Goat Notes

Working on the plotlines, my first job has been to compile a useful list of the major characters in Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland. One of the issues that came up quickly is a structural issue for the whole of Three Katherines of Allingdale, and makes me think I'll do well to keep the thirty-year gap unfilled if I possibly can. It's the question of what the major political players are doing in it.

( Narrative uselessness and structural uses of good royals in an aristo-sceptical fantasy. )

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 2,700 words.  The Puffin Superior kicks over the traces; Lord Evil objects; Golden Kate overrules him with a vengeance.  I've been waiting four years for this moment, and Kate's been waiting forty.  The Family Fight is SO CONCLUDED!

So that's the second climax - underpinned with something newer, more sinister, and generally squigglier, that leads me on to the last desperate throw, and the final confrontation with the Big Bad.  First, I'll just be wanting to tie off the ends of this chapter.

Wah-hoo!

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 380 words.  Excursion with puffins.  Good Katy doesn't seem, after all,  to have accomplished everything everybody hoped for - I'll need in the redraft to be a bit clearer about just who thought the Night Without Stars accomplished just what. 

Somewhere near Stoneygates, there is a man voluntarily going under the alias of Hob Hop-Toad.  He and some other fellows should get to make their reports tonight.  That's going to go down like black pudding at the Vegan Society banquet!

Speaking of black pudding, I've now finished the worst of my annual wade through blood and offal in the course of my employment.  The first Open Day of the term - a separate event! - is also safely accomplished.

I begin to see a light at the end of the Friday...

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: No words, but Golden Kate storming up to me in a blaze that burns away all the clutter and dither about her and the Young Duke in the forthcoming chapter.  Once again my old wolf demonstrates that however big of a bitch she may be to anybody else, this is nothing compared to how savagely she's prepared to use herself in their cause.

I don't think I need to worry about the Duke's looking weak any more, or the resolution looking stagey.  Geez Louise, woman!

Just back from a week's goofing off in the Bernese Oberland of Switzerland. Mountains such as the Ogre, the Monk, and the Virgin I never saw before, nor their high glaciers and the streams that tumble from them. It is also something strange to see hills feathered by great stands of conifers, each rising up to a third or half of the hill's own height. As for the most formidable meals, the mountains are plainly necessary in order to walk them off.

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: The Family Fight chapter has not so much split, as required me to step back in time and write another chapter from the Young Duke's viewpoint in Alland, simultaneous with all the late shenanigans in Langdale. Better far than trying to infodump it into Kate's big return scene, whose flow I now follow a lot better. The Duke can here emerge as the man I began to develop in the middle chapters, rather than the vain and callow boy of my vaguer original vision three years back. The tragedy he teeters on the verge of is just as wrong-headedly catastrophic as it was then, but much less stupid and more interesting.

He will need his runup for that, though; and the Puffin Superior, moving onto the board at last, gets to establish herself in some serious action before her fateful collision with Kate. And so the last of my important characters walks on stage.

Also I composed a folk ballad, Two Fair Maids of Alland, which has been earworming me all holiday and which I can at last record and drive out again. This one I can't post any time soon anywhere, because despite its wild inaccuracies it contains a major spoiler for the Family Fight.

A more friendly family meet-up for me now, and more travels immediately afterwards.  Then a summer which should see the... resolution... of the mortal struggles in Allingdale, and then only one last full-on chapter to go back to work on: the climactic showdown with the Big Bad, and its epilogue.  I'm working on the assumption that the first draft should be done and dusted by October, and the intense revision phase finished by the end of the year.

This is quite consistent with the pace so far.  It is also a very strange feeling indeed.

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: First chapter notes on the sequel to the Battle of Carrowglaze.  Of course the bloomin' thing has immediately fissioned: three chapters and epilogue to go, once more!  Still, it's progress.

What this short transitional Chapter of the Flowers is doing, is letting up the pressure between the recent intensity of the Battle and the coming intensity of the Family Fight.  The latter is just too dense and wracking to follow directly on from the former.  So I'm making a virtue of the contrivance I'm using to get one character where and when I want them; and having Kate's second embassy to Garcastle go the long way around via the lower ends of the dales, between which runs a road that can reasonably bear a carriage.

That gives Kate & Co. a little more time for their grief, and for waking to the strange new world their deeds have brought with the morning, before I bring us to the discord that introduces the true chapter of Mother and Son.  It also lets me move some crowded material about the rival Saturnist revolutionaries in lower Langdale, out of explanations and epilogue.  The Saturnist lollers are... just a bit of a problem, in the sense that militant proto-Maoist Anabaptist friars on crusade might not have been the Diggers' dream allies in the fields we know.  So now we're going to see a little of Luke's response directly, instead of slipping it all into later exposition.  This yarn isn't really about Folk Saturnism at all, but surely is about its wellsprings and about Katy's alternative, so I have to weave a fair deal of that matter into the borders.

I'll start the Flowers directly, while I'm still working out the structure of the subsequent chapter - seeing as I know what I need to feed through already.

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: A chapter and a half of re-read, the pace slowing as I jump into the diplomatic snake-pit, and disentangle various characters' attempts to take the hiss.

Kate is in Garcastle, and the two sides' respective agendas are beginning to fracture already in the wake of Elegant Elder Sister's meeting with the Young Duke.  Luke is dealing with his first setback, and making his tactical withdrawal over Hareborough pursued by pointy sticks.  The draft is only two-thirds as rough as it seemed at the time.

I may have to lose or gloss over some of the complication in the redraft, since it's a bit much to ask a reader to follow plot knots that even I'm having trouble with!  On the other hand, editing for consistency ought to lighten the burden considerably.  We'll see.

Big gain from this morning: I know now what the consistency edit for Luke's great gambit in Langdale will look like.  The way the story had grown, it made his earlier actions look somewhat flaily and half-arsed.  No.  I see now that he was just being much more direct than I'd thought - he sets up his diplomatic ground, such as it is, by his actions in the very first village, and in his first encounter with the Earl's lancers.  It's only after the coming crisis that he'll cube this very one-dimensional pretext, and make it real in deadly earnest.  So we get prefiguration of his Great Moment, and a ferociously ironic inversion of its original character, for free... I wish I could claim credit for having put that there on purpose!  But my Muse is welcome to the credit, if I can keep the goods.

That's one major known problem with the first draft solved, and not something I'd meant this re-read to address at all.  I hope the disentanglement of Kate's plotline will go so well, yesssss!

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 515 words.  Relatively Okay Genius puts forward a perfectly constructive proposal which is very difficult to argue against.  And the last of my plot persons, the learned Abbess who's been waiting serenely in her cloisters since the day I first put this tale together, comes into sight across the chessboard.

Such an influx of acknowledged wisdom and virtue must be pure win-win all round, so nobody need fear that it will do them up like a kipper.

Probably all I'll get done today: the half-term holiday's begun, and family frolics call.

Lob Lazy at the House of Silence: 560 words.  Cunning Brother, unlike Thuggish brother, actually bothers to research what he's getting into - and the conversations he gets into are much more interesting.  He will have the last word on everything, though.  I  just noticed a rather large and painful irony in that.

I found him a rune I liked very much, and I think I know what the next one is for, but the third is still a Mystery Plot Prize.  I knew it once.  I hope I rediscover it soon.

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: I've slept on the mess that is the Late Reveal plot fork, and it will probably work if I have to make it - at least, well enough for an exploratory draft.  I just need to get the bugs ironed out of that structure, and then do the same to Early Reveal.  Still deeply ambivalent about which I'd like to go with.

I was only being persecuted by some sort of Algernon Blackwoody ginkgo last night, which I suppose counts as an improvement.  What next, the Turnips of Terror?  It's not like I've been eating cheese before bedtime, or anything!

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 1,480 words.  The Bad Baron makes a bad mistake.  There is exactly one person who thinks the Young Duke isn't about to respond with a worse one.  Here I must rest a bit, because Elegant Elder Sister's stand on this is not what I imagined when I first sketched this scene, at all.  Will the others bring her round to that old turn of the tale, or will she not even go there?

The viewpoint has moved right back into its original in-world omni for this chapter.  Unsure whether this is a needful distancing made instinctively as the storm and strain increases, or whether it's going to have to find its way into somebody's head again in the redraft.  If so, this scene is probably Flashy Elder Brother's.  He's the most detached, the most slippery, and the only one of the main characters whose eyes we haven't seen through.  And this is one of those rare pinches even he can't bluff or juggle his way out of, caught cruelly between his little sister's hammer and Bonecold Refugee's anvil.  Yes - he, if anybody!  But I can't slow the spate now to make that happen.

At any rate, the next chapter must surely go with my old wolf Kate, alone.