Over with the Clover

[caper_est]

Now I know why I was hung up so long on the ending to the Wassail arc of Killer-Kate. It was the wrong bloody ending! I wish the back of my brain would talk to the front more clearly than it does.

"Enter Sir Richard of Clover Clough, bearing the Stone that Starts the Avalanche," made such a good turning point, and had so much of the cheap melodrama I love to drop in the right place. Unfortunately, having written it I can see that it's only going to complicate and dilute the main story beyond sense. I'm very fond of Sir Richard, who plays a significant offstage part in the missing thirty years of the story; but either he is going to continue as Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Book, or he's going to have a bit-part in the diplomatic sub-plot. Not a particularly comfortable part, either; but there's a lot of that going round in this story.

The trouble with giving Clover Clough an active rôle is that Richard's agency comes at the expense of my protags', by making everything that happens afterwards reactive - the sort of thing, in fact, that the Fairfielders might have done in some form anyway.  It gets things moving, all right.  But Kate and Luke need to be doing that.  Almost in the hour of their acceptance, they need to kick over the traces, as the Founder comes up with yet another cunning plan for preserving stalemate with a whole array of much more powerful opponents.

They need to make the Founder fight - which means showing her a path both to victory and to long-term peace that neither she nor her brilliant and diverse circle are capable of devising for themselves.  I've always known what my old reprobates had that would let them do that.

What I ought to have realized is that the story becomes axiomatically weaker, if I let the current of circumstance work with them rather than against them.

My gut evidently knew this all along, but was incapable of telling my head until the offending current had started flowing down the page. 

I.  Hate.  Revision.

Squillions of words, all writ with a pigeon-feather dipped in water.