...quickly dissolve into banality and romance

Title taken from a Quora question on horror movies.

A Fox's Wedding is officially started. I would really like to kick this one out in six months. (On re-tracing of notes, Fox and Hounds took eight actual months -- although stretched over nine in calendar time, it was interrupted by a month of editing work on The Fox Knows Many Things. And on that note! I am doing another edit round on Hounds, meaning it will technically be in third draft before it is published.)

But back to A Fox's Wedding. As much as I'm already generating ideas -- and putting a few things off the table as well -- I really need to hold off on brainstorming until I've done the pre-planning.

That's a bit of brain work there. I want to identify what parts of the process could be better. I want to find where I could have written a better story, and even more, where I wasted time.

But anyhow. A few things I already know: I've largely given up the idea of a strong overall character arc through the series. Penny is still growing and learning and will do so for at least another book, but the place she is emotionally and in relation to her character and archaeology at the end of Hounds is really not where she needs to be to make Wedding work. So I need to think of these as episodic, not as strictly linear.

I want to use things I already know. However. The Writing Excuses podcast had a recent episode titled, "Write what you want to know." I like that. So the Takarazuka Review is in the book and I've bought my first book to start reading up on that. (Because I know almost nothing about it but I've always been fascinated).

I'm also pretty set that there will be scenes in Kyoto, and in Tokyo. And the Fushimi Inari shrine (the one with all the torii gates), and Toei Uzumasa Eigamura (the Edo-era standing set near Kyoto). Business that is probably in it is the earphone bit (with her friend Aki giving her lots of not-always-useful advice), dressing up as a Geisha (possibly with shamisen), and a big training sequence.

Things that may or may not be in it; wartime Shinto, Kusanagi (the sword, not the anime character), the Zanryū nipponhei (the last of whom probably died in the 1980s), Lupin III, UFO cults, Iga Ninja, a Rocky V twist to the training, and a "Yamatai" episode (aka the death island from Tomb Raider 2013).

Things that are probably not in it; the Tokyo Tower (anything I want to do with it, I'd rather do with the Eiffel), and Moe.

Re the latter. There's not going to be a lot of people calling her "cute" and trying to get her into amusing costumes. It could be fun but there's a better book for that (specifically, the No Man's Sky archaeological survey/Great Nintendo Burial book). So the joke I'm going for here is that to most of the Japanese she encounters she is westerner; crude and suspect and freakishly huge. And yeah there's a ton to unpack there so that's a lot of fun stuff to be writing with.

I've also decided to use the stuff I know: Speed Tribes, the Home Dramas I watched on TTV, other things which are really a decade or three anachronistic. I don't think this virus is going to calm down in enough time for me to fly back there and do more on-the-spot research, and I've got a bookshelf full of stuff I'd like to get some use out of.

I Hate Hamlet

No, actually, I don't. It's the name of a play. Which I've done. But sometimes I do hate history.

So there's several thematic threads that are running through Fox and Hounds. One of them is Shakespeare, and particularly Hamlet. Another is Doctor Who.

At the emotional climax of the story, Penny quotes from the Gravediggers Scene. She even goes on about Yorick's skull; why it shouldn't be some plastic anatomy model but should look like something that came out of a grave.

Finished the scene, finished the edit, compiled, uploaded. And then I hit something in my Quora feed.

The Royal Shakespeare Company has a real skull. It was bequeathed by Andre Tchaikowsky, a pianist and composer. It took them twenty years to finally use it in a production, but in 2008 it starred as Yorick in a production of Hamlet, alongside -- David Tennent in the title role. David, who previous played The Doctor in, of course, Doctor Who.

And I'm actually glad I didn't know about this before I wrote the scene.

Oh, right. Yes, book is uploaded and I've ordered pre-release copies. I want to give my Dad a crack at it before I hit the "publish" button:

I also took the chance to tweak the cover for the Athens book:

For some reason they both ended up looking rather dark. Well, so with two down and a third in planning, I've got a general scheme. Artifacts when possible. Athena and/or her fedora in the image in some disguised form -- if possible (it wasn't in Hounds).

Space; particularly, in a tunnel form. For the third book, this will be the line of torii gates from the famous hilltop shrine outside Kyoto. Color grading; Knows is the old teal and orange, Hounds is more in the umbers, and Wedding will be greens and reds. And the Owl of Athena.

***

So that's up. The first big step on the Japan book will be pre-planning. Looking at what I've learned with an eye towards finishing faster and being happier with the results.


***

The Apple crazies continue. You can't buy an older OS from them, exactly. You buy a license, and three days later they email you twice; a pdf, and the key to the pdf. Which when you open it with that password, gives you another code, which you then "redeem."

Says Apple "the Redeem link is right there in the Quick Links drop-down." Dudes, if there was anything in the drop-down tabs I'd click it. Turns out you have to be in the "Please buy whatever shit we think is hot this month" part of the Ap store for the particular tab to be visible.

So hooked up the Mac Mini again. And this time, after going through all the agreements to re-install Lion, instead of popping up with "That item is not currently available from your selected store" (seriously, you call that informative?) it starts downloading it. Whew!

If the contractor hadn't given me twelve-hour notice he needed access, I'd now have three computers and three monitors and two keyboards and drawing tablet and optical drive spread around the desk. Instead of three monitors, two computers, and one keyboard...

***

Ordered a hank of black horse hair from Amazon and made up a new string for my Gue. After a bit of trial and error, I now have a pair of strings that sound decent and can be tuned a fifth apart. Now I should write some music for it.

Once the Japan novel is properly started.

Hot on the chase

Hot weather and smoke alert. And we don't do air conditioning around here. The swamp cooler took the edge of things when it got desperate but it was lousy weather to be running computer and dual monitors and pushing hard.

Except I'm getting there. I've done most of the re-writes and tracked in some of the changes I wanted to do as well. And I've been pushing it through ProWritingAid as I go.

(ProWritingAid was unhappy about the diary scenes, as those were open-end paragraphs as per the style manuals. But it also got nasty about elisions for dialect when they happened within a quote; every time I had something like "Canny bag o' Tudas, man!" it would flag that as having failed to close the single quotes before closing the double quotes.)

Down to Part IV and the last 12,000 words of the novel. Even started the upload process, putting in category keywords and blurb into Kindle.

The biggest chunk of rewrite text will go easy. That's the extended tomb crawl. I'll just pop my Royal Philharmonic recording of music from the first Tomb Raider games -- that I joined the Kickstarter on -- on headphones and type away.

The Geordie Final Exam is a bit more work. I've got a dozen different pages of Geordie slang open right now, including two different translation widgets (neither of which does that much). Did I mention I took a quiz on "How well do you know Geordie" and scored 11 out of 16?

Re-did the pencils for the interior graphics as well. If I continue at this pace, I can be ordering my Pre-release copies before I go back to work Tuesday.

But, boy. Even without turning on the switches that explicitly search for the stuff, I'm noticing a lot of repeated patterns in my writing. Similar sentence structure. Similar turns of phrase cropping up over and over. Good thing they are getting flagged as passive voice (since it is after all a story, not a business report, there are a lot of those flags. Which gives me a chance to re-visit some of them and say, hey, maybe this one character here doesn't say "in a manner of speaking" or "some of the others" or other stock constructions I'm over-using.

But ye gods, those commas. I can't afford the time to really dig into each and every one, and I don't have the grammar to quite understand what I'm doing wrong, so I'm having to, over and over, make a flash decision about whether to preserve Penny's breathless, run-on construction or to make it more grammatical.

Sigh. I'm adding that to the list for the Japan book; that Penny will be for most of it trying to speak more professionally (she's stuck playing her character for most of the book) and I can have fun contrasting it with her narrative voice.

In fact, the reverse has been the intent for two books now. That the narrative is slightly more professional (or her dialog is exceptionally flighty). The place where it really helped on this book is that the Londoners are mostly speaking in proper sentences so Penny's voice contrasts nicely.

Because otherwise my whole cast sounds alike. Even the Geordies.

Howay, man, I'm paggered but.

 Been a week of slow progress and small disappointments.

Take today. IT was dumping some old Mac Mini's, and I snagged one. Was thinking of setting it up for recording at the shop (so I can play trumpet parts without my neighbors screaming at me.) Had some company stuff on it. No problem, says Apple. Erase the hard disk, it will boot up from the restore sector and you can download the factory original OS right off the net.

Except no. Turns out Apple was either lying, have changed it, or were incomplete about it. But that took an hour or two of pressing buttons and hoping that it would actually work this time. So now I have a brick, and a copy of Lion on order just in case I feel up for making a boot disk for it.

My laptop has been running hot. Hot enough so it automatically cranks down the CPU cycles, which causes videos to stutter and CPU-intense applications like 3D stuff to get, well, ugly. That actually took a while to figure out. The same IT dump included a broken cooling pad so that got me thinking I should just order one of those.

Amazon lost the order. While it was wandering around the boondocks I thought a little harder and finally dug into it and opening up the laptop to clean out the vents and re-do the thermal paste turns out to not be quite as scary as I thought. But needs some special tools. So I ordered those.

And got to thinking about that. If I'm opening it up, why not replace the ailing optical drive, increase the RAM to maximum, and even put in an SSD? 

I got inspired enough I opened it up anyhow and blew out some of the dust. And then the cooling pad arrived anyhow so I'm using that for now.

***

And then there's software. Carrara no longer ran after the last OS "upgrade" and I had enough problems with it already. So I'd purchased Cheetah3D and that was good enough to knock off the calyx model I needed for the last cover.

The next model should have been simple. This was the section of Underground platform I needed for the next book cover. But it was a freaking pain to do in Cheetah. The UVmapper is not wonderful, there's no polygon groups (at least, not accessible), it can't manage to keep scale constant (I brought a model back out of the render to tweak, and it got thrown into a different scale and position the moment it had been opened by Cheetah.) And the poly tools -- well they basically don't exist. The thing is barely functional as a prims modeler and is useless for polys.

Well, fine. This time I'm finally going to learn Blender.

Oh, yeah. And while I was too sick and stupid to work on the novel over last weekend (and part of the week) I was messing around with Fallout 4. I've basically stopped playing the game. I think I spent as much time in console mode as out. "Player.additem" and "tcl" and the like are right at my fingertips.

More software skills learned at some expense and like as not never to be used again. 

Yesterday was all about making the busted UVmap Cheetah crapped out actually work. And then being very annoyed by the behavior of the Paths tool in PhotoShop...why? Because part of Leslie Green's look was a distinctive serif font that is apparently quite recognizable. There is a commercial font "inspired" by it, called Beeching, but several of the characters are clearly wrong and the serifs are the wrong shape and for twenty bucks...!

So I hand-edited Baskerville and it is close enough. Gives me even more respect for the art of font, with how to mix the thins and the thicks for grace and readability and all that other stuff I didn't actually do. I pretty much made a dog's breakfast of it but I'm using it anyhow.

Now I just have to add in the drips and broken tiles and the proper oxblood and so on. Plus displacement and spec maps and you know the drill.

***

And create the other graphics. I'm willing to put it out with a mock-up cover just as long as I'm printing author's copies for the beta readers. Because I really want my dad checking on the Britishisms and especially the Geordie. Because that's exactly the sort of thing he likes doing.

As I go through pass after pass, cleaning up and tightening, each pass I take out more of the Geordie and make it more obvious what they are saying. I was editing the first pub scene, though, just before I stopped to blog, and that turned out to be very annoying since I could either have Liam speaking Geordie or contributing. Which was only part of the picture; the characters in this scene aren't coming across as distinct voices. I realized I could swap lines around, they were that generic. And that's not good.

I've also been taking a lot of notes about ways I want to go through and bring the main plot lines out and make them more obvious. One of them being the "dun dun duuun!" pass; the one where I have the story (if not Penny herself) recognize that An Adventure Has Just Begun.

***

And one other rescue from IT's pile works fine; that's a 3 TB external drive. Which again slipped through their clutches with all the data intact and I just got done erasing it.

No More Tribbles

I've been having a real problem with Fox and Hounds. 

I constructed it as a stealth plot. It is what I call a "Tribble" plot, after David Gerrold's excellent description of how he constructed that fabulous Star Trek episode; things are happening on the surface and they look important but every now and then the camera cuts away to the tribbles getting more and more numerous...until suddenly everyone realizes the tribbles are the real plot.

The problem I'm hitting is that this is Penny floundering in Field School and finding London confusing, and Graham is dragging her out on a rather "Steed and Mrs Peel" series of interviews with colorful local characters.

Which means the poor reader is presented with a whole bunch of stuff and no way of knowing what of it is supposed to be important.

Part of this is intentional, and something I mean to continue: I call it out explicitly in this book as something The Doctor does (Doctor Who); that there are all these things happening that look like background detail or throwaways until at the climax one of them matters.

In the television series Eureka this is multiple and blatant. Last episode I remember watching, there was a new computer gizmo being tried out that predicted disasters before they happened. One of the ones it tried to warn about was a leak of cooling gel in one of the labs, and it looks like the gag was entirely about the Sherif Carter getting it dumped all over him. Except at the climax, the computer core is running so hot it is predicting that it, itself, is about to overheat and explode...and they save the day by dumping the cooling gel all over it.

Well, the way I've constructed Fox and Hounds, it it 16K words before The Blitz is brought up, 21K before the dig at the air raid shelter begins, 33K before they got shot at and realize there really is a mystery afoot. Graham isn't even brought on screen before 10K, and the connection between his Roman Coin problem and the Nine Elms dig, although hinted at, isn't made explicit until 60K (out of 77K current draft.)

That's because it is unfolding as a mystery plot. But there's no backbone. It is fine if Spenser walks around Boston for fifty pages before finding anything out, because he goes into the story knowing he is on a case. Penny doesn't know she's on an adventure. She even calls this out right at the top of the story; "I'm here for school."

So my editing problem now is to reveal the tribbles. To put in more of those scenes David Gerrold described where it is obvious that despite all the running around after Klingons and annoying Federation Trade Representatives, there is something important building.

And as of this moment, the best way I can think to do it is to make it Penny's perception as well. To have her actively addressing the idea that school isn't fulfilling enough and despite wanting to leave Athena Fox behind and become a real archaeologist, she'd love to have some interesting historical problem to dig into.

***

I complained before about how easy it is to put everything on the nose. I avoided doing that. But that means the historical focus is weak.

Story starts at the ancestral home of Lady Jane, the Nine Days Queen. There's a few random bits but the next big chunk of history is Armistice Day and the Great War.

With Nine Elms the focus finally zooms into the Blitz, specifically, 1941. That's an all-sides envelopment; the Blitz Experience walk-though exhibit at the Museum, cosplay as Ack-Ack Girl, the dig, the discovery of Linnet's diary.

But at the end of the dig there's an epic trek through Battersea Power Station as an artifact of the 20's (it isn't, but that's the main focus), then a trip to Shakespeare's Globe, before we finally go into the tunnels...but even then it is largely about Crossrail and a bit of Bazalgette and really not much of the Blitz at all.

So I've got some work trying to find a focus here.

rough comp

 It doesn't feel like a productive weekend.

I've identified the things I want to edit in the new novel. Other than that, it has been a lot of poking around trying to learn about Amazon categories and font use, looking through stock image galleries, trying to work up the blurb, and so on.

The concept for the new cover is to this stage now:

Of course I still need to model, texture, and render the bit of wall that says "Nine Elms Station" in that lovely Leslie Green tile-work. And purchase assets and take the real photo with something other than 100-baht pieces.

The select-float-change tool-move-anchor layer routine of Gimp got really old for me so I've installed the (bah) membership version of PhotoShop. Which has mucked up mightily with the Adjustment Layers -- I think they still do the same things, but that simple functionality is now harder to access.

And I had Poser running for 10-12 hours rendering a single god ray for a revised and cleaned-up version of the old cover. I want to play more interesting games with the font, and I re-rendered with a new color map for the ground (and no bullets) and this time I'm doing most of the adjustments before I collapse all the layers.

And, yes, on the work list is Third Printing revisions to text of the first book.

I don't want to be doing ANY of this right now. Actually, I want to be playing Fallout. I'm burned out. 

Or writing something new. The Japan book, for instance. (Which is to be followed by the Paris Book, except that one is more of a multi-city National Treasure tour as Penny clashes with a gang who have Templar Secrets on the brain).

And then a break from Penny. I need it.

Came up with another possible project, though. Was using PublishRocket to look at the Amazon keyword and category listings and realized I was getting really tired of the Slab Beefjerky heroes. And this is one plot bunny I am keeping under my top hat -- all I will share is the tag line:

THE WEIRD WAR JUST GOT WEIRDER

***

Oh; here's the current state-of-draft of the Amazon come-on:

AN AMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGIST IN LONDON. 

Penny Bright is going to be a real archaeologist. She’s not going to let tough classes, obnoxious fellow students, or her rapidly dwindling funds stop her. Nor the fact that she doesn’t, apparently, even speak the language.

Then things get interesting. Penny gets an opportunity to dig at an old Underground platform. At Nine Elms, she is drawn into the story of a young woman who sheltered there during the London Blitz. Meanwhile, a prickly and eccentric coin collector has come to her with his own mystery.

Before this is over she’ll have met mudlarkers and pantomime players, and gone from an illegal expedition into an abandoned power station to a bloody encounter on the very stage of Shakespeare’s Globe; all in search of answers about a lost love and a secret buried for over seventy years.

And when she is trapped deep under the streets of the old city and unsure of who her true enemy is, Penny is faced with the choice of becoming once again...Athena Fox.

Weeding

I just went through the woods with a can of orange spray paint, marking all the dead wood that needed to go and the thickets that needed to be thinned.

I'd call it the most productive couple of hours I've had in the whole writing process.

Did I mention I finished the first draft? Finished early Sunday Eve and I was completely wrung out physically and emotionally.

The books say to put your story aside for as long as you can and come back with fresh eyes. I should do that at some point, but right now -- now that I've just written the chapters in which I had to take up all the dangling plot threads and knot them off -- I have the best understanding of the architecture of this story I ever will have. This is absolutely the best time to go back and see when I introduced ideas and if I repeated myself or said too little...

...Or more often, said too much.

The worst repetition I see right now is that there are too many diary entries that tackle what living underground was like. There may be a way to collapse or trim these but that will take a separate work session. There's no overlap...so this will be a matter of losing what right now feels like important world-building details.

There's also two pub conversations which are basically mid-career management for the CRM archaeologist. There's overlap there.

Otherwise...not too bad. And the best part? I was able to take a whole bunch of things I'd brought in either because I thought I might need them or because the research was at the tip of my tongue, and mark them to be trimmed or removed. 

 

I mean, I don't want to lose James Henry Greathead, but if it helps the story...

I'm feeling good about the editing process. I think I can tighten this one quite nicely, and it won't take but a week or two (work and health permitting).

***

And I was reviewing comments I've gotten and I realized something else. In this book, I can explicitly flag some of the things for the reader as "you aren't expected to get this reference."

The Athens book was about trying to fit in around people who knew and appreciated the Classics, and there was a lot of "But everyone know about..." in the dialog. In the London book, I've underlined many times that the Brits are competitive. Hey, there's a scene in which Penny says, "can you please explain to the poor American" and they say, "nope, no can do."

The Japan book will offer an option to go this one better. They don't expect the foreigner to know or understand anything. She's not Japanese, after all! So anything Penny actually gets, there will be a big reaction. 

But the important thing is that I can flag for the reader, basically telling them, "No, you aren't stupid, nobody is expected to know this."

Still better to take out stuff if I can. It doesn't take much to leave a flavor of there being a whole world out there.

Speaking of. The Panto scene is up on the block for major re-write. That's going to end up longer, I'm afraid. It went far too much tell and not nearly enough show to justify it being in the book in the first place. I'm at 79.5K total, with a good 500 words already marked for deletion so...not bad.

There's a post office box in Poughkeepsie

In yet another entry on the "I want to write a novel but where do you find ideas?" this morning's news:

A mysterious hole is growing in the Siberian Tundra

An eccentric tech billionaire thinks the pyramids were built by aliens (the Egyptian ministry of culture has invited him over to check out the recently unearthed tombs of the builders).

And that's just the ones that would fit right in to the series I'm currently working on.

***

Did I say I'm getting tired of Penny's narrative voice? I've reached the point where I don't even know how it works. I never did write out what her grammatical style was; I just wrote. That may be coming back to hurt me. There's a process called Flanderization, where you take one aspect of a character and make it bigger and bigger until it takes over the character completely.

Works for ideas, too. One Klingon said it would have been a glorious war? Whoops, now they are all Space Vikings.

So one thing I have noticed, and it feels like it is taking over, is her stream-of-thought edits. It fits with her mile-a-minute act and the way she is making mistakes and very conscious of them. But it is annoying me. Things like (making this one up on the fly). "I should know: I used to play violin. Sort of play violin. In junior high. But I could still recognize when someone was singing sharp and she was singing really, really sharp."

Well, there's bigger fish to fry. Besides...ProWritingAid's grammar checker will flag the hell out of it and I'm likely to clean up quite a bit as I go through.

***

I'm writing the climax now. I expect it will be short. With any luck I can finish that and the epilogue today.

I've been pushing hard to finish. No patience for tweaking the emotional arcs or researching anything. I just need to have a complete draft that I can look over and then see about the high-level edits.

Yeah. My notes for the post Zero Station sequence were nothing but, "another epic tomb crawl." I toyed with idea of passing through other bits of infrastructure, reduced that to hearing the passage of a subway, but when the draft finally came it is basically all sewer.

Or something. I had never really intended to do sewers. All my research was subways. And I found some nice pages from drainers so there were lots of intriguing technical bits but I'm not prepared to spend a week trying to understand the sewer systems and then try to figure out how to make the journey work within it.

And besides, this is like the radio. Penny's done AV and she can plug it in and she even manages to work out how to replace a tube. But that's where her understanding stops. And this would be true even in third person, because the most common third person POV these days is limited, which knows only what the viewpoint character knows.

So she doesn't know how Bazalgette's grand system works and she hasn't the data to even theorize, so to her it is a tube lined with bricks and she has to do some climbing.

And, really, I should do that more. This book is if anything more dense than the last. Japan, my intention is to try to be a camera. To be almost completely ignorant of everything and describe only what it looks like.

There's reasons we don't like this. "There was a tree with sort of twisty branches in a dark green color and lots of leaves that..." is so much harder to read than "There was an olive tree."

And, of course, it isn't about the descriptions per se. We are writing books, not manuals. We're not trying to capture all the essential details accurately enough to reproduce it. We're trying to place the reader in the scene. In the Maryland suburbs the trees lining the streets are just trees. They might be happy or sickly or covered with snow depending on what you are trying to make of them, but they aren't the important detail. In Greece, there are olive trees. They are an important part of the visual and the cultural landscape and you have to put them in the reader's eye.

So sometimes you make jumps. You give them a term they shouldn't have known or let them make a lucky guess or even slip it in sideways (like saying the tree has olive-colored leaves). And if you look at it wrong -- take a clear Watsonian at it -- then the POV character is either being too informed or perhaps even psychic. The Doylist is that if something is going to be used through a scene you just can't keep calling it "the box that was mostly yellow and had three big buttons on it."

***

Lastly, I don't know about the arcs. That is going to be the first step of the edit process. Taking a long look at what the basic themes are. Because right now, it feels like the last third of the story suddenly leaps off in a different direction, leaving the settings and the cast that had been established and central. And the last big episode comes off as, well, depressing.

The end of Wentworth's arc is he died alone. The end of Penny's arc is she stabs a man. These are what I'd been writing towards the entire time, but they aren't feeling good to me right now.

Zero Hour

I've hit a place in the book where I both realize I don't have nearly enough understanding, and don't even know how to research it, and that I really don't care.

I'm just pushing through to the end. Penny has finally made it to Wentworth's ridiculous Zero Station, my one sop to realism that he may have repurposed an existing room  -- "Drainage or something," Penny guesses -- from the earlier station.

I had a nice collection of pictures of tunnel insides from the Northern Line Extension all ready, and I threw them on to my second monitor -- and they don't match. That took a bit of time, mostly staring at them (and watching another video of a TBM in action) before figuring out why they looked different.

While I was looking for explanation I stumbled upon the cutest narrow-gauge they had down there while the TBMs were still working.

So of course I had to put that in the story.

Did I mention how tired I am getting of Penny's vocal and narrative mannerisms? And here I'm facing a third book of them. So far my readership is some 90% older women who know my mom, but they are going out of their way to say how much they like the character so I guess I'm stuck with her for a while longer.

(Something about how she is heroic but realistic. I dunno.)

So I really had no idea how long the Tomb Crawl was going to run. And I wasn't padding it, exactly -- there's a wealth of material I barely touched. But I knew I wanted it to feel sufficiently epic. Well, from the moment she arrives at Kennington Green to the moment she realizes she's trapped in the Zero Station is four thousand words.

The plan is for another crawl, a crazier one through the Bazalgettian warrens currently containing the Effra, and onwards to a slightly-excavated Roman ruin. Haven't even decided what it is. I'd like a military outpost, because Wentworth has been going on and on about 300-type last stands.

***

And Japan is on. I still have qualms about where it sits in the overall character arc. It is in some ways too much, too soon. But I can play off those elements, make that part of the plot that having to suddenly be utterly convincing as the Famous World Adventurer, or falling head over heels in love, is indeed not what it seems and doesn't unfold the way you'd expect.

But, really, any qualms are outweighed by the ....oh.... anyhow, are outweighed by the fact that I could probably sit here and type the bulk of it with scenery descriptions and amusing misunderstandings and language fun without having to reach even as far as my own bookshelf.

And that's something I need right now. Even on this very productive day I've stopped multiple times to look up something, and that's not a good way to write. Worse, the sorts of things I'm looking up become a meal with way too much roughage in in. I need to write leaner -- even if I have no good idea right now what leaner looks like.

That "oh" in the middle of the paragraph above? That was me getting ready to type how I wanted something actually historical -- archaeology would be a bonus -- and then it hit me. As much as I don't want the reader to be facing pages of hard-to-memorize Japanese names, there is a historical but disputed business when Kusanagi was stolen by a rival clan. Or something. I forget the details, but there are reasons I want to use it...

Have a butcher's

I'd take a day off work more often if I thought it would end in 2,000 words done and another chapter completed.

The list of "beats" I didn't manage to get in is getting longer than the list of random stuff I'm hoping to cut out when I go into re-writes. I wanted to explain more about Guy's unhappy life during the sword fight scene but it didn't quite happen. But I did get some tweaks in today that explain better how Penny is using the sword fight to taunt him into giving up useful information.

Yeah, that's the method a lot of writers use, according to an unscientific browsing of Quora answers. For each day's writing, re-read the previous day and do a little light editing. This is less about the editing and more about remembering exactly where you left off.

So this was the chapter with RAF slang, Cockney Rhyming Slang, Jackie Cochran and the Attagirls, and the strange life and career of Orde Wingate.

I was surprised at how fast it went.

Or, rather, the actual writing went fast. I spent the morning staring at the list of beats I was going to try to hit with no idea how I could line them up to best effect. I finally opened Scrapple and started dragging them around and sort of like building a molecule or solving a puzzle once I had three that hooked together the rest fell almost immediately into place.

And that's a great feeling. Pretty much high point of the day, though closing another chapter is a good one as well.

Also threw more of my reference materials up on my Wordpress site. It is still annoying but it works well enough for what I'm doing (and I'm surely doing far more than the traffic will ever warrant.)

I also ran into a book -- series rather -- at Amazon that was rather interesting. The description was of very rote space opera. There was a big typo right in the middle of the blurb, too. And almost fifty reviews, which were slanted heavily into the five-star range.

And I looked, and not only were a lot of these basically re-phrasing what was said in the blurb, they also all had certain grammatical/typographical errors that, at least to me, felt of a kind.

I can't swear this is a man gaming the system. He must be doing something right, though; he's in the top ten in more than one category!

Downloaded the sample to read. Hrm. Not formatted well, that's for sure. Workmanlike, at least. Isn't getting my interest though. I'll reserve a full opinion for now.

Cultured Villain

The sword-fight scene is finished. And that means Part III is finished.

I'm not entirely unhappy with it. Of course it was never going to live up to the potential of a petty crook gone nuts with one of those fancy fantasy swords and my Penny -- still in the costume she borrowed from a Pantomime theatre -- has to try to defend herself using half-remembered stage combat tricks...on the very stage of Shakespeare's Globe!

This book, too, takes the Nth hour turn to the weird. She was all about digging dirt and looking for a cheap room up until the last third. Then suddenly she's doing midnight rappels and other crazy business.

I'm also not entirely happy I'm now standing at 68K. I meant to hit 60K at the III-IV break, with the book finishing as short at 70-75K.

Also worked on my Wordpress site. Either they've changed something or I've figured it out because it became less annoying to put in text and add illustrations. That's one of the things I wanted to do. Really, it isn't going to accomplish much as an Author Site, but for my own amusement I wanted to put up some of the photographs and charts from planning this, these, well now three novels.

Writing Down the Sherds

Another of the random thoughts that came was how few women are in the London book. I mean that have speaking roles beyond "Here's your coffee." Really, only Sarah, Cynth, and Susan Morris. Jean Patrick (the professor from U. Leicester) is prominent in the first chapter but then drops out of the story. Cynth was only in there for the Battersea scenes but I think she made more of an impact on the story.

Well, there's forty things in the air for the final IWM London scene and I still haven't figured out the best order to get at them. It is another Traveling Salesman problem; there is no solution that optimally follows all paths without doubling back. According to my notes, we have to explain that Wentworth vanished, Linnet is going to Wanborough Manor, and Clarissa McDougal got her Lens from Mentor of Arisia (Linnet is a science fiction fan). Mick is going to talk some more about Zero Rooms and so forth, and explain who the heck Orde Wingate is, and if he has time left over he's going to attempt to explain some Cockney Rhyming Slang.

And, yeah, this is all essential to the plot! The plot is a web, a skein of connections. Penny went into this with a false choice between play-acting an archaeologist or being an archaeologist, and the division was made more artificial by the way she found herself working at a CRM firm (the boring end of commercial archaeology) and having fun in London with her friend Graham. So everything from Panto to the reenactors at IWM London has a part in describing the boundaries of this seeming choice.

Sigh.

Maybe the Japan novel will be simpler. Maybe I can finally figure out a way to plot that doesn't end up with these briar patches.

Another reason I'm not sweating things like paid editors, beta readers, Amazon reviews and author websites. I don't have confidence that my writing is worth it yet.

Oh, come on! How could I forget about Nyvoni Brent from the museum, Helen and Martha (who were kids at the time of the Blitz), and sure not-actually "Molly Malone" and the other one were only there for a scene but, right, should really be counting Linnet.

So, okay. There are some women in the book.

I was a teenage Beowulf

Finally into the fight scene. Just downloaded two books on stage fighting and already read one cover to cover (well...a lot of it was warm-up exercises so I skimmed it).

Once again there is so much wealth of things I can't put in the book or my critics will cry at me again. "Birdie" is one of those instant expert types (just add factino and stir). He's got a fancy "combat ready" sword from one of those Chinese companies but has no idea how to use it. Penny has had one class in stage combat, and she's ended up with a display sword with rat-tail tang. Graham is also in the scene and he's actually got HEMA background -- although he hasn't owned up to it yet.

And oh yes, we are starting in the Tiring-room at Shakespeare's Globe in Bankside. So there's props storage and a curtained alcove to stab your Polonius in and the stage is trapped and above the awning is the machinery for producing gods on cue. And the thatched roof with sprinklers in case another cannon shot gets loose.

Oh and just because that's never enough, "Birdie" (his name is Guy, he was calling himself Fawkes at the Battersea Power Station break-in, and another guy on that hack started calling him "Birdie" after, one presumes, the phoenix from Harry Potter) has a scouse accent which is he trying unsuccessfully to hide under the most up-town version of Estuary that doesn't slide all the way into Received Pronunciation.

At least this means no funny orthography. Although Penny does chose to remember that Tony, her Geordie foil, had called Guy a wanna-be "reet bobby dazzla."

So I had a bit of real luck on this. I asked on Quora and a very cool lady from Oxford explained a bit about the Globe backstage, and we shared a few theatre stories (and then I clicked on her profile and, oh, past president of an archaeological society? Whoah, I feel abashed.)

So I know more than enough about the Globe, stage fighting, and prop swords to drown my audience. The problem now is going to be sorting it and figuring out how much I can leave out.

All the time I was struggling with the second slot on my tenor trombone, I was thinking it might just be easier to switch. So I kept looking at alto and soprano trombones. The one advantage of the soprano is it slots exactly like a trumpet, so I wouldn't need to retrain my lips. Downside is it barely sounds like a trombone. There are some plastic altos that are really cute (and cheap) but they sound plastic.

And wouldn't you know. I'm starting to find the lip for the tenor. I still don't like the instrument. Trumpet is more satisfying.

But at least I'm not shopping for a new trombone. Oh, no. After the fuss with the contractor I ended up with the chin-cello hanging by my desk for "loading screen" practice. And I've realized I can really make use of that silent violin practice to improve my fingering.

So I want to switch that back to violin strings. And buy another electric to switch my octave strings to. So, yeah. There's always something in my Amazon shopping cart!

(That was an obscure post title. I'm pretty sure that was Book of Sequels. Anyhow, it promised plenty of "Saxon violence." I didn't manage to work in my continuing adventures with the Yahama Venova but, yes, sax is part of the picture of my growing stack of instruments.)

The quickest way to get to Harlem

Boy. A thousand words done this morning. It's barely lunch. I am just steam train. And that was with editing of the previous day's work, too.

Aladdin is still in at the moment. I might leave it to my beta readers. The competitors are Dick Wittington -- I did previously mention the Lord Mayor (he was having a big parade at the time) -- and Jack and the Beanstalk. I sort of like Wittington for being more obscure, but both are good Principal Boy roles and both are a rags-to-riches story which sort of vaguely tracks with other themes I have going on.

I did change the venue from Elephant and Castle to The Mudlarker and I'm going to add a storage locker proximate to the "under the London Bridge arches" original and future location of the Vauxhall Playhouse.

And I've done the last quoted excerpt from the diary. It was brutal. In that I had a dialog section within the diary, and since this isn't set out typographically with a scene break or italics this means quotes in quotes. I broke the rule of new paragraph per speaker last time I quoted from the diary, but that was what I had to do this time. And because of the rules of rolling quote, it looks like this:

“‘Rest. Recover,’ his mystery friend told him. ‘If you miss this war, there’s always another on the way.’ And without a change in his voice he turned to look up the stairs. ‘And I see you’ve already started training your own.’

“‘It isn’t like that. She’s a civilian.’

Yeah, my grammar checker is going to hate me. The mystery man with the Dick Tracey jaw is of course Orde Wingate. And once again a choice forced on me; I can't follow the proper last-names-only because then I'd have a Wentworth and a Wingate in the same conversation.

So Linnet is off to interview at Baker Street and in the final diary entry she'll reveal she is leaving for Bletchley Park or wherever. I've forgotten which of multiple addresses for SOE would be appropriate in early 1941. I've started looking stuff up while I get to it rather than try to keep track of it all now.

And another loss. I wanted to talk about pub names at some point and how a lot of the animal names "Red Lion," etc., whilst still rooted in heraldry and the partisan sympathies of publicans, are these days most often part of foreign-owned chains. Elephant and Castle being Canadian at present -- although I can't tell if they have any of the ones by that name in the UK.

All of this in aid of doing the title drop, of course. That, and I need to get around to pointing out that Vauxhall is or was quite plausibly Fox Hall. I had the thought today, too, of doing references to British children's books for the Part names. I already have two, you see. Well, time to see if I can't chase Fawkes back to his hole. Now that my intrepid pair knows who he is.

One slapstick sword fight coming up. I took today off work too. My boss is happy I'm taking some time off -- I was looking ragged, and things are as quiet as they are likely to get, and better yet, I have a bunch of vacation hours now and it looks to be many months before I'd be able to spend them in the proper way.

Perhaps by this weekend I'll finally have her exploring her first (approximate) tomb.

Loverly

2,000 words completed today. And there's an "oops" there -- I was aiming for as low as 70K but I am going to be crushing right up to that 80K by the time I get to the epilog.

Only 600 words was about Panto. I described the theatre a little more in the first draft, but before I'd finished the chapter I'd knocked out several descriptions that didn't need to be there.

And I never did explain what a Panto Horse is.

This whole sequence feels like it is pulling sideways, but then I've felt I've been pulled sideways since the dig ended. If I was the kind of person who could do a massive re-write, I'd try to work it so the dig ended suddenly and the very next day Penny went on her illegal entry back into it.

All along I've been trying to chart a course between getting too scattered, and being too on the nose. I just got done writing the beginning of a scene at the Elephant and Castle pub, which is in fact in Elephant and Castle and very close to the temporary spaces of the Southwark Playhouse. And then I found out there was a pub called the Mudlarker. Which would be perfect for a meeting with local metal detector people. And is right on the bank of the Thames near the New Globe. And, as it happens, near the previous and future home of the Playhouse; under London Bridge.

Could that be any more appropriate to the themes of underground and rivers and even the idea of theatre as a bit subversive?

I also should not have picked Aladdin as the show being done by the Lambeth Larks. I'd just thrown it out there during a much previous scene and didn't feel like going back. But there's cultural context that gets thrown into the mix. Plus the cross-gender casting doesn't really hold, not for modern productions anyhow (well, not for modern productions in general -- even Jack of the Beanstalk fame is probably played by a young man in modern productions). The sole grace is this is where Widow Twankey comes from but in the final scene I couldn't even put that in (plus the reader has probably completely forgotten that I referenced that character way back in Chapter One).

Well, I'll think about it. After I've reached the end of the book. There's themes and arcs I'm trying to weave and I don't know if they are going to work.

I think the other part of my discomfort is that all of this stuff, from the last working day of the dig to the sword fight at the Globe, is interstitial. Scenes that have to be there to wrap up certain plot lines and advance certain other plot lines but otherwise don't have an identity of their own.

I'm into the final Detectorist scene now. This was an arc that started back in Chapter One. Basically, local metal detector clubs got pissy, and she's meeting with them to tell them that as far as she knows archaeologists working on the Underground aren't blaming them for anything. But that's it. The entire outline for the current scene was, "She meets with them." It doesn't even matter what happens. Everything that plot line was supposed to do, has been done.

Except I ended up offloading some of my diary problems in this direction. I just couldn't organically work the diary stuff into anywhere else, so now I'm stuck with a scene where Penny is reading the diary to a group of strangers.

And this is the Diary day where we get Captain Wentworth's real name, and Orde Wingate stops in, and Linnet drops hints she's volunteering in the direction of SOE. Plus this is also where Wentworth tries and fails to communicate to Linnet how he feels tainted by the violence he partook in and the capacity for violence he discovered within himself, and Graham simultaneously tries to warn Penny that she is taking her arrow-dodging, bomb-daring "heroism" with too light an appreciation of the possible consequences.

The Panto stuff only has a tiny payoff in this book. It is another window to the dress-up character of the distaff Indiana Jones she's been playing at. And an excuse to talk about her flirtation with the role of the kind of hero that really only appears in fiction. Other ideas from this I intend to get into in the Japan book, where one of the main characters is a senior member of the Takarzuka Dance Troupe.

And I still have to struggle through the Old Globe scenes. Boy, there's suddenly a lot of theatre going on.

Oh and oops. I have one more reenactor scene to write before she finally starts her big Tomb Crawl.

Knits up the raveled sleeve of care

Finally got some sleep. I was feeling physically ill from want of sleep but today, finally, there's no work, no contractor coming in to work on the apartment, no noisy party outside, and I could finally sleep in.

I am less than inspired on the book. Heck, I got mildly inspired by the thought of pulling an edit on the trunk novel (Shirato) and getting that out there. (That thought came out of house cleaning...in a roundabout way.)

Also new thoughts on Japan. What I wanted to do with it is too far along certain paths in the overall character arc. So I'm reconsidering which book in the series to do next. The "Paris" book, if I could figure out how to do it in a way that doesn't amplify my current faults. Or something new. I want to get her to Paris before Notre Dame burns but I have a few winter months to play. Boston maybe. Good thing the Big Dig is dug already...

(Yeah, there it is again. The "where do you get your ideas." Writing archaeology adventures, no week goes by without reading about something that would be cool to write about.)

(That said, I could use an idea that would work well in winter. I should go through my list of Fox-related titles and through the sticky elements of the character arcs. All I have at moment is I'd like an adventure that gets her some additional notoriety -- that sets up Japan better -- and that gives her a chance to get some more acting in and otherwise work on her poise before she has to pull off the Great Deception necessary for the Japan book. And also one with no romance at all. And it would be nice to get into some solid history. Not that London during the War isn't, but how about something from an era where there aren't living witnesses?)

(I'd like to send her mountain climbing some time, but winter and mountains is suicide. So is going to check out the Duga radar. Although I would like something outdoors. Central America? All the adventure archaeologists head that way eventually...  I guess I should hit up my travel experiences too but I'm running out of places I've been.)

***

I think the scene I'm stalled on now is another "the perfect is enemy of the good" problem. I had this idea of the big heart-to-heart between Penny and Graham being where she finally explained what happened in Athens, they read Linnet's diary where she talks about her intentions to join up, and Graham cautions her on the pitfalls of the path of heroism. More-or-less. It's complicated.

But the diary isn't lining up. Linnet's relationship with Wentworth needed another chapter to develop, and unless I can kick the discovery back a day the visit by Orde Wingate has to wait for next entry. And the Athens stuff -- at this point it feel better for Penny to indulge in a "how did I end up here?" when she's in the flooding Zero Room under Nine Elms.

Oops. Was that a spoiler?

Sigh. I had dreams of this great scene that would bring everything together. I haven't learned how to write that well yet, though. So the delay in getting back to work on the current scene is basically me letting go of the what could have been and sitting down to write the what must be.

In fact I think I'm coming all the way around until the discussion is in terse exchanges in the middle of something else. Quite possibly running after the suspect.

Hair

Pulled a fourteen-hour day Saturday. But we had the test chamber back in operation by Monday. And then I found out a contractor was coming into my apartment Monday so I spent all Sunday packing up computer and table and everything to make a space. By Wednesday I needed to take a day off...and I'm still tired.

Weird. Spent the lockdown just dealing. Now that I'm back to work, I'm finally getting to all the little annoyances. Replacing light switches and window cranks and so on. The place has never been cleaner (okay...it was cleaner before I moved in. But it is getting better. And more comfortable.)

Also re-haired a bow. My cheap bow -- not even the forty-dollar carbon fibre one. Boy, was it cheap. When I got it open, I found out the wedges were soft plastic and they'd been glued into place. But now I know basically how replacing bow hair works. And, yes, I've been back to practicing on the violin. Seems like all the music I want to write now has a violin part.

Unsurprisingly, not a lot of fiction writing done. Have had several ideas about what to do with the Japan novel. I still think Paris should be first but that one would bring out all my bad habits so I want the change of gears the Japan book will give me.

And on that. I had a nice talk with a family friend who just finished the Athens book. There's a trend here. Well, besides that older people seem to be liking it. And that women like the character -- and that's a relief, because male writer trying to write a female character (in First Person POV, to boot)...

But there's also a repeated "You must have done so much research."

Which is, right there, a writing fail. It isn't supposed to look like you did a lot of research. You are supposed to DO the research, but then you put in the book only what absolutely needs to be there.

And that's been worrying me a lot about the London novel, because it feels dense and complicated to me.

But this last time, and yeah some of the things my German friend said, are giving me hope. I am thinking at this point that just maybe the stuff I spent time researching is not the stuff they think I spent time researching. And maybe I'm lucky and most of the stuff I'm sweating in the London book is on me, not on them.

In the Athens book there's some Greek mythology and some Bronze Age history. And some other history (even a bit of Roman stuff). Heck, in chapter three my protagonist gives an impromptu lecture on the Thera eruption and its effect on the Minoan civilization. And this is what I meant. I already know this stuff. I didn't research it for the book, it was just there. Every single one of Penny's impromptu lectures was me, going off the top of my head just as she is.

Same way that every time in the book she quoted Shakespeare from memory, I wrote it by....quoting Shakespeare from memory. Okay, sure, I looked up the passages and I edited a little here and there, but the basic lines, like the lectures, was me just writing what I know without having spent any specific effort towards it. So I don't think of these as "hard" or "complicated" and when I weigh density of prose and all that I undercount all this stuff.

Thing is, names and dates are a flag. They code as Serious History. They codee as "obscure facts that someone had to look up." And I think that throws up a barrier to the reader, too. When they realize they are being fed history, they tense up.

Meanwhile, this is what I actually spent time researching:

What do signs look like, are there seats or compartments on the train, does the desert come after or with the meal, what time is check-out. A lot of daily living stuff, in other words.

So the London book might or might not pass. There are a few bits of "throw a lot of dates and names at you" things. Bradgate Park and a bit of the history of the Nine Day's Queen. The history of the Battersea Power Station. And of course stuff about the London Blitz. And there's a very brief bit about the geology of London which is likely to send some people screaming.

The stuff the reader probably won't have trouble with is stuff like what is in a Full English Breakfast or how the rooms are arranged in Graham's "flat" (actually a two-up, two down walk-up with an expanded garret). I think. I think it will just come across as description. That's my theory, see. That if it isn't really exotic (like describing a kimono) then it is just "stuff." It is still a pub and a cab and a train even if some of the details are different. Nothing to get scared of.

And the history stuff was largely unfamiliar to me so I had to research it myself so I'm a little more conscious of it.

But, sigh. There is stuff which I didn't have to research but which might or might not bother the reader. That is, give the reader the sense of being overwhelmed by facts and details. Stuff like British pop culture. There's a sort of running reference to Doctor Who (the idea -- not really made explicit -- is that Athens was a gods-haunted place but England kicked theirs out and replaced them with pop-culture heroes. So The Doctor is the functional equivalent in this book of Athena Polis in the last.)

Possibly not helped by something I've been doing since I was a role-playing game referee; that the world has a life independent of the protagonist, and there will be things going on around her that she doesn't understand and never will. In many cases these are what TVTropes calls a "Genius Bonus"; a reference that isn't spelled out but that those in the know will, well, know.

I named Doctor Who and The Doctor. But in a different scene the actor Tony Robinson shows up and someone says, "Oh, that's Baldrick." And later someone in his presence says, "She has a cunning plan." And there's no explanation for this.

Heck, I lampshaded it in a different scene. When they discover the fabled White Room at the Battersea Power Station one of the Urban Explorers makes a crack about a white room by the station, and another comments on the lack of black curtains...leading to a third complaining he has no idea what they are going on about. (That sequence started with someone talking about the Dark Side of the Moon -- but here Penny explains to the reader about the Pink Floyd album cover.)

Sigh. Breakfast is over. Time to once again put the computer in the closet, tuck the table up against the wall and prepare to stay extra-late at work because it looks like the contractor is going to be tearing holes in my ceiling through the weekend. 

Strange Days

This weekend has been exhaustion and depression. I haven't felt up to working on the book and haven't wanted to work on the book.

Today I finally got back to it. Maybe I'll take some days off next week. We're supposed to work this weekend anyhow. We want to redo the test chamber while nobody is using it.

Made a travel mug of strong coffee with my new electric kettle. Had an apple cinnamon scone. Put on my Athena Fox mix tape. And finally got moving again.

Oh, and had a weird insight. I'm listening to one of Carlos Elene's excellent game covers as I start this. He's been working with more and more performers lately and that's all to the good, because while he plays quite competently at piano, bass, and of course his lead sax, I heard something new this time.

And that's the performance choices -- those tiny nuances of accent and phrasing -- are the same in all his instruments. And that I feel is a weakness. I can hear the same thing in SquidPhysics and I assume in other one-man-band recordists. There's a dialog between players, but there is also more richness even if they record separately, because each makes slightly different kinds of choices.

***

But back to the book. This was the scene that felt most difficult. Sure, I'm wrapping up a lot of plot lines and that is either easier or harder depending on how much has to be pulled together and how much time there is to do it.

I just could not find what it was I wanted to say. Actually saying it is easier. Well, the current draft is a total cludge but I think I have something at last.

And did I mention the problems I was having with the diary conversation had propagated back? Yeah, I'm two scenes back, because the problems in the diary scene had grown out of choices I'd made back there.

I'm not looking forward to editing this mess. Well, not the work. I can do that. But rewrites (as opposed to spell check) is a place where you can revisit the roads not taken. And for anyone like me that is a horrible place to be because I'll be back at the crossroads agonizing over the choice again, while my little horse thinks it queer that I'm not pushing on to formatting for publication.

Oh, yeah. I got nothing against self pub. I've got even less against traditional publication. But I feel I have more to learn before it is even worth approaching one.

***

My music has suffered in this time. Being stuck at home unable to practice. Lacking the energy and the time to start any new pieces. I put new strings on my lute-back ukulele and I love it (synthetic gut-and-silk strings -- very medieval sounding).

My original 7C has corrosion pits inside and no longer slots clean. I'd really transitioned to the 5C anyhow, which is more secure slotting with mutes (which I have to use for many of my practice sessions) and is probably good training for the upper register.

But I picked up a screamer to try out. Don't know exactly where it sits but probably close to a 12-something. (That's Bach numbers -- nobody agrees on the numbers otherwise, not even the direction). It leapt right up past the over-the-staff C first time I tried it. But I'm liking more and more the full warm sound of the 5C.

And speaking of full sound. The trombone is still a pain. The second partial is horrible for me. I keep blatting on it. I keep thinking of getting an Alto (plus I could use a better machine -- this one has a noisy slide, no tuning slide, and is heavy). Or even a soprano, which slots exactly like the trumpet I'm familiar with and wouldn't be splitting my training so badly. I've been listening to Seb Skelly, who uses a soprano trombone and shifts it down an octave in the mix and it sounds decent. But all that sort of thing feels like it defeats the purpose.

So best wait until I'm making more music before I set out to add more instruments to my collection!

***

And the grind continues. I'm back up to the diary scene and it is slow going. The immediacy helps. I'm still not doing quotes within quotes, though, and I think I have to. I need to hear what Linnet and Wentworth actually said to each other, not just Linnet's reporting of it.

And there is of course still so much pushed onto the shoulders of this one scene. So slow going and even though it is only two PM I already need a break.

And I put on a playlist of Bardcore and somehow managed to shove my way through the diary scene. I have no idea how much I may end up editing this. The nested quotations are nearly as annoying as I thought they would be.

I offloaded some material on to the last two diary scenes. That's fine. I've realized how this works; the dig ended last chapter and with this scene, Linnet's story moves into larger prominence. I could even say that while the center part of the story is Penny spending her days in the Nine Elms Shelter and going on adventures with Graham evenings and weekends, it is now Linnet spending her nights in the shelter and Penny's adventures have become more serious.

Graham gets one more chapter. I'm still far from happy how I dealt with the complexities of their relationship, but it will have to do until I am ready for rewrites. And beta readers. I really need to score some beta readers. I'm making more these days, though. So I could actually go to the ones who charge for it.

Siege Mentality

One again I start the weekend with no confidence at all in writing. I don't think I can do it. And I don't think it is worth doing (not writing in general, I mean what I am doing).

So of course I also realized another place in which I ended up telling a different story than I'd set out to. I was looking at questions on Quora again and someone was asking about symbolism and that started a train of thought.

Well, the keyword I started this particular book with was "Under Siege." No, not the movie on the boat. That the arc of this book was sending Penny to London, having her suffer in cold weather and unfamiliar surroundings, go broke, and be shivering and starving while also being harassed by her fellow students as she's struggling to make a go of it as an archaeologist.

And the book would move underground in stages; starting with a "soft" introduction with the Tube as a place that is dirty and damp and scary and progressing towards both digging into and getting second-hand experience via what they were uncovering with the literal siege of the Blitz.

The big symbol through this is the North Sea, as a storm surge, a tide, paralleled with invasion and siege, from Boudicca's sack of Londinium to Penny's current situation, and it culminates in Penny trapped underground in a W.W.II shelter as the waters are rising.

But, you see, that's where plotting happened.

***

I've been writing about this on Quora and if I write that How To Write book it is going to be a big part. And that's the "Where do you get your ideas?" question. Because it is almost exactly the wrong question for someone who is writing.

As much as it makes sense for someone who has yet to learn how to write. And that's Quora in a nutshell. It is for people to ask beginner questions. It isn't like a forum, where you join, familiarize yourself with the place, learn the questions people hate to answer, and otherwise fumble around picking up the basics without, honestly, a lot of help. Quora is really not where advanced writers meet to hash out nuances in how to properly do an untrustworthy narrator in First Person. They are a place where people ask, "What is the difference between First Person and Third Person?"

It is a bit frustrating. It is like asking about what the controls on a car do. Yes, you need to learn that at some point. But it isn't something that really comes up when you are actually learning how to drive.

And that's really most of what is in a book about how to write. It is the stuff that everybody who writes already knows but, even more importantly, knows so well they don't think about it most of the time. You've got the basics. Now you are struggling with the interesting questions. It is nearly impossible for a book (or an explanation!) to do justice to both levels.

This is a long-winded way of saying that "Where do you get your ideas?" is an unanswerable question.

It isn't about the ideas. It is about the writer. The ideas are everywhere. But the ideas are also nowhere if you don't have that skill in figuring out how to use them.

So, yeah. I'm still learning how to use them. This was a good learning experience I guess. I'm not unhappy with the directions the story went. What I would like is to understand how it went as it did. Was it that I lacked the skills to tell my "siege" story? Or that the idea simply wasn't capable of carrying the story and HAD to be modified?

It is possible -- I realized this during the Battersea sequence and am even more confronting it over the Globe sequence -- that I had a basic error in outlining.

When I set up this story, I pretty much looked around and said, "What are some fun things to do in London?" I didn't realize how much it was going to turn into a Blitz story, not at first. So the idea that there are scenes at Trafalgar Square, The Tower of London, The New Globe, Highgate Cemetery, Battersea Power Station, and not even slightly to mention Bradgate Park in Leicestershire, is a bit off that model.

It isn't like there aren't a million Blitz related things I could have done. What with the Imperial War Museum, the new Blitz Experience near the London Eye, HMS Belfast, the Churchill War Rooms, the Deep Underground Shelters...

My objection was generally that this was a little too on-the-nose. That having Penny go to London and somehow every single thing that she gets involved in is about the war looks like author manipulation. Well, that was one reason. The other reason being I wanted to use the Globe, my dad wanted me to use Highgate, and I thought if I used Battersea I could work a Pink Floyd joke in there.

***

I recently watched a short video on the skilled editing job that rescued Star Wars from the dismal mess that had been the first cut. And a couple YouTube articles on writing. And I'm sort of giving up at the mid-point of the second book of a series I found on Kindle.

The first book had promise. It looked like he was figuring out how to write a story, and I wanted to see where he was going to go next. Well, apparently that was where he had been trying to go, and the second book was more of the same. It does seem that what he wants to write, somebody wants to read, because he's up to twenty-odd books between a couple of series and I didn't look at his numbers but he can afford full-painted covers so there's that.

I happen to want to tell the kind of story Ben is telling in the Rivers of London series, though, and that particular set of books is getting not just readers, but awards, a comic book, and options on a TV series. I'm not making a comparison, mind you. It isn't about that.

***

So that may be a lesson as I head into plotting the next book. Okay, I'm still not fixed on what my next project is going to be. Probably the next Athena Fox story, though -- because as much as I am getting really tired of First Person and finding it harder and harder work talking in her voice for the length of a novel, a series has more weight both among readers and in the numbers game of Amazon's ecosystem.

And I'm still a little split. The Japan book would make more sense a little further down the road. Especially, it might make more sense after the "Paris" book -- the latest thought being that one is more of a greatest hits, multiple city tour book. The "Paris" book is the Eco book; Penny is caught up in a fake Templar Conspiracy and at the climax watches Notre Dame catch fire.

The reason to do the Japan book first is I'm trying to shake some bad habits. Habits the Paris book is totally tailored to bring out in force.

So on the one hand, I'm assembling another list of "wouldn't it be cool" stuff for Japan. At this point some of them are so much in my head I'd have trouble letting them go, like climbing the Tokyo Tower (probably by the stairs but you never know), getting attacked by ninjas at the Toei standing Edo-era village set outside Kyoto, and getting lost at Fushimi Inari during the kind of weather that gives the book its title. And is going to wear kimono but that's a given.

I just hope that when I've got it all plotted out those won't end up feeling out of place, like the New Globe is for the current novel.

I'm still brainstorming but I'm seeing it in sort of three parts. Part One is the same Romancing the Stone game; Penny is getting mistaken for the YouTube character she created, and put into crazy situations she manages somehow to survive.

In Part Two, she finds out this wasn't luck. There's a very off-the-records effort by a flamboyant and charismatic agent of the Japanese Government to take down a cult leader with an interest in fringe archaeology. So there's an excuse here for the whole range of Junior Spy activities, from Embassy Balls with handlers sending instructions to a hidden earpiece, to a training montage in the spectacular scenery. But for me, one of the major attractions is being in social situations where Penny has to use every bit of acting skill and misdirection and social engineering to keep anyone from figuring out she really isn't Athena Fox.

In Part Three, the government gets a clue, a spine, or both and cuts their losses. Penny is left without support and with the illusion crumbled. And gets a chance to find out just what the real Penny can do.

At least, that's the scheme right now! I have a month of writing and basic edit and then I'll be scrounging for beta readers. For the reasons above, I don't feel I can afford to spend a lot of time in rewrites. I need another book up there STAT so I can build my numbers. And quality is going to have to suffer.

Thanks, I hate it

Wrote the scene. Next day was very tired after work but still got one thing done; I decided it didn't work.

What I was missing was the immediacy and the sensory impact. So instead of telling most of it through the framing story, I'm trying to tell it in direct quotes from the diary. Which is more work of course.

This is a crunch scene in that the outline said that Linnet was going to slowly reveal as her relationship with the Captain developed. But as I hit draft I find I don't have the luxury of time. Linnet only got six scenes total when I counted back to the earliest possible day I could have the diary unearthed.

I got two hundred words into the more immediate approach and I read that aloud and I realized I was name-dropping without sufficient context. So back to the drawing board again. The idea seems sound but the execution...?

Another draft and got a little further. And then realized this is where a lot of threads are coming together. This scene is having to do the entire "develop the relationship" in one go, and it is also the culmination of all the scenes with Graham because on the following day, he blows up at her and those are the last direct quotes we'll get from him.

And as soon as I realized that I thought of a couple of "bits" and directions the scene could go and beats I wanted and I realized...

I need to set it aside for another day while I think about it some more.

Great Klonos' carboalloy claws!

I've reached a very annoying scene.

Over the third part of the book I've been trying to sneak in a parallel story. While Penny is digging with her fellow archaeologists ahead of the construction crews at the old Nine Elms Station, a local paper has been publishing excerpts from the diary written by a young women who sheltered down on the abandoned platform during the Blitz.

I didn't get the parallelism as good as I might have liked. Well, I also didn't like it to be too obvious. Well, the way the scenes shook out for me as I moved from outline to actually fleshing them out, Penny's relationship with her friend Graham is hitting critical points just as Linnet has finally managed to start writing about Captain Wentworth, the man responsible for sticking an Aux Unit depot in the Nine Elms shelter.

And they are bonding over SF. Which was a somewhat late addition on my part. Wentworth is mooning over the glorious last stands of the past, from Rorke's Drift to the Siege of Acre. Linnet, not to be a passive part of the conversation, is coming back with the armageddons of, well, Buck Rogers.

And this is already tough as hell to write because while an educated woman of 1940 -- particularly one that educated largely on pulp magazines -- is a familiar voice to me, quotes within quotes are just not much fun. The scene I'm working on, Penny and Graham are discussing Linnet's latest diary entries where she discusses what she and the Captain talked about and this is less Phillip Nowlan and more Christopher Nolan.

(Cue the Inception sound effect).

There's two other things on the table at this point. Penny has been zig-zagging back and forth between being a responsible -- but boring -- worker bee of an archaeologist. A junior digger. And in the excursions inspired by Graham, she's been running around meeting eccentric people and eventually getting into more and more "stunts." Like breaking into Battersea Power Station.

So this is coming to a head as well. At the center of this particular story, as much as it is wrapped in a mystery and a Blitz story, is Penny feeling forced to decide between Serious Archaeology and being Indiana Jones.

But there's a subtler side to this. Whatever happened in Athens that let Penny be a real-life Athena Fox, it is an uncertain magic. The main reason she got shot with a bow at Highgate Cemetery is so she could be bleeding and in pain for the rest of the story. Stunts don't always work and real violence isn't like the movies.

One of the things Captain Wentworth is hiding is the kind of violence he experienced first-hand in ugly things like the Arab Revolts. And Linnet is in the same naive stage where she is going to volunteer for SOE before this is all over.

And Graham may appear to be an ordinary, out-of-shape guy, but he's a serious Roman reenactor. Well, something he did let him understand something of how violence really works. It is a lesson Penny is going to be learning deep under the streets of London. It is something I'm going back and forth on endlessly and having a lot of problems with myself because it totally changes the feel of her stories.

So I'm trying to fold this in as well. My Inception conversation over chicken tikka masala is trying to parallel not just Linnet and Penny both spending their days/nights down in the Nine Elms shelter, it is both having too close a contact with worlds of fantasy and having an older male mentor figure (though not Mentor figure) who is for whatever reason unwilling to try to explain to them the true cost of violence.

And thus it is going to suck. I mean, sure. I can write it. I can cut out a lot and it would probably be a better scene for it. Allusions the readers doesn't get just makes them bored and confused. The thing that really sucks is I can't possibly put in it what I wanted to put in.

All those months of figuring and outlining and researching and everything I know about Captain Wentworth and his past and his relationship to Linnet I can only touch at third hand, through a half-dozen snatches of quoted dialog. And that ain't enough.

The other thing I realized this weekend is that Penny is exhausting. Maybe it is just a quality of First Person. Maybe it is her energy and raw nerves and the way she jumps around like the later regnerations of The Doctor. Or maybe it is the peculiar effort of going inside the head of someone very different from you and having to feel what they feel as you speak in their voice.

Whatever it is, I had to take frequent breaks. So I'm happy I got 2-3,000 words done over the weekend. Even the first draft of the Lensman scene. Next chapter includes the sword fight, so I know I'll lose a little time doing some specific research for that. Might even open my book on the New Globe. Assuming I still have it!