No first lines for you. Well, one. But that's it.

You writer-people on my friendslist: you're all so sequential. Most of my works in progress have first lines in the sense that it's the first line I've written on it, but writing things out of sequence means that that's often the fortieth line of Chapter 5, eventually.

The Aesir noir book starts, "I don't much like the gods," so far. That one might actually stick around. But look -- I can't even tell you the first line of Sampo, because I rewrote that bit longhand, and it's downstairs in my paper journal. The thing is drafted, and I've even done my standard "rewriting the beginning" schtick, and I still don't know the first line. 40K on Midnight Sun Rising, and do you think I know the first line? I do not.

I've been poking the tech levels of the Aesir noir book in my head. No gunpowder, and I'm resisting bad jokes like having "heaters" that actually heat things. It's a fascinating thing -- at least internally fascinating, can't speak for you folks and your reaction -- to look at things like the shoeshine boy/newsie who has the word on the street for Our Hero: what social structures made him? What would alternate social structures make instead? Who in this society is supposed to take care of stray kids like that, and how effective are they at doing it, and has it changed recently? It's good fun. Especially since it's roughly 400 years after Dwarf's Blood Mead, so I have two points with which to draw my curve: the DBM stuff and the Chandlery stuff, inasmuch as I choose to use it. "Noir" means a gajillion different things to people, some of it more "Blade Runner" than "Maltese Falcon." Mine is the older kind. A past tech, not a future -- but a future of one of my other books, and no past we've ever had, so. So. The little wheels turn.

As I said over on novel_gazing, I've posted more pictures from London. This is the set from Monday, so it's standard London landmarks taken by indifferent photographers on an indifferent camera. Um. And don't you want to rush right over and look now that I've said that. But what I mean is, Monday is the low point; all the rest of the photos are better in some direction or another. The Monday ones are here and onwards, following the links at the bottom. There'll be more to come: Tuesday will be the Bletchley Park pictures, and even my photography combined with my camera couldn't ruin some of the cool stuff from Friday at Kew Gardens with the Chihuly glass. But none of that is up yet, so you'll just have to suffer through.