Goat Notes

Chugging along here restructuring the Fairfields Arc, with several new scenes in prospect, and a much stronger rôle for Katy Elflocks herself.   Fixing of plotting and pacing continues.  I have two alternative timelines on the go, one of which is going to have to be eliminated before I know just what the whole plot and flavour will turn out like.  More work on hand before it's clear which version works best.

The Deed of Katy Elflocks: A new 2,000 word scene composed last night and this morning, to retrofit one of the thorns in Katy's side from Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland, and make the portrayal of the Dales more consistent between the two stories.  Also planted a couple of Chekhov's guns, so that they're not just pulled out of my ear in Killer-Kate.  Pulling guns out one's ear is not, I'm told, considered best practice by the cognoscenti.

I spent most of the last week donkeying through the major structural critique of Three Katherines as a complete novel.  What came out of this:

1) I'm going to go ahead with the two-part story in strongly differentiated voices.  First, the theme's expounding in Alan Eaton's lighter, terser, more courtly and satirical fairy-tale of Katy.  Then, the development and resolution in Hick-Mack-Heck and Sairey Salt-the-Stew's denser, fiercer, more grounded and committed folk-epic of Killer-Kate.  The Lord Dunsany knob is turned higher in Alan's style, the William Morris knob in Hick and Sairey's, though I think they're both recognizably modes of mine.  The authors don't explicitly intrude themselves into the tale at any stage, but it helps me to have a fair sense of where they're each coming from.

2) The unfolding of the untold middle tale of Kit Fox seems to more or less work in Killer-Kate: again, I'm going to leave that part of the structure largely as it is, give or take a bit of modification in detail.

3) The Rival Revolution subplot doesn't need much more work than I just supplied it.  The Lord Evil, Puffin Superior, and Diplomatic subplots will on the other hand require significant structural changes, not least because they all bear on just what exactly everybody is fighting for.  I've donkeyed up some of the legal, customary, and folk-historical groundwork over the past week, and shall start the Political Rewrite shortly.  This won't - or shouldn't - add to the proportion of politics in the story: it's about rooting it in local reality, and about making the characters' actions mesh more reasonably, whilst removing patches of pointless intriguey filler that never went anywhere.  It's by far the biggest and most critical section of the rewrite, and will certainly involve at least three new chapters.  It may also involve the disappearance of one or more of the existing ones: can't see that far ahead, yet.

Anyway, the job's begun, and I'm writing actual story again!

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: Oy! Still bogged down in the political revision, largely because the Puffin Superior's part in the later story has also had to put out back-roots that will support it - and some of her issues are metaphysical more than political, hence even more bewildering to deal with. This is the trouble with her rise from "plot person who knows something critical to the climax" to "significant major character in her own right". It's only a somewhat outrageous parallel to say that I got three-quarters through the first draft, and then Father Brown stepped out of Chestertonia to join the opposition. The Puffin is not a negligible quantity.

And she seems to have decided that what is best for my soul is lots of lovely work. Pah!

There are only so many hours one can spend on this sort of thing every day, so I've decided to start reserving at least one of them for Chocolate and the Gods, before it starts going all blotchy and bloomy on me.

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: A breakthrough!  I've finally teased apart the threads of the infamous Four Agenda Pile-Up at Garcastle.  Lord Evil now has something to do that is... worthy... of him; Relatively Okay Genius's masterstroke, disentangled with few changes from the former muddle, shows up as much more shocking and brilliant; and there is lively and desperate action to replace the worst passages of talking heads and ominous introspections.  The cost of all this is another chapter in the middle, provisionally dubbed Hell-Stalk.  That's the third, now.  Even at an optimistic estimate, I'm going to have to allow a month for this trio.  Depending on how the rest of the revision goes, the Easter deadline may still be attainable.

Coming to the end of the political critique now.  By this weekend, I want to have the revised structure it implies up and running.  The simpler critique of the Big Bad's thread, and the unpredictable process of trying to integrate Kate with Katy around Kit's pivotal untold story, will then conclude the structural issues, and set me free for the big new sections and deletions.  This will surely take me up to the beginning of March, when I can start the detail edits; after which, beta-reading, final polish, and submission I guess in mid-spring.

Quiet worldbuilding and fantasy for Chocolate and the Gods continues to lighten these sloggy hours, though it's not yet ready to be told directly.  Chocolate qua chocolate begins to seem an unexpectedly minor detail of its flavour.

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: Another short but intense phase of diplomacy  revised.  Huge matters got whooshed past in the first draft because I didn't know about them, and the emphasis left on more tedious stuff because I understood it and needed it to progress.  Structural changes indicated at present:

- Diplomatic infodumps, here and just before the climactic chapter, to be replaced with dramatic yarn showing the actual moves on the ground.  Two new chapters probably required, bringing the Debating of the Wood and the Doom-Riding episodes respectively to the fore.  Vividness and tension both thereby much increased from the original sketch, and space for some much-needed development work added.  Some signposting blah throughout the book can probably be removed at the same time.
 
- I may be able to get rid of one, or even two, of the shorter and less interesting chapters, by drawing off their vital spirits into one or other of the new ones.

- The manoeuvrings of the Duke's advisors now get spread much more evenly throughout the book.  The Puffin Superior can be contacted covertly as soon as it makes sense to do so, and so is no longer parachuted in late in the game.  As much delay as I need can be attributed simply to her age, the (tweakable) distance, and especially the combination of bad terrain and filthy winter weather.  Meanwhile, Lord Evil has a more interesting focus in the early part of the negotiations than lurking around plausibly upholding Evil.  I haven't got all the details yet, but I'm beginning to get a strong feeling for what the rebalanced plot must look like.

- I'm quite proud of Garcastle's physical presence and palpable weight of history, in the story as stands.  On review, I'm far less impressed with the way I've conveyed Garcastle as a living community.  This would be a fault even in a conventional epic fantasy.  In a commons'-eye tale like this one, it's simply not acceptable.  More research and imaginative exercise required here, and soon.

My pace isn't too horrible to date, but it's still not as fast as I'd like, and I think I'm going to have to do some heavy bashing over the weekend to keep to my schedule. 

I finished up my most pressing donkey-work on Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland, and am now the proud possessor of:

1) A complete scene breakdown, which I'm using as a template for all high-level revision passes;

2) A story calendar, which is considerably less buggy than I'd suspected;

and

3) A digest of all the political/diplomatic matter in the story, indexed by scene.

This is so that I can plunge into the first set of revisions, namely the ones which make everybody's agendas internally coherent.  (In the story, they make sense from the perspectives of the people involved, and evolve over two or three eventful months.  In the real world, they evolved over two or three years, and the plans I started writing aren't altogether the same as the plans I brought to a conclusion.  Also, I occasionally lost track of some of the multi-decker whoppers the Duelling Diplomats are exchanging in the background.  It's all right for the reader to skim that - background, and all! - but not for it to disintegrate when the reader does look twice at it.)

And now I'm started.

This is the one job which I need to get right in order for the story to hang together and make more than impressionistic sense.  I'm giving myself a week for it, or at least for the coarse-grained corrections which are all I need to make at this stage.  Some good stuff I can't discuss without absolute spoilerificity has already emerged from the shadows in which my subconscious or my good fortune hid it.

I'm expecting to lose a big chunk of wordcount in this phase, as I remove all the repetitious speeches and diplomatic blah in which various  characters kept me up to date on what they thought they were up to through different stages of the first draft.

After this is done, the next big job will be the handling of the Big Bad, which links up with the integration of Katy Elflocks and the Great Untold Story.  Successively finer-grained stuff after that.

My sinister master plan is to have a submission-ready manuscript by Easter.

Happy New Year, all!

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: Sorted out the Big Bad plotline, which turned out to make more sense than I was afraid it did: only a few tweaks here.  The main edit is going to have to be for presentation.  The first appearance of the Big Bad is maybe not the grossest in terms of sheer power, but it is unfortunately still the most terrifying.  Second most terrifying, would be fine.  I need to polish the final confrontation some more, until the Devil is glaring out of its mirror.  I'm not saying it's flat, but there have been a lot of peaks in this book, and this one  has to make a fitting finale.

I'm coming to the end of this plotline survey now.  I'm not ready to tackle the top-level issues once and for all, so it's back to the geography (boo!) and post-draft research issues for the donkey-work.

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: Worked on geography and finished notes on the Witchy Wizardy subplot. Overall sense is that it needs a deal of work - but that work done, it could smooth off some of the other plotlines and ideas as neatly as sandpaper.

This large plotline is the most organically grown of all, having been completely unimagined in the story's origin, and by degrees become central to it. It centres around the three pure magic-specialists in the younger generation: Flashy Elder Brother, the virtuoso wizard; and Bonecold Refugee and her friend whom we might call Knife-Rede, the inexperienced witches. The subplot coalesced around a datadump excuse; the need to win two nonmagical tricks in order for Kate to challenge the Dull Tower; and an intended romantic tie-off at the ending, which has now grown implicit and ambiguous. Much was revealed in the telling, as its three central characters came out of the shadows and spoke to me.

( Avoiding magus ex machina )

Finally, I've sorted out a bunch of details and raised a few more questions about Bonecold Refugee (by far the most pivotal character of the three, as things turned out), and the relationship between the various known approaches to the Art Magic in the Kateverse. One thing I should certainly have picked up without waiting for the revision for it to smack me between the eyes: Bonecold has the training and the turn of mind to be a most formidable witch - in many ways she is like a Katy Elflocks who got smacked with the predictable reality instead of the fairy-tale - but she doesn't really think in witchy terms more than she can help.* I think her true vocation is wizardry, even though she doesn't know or do any, at least in the main course of the tale.

Wherein it is seen that even the author can miss even the most blatant incluing threaded throughout their own text. Repeatedly. Extensively. D'oh!

* ETA: "turn of mind to be a most formidable witch... doesn't really think in witchy terms" appears to make no sense. What I was trying to say is that she has a mind that can wrangle witchy magical concepts and entities very well - but the directions she takes them in, given any choice in the matter, aren't very witchy at all. Gah, that was clumsy of me!

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.

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: Set down thirty years of the Royal Court's agenda in the remote and boondocky Northdales, and the dales-folk's frequently underwhelmed response thereto.   As I mentioned here, this is all important for the shape of the tale, but not particularly obtrusive.

Raised a few questions, received no big surprises, caught no big howlers.

Off on a belated birthday outing with my brother and sister-out-law now, so probably no more work today.