Minor spoilers ahead for Too Much Love
After a year of writing about New Rome, I should be fairly comfortable writing about places I've never been. It turns out what's really nerve-wracking is writing about places I've never been that my readers may have actually seen.
Big chunks of Chapter 30 happen on St. Martin and in Kathmandu, Nepal. I'm solving a lot of the problem with St. Martin by inventing a resort for the action to take place in loosely based on my research about Club Orient.
With Kathmandu, it's another story. The action takes place all around the city a few months after the earthquakes that devastated Nepal and the surrounding regions in 2015. And while I've done the best research my Googling skills can handle, I'm sure some of the details aren't true-to-life.
Here's the sort of thing that stresses me out: The golden spire atop Boudhanath Stupa was damaged in the quake. I've seen pictures of it standing with raw brick exposed, covered in scaffolding. I've seen pictures of it missing entirely. I have no idea what its state was in late July 2015, so I went with what works best for the story.
(And don't get me started about why some pictures of the eyes on the monument are blue and some are brown. Is it seasonal? Does it vary by year? Were they blue before the quake and brown after? I have no idea. But, I think I punted on that one.)
Anyway, all of this happens in chapter 30, which is turning out to be monstrously long. It may turn out to be fifty pages in Google Docs. I'm also on my fifth day working on it. This all makes me glad I've got a backlog of chapters to post.
Chapter 17 this Friday. In it, we see Nick and Company finally start to settle into the business of giving away huge amounts of money, Simon being Simon, Arwen being Arwen, and a major left turn in someone's plans.
(Blame six years of watching Mad Men for the largely unhelpful teaser.)