Potting about

Me with my hair tied back, in the studio,
consulting my lab notes, deciding how to
glaze a cup

Some of you folks may know, I throw pots in my leisure hours.

This is sensei. My teacher in flinging clay.

Writing is a cerebral kind of job, abstract and fancy. Words do what I tell them to. If I don't like what I've got, I make them line up in a different order. Within the limits of my ability, I am all powerful.

Here's one of my recent pots,  a little bowl
with Walnut Spice base and Blue Monday decoration.

Pottery is entirely different. It's physical and intuitive and damned stubborn. I can't talk the walls of a too-thin bowl into standing upright no matter how persuasive I am and how much I know about the origins of the clay and composition of glazes and the shape of Medieval or Roman pots.
Mere thinking, mere knowledge, doesn't help. I am at the mercy of reality.

This is a spread of some of last month's work from the class. The bean pot in the lower right corner is mine.

The art building on the Community College campus
 Go fifty yards in any direction and you're in the middle of a cow field.
Here we got excellent facilities and excellent students.

Writing is hand-wavy and subject to change.
Pottery is solid.
You can see why I like potting,
though I am not so terribly skilled.

Since I produce rather more pots than I can possibly use, I give them away to folks on my mailing list.
(Join by dropping a line to joannabourne@gmail.com )

More on the writing life ... and dogs

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I want to let Mandy-the-Dog free to run about the woodland a-chasing of the deer

(hums, “My heart’s in the Highlands. My heart isn’t here.” )
and otherwise amusing herself when I go down into the valley to the coffeeshop where there is air conditioning and, well, coffee.

But if I leave the door open so she can get in and out, Mandy hears me start the car and takes off, even if she has been given a big plate of chopped chicken breast and should be wholly immersed in that. Mandy comes bounding after me with admirable speed and follows me all the way down hill, about a quarter mile and a bit, to the mailbox.

Bound, bound, bound goes Mandy, chasing after me.

I stop at the mailbox and put my head on the steering wheel and am pretty sure Jane Austen never had this problem.

Mandy will not get into the car with me. She has been there and done that and knows I am going

to drive her back and lock her up in the house. No fool, Mandy.

So I turn around at the mailbox and drive back to the cabin.

Bound, bound, bound goes Mandy, but this time uphill.

I lure her inside with tiny bitty dog treats which I hide among the sofa cushions and under the edge of the rug. She will find them, or I will, eventually. Thus I demonstrate the triumph of human cunning that has kept us one jump ahead of the canine community all these years.

I close the door behind me and drive off in the direction of coffee.

I need hardly say that the cat takes no part in this drama, demonstrating the feline cunning that has kept cats one jump ahead of both the human and the canine community all these years.

The HEA and Dire Poverty

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I was on twitter last night, late in my time zone, chatting about whether one could write a Romance where the protagonists were no-kidding-around dirt poor. Is there an HEA for folks scraping by in the dangerous underbelly of existence?

HEA, in case you have wandered in looking for information on the UN’s policy on Education, is “Happily Ever After”. That, or HFN — Happy For Now — is required if a book is to be genre Romance. No happy ending and you may be writing a love story or Woman’s Fiction or Literary Fiction or Fairy Tales for Rabbits or perfectly lovely General Fiction, but it’s not a work of genre Romance and should not be advertised as such.

 

This isn’t talking about the poverty of a pioneer cabin, or a Western dirt-scrabble ranch, or a small farm in Wales, or about the working-class life of most people everywhere and everywhen. This is poverty with a capital P. The pure quill, the desperate grinding-poverty poor.

So I thought about poverty and genre Romance while I was reading tweets and writing tweets and I came to a couple conclusions.

A San -- or Bushman -- person. They have the oldest DNA.
They're probably like our distant ancestors.
They are quite beautiful folk, btw.

First off, one may love deeply when the next meal is problematic and the chickens have come down with mad hen disease. Happiness isn’t conditional on tea and cakes, such as those in front of me. Young San heroes and heroines in the Kalahari Desert of Southern Africa may snuggle together on the rocks, cheerful and content, filled with gratitude for the day’s berries and nuts, hoping for an unwary antelope tomorrow. The bitter and lonely trolls I meet on the net are not an advertisement for a safe, rich, comfortable life.

 

I poked around in the attic of my mind which is furnished with much oddly shaped furniture when you come right down to it and considered love and happiness and poverty and suffering and genre Romance.

Genre fiction is market defined, which is neither good nor bad. It just is. Folks don’t come to my genre looking for bleak reality. Most of them have a plentitude of conflict, worry, and sorrow stocked up. They come to Romance for the feelgoods. To get away from all that durned Reality. And if I’m taking their money I’m going to give ‘em what they’ve paid for because that’s my contract with the reader.

Which brings us round to the original question — can one write a satisfying genre Romance with grindingly poor protagonists?

 

I considered Maslow. Maslow, for those of you who slept through Freshman Econ and Philosophy, spoke of a “hierarchy of needs”. What is important to humans? He made a pyramid that stacks the last two thousand years of thought on this into a single graphic, the better to jog folks awake in Econ 101 and give them something to doodle in their notebooks. I have no idea who Maslow was, btw. He may have lived on a mountain top, cowering before black bears, instead of teaching at some uni.

Anyway, see the pyramid above. Every layer rests on satisfying the substrate below. The general idea is you don’t go so much looking for love when you’re starving to death or exiting stage left, pursued by bear. Like all simplicities, Maslow’s hierarchy doesn’t quite cover reality so I will quote Edna St. Vincent Millay who probably never heard of Maslow but argues on the other side anyway.

Edna

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;

Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;

(I’ll interrupt here to point out she’s about defining the two lowest levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and goes on to deny their primacy.)

Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

Millay’s poem speaks of the triumph of the third level of Maslow’s hierarchy.

When I’m putting together the outcome of a story, I want to check off all — jo stops to count — five Maslow levels. I want the HEA to plausibly suggest a safe and comfortable future. Love itself gives the male and female protagonist those upper three levels.

Yeah love!

So what about poverty and genre Romance?

Not exactly what I'm having now, but close

I decided the genre requires some absolute floor of pain and desperation for an HEA. Not tea and cakes necessarily. Okay. But not a life of starvation either. Not assured safety, but danger and damage faced by the protagonists and survived and overcome. (I’m thinking Outlander here.)

  

I think poverty also works if the protagonists are sustained by what makes poverty secondary. Medical missionaries; scientists living in an Amazonian jungle to collect disappearing languages; a free-love, Vegan, farming commune, living in yurts; (I know somebody who does this;) clear-eyed radicals living in the bowels of a dystopian future city, fighting the dystopes.

I know these books must be out there, the HEAs where the protagonists are poorer than church mice, but it’s still an upbeat, hopeful ending.

So I ask you ... I come to lay it at your feet for judgment. Can dire, grinding poverty with no prospect for better be part of a satisfying escapist genre romance?

Posting to My Other Blog and Similar Disasters

So.

I wrote my long and complicate post and was ready to put it up on the Word Wenches' website.

It would NOT post.

Me and technology, we are not friends.

For about an hour I tried this trick and that to get my post out of Typepad limbo and onto the website.

No luck.

I decided to refresh the page.

I was reluctant to do this because I might lose the posting altogether and that meant restarting from a file saved to my computer as an .rtf file and I'd have to redo all the niggle work of adding links and replacing paragraph spacing, which get lost in an .rtf file.

But ...

I had no choice.

Three of Eight Wenches and a building

Trembling, I reached my feminine but competent hand toward the computer. I bit my full lower lip, dreading the moment I'd destroy my document with . . . yes . . . my own index finger!

I pushed the refresh button.

Even now it wasn't too late to turn back. The system tried to warn me. "You may lose unsaved data," it whispered.

I'd heard those warnings since I was a freckle-face young girl in pigtails. My family and friends had tried to protect me. But I was a plucky, impetuous heroine and I WOULD NOT LISTEN!

I gave a whimper, husky and sensual, like one of the more appealing marmosets.

I pushed the 'Leave Page' button.

Plucky girl heroines

We all know what happened next . . .

. . . which was that the page reloaded and then everything worked fine and I hadn't lost my data so I published my posting to the website.

Sometimes good things happen to heroines, because the Black Moment time hasn't come 
and won't while I'm at the keyboard
 because readers don't give a damn what happens on a computer so writers plot their deep emotional turmoil elsewhere.

Excuse me. I have to go pick up a candle and head down to the darkened basement -- alone -- to investigate the creepy noises I hear down there.

Technical Topics -- Breaking Comma Rules for Fun and Profit

... or, like, not

 
Punctuation Rule Breakage
Pro or con?

Elsewhere somebody talked about leaving out commas when he didn't like them. This is a response I made.
I'm assuming this is breaking hard rules, not just using the great expanse of stylistic wriggle-room Chicago Manual of Style and its brothers leave us.


I came up with five consideration to think about when playing fast and loose with commas. This holds true with a lot of writerly eccentricities besides comma punctuation, I suppose.


First off,
Let's say you leave out commas that do not, for some reason, please you on a case-by-case basis.

The publisher's copyeditor will have to laboriously add or remove those off-brand commas.
She really has no idea which comma-errors are done on purpose and which are true mistakes. She has to mark them all.
While she's doing all that comma work, she's not fine-combing your manuscript for other problems.
She's only got a set number of hours, most likely .
What do you want her to work on?

Managing Editore: Been a hard week

When you're confronted with her copyedits, you now have many hundreds of editorial marks and comments that you have to go through and leave in place or stet.

Then the Managing Editor picks up this complicated mess and says "I got an author here who doesn't know basic punctuation" or worse, "He's doing this on purpose?"
The Managing Editor's job is to look at every stet and say 'yes' to some and 'no' to some. You've given him work. Much work.
You have just pissed off the Managing Editor.
This is not a good thing
for anybody.


There will be some important stets you want to make. It's easier to argue for that one important stet if you have not just been stroppy over 800 missing-comma stets.

Sometimes we don't want to innovate

Whatever the outcome, the copyeditor, the Managing Editor, and you have wasted a lot of time and effort.

 

Finally --

While most readers won't notice commas one way or the other . . .

the ones who do notice intermittent use of the Oxford comma or failure to set off essential relative clauses with commas
will not only be distracted from the flow of your fiction,
they will see these as mistakes arising from the author's ignorance
rather than considered authorial choice
and in their heart of hearts, they will think less of you.

A careful, kind and intelligent reader asked me why, in Black Hawk, I used the word 'antiseptic' long before the germ theory and why Justine dissolved her antiseptic in liquid and packed it in bottles.  Why not just send the powder along on these expeditions.

(Jo clears her throat) and says 'THANK YOU' for caring enough to wonder about this.

And I haz  reasons (excuses):

As to the word 'antiseptic'. Millennia ago, long before they understood the mechanism by which it worked, folks knew some stuff discouraged infection. By mid-C18 folks had a word for that and it's the same one we use today. Antiseptic. The OED gives us a 1751 "Myrrh in a watery menstruum was 12 times more antiseptic than salt water."

The writer's problem is that 'antiseptic' sounds very modern.

So I sat for a while pondering whether I should use it. This is classic historical writer dilemma and one of the things that drives sensitive souls to drink -- coffee if not brandy, anyway. 'Historical Word Problem' hits me three, four times a book.
But antiseptic is a couple generations prior to date-of-story, so I went ahead and laid it down.

I also considered the vexed question of which medications would be carried as mix-it-yourself powders and which would be aqueous solutions or tincture-of-this-and-that. It seemed to me the choice depended on the exactness with which the solution must be prepared and how quickly the solution would be needed when called for.

I posited that Justine's mixture takes a good long while to go into solution -- thus the boiling water -- and is likely to be needed PDQ, if needed at all. Bottled at the source, it can be used immediately. Prepared In the field, it would need hot water and a long while to dissolve.  This is the same reason a modern first aid kit intended for use in the outback would have its antiseptic in liquid, ready to use, form. 
Justine includes one bottle for immediate use and also the powder for mixing a further supply.

I have her dissolve in water rather than alcohol because this is a water-soluble powder. Oddly, I find no indication folks thought of alcohol as antiseptic in 1800. It may just be I haven't researched it enough.

Carrying liquids could feel a little 'off' to the reader for several reasons. I think it's because liquid is heavy. Some part of our mind is reluctance to see clunky bottles of liquid cumbering up a medical kit that has to be carried through the jungles of Borneo or wherever.


The medical cases of the era were heavy.

Technical Topics -- On Modifiers

I was nattering on elsewhere about my stance on adjectives.
As I say, I'm not against modifiers. I'm just not in love with them.

Here's why, being general about it.
The strongest writing is powered by nouns and verbs. If we find ourselves needing lotsa modifiers, it may be because our nouns and verbs aren't doing their proper work.



At some stage of redraft, it's maybe useful to mentally pluck away all the modifiers -- the adverbs, adjectives, and modifying phrases -- and look at the writing without them.

Is this stripped-bare passage left without precision, color and exuberance? Can we perk up the nouns and verbs? Make them visual and specific?

Can we exchange 'the crisp, smooth-skinned, shiny-green eating apple' for 'the crisp Granny Smith'?

  

-- We're tempted by modifiers because they're easy to add. We can slather on three dozen adjectives in the time it takes to locate one good noun.


-- We're tempted by modifiers because most of the rare, impressive, Latinate words we know happen to be modifiers rather than nouns and verbs. (I think that's because our language base is Germanic. Latin is the fancy add-on.) 
And who doesn't want to sound erudite.


-- We're tempted by modifiers because we don't trust the strength of our own writing. So we concentrate on surface decoration rather than underlying sentence design. Then we end up with the dress way up above instead of the one here down below.

Technical Topic -- Starting With a Dream

Elsewhere, folks are discussing beginning the story with a dream sequence.

I have lots of stuff to say. 
Most of which I have already gifted to the world but am perfectly happy to say again.

So I go something like this:

Dear Dreamer,


When we approach a new story we ache to start with what happened to everybody in fifth grade and the history of the Seven Kingdoms and acting-out-stuff-we-could-tell-in-200-words. We are convinced the reader needs to know all this infodump and backstory to understand what's going on.

But this -- generally three chapters of -- backstory and infodump
doesn't belong in Chapter One.
Chapter One has lots of other stuff it needs to do,
and backstory gets in the way of doing that vital stuff.

A dream, even a recurrent dream that is important to the plot, sounds very much like backstory.

If you need the info contained in the dream, drop it in Chapter Eight:


Maurice looked up as she came in. "You look awful," he said.

"Another of those dreams."
 
He pulled over a new plate and put half his English muffin on it. Not the part he'd bitten into. The other half. "Tell me about it."
 
"I don't want to--"
 
"Tell me."
 
She dropped into the chair, propped her forehead in her hands and spoke, not looking at him. Not looking up. "It was ... 1943, I think. Or '44. I was a nurse, somewhere tropical. The South Pacific. They were bringing in sailors all mangled to bits. Some ship had been hit."
 
"And you were working on them. A bad enough dream." Maurice put milk in a cup of coffee. No sugar.
 
"I wasn't working. I was in ... a big browny-greeny tent. Hot. Sweaty inside. I was in my quarters in the tent, looking in a mirror. That was the worst, worse than what happened next. I looked in the mirror and it wasn't me."
 
"Like the other dreams."
 
"Like all the rest. I had a gun. I shot myself, looking in the mirror, seeing myself do it."
 
"Drink your coffee." Maurice set it down at her elbow.



That's 200 words. It conveys the information. It doesn't tangle the feet of Chapter One when Chapter One is busy doing other things.
It doesn't pull the reader out of the ongoing story to tell a little barely connected pocket story.
(If you absolutely must act out the info in the dream, this can become a flashback.)

And plopping the dream into the realtime of the story lets the protags immediately relate to the information of the dream.
That protag reaction gives the dream emotional meaning.

Technical Topic -- Just Leave Stuff Out

Elsewhere, somebody asked, (I'm paraphrasing,)

"Time passes between one chapter and the next.  Stuff happens.
Do I have to write out all those scenes of checking into a picturesque inn and selling the horse and leaving a message for the dwarf?

How do I show the reader what went on without dropping long, boring explanations at the start of the new chapter?"


This is part of the larger topic of
 Just Leave Stuff Out
where we don't tell the reader most of
what's going on in our timeline
because most of what people do is excruciatingly boring.

So you don't take the character Miles out of the library and show him walking along the

Not taking every separate step

hall and then downstairs with his hand on the bannister and then down another hall which you describe in detail and then to the kitchen door and then he opens the door and walks in . . .

It's more like,
"I'll just ask Doris about that." Miles stomped out of the library.
He didn't find Doris in the kitchen.  She was out back, in the kitchen garden, hanging up damp tea towels, looking frazzled. 

We have skipped right from brandy by the library fire to tea towels in the garden and skipped the dull long dull trek through Milton manor.

(We have, incidentally, changed scene without knocking the reader over the head with it.  Did you see that?  Zip.)
The reader is grateful.
Even Miles is grateful.

When we move from one chapter to another and change place and let time elapse, we take advantage of Just Leave Stuff Out.

Chaptering is a place where we have have lots to do.  It's a bit like the beginning of the whole story, in fact.  We re-involve the reader.  Just as we don't start our story with a collection of backstory factoids, we don't start a new chapter with a clunky summary of intervening action.    

The triumvirate. I leave you to decide who is which.

Here's what we do when we start a new chapter in a radically new place.
Generally speaking, our goals are:

(1) establishment of POV, (if in 3rd limited,)
(2) establishment of setting, and
(3) action that is happening right now.

This is the triumvirate of
Whose head am I in?
Where the devil am I?
What's going on?  (We want something going on even if it's trivial.  We want a character in motion.)

Lookit here.

***

Chapter Six

Hork was as fond of rodents as the next man. His sister raised prize-winning ROUXs back home--fine eating and and a soft, spinnable

Action holding onto the story

wool in the fall. But he didn't like the wild pygmy variety that scattered underfoot as they walked into The Willing Wench.



-- And we got a character in motion, rather than a static scene.

He's walking into an inn.  We could even add more opening of doors or pushing aside of bystanders if we wanted to.
Motion.  Action.

-- We know where we are in space and time.  We are in the scene because the character has performed an action.

-- We have identified the POV character for the chapter because we see his internals and he is the first identified character.

In short, this first paragraph does the triumvirate of scene establishment.


I like to go pretty fast into dialog at the head of a chapter. Just my preference. I like this first dialog to hold emotion about the scene at hand and to hint at the next problem.

"Why don't we just eat in a sewer and skip the middleman?" He followed Jeremy to a table in the arse end of the tavern, careful where he put his feet.

"You wanted skanky? I give you skanky." Jeremy brushed at the history of former meals that encrusted the table. Gave up. Sat on the bench. "Brytog will like this place."

"And we have to please Brytog."

"God help us, we do."

Not mentioning the obvious

Okay. We are fifty or a hundred words into the scene.  All of the words have been in the scene's realtime.  We've added more stage business to show time passing and to solidify the fictive place.  This is about the earliest point that we bring up anything that happened elsewhen and elsewhere.

We mention only what is not obvious.
And our readers are very very smart, so lots of stuff will be obvious to them.

If our characters are warm and dry in the new chapter and last chapter they fell in a river, the reader will figure out they have changed clothing. If it is night and last chapter was noon, they know time has passed. If our folks walk off to their room at the inn, we don't need to say or to show one of them renting a room.  We Leave Stuff Out.

We add stuff that is
(1) not bloody obvious,
(2) important, and
(3) related to the problem the characters are going to deal with.

Insofar as possible, we wrap up the backstory factoids in ribbons of what-will-happen-next.

Ok.  Let's add that backstory ...

Jeremy tapped the purse he wore at his belt. "I got three and six for the nag and eight for the tack. It won't be traced back to us. I dropped some of it on replacement arrows, which you can complain about later when we're back at the inn.  The innkeep and the fletcher both say there's no werewolves in town. The Lythrops are hiding or run off in disorder. Or dead."

"Maybe they ate here." Himself, he wasn't going to touch anything that came out of that kitchen, including the tavern wench headed their way.

***

This is same old, same old problem of how to add backstory invisibly.

So let's say, for some arcane reason it's important the pack horse be accounted for.  Let's also say it's important to show somebody rented a room at the inn.
(Though basically these both sound dull as dirt.)
But let's say they're important and we gotta add them.

We want to convey these past factoids without dragging the reader's mind away from the present scene and back into the past.  
So we don't talk about them in a way that calls up the past.

We talk about them now-ish-ly.

The sale of the horse six hours ago greets us in the story present time because it's all about 'we won't get caught'. That's a 'now' worry.  A current worry.  We aren't dragged back to the morning and a scene with the unimportant guy who bought the horse.

The sale of the horse segues to arrows -- arrows with a 'now' location and intended action in the future when they will be examined.  'Why do they need arrows?' the reader asks herself.  This drags her to the future instead of the past.

Also -- 'nother technical point here -- we've given both character a plausible reason to talk about that sale.  We've avoided As You Know Bob where one guy describes dull intervening events to the other.

And if for some reason we want to tell the reader there's an inn chamber rented?

An inn, but probably less exciting than the Willing Wench

We don't go back into the past to show the innkeeper haggling over storing their luggage.  We firmly place that inn-rental factoid in the present by surrounding it with werewolves which are a current and future problem.
(This is like putting medicine into the ball of hamburger and trying to trick the dog into swallowing it, which is to say, not easy.)

So it's less a backstory dump of,"I rented a room. Then I sold the horse. Then I ..."
It's not so much, "This is what I did four hours ago and that is what I did next."

It's more, "When I bought oranges in the market there was no rumor of the princess coming through town,"
which brings the past action of orange purchasing into a relationship with the next problem in the story.

Technical Topic -- Where does the Spy Stuff Come From?

Most Excellent Reader Elizabeth asks:

"Could you talk about how you come up with all the various capers and escapades for your spies? 
All the fiddly bits that string together to make up the jobs they pull basically. 

How do you do that? How do figure out the pieces and then put them together?"


Hah!  Bit of a tough question.

Plot devices. I haz them.

One good thing is that the spy stuff is all 'plot device', really.  The stories do not hang on the outcome of any of the spy stuff, except in Forbidden Rose where the actual historical politics are important.
All this running around, doing stuff, is just plot device, That means I can plug one thing or another thing into that spot in the story.  I have something to accomplish and it doesn't much matter which 'device' I choose. 

So, for instance,  I had a spot in Spymaster's Lady where I want my heroine to escape Meeks Street.

I set up an event -- a plot device -- that makes the escape possible.

I need a plot device because it is not like my Meeks Street guys are going to go out one afternoon and leave the door open behind them.

But it could be anything, so long as it opens up Meeks Street so my heroine can escape.

I considered a bunch of possibilities. 

Sorta like this coach

I can have a coach drive by and men shoot out of it, hoping to hit somebody in the house. 
(My heroine escapes because they have loosened the bars on the windows.)

Or I could use a cat playing bagpipes

I could have some bad guy throw a satchel bomb over the side wall.   Or they leave a box of explosives at the front door as a delivery.  Or they park a wagon outside with a bomb in it.
(That would loosen the window bars but good.)

Or maybe somebody drives up a load of cobras and dumps them in the back garden

Cobra, which Adrian could have got hold of

(and everybody has to get out of the house and she escapes in the confusion.)

Or the baddies could steal Congreve rockets or fireworks and set up on the next street and lob some explosive rockets through the air.
(That makes a nice weakened spot in the house wall for the heroine to pull the bricks away and slip through.)

Or somebody could sneak up to the roof and drop a keg of gunpowder down the chimney.  Boom.
(Which blows through the bars they have blocking the chimney and the heroine is up and away through that chimney.)

There are others.

I don't have to stick to one possible caper.  I have a choice of many.
I pick the one that lets my hero and heroine do exciting things together.

And is, like, plausible.

I try out all these possibilities in my mind and toy with them and brainstorm with myself.

Gordon Riots. My answer to folks who think London wasn't violent

I go with the scenario that comes to my mind most clearly and strongly.

Where did I get the ideas for the possibilities I list above?

The coach drive-by comes to my mind from the Gordon Riots and various other riots of the period.

The satchel bomb -- I was in Paris when somebody threw one of these into a building.  Shook the glass in my windows but good. 
Cobras are in an old trunk novel I have under a bed somewhere. 
The rockets came to my mind because I like fireworks.  (I did a Word Wenches blog on period fireworks.) 
The keg of gunpowder is from the 'Infernal Machine', plot to assassinate Napoleon. 
Putting something down the chimney is from the story of how Hawker first entered Meeks Street.   

How do I figure out the details of making the 'spy stuff' happen?

Research.
And more research.
(Le sigh.)
Lotsa research.

None of that shows up in the scene, drat it, but my life is just full of finding 1800 stuff out. 

If I want my bad guys to do something as simple as arm up and go shoot into a house,
I can't do that till I ask myself --

What kind of neighborhood 'police protection' would be available at that time. 
(Short answer -- none.  Paris had police.  London didn't. That's why London had muggings and gang rapes in good neighborhoods and periodic riots.) 

Would the available neighborhood protection prevent a shooting or chase down the criminals who did it?

(No.)

What kind of weapons would be available? 
(I know more than I want to about period guns  Much more.  Ye gods, that is boring research and there is infinite scads of info.)

Would somebody be able to get hold of a bunch of guns? 
(Peace had come.  Much corruption in 1802 in the matter of army weapons.  Lots of weapons lying about in London) 

Would Frenchmen be conspicuous in London?
(It was the Peace of Amiens. Lotsa Englishmen travelling to France. Lots of traffic the other way.  London was full to the gills with Frenchmen.)

This is a metaphor for Research

How fast could they shoot? What would it sound and smell like?

(Y'know, Youtube is just a wealth of research goodness.)

What were security bars made of, how did bars get set in the windows; did London houses have bars; would a shotgun blast loosen a bar; how widely were they spaced; how much space does somebody need to climb between bars
 ...?

(Endless research.  Endless.)
And yes I really did work all the stuff out.  All the details of the 'spy stuff'.

So the long answer is above.
And the short answer is, "I dream up what should happen.  I picture it.  I spin it out of all my experience.  I blue sky it.
Then I research the details
to see if it could really happen."

Technical Topic - Why Are They having Sex on a Cactus?

Someone mentioned --
this is a kinda summary and paraphrase here --
the unlikelihood that our Hero and Heroine would fight a pitched battle in the morning, scamper like hell cross-country in the afternoon, and then fall onto their bedrolls in the evening with energy enough to stage a six-page sex romp.


And I have to agree.
Even when I was young and and limber I could manage no more than two out of three of those on a good day.

So why do we see love-on-rocks romps and stufflikethatthere in good Romance?

Why do skilled writers give us this sort of over-the-top scene?

More to the point -- why do readers love these scenes?
Why does the reader suspend disbelief here, when she'll go ballistic on the authenticity of the fish knives?

Couple of tropes at work here.
One I think of as 'Naked in the Heather':

genuine heather

Our redoubtable hero and heroine think nothing of stripping down to the buff and having at on a heather-covered hillside in the Highlands, in March, taking no notice of gorse bushes and rocks and bristly heather and, well . . . March in Scotland.

genuine sand

The H&H make love on beaches, (with sand in every crack and crevice and I do not mean among-the-tidal-rocks crevices,) in haystacks, on New York City ledges high above the traffic, and in public toilets at the airport, (Ewwww.)


The other trope I call 'It's Only a Flesh Wound, Honey', which is often also Glad-to-be-alive Sex.

Our H&H take time out for some nookie while fleeing packs of ebil men armed with AK-47s or rising hurricane waters or, nowadays, zombies. Nor are they deterred by various wounds acquired in their travels.
One can only marvel at the good health and general enthusiasm of all concerned, frankly.

Why are these tropes not merely tolerated, but popular?
I haz theories.

genuine passion

One is that readers see sex in these unlikely situations as a sign of overwhelming passion. They know they would be distracted by the prospect of hermit crabs scuttling over their private parts on some secluded beach.
The heroine isn't ...
because she's transported by passion.

Many folks come to Romance genre for a fix of exactly such overwhelming, transformational, the-world-well-lost-for-love, crazy passion . . . an indifference to gorse bushes and gunfire being absent from most folks' real lives because they are not fruitcakes.

And readers enjoy the mix of desperate, adrenalin-producing action and sex because it's just plain exciting. They'll tolerate the unlikelihood that one would pause for a quickie in the middle of hot pursuit if the sex is really, really good.

Romance writers use these old reliables because they work. The tropes heighten emotion. They feel familiar and comfy to long-time readers. 

Now.  Full disclosure here.  I did the Glad-to-Be-Alive-Sex thingum once that I know of.  It was in  .... um ... My Lord and Spymaster.  Jess and Sebastian have escaped, unhurt, from the lair of Lazarus.  Jess had done some knife fighting in that incident.

genuine Romance book

****

Oh, but she was amusing him, wasn't she? 

 [Sebastian said,] "When you brush up against death, you want to couple afterwards.  I found that out years ago.  I didn't know it worked the same with women.  Does it?"
 
"Does this time," she said frankly.  "Mostly I was real young.  And the last couple times I was so seasick I didn't want to do anything but curl up and die. 

******

So that is my own particular contribution to this trope.


Writers have the special joy of watching really good writers subvert these tropes.

not quite a sex scene, however

Remember the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where a bruised, exhausted Indy falls asleep before the H&H can make love? Spielberg pokes fun at 'It's Only a Flesh Wound, Honey,'and makes the writers in his audience fall in love with him.