Goat Notes

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!

Bah.  270 tedious words on the new chapter, which have no future except as construction lines.  The construction they imply is much more interesting, but that isn't accomplished yet.

I'm beginning to feel that my diplomats can go and stick diplomacy where the sun don't... Eh?  Beg pardon?

The question which sabotages is: how do you get a young and green feudal lord from an honour culture to engage with you at the same time as - from his point of view - (i) insulting him; (ii) threatening him; and (iii) undercutting the whole basis of his and his peers' legitimacy?  By 'engage' note that I don't mean in furious mortal combat, with either himself or his guards!  Guards!

Methods already foreseen:

(a) Give him something spookily incalculable, but evidently and unexpectedly real, to fear if things go bad.
(b) Set things up so that declaring hostility holds at least as many problems for his pride as talking.
(c) Give him both reasons and pretexts to make magnanimous excuses for your audacity.

These don't have to hold up for that long, because while success in the talks would be an extremely desirable outcome, it's not the most likely outcome, and is a pretty secondary consideration to their sheer distraction value.  Unfortunately, it becomes more and more obvious as I write that said methods are reeds too weak for their purpose.

So what I got out of my bad words this morning was chiefly

(d) Let him seize the initiative with a real genius plan to seize unlimited honour and dominion from this unpromising situation, in a way that only his heroic vision and forbearance could ever have dreamed of.

The 'real' part in that sentence is strictly optional.  But the way my antagonist jumped at that opportunity, as I plodded out the door to work wondering what next, reminded me forcibly of two things.  Firstly, what a consummate bred-in-the-bone predator a proper feudal aristocrat is - even a relatively 'nice' one.

And secondly, above and beyond all that, how very much this man is the son of the mother he never knew.  I'd thought he'd be far easier for me to nudge around, but now I'm none so sure.

I'll do well to get all these knots undone by the end of the month.

- Diplomacy!   PPPPPPPTTTTH!  I taunt it a second time; I fart in its general direction!