Goat Notes

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 1,750 words, again with a lot of Great Kate Coredump.  The challenges and confessions are over: now come the distorted echoes off the Wall of Men before her.  I learned something important about Mostly Okay Genius by listening to his silence here, while Kate was in my head to read it - something both fine and horrible.

Next: the advisors try to push towards endgame.  But nobody has noticed that a Puffin Superior is a piece at once black and white, nor guessed what they are settting her up for with this fatal confrontation.

I might actually get this megachapter finished in time for my birthday.

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 1,050 words.  Kate gives the Duke both barrels.

Not loving this version of the Family Fight scene so far, since it is coming out as something very much like a Great Kate Coredump.  I seem to have this problem with the first drafts of her epic speeches, though several have caught alight some way into the proceedings, and shown me unexpected ways forward.

She's going to be blasting right away for a good few paragraphs yet.  I'll decide which ones I need to blast away in a month or three's time, if my master-plan stays on track.  Probably rewrite most of the rest, too.

For now, I can only follow her into the fire...

That peculiar condition occurring whereby a scene that was really dramatic in your head slumps, when performed by the actual characters, into a merely serious and somewhat tense conversation.

That prosy lump through which I slogged out a beggarly 200 words in the grey light this morning. I shall finish it - and the chapter - tonight, because I know how this modest scenelet will now play out. It will not (and must not) survive in this form through the redraft.

I do at least see what my problem is. There is just too much stuff that has to be unpacked, before the characters can really cut loose into the drama I'd intended. I didn't know what most of it was, before I wrote this. Now I know, and the unpacking is going to have to be redistributed backwards, and the climax shifted forwards to give it extra room for doing so. Before I can do that... I need at least one more rough chapter's worth of data.

The first was my two protags' arrival in this precarious mediaeval anarchotopia; this one is the man's exploration of it. The next is the woman's, and she has been the Duchess of Drama since I created her a couple of years back. She is also quite good at smacking my head when I annoy her.

I have some hopes that old Kate, at least, will prove herself thoroughly smoosh-proof.