The Other 30-Second Rule

Blue has been doing a long discussion on historical accuracy in the Assassins' Creed games (over on Overly Sarcastic Productions.) According to him, during the first game they came up with a "30 seconds on Google" rule; don't put anything in the game that could be found wrong with that little effort on the part of the player.

Not a rule that attracts me.

My generic rule for historical fiction is "Change it reluctantly and only when it makes a better story." But that needs unpacking. It requires, primarily, doing the research properly (or at least more deeply than 30 seconds on Google.)

"A better story" is a siren song right there. Say we've decided to do a pirate adventure. Pirates are cool, right? Wouldn't it be even more cool if they had, say, jet packs and machine guns? Thing is, you don't go far down this path before the things that make it a pirate adventure aren't there any more. It is just an "adventure." Those very "restrictions" on what you might think might make a more fun story are part of that world you are inviting the audience to inhabit.

This is, mind you, before we've even touched the idea of historical accuracy for its own sake. Or, rather, for the sake of the audience who slept through class, who are only getting their history through fiction, and who let that history shape, among other things, their real-world politics. 

So the first thing the writer needs to do is study the real history. Some, I feel, hate to do this because they have this idea in their heads and they are afraid that real history doesn't permit it. This may or may not be so. What I am sure of, is that real history has surprises. If you do the research as early as possible in the process, you will discover things you would never have dreamt up on your own.

So the first test of "Change it reluctantly and only when it makes a better story" is to see if you have to change it at all. Maybe history permits the thing with some slight modification. Maybe history offers an alternative that has even more story potential than what you had originally been thinking.

I am also tempted to think of this as a young writer problem. Inexperienced writers agonize over ideas. They are always asking where they come from, and they are loathe to let go of them. One of the tells here is that inexperienced writers are often worrying that other people are going to steal their ideas.

With experience comes the impression (it may not be entirely true!) that ideas are floating everywhere. The skill comes in figuring out how to make a story out of them. Well, more than that; the skill comes in seeing an idea in the rough, and then, knowing if an idea is story-worthy or if it just won't work. And then the skill in constructing story around it.

In any case, the last part of this little "Change it reluctantly and only when it makes a better story" is that if you do end up making a change, you can do so in a way that is justifiable, and that fits the larger truths. You've moved your understanding up to the next rank of history; not the dates and numbers, but the motions and currents.

And you surround your change with enough truth that the reader who spent that 30 seconds with Google will nod and accept that you, also, know the real version.

A Mighty Wind

I have few enough readers so far that it is hard to do any kind of analysis. Certainly too few to check anything beyond the gross effect of advertising. That, at least, seems to track; I sell copies when I am spending money at Amazon to place my covers in front of eyeballs.

But there is a puzzling pattern that is almost there often enough to make theorizing possible. And that is several Kindle Unlimited page read counts that seem to get to about 30 and stop.

I have an idea for this. This marks the start of a second chapter in which the plot is unfolding as a (relatively) realistic travel-thriller. Or, rather...the start of a second chapter after the incident on top of the Acropolis.

Where a strange wind blows right after Penny thinks about gods and hubris.

So is it possible, this is the place where the reader finally clues in that this ain't Percy Jackson? That the gods are never going to be more present than a mysterious wind or a stranger with gray eyes? And that this is not the contract they wish to enter into; that they want something more urban fantasy?

Well, I went and started a give-away at Goodreads. Might be a mistake. Goodreads is a tough crowd. Books I've liked and personally given four or five stars are being ravaged by other reviewers there. If anyone actually reviews (the usual ratio is rather lower than one review per 100 copies read), I had better be in a good mood when I read them.

Game of Computers

So it kind of goes back to Horizon Zero Dawn, which when I booted it up complained my graphics card was too small. After a lot of hesitation I went ahead with the upgrade.

The new card arrived roughly the same time I had a bit of a recovery from my cardiac woes and was brimming with energy. So I vacuumed out the gaming computer, put in the new card, upgraded the RAM, and finally got around to mounting the terabyte SSD that most of the gaming files are on.

And while the tools were out...

My main computer -- an older Macbook -- was running hot enough that even the external fan wasn't able to keep up. Popped the case meaning to blow out the dust, and maybe redo the thermal paste if it didn't look too hard.

Discovered the battery was swollen. So a couple days later, new battery, new optical drive, upgraded RAM, new thermal paste, and, yes, the vents and fan all cleaned up. And I can finally ditch the external fan.

And I was still going. Stayed after work to try to make progress on recording a cover of Game of Thrones. Now that my brain was sort of working again I quickly realized I had a harmony problem and to solve it what I needed was a keyboard.

Which I couldn't get to work on the rescued MacMini I had at work. But by this point I'd started cleaning out the closet and not only did I find my old G4 laptop, but a rescued iPad (same recycling bin as the MacMini) that I'd totally forgotten about.

Mostly because iPads are useless. There's no connectivity -- unless it is only a year old and can connect via iTunes, and even then moving something you didn't just buy from Apple is a total pain. It, like the phones, isn't designed to create content. It is designed to consume other people's content. Preferably content you pay Apple for.

It does do one thing, though. It will run a simple Keyboard ap from the ap store and that's enough for me to solve my harmony problems. Sigh. I'd finally rehearsed the lyre part to where I could perform it on tempo. But now I had to retune the strings and learn a different and more complex part.

I also discovered the main key to getting a smoother sound on the Gue was to tune it up to a higher pitch. That, and switch the extra-sticky bass rosin for some violin rosin.

So the laptop works, though. I mean the other one. I've now brought it home and considering the next computer adventure; yank Cubase off it and see if it will run Reaper, because then I can mix the way I'm used to mixing.

Weird. The Mini has a much faster chip -- dual-core Intel i5 I believe -- but due to the internal firmware it can't be taken any higher than OSX 7.5. That's a perfect dead spot between stuff I've owned in the past and have registered, and stuff I use now and can find downloads for. Basically; nothing runs.

And, yes. Reaper installed and registered. Anyone need an old MacMini?

This all falls out better than I had intended

 The great thing about general background research is you find the things that should have been staring you in the face.

The Paris Exposition of 1900. Which was combined with the Summer Olympics (only the second one of the modern Olympics) and that included a motor race!

And as I'm finding, this is the turning point; where the belle époque slowly turns into the fin de siècle. This is very much another of those turning points, where a new world beckons but the new dangers are becoming visible; the motor cars and early airplanes harbingers of industrialized warfare in the trenches of the Somme. The social changes that bring a new wave of poverty and displacement...and, yes, Paris was suffering through a rise of new antisemitism and xenophobia and reactionary movements even in this moment of artistic and philosophical exploration, humanism, and feminism.

As so many times before. The revolution overthrew the monarchy and ended up putting an Emperor in charge. Who then got replaced by another king -- but at least this one was a constitutional monarch. This is the time of the Third Republic, limping even more than usual for French politics but, as always, striving for something that remains out of reach.

So...my desire to somehow conflate and compress some of the themes of Steampunk, the shock of the Great War, and the struggle of the artist, are all actually here and ready with an excuse for one young cavalry man to visit; the Paris Expo! 

(And another strangely steampunk-reality bit of timing; they are currently tearing up the streets to install the Paris Metro, with those fantastic station entries that ushered in Art Nouveau).

..and other French words

Another research book arrived today. I'm not really intending to read all this stuff, not that deeply. But I am getting excited about the basic concept of my next book.

Here's how I'm thinking about it now; at the outer layer, this is a DaVinci Code story. Run around scenic Paris visiting famous artworks and monuments and ferreting out clues to a treasure one step in front of the bad guys.

Under that, it is more a story of the hero conundrum; that the tough part isn't becoming a skilled martial artist or gaining super powers or whatever; the tough part is that the problems of the real world aren't so obvious and aren't best addressed with a fist to the chin. For this story this is happening on both sides of the treasure hunt; the people who put it into motion really want to be breaking into museums at night and scaling buildings and all that Uncharted stuff in search of a lost treasure. For Penny, she's accepted that she is on the path of being a hero but she's discovering she is actually really, really bad at waiting for adventure to come to her. Assuming it ever does and what happened to her last year isn't just a fluke!

Ah, but where this particular rubber meets the road (sabot meets cobblestones?) is Paris. Paris for what it represents in the arts and in the dreams and the inspiration, a million reflections of the City of Lights from a million different admirers all trying to grasp the intangible. The points of contact here are largely two; an American tourist, an art student wanting to find that inspiration in the place where so many others created.

And a figure from the past, glimpsed through his memoirs, who was in Paris in that heady, crazy period where the belle epoque, the birth of Impressionism and the Can-Can and the ramp up to the Paris Exposition slides into the fin de' siecle and the growing rumors of war.

And Montmartre, a ramshackle village on steep hills covered with windmills and vines, where the latest "commune" could live the Bohemian life and let the tawdry and licentious entertainments free writers and artists from the established art and literature. Which grew and became too popular and with the Exposition the energy shifted to the Latin Quarter instead, leaving only the bars and brothels. Always poor, the class lines are very visible across this entire period and beyond; Sacre Coeur was dedicated to the dead of the communes during the Revolution. 

And the funny thing is? I don't really have to have a deep understanding of the geography or the economics. I just need to name-check a little Toulouse Lautrec and show the seedy floor shows he loved so much, and the picture is there, or at least as much as I need.

There's a small cafe

There are writers who believe strongly in the first draft. For them, the story flows out all at once and should not be held back for research or revisions.

I'm not one of them. I revise as I go anyhow, and for the kind of thing I'm doing in the Athena Fox series, I am totally comfortable with delving into the deep research only when I've gotten to the scene in question. Of course the opening scene here sets the stage rather literally; a place that she will return to over and over through the book and two characters who will play pivotal roles.

Montmartre was a given. I stayed there myself. After a lot of poking around, I settled on the Place du Tertre as the location for the opening scene: this is the square full of artists (who are rather less Bohemian than it might be expected, having to be officially approved to dare create art in front of the buying public.) And it is smack dab in tourist central; being, among other things, directly below Sacre Couer.

And the first lampshade is being hung because the young starving artist and the probably-not-a-seamstress young woman meet here, at Cafe la Boheme de Montmartre. Which I do have to name, but otherwise have to be careful about what I say. I can say here that the TripAdvisor reviews are almost unanimously negative on the food and service, (and prices!) but this is a real business that makes much more money than I will ever see and I don't need to be seeing letters from lawyers.

The front-loading here is cafe culture, seasonal weather, basic language, tourist behavior, Parisian street fashion (or, rather, what people wear that will out them instantly as a tourist), Academic seasons (this is, for some institutions, Spring Break), and maybe a bit more.

Well, there's also the Headless Monk.

My other legal disappointment at this juncture is Colette. She is so incredibly quotable. Here she is, as a young bride, returning to her rooms alone as Willy worked; "...where she enjoyed...the leisure of a prisoner and the rest of an invalid."

Colette is probably out of copyright. Sadly, she wrote in French, and the translations are not (I ran into the same problem with quoting from Verdi operas; I could quote the libretto but I had to make my own unique render into English.)

One short scene

I've been working on the first scene of the Paris book for quite some time now.

Of course first chapters are hard. That's where you have to grab the reader's interest, introduce the main characters, establish the setting, and give them a hint of what the story is about (the contract with the reader). Which means you yourself have to figure out who the characters are and where you are going with the thing.

So the bits finally came together, with a bit of help from La Boheme, STEM, and Prince Valiant. All stuffed into a cafe somewhere in or near the Place du Tertre, 18th Arrondissement close to Sacre Couer.

(And I've been having a lot of fun getting speech to text to accept French names when taking a quick note during work. It has finally decided to accept Sacre Couer but nothing, it seems, will let it puzzle out belle epoche.)

Not helped by having to take my car in for a check engine light (it was due for the next service interval anyhow). Or continuing lethargy and pain -- they're going to hang a heart monitor on me next week.

And I'm spending some of my work time deep into materials science, reading lots and lots of manufacturer's datasheets. There's a product we build that was basically designed and managed by our department and it is sort of resolved to me at this point. So a company full of engineers, and I'm the one who is trying to puzzle out this stuff as we struggle to finally achieve a full Class A rating.

***

I have most of the stuff together for the Paris book now. I still have a chunk of research I want to do, because it is going in a lot of directions. Napoleon, but more than that, the Belle Epoche and the history of Montmartre. Fortunately, I can wait until I get there (that is, to the specific chapters) before I need to know more about parkour or the Palais Garnier or Les Invalides etc. 

It isn't that exciting a story for me, though. Not sure why. I set up this series to do some action but I'm not sure that making it chock-full of action sequences would do me better (there is a climb up Notre Dame de Paris, but even when she is clinging to the grotesques the stakes are "merely" personal. There's no grand goal here, no big plot, no ticking clock.)

Be that as it may. I'm looking for a bit of a kick by thinking about what story might be next. Besides; I've set as part of the style that every single book has a "next time" on the last page. Which implies I should have at least a sense of what the next book might be!