Comfort and Oy

230 words this morning of a scene I hadn't the hardiness for yesterday after work - wherefore I fled to put the last coat of varnish on the new door instead, and pursue its various sequels.

This passage is actually part of a celebration, and done with goodwill on all parts.  But it's a mediaevaloid country custom, in a hard and dangerous place, albeit an unusually kind and free community.  When I saw how roughly the mock battle for the New Year was going to play out  ("She wouldn't know she'd won if she'd not spent blood nor tears on it," says the canny seamstress-witch Ciss Cross-Stitch in the back of my head, advising the Founder of Fairfields as to why it isn't always sensible to persuade people to behave sensibly), all my sensibilities both old-fashioned and new-fangled positively cringed.  Even my court-reared characters winced.

Which suggests to me that I have at least something right about the tone.  If a community of medieval peasant-pioneers on the ragged edge of Elfland thought and acted inside my modern comfort zone, I would certainly be getting them wrong.

Of course, too far outside the consensus modern comfort zone, and that's a potential problem for the reader.

What I'm trying to do, whether this particular scene survives the final cut or not, is to conjure a place in some ways rawly uncomfortable, and in others warm and welcoming - so that the whole should be seamless, and at best dearly desirable for the reader to visit, or at worst wholeheartedly believable in the way it speaks to my tumbleweed protagonists of 'home'.

Elsewhere, I am still being wormed, and Edward Lessingham has just turned up with wood and tools and interminably described ornamentation to fix up his half-cocked frame story.