caper_est | Search for the Heroes Around Herself (Reply)

This morning's writing was much better, catching fire again and bringing me to the end of the scene. I may well keep it yet.

When I was but a nipper, I suffered from an excessive sense of myself as the Hero of the Story - a delusion not to be confused with actual magnanimity and heroism, with which in my observation it shares certain roots, but which it is all too apt to hamper and spoil. I got better, honest! But this has no little to do with how I ended up writing, in Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland, the tale of two genuinely heroic personalities emerging from long delusion-fuelled villainhood. I have, how shall one say, a certain natural sympathy for them, and a desire to see them get it right.

Their methods of getting better are turning out more sharply distinct the longer I write them. Luke has tended to the more obvious course, which is also my own and I suspect most people's: getting used to being a plain man among plain folks, and seeing more value in that. But Kate can't think in terms of equality at all, or at least not at all as a good thing.

So this morning, as I finished her scene, she was seeing heroes out of legend in an unpretentious farmer and his wife, even as she no longer sees them in herself. More interestingly, I know those particular heroes and have written half their story. I don't think she was wrong at all.

That's... quite a way to go.

560 words: hospitality, Stew, enchantments older than magic.