Goat Notes

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 710 words.  The Young Duke's supreme offer.  When he really breaks out, he can achieve an Eddisonian grandeur of spirit to exceed even Golden Kate's.

Of course, my world isn't Zimiamvia, and it was not made for the benefit of any Lessingham, and its heroes and aristocrats are most decidedly not supermen.  This may have some bearing on subsequent events.

But this was his moment of all moments, and man! how he has earned it.

230 words this morning of a scene I hadn't the hardiness for yesterday after work - wherefore I fled to put the last coat of varnish on the new door instead, and pursue its various sequels.

This passage is actually part of a celebration, and done with goodwill on all parts.  But it's a mediaevaloid country custom, in a hard and dangerous place, albeit an unusually kind and free community.  When I saw how roughly the mock battle for the New Year was going to play out  ("She wouldn't know she'd won if she'd not spent blood nor tears on it," says the canny seamstress-witch Ciss Cross-Stitch in the back of my head, advising the Founder of Fairfields as to why it isn't always sensible to persuade people to behave sensibly), all my sensibilities both old-fashioned and new-fangled positively cringed.  Even my court-reared characters winced.

Which suggests to me that I have at least something right about the tone.  If a community of medieval peasant-pioneers on the ragged edge of Elfland thought and acted inside my modern comfort zone, I would certainly be getting them wrong.

Of course, too far outside the consensus modern comfort zone, and that's a potential problem for the reader.

What I'm trying to do, whether this particular scene survives the final cut or not, is to conjure a place in some ways rawly uncomfortable, and in others warm and welcoming - so that the whole should be seamless, and at best dearly desirable for the reader to visit, or at worst wholeheartedly believable in the way it speaks to my tumbleweed protagonists of 'home'.

Elsewhere, I am still being wormed, and Edward Lessingham has just turned up with wood and tools and interminably described ornamentation to fix up his half-cocked frame story.

Last night I made a new and lovely discovery on LibriVox: its volunteer Jason Mills has created the whole audio-book of one of my old public-domain favourites, E R Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros.  Sumptuous!  Let us now praise all cheerful givers and sharers.

The inevitable result was that I spent a great part of last night in a long and involved dream set in the far future of that world, in which Witchland and Demonland and the rest had broken out of their old doom, and built a global modern civilization with hospitals and Indian restaurants and fiat currency and everything.  Also, it had motorways and Tube networks connecting it directly with Bristol and London.  I think the dread mountain of Zora Rach nam Psarrion was rather more closely accessible from Bristol than was quite reassuring , and that the gang and I were trying to retrieve somebody from its damnations; but the method was rather involved, and I'm not sure that I followed the logic of it even in the dream.  Shepherding a large crocodile of bewildered infants down the side of the M4 motorway was part of it.  My late Dad was the brains of the whole operation, and he was in one of his inscrutable humours.  Lord Juss was definitely behind my family's urgent invitation to the Curry Gardens of Variable Geometry, though - and I had more than a suspicion that Lord Gro was behind all the snide five hundred pound bills. 

The point, if there was one, appears chiefly to have been to prevent my rising from my bed any less exhausted than when I retired.  But it was a good exhaustion!

Also: 890 words of Book, on madness and vengeance and the darning of stockings.