Goat Notes

That would be both my protagonists' lives, and my feelings about the prose that bears them along, at this point.  Meh!

I fixed a big bundle of inconsistencies concerning the state of Kate's health in the early story, and discovered that the answer I finally happened on had been lurking unnoticed in the text all along.  I failed to plant a Chekhov's Suitcase Nuke in this scene, so I'm hoping to wedge it into the next one.

This is the part of the book where I got stuck for a year and turned to gentler work, before taking up the original telling again.  It's all in this week's quota, and it's nearly as brutal to revise as it was to write.  Next week will be Purgatorio to this section's Inferno, and after that - Fairfields, which is not even the Earthly Paradise but will do until something better comes along.  So at least I've got some motivation to stick to my timetable!

For a scene that took me so long to sort out, I didn't have much change to show for it.  I fixed a fossil of a previous chronology, and discovered something about fern biology which I never bothered to look up when I was studying it as a scientist.  One more scene makes a chapter, and starts the super-quixotic Last Quest.

Return of the Kateverse folksongs! Run away! Run and hide!

Soldier song, set ten years after The Deed of Katy Elflocks and twenty before Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland. It does not depend on knowledge of the story.  It has a tune, though not a very remarkable one, and I've probably nicked the musical elements from some part of the Great Folk Cauldron or other.




When I was naught but a lad of sixteen,
Ambrosine Wills was the name of my Queen.
Freely she called to me, gaily I strode
Daily to meet her by the old river road!
The old river road, boys, the old river road -
Our babe came sailing down the old river road!

Payments grew many and pennies grew few.
Amber and I barely knew what to do
Till our lords put the young Queen from her throne.
I took her silver, and left Amber alone.
The Allwater road, boys, the Allwater road -
Off with the Green Rose down the Allwater road!

Battles we fought for her, battles we won.
Bounty she showered when her battles were done.
Now I could pay all the debts that we owed,
And farm like a franklin by the old river road!
The old river road, boys, the old river road -
Homewards to Amber up the old river road!

Back home by Siffswater, Amber was gone,
Fled with a pedlar and with Simkin our son.
All the Queen's silver she'd spent for their meat -
Fled with a pedlar so Simkin should eat.
The damned river road, boys, the damned river road -
She saved our Simkin down the damned river road!

I walked a thousand miles, bowed and bereft,
Back to the Green Rose, all the queen I had left.
Loyalty I offered her, loyalty she showed -
I send her foemen down the Black River road!
The Black River road, boys, the Black River road -
Till I meet Amber by the Black River road!

Finished revising the first scene this morning.  Getting through this week's remaining four will require a slight acceleration.

What I Did:

- Changed the opening narrative voice from the one I started with, to the one the story acquired as it evolved.  Exit Alan Eaton's redaction of an unattributed Allingdale folk-tale: enter Carrie-Anne Booklorn's redaction of the Fairfields folk-epic of the Rising, as told by romantic Hick-Mack-Heck and earthy Sairey Salt-the-Stew.  The telling is now finer-grained, and closer to a peasant's-eye view, than the way I began it.

- Backfilled some of the consequences of the way I later developed Northdales history.

- Sneaked some incluing and Chekhovian gunnery into the scene.

- Made the village of Blackwaterside into more of a particular place and less of a generic backdrop, in keeping with the way I depicted the Langdalehead region when my characters finally got back to it.

- Patched some shoddy prose, which henceforth may be taken as read for every scene.

Scene Two is another that will need quite a bit of work, in the light of where I took all the stuff in it later.   I'll see what I can do about that tonight...

Three Katherines of Allingdale: Masses of research and plot-wrangling going on, though little enough actual writing.  The Wassail Arc is going through some serious changes, in the course of being drawn taut into the line of the plot.  By far the biggest change sorts out a number of my other problems simultaneously - it's now really the Fairfields Arc, spanning almost a year from the Wassail until the approach of the next winter.  Much of that year is going to be skipped over or alluded to only in passing.  That still gives time for a number of things to develop organically. 

Most of all, it gives Katy Elflocks time to try to deal with the situation her own way - and actually fail, learning first-hand what sort of impossibility she's up against this time.  That's really far more in character than deducing a lot about the Big Bad in advance, so Kate and Luke can convince her and her circle that it's time for desperate remedies already.  And I get to do big reveals in action rather than exposition!

I couldn't do that the first time around, because they hadn't been fully revealed to me either.

Also, Fairfields' military strategy in Langdale now looks at least roughly plausible - they actually do logistics, and get time to set up the anvil for their great stroke at Carrowglaze in a less handwavy manner.

Here I go again...

Or weird quantum-mechanical state of chapter, as the case may be.

Further work on the Fairfields arc of Killer-Kate has revealed that it needs to be tautened up by, 'ere we go again, adding another chapter.  I have a fairly strong vision of this already, including the makings of a climactic scene I like a lot.  As a bonus to resolving most of the problems set out in the previous post, it gives me a free chance to bring back the Big Bad plotline to the front of the reader's mind again, without adding yet more fruitless talk and speculation.  Which makes it a pretty rich vision.

What makes it an embarrassingly rich vision is that I have two of it.  There's a pre-Wassail version, provisionally titled Hunt and Holt, and a post-Wassail one I've dubbed The Holt and the Haunt.  The former is slightly more focused on Luke and the mortal opposition, the latter on Katy and the Big Bad.  The dynamics of the surrounding chapters will depend a lot on which one I choose.  Post-Wassail is looking better in several ways.  But I can't choose one for certain, except in the act of deciding how the whole Fairfields arc is going to end up.  Which can't be decided for certain until the whole-book critical review is finished, so that I'll know what I need to plant in the Fields and what I ought to grub up.  Meantime, the chapter exists in a cloud of uncollapsed contradictions, and is going to stay that way for at least the next week or two, as I plug on criticizing the first draft all the way to its end.

Has anybody else had similar experiences?  I seem to have spent quite a lot of time with this book, holding contradictory plot ideas in tension until the stronger one crystallizes into truth.  This is just a blatant case.  It's somewhat mind-bending and occasionally exhausting; and until I'm done I'm not going to know whether it's just inefficient and indecisive, or a necessary part of telling this tale honestly.

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: Finished first revising pass on the Last Quest arc, which is thematically a cascade of heroic descents into, and escapes/rescues from, successively more profound hells of one kind or another.  This happened more or less by accident, but is now being sharpened and accented by design, because it's so well-placed to foreshadow the corresponding public hell-harrowings attempted by our heroes in the Rising.  This re-emphasis also builds up and draws together the matter of the Curse.

Also, I now know why Katy is so ignorant of such a horrid lurker on her threshold, until Kate and Luke make it... impossible to overlook any more.

I'm now moving onto the Wassail arc, which I pretty much made up on the hoof and which needs to be purged of considerable process-writing and dead-ends.  The numerous characters of Fairfields will want to be made consistent with their later development and portrayal in the Rising, and the exploratory sections repurposed to fit with events later in the book.

Before I reach the Rising, I ought to have some research materials I've ordered, which I need to get Garcastle and its sketchy community into a truer focus.

In my copious spare time, I continue exploring the broad frontiers of my ignorance about West African history and culture, in order to be somewhat better-informed when I finally get past this epic and onto Deity & Decolonization/ Fatal Exploit/ Translation & Transgression/ the One About The Chocolate.

Three Katherines of Allingdale: Another week of donkey-work.  Analysing and amending the Lord Evil arc; annotating old scenes for revision in light of it; writing the outlines for the first set of new ones; and finally coming up with a rough geography of the north-eastern counties and foreign nations which is plausibly consistent across the whole tale.

Still to do: rinse and repeat for the Puffin-Genius arc; ditto for the Matter of Fairfields; ditto for the Big Bad/the Untold Tale.  Then a consistency-check per major character, a correction-scheme for all major blunders so far noted, and the big straight-through rewrite before final polishing.

(sigh)

The Deed of Katy Elflocks: A new 2,000 word scene composed last night and this morning, to retrofit one of the thorns in Katy's side from Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland, and make the portrayal of the Dales more consistent between the two stories.  Also planted a couple of Chekhov's guns, so that they're not just pulled out of my ear in Killer-Kate.  Pulling guns out one's ear is not, I'm told, considered best practice by the cognoscenti.

I spent most of the last week donkeying through the major structural critique of Three Katherines as a complete novel.  What came out of this:

1) I'm going to go ahead with the two-part story in strongly differentiated voices.  First, the theme's expounding in Alan Eaton's lighter, terser, more courtly and satirical fairy-tale of Katy.  Then, the development and resolution in Hick-Mack-Heck and Sairey Salt-the-Stew's denser, fiercer, more grounded and committed folk-epic of Killer-Kate.  The Lord Dunsany knob is turned higher in Alan's style, the William Morris knob in Hick and Sairey's, though I think they're both recognizably modes of mine.  The authors don't explicitly intrude themselves into the tale at any stage, but it helps me to have a fair sense of where they're each coming from.

2) The unfolding of the untold middle tale of Kit Fox seems to more or less work in Killer-Kate: again, I'm going to leave that part of the structure largely as it is, give or take a bit of modification in detail.

3) The Rival Revolution subplot doesn't need much more work than I just supplied it.  The Lord Evil, Puffin Superior, and Diplomatic subplots will on the other hand require significant structural changes, not least because they all bear on just what exactly everybody is fighting for.  I've donkeyed up some of the legal, customary, and folk-historical groundwork over the past week, and shall start the Political Rewrite shortly.  This won't - or shouldn't - add to the proportion of politics in the story: it's about rooting it in local reality, and about making the characters' actions mesh more reasonably, whilst removing patches of pointless intriguey filler that never went anywhere.  It's by far the biggest and most critical section of the rewrite, and will certainly involve at least three new chapters.  It may also involve the disappearance of one or more of the existing ones: can't see that far ahead, yet.

Anyway, the job's begun, and I'm writing actual story again!

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: A running problem with the revision has been trying to make Evil Lord Evil's behaviour make consistent sense that doesn't boil down, on closer analysis, to "Everything I do, I do it cos I'm Stupid Evil!"   Yes, he is what at least in parlour-psychological terms would be called a high-functioning sociopath; but, hello, high-functioning!

But I've finally worked out what he's about, and why he's always slipped out of my grasp like a greased pig up till now.  I've been thinking of the less-evil antagonists as the cautious, canny, reluctant modernizers, and Lord Evil as the defender of the worst of the bad old ways - he is, after all, pretty much the poster boy for viciously irresponsible aristocratic privilege.

Actually, everything he does starts making a hell of a lot more sense now I understand him as the modernizer - the improver - the guy who's really good at figuring out how to make oppression pay and look shiny, instead of cost and smell stinky.  His rivals are rationalists, but they're conservative mediaeval rationalists: not his kind at all.  But Lord Evil's found the hole in their law-web, and - for all his early mistakes - he's found a 'progressive' way to mine money out of it, at the peasants' expense, without destroying them.   And it's an exploit that only a certain sort of... focused... mind could have thought of.

In a way it's the inverse of Our Heroes' existential challenge to the old manorial regime.  Our lad might be really at home today, in the ministries and boardrooms of the prison-industrial complex.

Anyhow, now I know where his policy's coming from, and why some of his existing advice goes the way it does.  From where he's standing, Katy & Co. just threw the Dale-Lords the opportunity of three lifetimes.

And I think he's finally thrown me the master-clue to the Revised Political Plot.