Goat Notes

The closing scene to the Last Quest arc, while I work on the sense of the climactic scene.  I think that will hold: my map-let is strangely acceptable.  Here I had only to tweak some dialogue, and make the movements part of a consistent topography.

Fairfields at last!

Ah, Scene 9, the spear in my heart!  But this time the wound is clean, and we will never be quite in hell again - from here on in, our heroes are really heroes at last, doing tearingly generous deeds without recking either of their own glory or of whether the beneficiaries have the least conceivable claim on them.

The changes required in this long section were pleasingly small and subtle, although they have made all the difference.

This is not the climax of its arc - I have a couple of scenes left before I get there.  But it is the pivot.  This is, of all places, the place where Kate is permanently established as not merely Gawain the flawed flower of the old order, but Launcelot the unwilling and transcendent harbinger of the new.  (Who on that reading is Luke?  I think he most nearly counts as dead Tristram and living Palomides in one person, which is a pretty interesting combo - and is it utterly an accident that both knights in their latter days came to love Sir Launcelot above all other men?  H-m-m-m!)

The rest of the Last Quest Arc should be relatively a glide, in which case I will be back on schedule come Sunday.

Scene 9 is many of pages and full of trouble, and constitutes most of Chapter 5.  So I'm working on its many issues in the background, whilst I polish some shorter and simpler scenes that follow it.

This one wanted little beyond the sharpening of a couple of character points.

Considering what happens here, the revised version ends up markedly less depressing than the original.  Added some history and psychology, and have serious hopes that the result reads faster and shorter.

I planted the thing I was trying to plant yesterday.

The next scene is the one I spent a year, three years ago, compulsively avoiding writing.  Nearly half of the most different tale possible got told just to be writing something other than this shoggoth-shagger*.  After tomorrow, I ought to be sauntering uphill for a nice old  while.

*No actual shoggoths were shagged in the drafting of this scene.  No future shoggoths will be.  Tekeli-li is not a good pick-up line.  If it works, run away.  May not apply in Palmer Land, Alberta, or Penge.  Void where prohibited by quantum.

It's marvellous how it concentrates the mind, having to either finish a scene right now, or leave it the way it was.  Plenty to fix in this scene, mostly removing repetitions and correcting obsolete backstory.  Chapter Two, and my first week's revision quota, accomplished!

We know a song about that, don't we?  Unfortunately, the folk song is about as accurate as folk songs usually are, and Golden Kate is about as qualified to be a beggar as I am to shoot ogres through the heart from horseback.  This turns out to be an issue, since in the first draft her stint  as an impoverished hermit appears to require several tools she can't make for herself in the wilderness, and I'd forgotten to allow her any truly useful interactions with other human beings.  She is a ridiculously good woodswoman for an aristocrat, but nobody is that good.  Her circumstances are accordingly rejigged to fit (i) plausibility, and (ii) the tone of the rest of the book.

Several other changes have been made, all according to the principle that everything that is complete cobblers when you think about it twice has got to go - however fine the prose it made, and however prosaic its replacement.  Sacrifices have occurred.  Boo hoo!

Two more scenes, one of them very short, to fix on Sunday if I want to make my quota.

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...

From an unpublishable fragment in which a definite non-poet attempts to recount a part of the backstory which does not translate reasonably into prose, from a place where even the physics rhymes instead of repeating.

I don't know that I'll get any prose out of this excursion myself, but I did get some enlightenment on one of the Kateverse's wilder mysteries.

Inspired by this thought-provoking conversation about the tension between story-telling and word-craft, but at a somewhat different angle and not directly responsive to it.  The same events are covered in each of the following... yarns. 

First up, we have this exciting fight scene from super action thriller The Flowerpot Conspiracy!

Bill hit Ben. “You rat!” snarled Ben. Ben hit Bill and knocked him down. 

“Weed!” cried Weed.

I might call The Flowerpot Conspiracy many things, but the salient one here is under-written.  Even Dan Brown's prose needs to do more than this, to engage the reader with the tale.

Next, we turn to Death and the Daisy, a hard-hitting pulp-style adventure:

Ben stepped in front of Weed. “Back off, Bill!” he warned.

Bill came in swinging. Ben’s block was a hairsplit late, and his brother’s fist smashed into his nose, staggering him backwards in a sputter of pain and blood. “You rat!” snarled Ben, over a rising vegetable keening from Weed.   He surged up under Bill’s careless guard, and slugged him a good one to the solar plexus. Bill whuffed, choked, and folded. Ben cast a cold eye down on him, and finished the job with a hammer-blow to his occiput. Bill went right down and stayed there. Ben wiped his eyes on the back of his hand, then withdrew his long unsavoury handkerchief from his pocket, and clapped it to his gouting nose. It hurt like the devil, but at least it didn’t feel broken.

“Weeeeeed!” cried Weed.

Death and the Daisy is not, perhaps, very good.  For one thing, I write punch-ups not much better than I practice them.  However, in terms of matching style and matter, I think it's about on the right level.  This is deliberately about the most basic level of story for which it's worth finding a properly-matching prose style: Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men fall out over Weed; Bill goes to the bad and does foo-bar; Ben and Weed emerge triumphant.

Now we can turn the prose dial right to the other extreme.  Here's the excerpt from a treatment I consider overwritten - that ambitious romantic mediaeval fantasy, The Weed at the World's End:

Bill’s eyes, cold and unwholesome as the stagnant waters of some peat-hag or mire in the kindless days of February, glinted evilly. As a man wisp-tempted Ben’s brother now seemed to him; as in a manner led by some vague unhallowed light through obscure marsh-tracks and by-ways in which all goals go awry, united only in their despair of any good ending.

Yet it was the Damsel Weed who must now be his only care – whether by duty, as his oath and his chivalry charged him alike; or for the right of the matter, seeing how Weed had set aside all thought of comfort or safety in her care for the many-coloured world, whereas Bill ever slighted all causes save his own liking and pleasure; or yet only for Ben’s very love and delight in that dear flower-nymph’s fellowship, who had become to him through many trials indeed his Day’s-Eye.

Bare is back without brother behind it, thought Ben in great anguish of mind; yet say again this, that love exceeds blood as blood surpasses water; and my soul’s choice is made! “Back off, Bill!” he warned.

His words fell as a doom: the author could no more be arsed: the reader slumped gratefully into the all-solacing arms of Morpheus.

Oh wait, they didn't.  This news brought home to me through my current whole-story, line-by-line critical pass over Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland.  I'm about half-way through that now.

- Luke's strategy in the Rising, on more careful analysis, involves entirely too much of: "Ha!  The nobles are used to summer warfare!  But this is winter warfare, so we can cunningly deploy tactics against them which will work even less well in winter!"

- If Dougal Dare-All really needs Luke to come up with the good plan Luke presently supplies him, he needs to be re-named Dougal Duh!-All forthwith.  They are supposed to be experts in totally different spheres.

- Neither Katy Elflocks nor any of her circle are supposed to possess any spark of military genius.  This does not mean they won't notice when a plan is slapped together entirely out of hope, cheek, plot wire and gaffer tape.

- And the fact that they're exceptionally good with hope and gaffer tape doesn't mean they won't insist on something more substantial at the core of it.

- In particular, neither Luke, nor Dougal, nor the former merchant-adventurer, nor the clever grange-clerk of Fairfields are going to involve themselves in a campaign whose logistics appear to have been delegated to the rats, rats, big as bloomin' cats, in the quartermaster's stores.

Katy ain't no Elrond, Fairfields ain't no Rivendell, and all their fellowship are well aware that Kateverse providence is somewhat less trustworthy than a prince's promises.  This is not the fairy-tale part of the story!  (At least, not on that overt a level.)

I'm seeing and sketching out solutions as I write, and trying to minimize the amount of new or magical matter in them.  The good news is that getting the reconnaissance and logistics right should simultaneously solve another problem: the narrative slackness of the important Fairfields arc, which was written in largely exploratory mode the first time around.  The less good news is that this exposes a need for even more re-writing than I'd expected.  Still, after all the time I've spent on the book so far, it would be a crying shame to send it out half-formed into the world like the proverbial unlicked bear-cub!