Goat Notes

A modest 180 words on the WIP this morning, but a less modest Plot Attack session which is lifting some of the mist from this chapter. My best advance was yesterday afternoon, when I heard the words - an outcry of Kate's, as it happens - that should in the next chapter yield the whole emotional resolution to this whole Wassail arc. Meanwhile, strange storms and wild rides are brewing on the horizon. Yay! Action!

Those 180 words got me thinking about something else. I'm perennially fascinated with questions of identity, and the special angles SF and fantasy offer for tackling them. One aspect of this is that I love to read - and to write - yarns in which people collect names and soubriquets through their lives, and are referred or alluded to by different ones in different contexts. This just happened to hit me in the face today, because Kate (no slouch at name-collection herself) has a really hard block on thinking of one major character in her current, rather than her former, guise. There's insight there, as well as incapacity.

And so I think of my love of name-play, and how such different masters as Tolkien and Le Guin work it, and how to do it without falling down. I think also of my ultimate backburner project, and my favourite character from it: the merchant-princess Luksani of Lattés-lochis-bol, most commonly called Locket of Latch, the Gilded Lily, Treasure-Bright and Perfumed Night, in whose world the free play of names is an essential part of social and magical interaction. I think of Kandakay, the beloved outlander who collects soubriquets the way weird fish-shaped ornaments on mantelpieces collect dust, and detests that popular invasion of her personal space with a fierce and silent passion.

And I think - here is where all feedback would be specially appreciated - of the trickiness of making it work. On the one hand, the richness and flow of reference; on the other, not letting the reader get confused about who the blazes Gift-Horse and the Swan-Born are, or even whether they're the same person.

My own recipe has always been play-by-ear. It seems to work well enough, but it makes it hard to analyse when it fails. Anyone else?