Goat Notes

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: 2,350 words, and finally finished the Kaleidoscope Chapter! Man, this will want redrafting - but so much all these different viewpoints have taught me, and this was surely the place for them.

A random thing Elegant Elder Sister said to her favourite enemy cast a new, and quite horrifying, light on what she stands to lose if things go any wronger. It's an aspect of elvish things that was more than once a minor plot point in The Deed of Katy Elflocks, and whose implications here I'd missed when the unanticipated storm broke on this tale two chapters ago. Awk!

Indeed, there are sound reasons most of us build our houses to look away from the dubious hills.