Goat Notes

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: A breakthrough!  I've finally teased apart the threads of the infamous Four Agenda Pile-Up at Garcastle.  Lord Evil now has something to do that is... worthy... of him; Relatively Okay Genius's masterstroke, disentangled with few changes from the former muddle, shows up as much more shocking and brilliant; and there is lively and desperate action to replace the worst passages of talking heads and ominous introspections.  The cost of all this is another chapter in the middle, provisionally dubbed Hell-Stalk.  That's the third, now.  Even at an optimistic estimate, I'm going to have to allow a month for this trio.  Depending on how the rest of the revision goes, the Easter deadline may still be attainable.

Coming to the end of the political critique now.  By this weekend, I want to have the revised structure it implies up and running.  The simpler critique of the Big Bad's thread, and the unpredictable process of trying to integrate Kate with Katy around Kit's pivotal untold story, will then conclude the structural issues, and set me free for the big new sections and deletions.  This will surely take me up to the beginning of March, when I can start the detail edits; after which, beta-reading, final polish, and submission I guess in mid-spring.

Quiet worldbuilding and fantasy for Chocolate and the Gods continues to lighten these sloggy hours, though it's not yet ready to be told directly.  Chocolate qua chocolate begins to seem an unexpectedly minor detail of its flavour.

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 1,300 words, the end of the chapter, and the characters steeled for their run-up to the Big Bad.  The intent of this final scene, and how it sets up the Monster Ultimate Showdown, only showed itself to me two weeks ago.  This is now a lot tenser, and preceded by a lot more bitter in the sweet, than my long-held vision of it allowed.  Here's the price of making the Ultimate Showdown the Monster One after all - yet I think it opens more space for last night's brief access of tenderness and warmth, too.  Yes, I like the way this is going.

Only the final action chapter and an epilogue left, now.  This prospect remains rather dazing to me, after two years of active work, and a previous year with the ideas stewing around a few thousand words of beginning.

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 1,500 words, finishing the Young Duke's viewpoint, cutting his trio of scenelets off into a short chapter of its own, and beginning a pure Chapter of Showdown which is now told entirely from Golden Kate's perspective.  In her first scene, all has been very literally darkest before dawn; but dawn is what we have come to.

Decided who exactly is going to be present for the Conference, and why.

It's today...

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 1,460 words, and just got up to the climactic and final bit of the chapter.

Most of this is going to have to go into incluing in previous sections, be moved back into previous episodes, or just deleted and left for implication.  I can't do that in this first draft, or I'll forget half of what I was trying to imply.  The Bonfire Arc is definitely taking a turn I hadn't planned for.  That's new, eh?

Also, my nerves are piano-wires, my muscles feel fresh off the barbecue, and I am mucous as any slug.  There's a simile I shan't be working into any folksongs any time soon!

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 1,640 words, and the end of the Chapter of Puffins.  We have already seen Katy's great stroke in a previous chapter as miraculous and redemptive, and here now we get to see it from the angle where it looks about as redemptive as a big byakhee beanfeast.

I was chased out of my dreams by killer crocodiles at three in the morning in order to finish this.  No lie.  I hope that the lady responsible is now satisfied!

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.