Goat Notes

Made sense of and wrote up the Elvish court's various agendas throughout Three Katherines, inasfar as I am ever going to make sense of people who are wont to treat time, space, logic, and basic arithmetic as despicable little bourgeois conventions, dahling.

This involved a severely reduced ration of sleep on my part, and the re-reading of the bits I'd signally skipped on my survey re-read, because I knew already what they did for the plot and what a rough ride they'd give me.

One thing I thought I'd remembered correctly, and hadn't, was the sheer amount of discord emanating from the Palace of Blue Flames in general, and the raving virulence of one of its voices in particular. That voice now seems to be introducing a theme which surfaces again and again in less horrid, often inverted, but equally terrible forms throughout Killer-Kate: in the desperate council at Fairfields; in the Young Duke's intoxicating vision of having all his cakes and eating them too; and in the Widow's apocalyptic reading of what the Langdale Rising has done, before the whole theme is resolved in the grand ending. Also, it's heavily prefigured by Kate and Luke's insane ambitions way back in Katy Elflocks.

Little of this was on purpose, and half of it I didn't consciously notice till I revisited the Elvish plot last night. It's a good theme and a central one, but I'm beginning to think I might do well to lighten up on the detailed hammering home it gets every time it surfaces in the exploratory draft. Something to watch, there.

I'm horribly tempted to think of this as the Elfmarch, Fuck Yeah! theme. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

Brand and cup, borne about the farm's borders in the deep midwinter night, and frank greeting to the Things beyond...

Most of this passage will have to go, but it does some important things before it gets me home to door and hearth - character work, which I was planning, and an unplanned reminder of just how scary it is to make a daily living in the elvish marches, and what kind of people must do it.  That sort of slipped out of the detail along the way, and it's what exploratory drafts are for.  Indeed, what are these four rough chapters but going around the borders of my whole havens with a torch, greeting and warning all the strange soul-mongering things I find there?

850 words.  Drawing to a close now.  Fire and meat and dance to come, and then the news that ends the Wassail arc and sets everything cascading towards the climax.  I want this chapter done by the start of my long summer break, which leaves me a week to do it.  It's doable.  Then a  month, no more, to re-read, re-envision, revise, and plot out the course of the Revolution.  Ideally, with new writing in parallel too; but we'll see about that.  I need firm earth under my feet, first.

I know more about wisp-lights than I did yesterday, and will take this as plainest warning not to stray after them.