Goat Notes

So during the revision process for Three Katherines, I need to keep the purely creative side of things bubbling away, as rest and recreation if nothing else.  Of several candidates for the Next Big Project that have risen and fallen over the past month, by far the most tempting and successful to date is...

...A fantasy of epic conflict, magic, manners, applied theology, the amorous graces, d--gs, decolonization, and...

...let's just say that the working title is Chocolate and the Gods.

I'm not dreading the research for this one.

Meanwhile, the revision job continues to grind through round after round of diplomacy.  I foresee a good deal of material migrating backwards in the text, to be dramatized under slightly different circumstances.  Also, I did some actual text revision, and am now substantially happier with the climax of the Great Action Scene.

Onwards to completion, submission, and chocolate!

Spent an interesting evening upholding the funky monkey side of a friendly debate between Pan narrans, the Storytelling Chimp, and Homo faber, Bob the Builder.  A rum do rather, what with my being the science technician, and the other party the theatre manager.  The venue was the lobby-bar of the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel, that magnificent folly of a cathedral to Being Elsewhere Soon.  Bright Young Things seemingly fallen through some rift from the Twenties flitted through the dim spaces, in tuxes of unvarying shadow and ballgowns glowing every colour will-o'-the-wisp flame - until at last an enormous invasion of bagpipes put all other sights and speech to rout, ours included.  I think we each concluded that the environment had pretty much illustrated the perspectives we came in with.

It is hard, though often rewarding, to communicate across that deep narrow divide between those of us to whom Secondary Worlds are things in themselves, and those to whom they are only tools for producing a desired effect in the Primary. 

This was a good session in a setting I'm glad to have discovered, and will certainly nick detail from for any number of purposes before I'm done with it.  I do wonder, though, how anybody actually manages to feel comfortable in a place like that - for all the excellent physical comfort, pleasant service, and intelligent layout it has to offer.

I think I must always be a bit of a peasant at heart.  Explains something, above and beyond my more mutable beliefs, about the kind of tales that draw me.

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 250 words.  The party for the final venture assembles, and comes down to the Duke's town of Garton.