Tidal Surge. So although I'm in general sticking with the new and generally unliked "upgrades" to the museum, I am comfortable with dragging one exhibit forward in time as well.

I probably don't have to move the Lord Mayor's Show, though. And my protagonist already slept through Guy Fawkes Night. I'm trying to keep this more focused on W.W. II. It's not easy.

***

Oh, and that's another oddity. I've been so used to using Expedia and TripAdvisor and so forth to figure out where hotels are, what museum hours are, basically sanity-check the action I'm writing. Well, I need to figure out how to use those with the Wayback Machine, because what they are spitting at me now is the reduced routes and inflated prices and closed doors of, well, the current pandemic.

***

Coffee arrived, and a new headset. And I discovered bluetooth is a dog's breakfast when it comes to running off a laptop. Spent an hour fighting persistent stutter, and it is still stuck in a lower-quality codec I need Developer tools to fix. And according to forums, this is a cross-platform reality.

On the other hand found a substitute for iTunes that doesn't hog all the system resources and re-arrange your files just for fun. So that's a nice change.

Journal of the Plague Year

Yeah, I've read Dafoe. But I haven't read Johnson or Pepys.

Research. It is so much fun.

So one of the sub-plots in my London novel is the diary of a shopgirl discovered in the collapsed part of the Tube Station shelter my protagonist is helping excavate. This is there to advance a lot of themes, but prominent among them the idea of archaeology bringing the individual story back to the broad sweep of history. And uncovering the lives of the ordinary (where history generally records the lives of kings).

And, yeah, I should have realized it: Londoners are a diary-writing, journal keeping, letter-sending breed. I've been reading up on The Blitz, particularly man-in-the-street impressions. And I've found there are so many personal accounts by people who either were or proudly called themselves ordinary, that there has grown up a whole field of critical rethinking on the genre.

The ideas that the mythology of The Blitz needs to be questioned is already out there, and has already gone full-circle at least once. Wartime censorship and government propaganda were very much interested in keeping up the idea of all of England rallying as one, class distinctions forgotten, crime put aside for the duration, chin up and a song in their hearts standing shoulder to shoulder against invasion and bearing the deprivations stoically.

Except the private diaries and un-sent letters reveal...yeah, the people really did feel that way. Although they were much more aware of a very real crime problem and class conflicts and there were some racial conflicts as well. And so the circle goes around; researchers are questioning the questioning of wartime letters.

Well, okay. So the diary isn't a big thing, not on the surface of it. No revelations to the general audience. But plenty of insights for my audience. And my protagonist. And that is sufficient.

Recalibrating Goldilocks

I'm not going to London.

Well, pretty sure.

Instead I'm going to write. I've reached a point where I'm just theorizing in empty space. I need to start putting down text. I need to blow through this thing and see what I learn.

Okay, I think I learned a lot from the last one, and from editing it and reflecting on it and trying to figure out what I need to do better and how to do it. I know I go on a lot about "look and feel," and I haven't changed my mind about how that is subtle and difficult to find. I would love to go to London if it was the only way to get the three precise words that gave a sense of the brown mass of the old Battersea Power Station looming against the overcast sky.

That was the reason to pick things I knew, things I'd done, places I'd been. That hope that I had somewhere that strong sense of the gestalt of a thing. Not necessarily a truth. More like a convincing lie.

Anyhow, there's a Goldilocks zone between not knowing enough to write convincingly about a place or a thing or whatever, and having so much it was a lot of wasted time collecting it. I collected what the signs looked like inside German train stations.

Okay, sure, I did end up with a line in the final novel. Part of a line. "The signage was in German and English and was very good." But, really, I didn't need that line at all. And there's the sneaking suspicion it wouldn't be there if I hadn't looked up the stuff.

So, yeah. I think I've honed my sense for what is going to be in the final manuscript. I've outlined this next book about as much as I intend to, and I've got a basic breakdown of how many words there are actually going to be about certain things.

I'm opening in Bradgate Park, with the field school in session to learn about survey techniques and get a live demonstration of metal detectors. There's going to be some banter and probably a Simon and Garfunkel reference. I need to know if there's a named open meadow and if this really is a dog run and if you can see the folly from there. And that's about it. Two words about trees, three about grass and I already know two of those because I'm doing a gag about wellies; drawn from -- yay! -- personal experience on a parachute jump into Maryland.

And the metal detectors? If it comes up in dialog, a brand, and probably some gaff about how you listen to the signal.

But that's all I need. That's my new Goldilocks zone. I don't need to go there to get enough to sell the scene. I don't need to stroll over the park with Google Maps or whatever. A couple of pictures will do me -- and the rest is character interaction and dialog.

Oh, but this doesn't mean no research. That first scene is about archaeological methods. No; this book is about Penny learning them, but it isn't about teaching the reader them. It will be mostly left off-stage; "We studied all day. That evening at the pub Doug said..." (I'm going to make her run a dig in a later book. That's when it will come up!)

But I still have to read the Excavation chapter in at least one of my books on Archaeology.

(There's a new rant building in me about how the whole "Athena Fox" angle has nothing to do with the story I want to tell about Penny in London, and how it isn't giving me the stories I thought it would. But later.)

The British Museum has lost it's charm

Well, no, it hasn't. I'm just on the fence on whether I want to run out to London within the next few weeks.

Putting aside whether I want to run up a new credit card bill right now, and allowing that "research for a novel" is just an excuse anyhow; this would be a tourist trip and is worth whatever that is worth. Putting aside all that, I'm wondering if having a first-hand experience of the "look and feel" of the settings I will be using will improve the book...or make it worse.

***

So far the two people who I know actually read the last book told me there's "too much stuff." Said accusingly, in fact going out of their way to tell me there's too much.

How, exactly, is this helpful? What stuff? They say it like it is obvious, like there are words that clearly shouldn't be there. That there are words I went around adding in, like a cook suddenly gone crazy with the pepper mill.

No, it isn't obvious. I know the text is dense. I know because I've spent my entire writing life trying to decompress, trying to write less dense. But I don't even know if I'm decompressing the parts that need decompressing! Was there too much dialog? Too much description? Too much action? Too much movement? Too many concepts? Too many new words? Too many explanations? Or maybe not enough?

I feel "not enough explanation" figures in there somewhere, balancing with "too many concepts." The other advice I've heard often enough to be annoying is "You know all this stuff, and you have to understand the reader doesn't."

Like fuck I do. I've forgotten most of my research already. When I go back and re-read, and yes I do re-read, I am reading with a clear mind and little to no pre-knowledge. I know this because I'm finding typos and missing words and unclear phrasing and if I already knew exactly what I expected to find, I'd never see any of that, either.

The sole advantage I have is I know what stuff is plot-important and what is set dressing. I know what I can afford to skim through where a first-time reader doesn't.

So which things are "too much" and which things are better replacements? Because it is easy to say you have too much description, too much action, too much dialog...but you are also required to have a book that is at least 70,000 words and if those words aren't any of the above what they hell are they?

So I'm theorizing into a vacuum. Maybe if I was in the place, the setting would insinuate itself with simple, direct language, I wouldn't get caught up in all the "details you keep adding, shame on you" and I could knock out the text (also, without having to spend all that time strolling through Google Street View and so forth trying to get a sense of the places).

But maybe it is description that people are complaining about and if I saw the actual Highgate Cemetery I might end up putting too many of whatever those wrong words are in there, and have another crap book nobody wants to read. Maybe it is better to shut down Chrome and stop finding out anything because then it might accidentally make it into the book. Oh, no, I gave the actual name of a Tube Station! The book is unreadable! Too many notes, Herr Mozart!

***

I roughed out an itinerary. I know some well-meaning person is going to go, "Things never quite go as planned when you travel." So, what, you don't plan at all? Nonsense. I've travelled enough to have a realistic idea of how much to strive for and to build in lots of slack and cut-outs.

Looking at a week. Would like to do more but I don't have a lot of vacation hours saved up. Airfare and hotel is about a thousand dollars. A little more and that gives you one hot a day -- which got me through the last trip I made to London.

Turns out Field School isn't on, not this time of year. Would still like to do a day trip out to Bradgate Park. Two hours by bus, each way. So I wouldn't really be able to make a full day of the British Museum, but I can probably hit that, the Imperial War Museum London, the Globe, take another stroll through the old pedestrian tunnel, visit Highgate, pass through Trafalgar (not strictly necessary), take a gander at Battersea Power Station and the Vauxhall neighborhood across the Thames. And make sure to hit at least one pub, and have some proper fish and chips. And if I can find one, the Full Breakfast.

Stop, Youth!

I have the bones of a plot. Trouble with sharing it is, it is easy to list "they go here, they do that" but it doesn't capture the reasons that place and that activity are going into the plot. Theme and pacing and the hidden structure that makes a story out of an event are much harder to put on paper in this way.

This is why writers seem to go out of their way to collect silly-sounding terms, and keep waving them around. Thing is, when I say "I chose a three-act structure" that is not just descriptive of the form, it is also documentation of a process; that I am saying I considered and rejected "save the cat" and "heroes journey" and a number of other structural/analytical frameworks.

So I need this, as I am working through plans and notes. I can't write out the entire thing every time I want to ask myself "do I want to do A or would B work better"; I have to have short-hand methods of describing the parts I am trying to fit.

Well, this one is original with me. "Stop, Youth!" doesn't describe the whole plot. It describes a plot where there is a sharp turn, a specific sort of sharp turn.

It comes out of the second Lensman book. Kinnison has defeated Boskone, saved humanity, and is strolling into the sunset with the girl. Then Mentor of Arisia stops him dead with a telepathic warning. Turns out "Boskone" was just one face of the vastly larger and more deadly Eddore, and Kim has just burned every link, every clue he had towards finding the real enemy. A real enemy who, by the way, just saw them using the super-weapon that ended the last book, and can now reverse-engineer their own...

I had wanted to make an arc that points down for most of the book, but for various structural reasons instead I have an upturn. An interlude that lasts far too long to be called a Hope Spot.

***

So caveats given, here's the nascent outline:

Part I: Penny is at Field School in the London area but everything is going wrong. She's not gaining the contacts and professional experience she so desperately wants and she's going broke, too. So lots of down and out in London stuff, street views of living London, and of course stuff on the practicalities of Archaeology as a career and the actual process of an investigation.

Part II: someone she met on the previous adventure shows up and now there is an enemy that is a little more obvious and basically everything is a little less serious. So a romp through dead parrots and Roman re-enactors and the New Old Globe and even Pantomime. Culminating in a real fight with fake swords.

Part III: a rescue dig in the subways. A real chance for real experience and camaraderie...and then it goes bad in a flash with violence that can't be faced with a costume and a quip. And this is where I really have fun with underground London.

And, actually, they are all interwoven. She's still down and out through most of it, just she has increasingly better living arrangements available. The reality and the reality of violence is under the surface through the Dead Parrot stuff. And the rescue dig came in about half way through that sequence.

So, yeah. It is ALL getting in there. I'm still at about 60K worth of plot so there's more to play with here but having that long "comic interlude" and then the sudden "stop, youth" moment as the sharp turn into the pit lets me get the coins, Romans, metal detectors, wartime London, field school, theatre and all in there.

***

But there's another thing. Another thing that makes this slow going.

This plot is going to some dark places. There is violence, and a strong undercurrent of sexual violence. I'm uncomfortable with it, and uncomfortable thinking I'm going to be putting it in front of other people. So this is even worse than feeling my research is not good enough, my characters are not believable, my dialog is unrealistic, I'm culturally appropriating all over the place and I'm basically not a good writer.

Basically, I can only work for a few hours, then I have to put it aside until I can work up the courage and confidence to go back to it.

Would help a hell of a lot if I had more sales. I'm entirely within my personal predictions; lifetime sales of around a hundred, meaning 2-3 a month, meaning the first month can go by without a single book getting sold. At least my KPP page count is still there. The algorithm is opaque (apparently genre changes the "pages read" that the algo generates) but my best estimates still say there are more pages read then there are in the book. So that's a good sign.

***

Reading list time. I wanted to outline as much as possible before hitting research so the research pool was smaller. I really do have to do some general reading about what is under London, though. And browse through some materials on theatre, especially pantomime.