Goat Notes

Oh wait, they didn't.  This news brought home to me through my current whole-story, line-by-line critical pass over Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland.  I'm about half-way through that now.

- Luke's strategy in the Rising, on more careful analysis, involves entirely too much of: "Ha!  The nobles are used to summer warfare!  But this is winter warfare, so we can cunningly deploy tactics against them which will work even less well in winter!"

- If Dougal Dare-All really needs Luke to come up with the good plan Luke presently supplies him, he needs to be re-named Dougal Duh!-All forthwith.  They are supposed to be experts in totally different spheres.

- Neither Katy Elflocks nor any of her circle are supposed to possess any spark of military genius.  This does not mean they won't notice when a plan is slapped together entirely out of hope, cheek, plot wire and gaffer tape.

- And the fact that they're exceptionally good with hope and gaffer tape doesn't mean they won't insist on something more substantial at the core of it.

- In particular, neither Luke, nor Dougal, nor the former merchant-adventurer, nor the clever grange-clerk of Fairfields are going to involve themselves in a campaign whose logistics appear to have been delegated to the rats, rats, big as bloomin' cats, in the quartermaster's stores.

Katy ain't no Elrond, Fairfields ain't no Rivendell, and all their fellowship are well aware that Kateverse providence is somewhat less trustworthy than a prince's promises.  This is not the fairy-tale part of the story!  (At least, not on that overt a level.)

I'm seeing and sketching out solutions as I write, and trying to minimize the amount of new or magical matter in them.  The good news is that getting the reconnaissance and logistics right should simultaneously solve another problem: the narrative slackness of the important Fairfields arc, which was written in largely exploratory mode the first time around.  The less good news is that this exposes a need for even more re-writing than I'd expected.  Still, after all the time I've spent on the book so far, it would be a crying shame to send it out half-formed into the world like the proverbial unlicked bear-cub!

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 370 words.  Kate gives the Young Duke the first barrel.

Also several hundred words of the increasingly weird dual Wood of Weyre fairy-stories that are obtruding myself on my attention.  My Muse is veering between the Cinderella variant, and its Snow Whitey sequel a generation down the line, as each feeds back loopily upon the other.  (The Snow character's being the Cinderella's character's daughter is the least of the craziness.)  It's a bit of a distraction, but writing it until Cynthia Coeur-de-Verre and her friends get bored with me is the price I'm paying for any sleep at all, just at present.

Meanwhile, I return from half-term holidays to work, to discover the real world imitating the Wood of Weyre as heartily as it is able.  Nnnngh!

In other news, 500 lunch-break words of The Princess out of Time, the Kateverse's answer to Sleeping Beauty. It may or may not get finished: its main attractions are (i) it is writing and it occurred to me; and (ii) it's exploring a culture and a religious perspective that touches marginally on Three Katherines of Allingdale, but gets no direct screen time there, and no love at all from absolutely anybody.

Listen: they tell stories in Volkary, too. Jack Angrist Shallow was the best tale-teller of all those countries, and if you rub off the gloss the bad church made him put on it, no-one from the King in his palace to Katy in her wightwoods has ever heard a better!

But you can't ever rub off the gloss; nor is it yet clear to me just how much Joachim Angristus Schlau really believed in his national version of State Saturnism, and how much he was satirizing it - except that elements of both seem most distinctly present.

Volkary is a fairly large and near neighbour, about which I've previously showed a broad and regrettable tendency not to know Jack.

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 390 words. Lord Evil driven to his last bold throw. He's making half of it up as he goes along, and so am I. This can't in any way go wrong, especially if the Young Duke latches onto the thing there was never any chance of him latching onto because, oh, er, whoops. There are a lot of clever people in this room, and at least two epically impetuous ones, and I'm increasingly uncertain as to who's going to win this bout, and how!

The Popinjay: 450 words. Beauty steals the scene from Bright Young Thing, shuts it down, and embarks upon her own. She wasn't supposed to do that. Well, now I begin to understand her, and why she is the person to deal with the Beast-Thing by and by. There's a subtle perversity in her romantic and ingenuous spirit, considerably more disturbing than Money Spider's asocial calculation or Bright Young Thing's edge of cruelty. It's wickedly familiar, but I'm not sure I have a name for it. Not the usual thing that sets belles up with beasts, certainly - nearer to what Arthur Machen meant in The White People, when he discoursed of those great sinners who commit no named sins, and are even rarer and less detectable than great saints. Whether Beauty is heading for great sin or awesome sanctity or just extreme humanity, was always going to be - a matter of interpretation. At any rate, she's already much more formidable than I first took her for.

For my own sins - specifically, trawling YouTube before bed for a half-good version of Cassilda's Song out of The King in Yellow - I was repaid with gloomy and ill-remembered adventures in a decadent Venice. I would call this a step up from my Lankhmar City-Break the other night, except that when my alarm woke me, I found myself channelling Azathoth's internal monologue. As signs go, this is never a good one.

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 840 words, of the knife-fight between Fiery Younger Sister and a piece of very frisky scum indeed: nimble young tiger against heavy-pawed old black bear.  I may need to edit some of it for combat realism in the redraft.  Then again, I may not very much, because whilst FYS isn't explicitly supernatural, in her battle-taking she dances somewhere between the poles of Hu Sanniang and the Hound of Ulster, and I'm not sure how naturalistic one can profitably make that sort of thing anyway.

The ghastly resolution tonight, and I well done with it.

The Popinjay: 380 words.  Bright Young Thing may not be a wicked stepsister exactly, but I see the slander didn't just spring out of nowhere, either.  On the other hand, I don't think there are many other people in any world who could treat some of the things Beauty comes out with as sensible conversation rather than affected sentimental drivel, so it all turns the carousel.  I like carousels.  BYT and Beauty would like them too, if only either of them had ever encountered any.

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 2,000 words in two scenes, finishing Garcastle from the viewpoints of Bonecold Refugee and Hero-Father.  Yes, I did need to give the latter a turn after all, and I turned off the computer last night wondering how I was going to do that without diminishing him.  Seeing him from outside is one thing, but "he that has been what he's been"...?  Dangerous, dangerous to get the reader in too close to him.

And then as I was ready to drop off I remembered what kind of story this really is.

So this morning I got up, and wrote his scene in undiluted fairy-tale idiom, and that gave me both the directness and the distance I needed.  And left me the energy for Bonecold Refugee's simultaneous scene, too.

One more scene only, and this chapter's done.  All the big crunches are now just around the corner.

In further fairy-tale developments, Jack's wireless router went haywire, and he did this and that, and presently it worked again.  And a week later, Jack's wireless router went haywire again, and he did this and that, and presently it worked just as before.  And Jack thought, "I know what comes next, and it's probably not a good idea to wait for the payoff!"  So in the interests of remaining Internetted, I shall just be doing some techno-shopping Real Soon Now.

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 190 words.  Linking matter.

Lazy Lob at the House of Silence: 1,430 words of yet another Kateverse folk story, inspired by legions of good-for-nothing folktale youngest sons called Boots, who always come up trumps.  I didn't ask for this one, it just came, with a little help from something Bonecold Refugee did in the main novel recently.  Nearly set Thuggish First Son up for his well-deserved fall.  This is the easy bit.  Cunning Second Son I'll need to out-think.

The World on Maltby Edge: An apocalyptic folksong from about the portion of Killer-Kate I'm writing at the moment.  Its in-world composer wishes the people were not so new fangle.  I made an audio this time, which singing for reasons of health and safety and rotten tomatoes I shall not inflict upon the public, but which shall save my forgetting what the blazes the tune was by tomorrow.

The Popinjay: 1400 words.  NONONONO DON'T PLUCK THE FLOWER!  Oopsie.

This ends the first section.  For the next bit I need to diverge from the traditional line of the tale, and go back to Beauty and her sisters, whom we shall call Money Spider and Bright Young Thing. 

Just because they're all sort of sympathetic and love each other, doesn't mean they get along...

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland - 450 words.  The Young Duke and Glamorous Elder Sister find themselves at crossed stars, more through their virtues than their faults.

The Popinjay - 510 words of the enchanted castle, all of which I now see I must plane away and carve deeper.  I'd got from Charles Perrault to Tanith Lee, but I need to move all the way to Algernon Blackwood.  I doubt now it is even really a castle at all.

I believe I mentioned declaring a literary Kate-out over the weekend, and finishing the Council Scene of Doom by hook or by crook? 

Hah.  I did manage to extrude a megatastic 140 words, and to stumble upon perhaps the least romantic romantic set-up that has yet been committed to paper since Pierrette Publishing's* now legendary Patient Passion at the Clap Clinic (75pp., available at any good recycling plant near you).  I really wonder where this story is going.  Often.  Some hopes of moving beyond the CSOD tonight.

What I did manage was 1470 words of The Popinjay, linking up the two fragments of text that previously comprised it.  I'm increasingly uncertain whether this is more the Beauty character's story than it is her middle sister's.

* Whose other classic category romances include Surgical Appliance Adventure, Hot in the Sewer, Sex and Ducks and Hovis Rolls, and - in their one serious contribution to the fantasy genre - a strangely neglected vampire-shagger called Bathtime for Bathory.