Goat Notes

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: 690 words.  Bringing Fiery Younger Sister's gruelling scene to boiling point.  FYS is reminding me of one of those cartoon characters who produce massive offensive weapons out of thin air at the drop of a hat.  She can't do that physically, but she can pull out of thin air a way to use anything offensively, because she really Just Does Not Care.

There's a limit to how much of that scene I can stand at once, so I skipped ahead for the rest of my wordage to put in the description of Secondary Villain's stronghold: Castle Carrowglaze, the Green Rock of the Blue Boar.  It's kind of a dump, but the setting ought to be worth something to a discerning buyer.

The Popinjay: 340 words.  Bright Young Thing is a very bad person.  A very good bad person.  This is probably why the family's sparkling cynic is also the only one of them who takes her religion seriously instead of piously and conventionally.  Not that the priests could appreciate that - or that Beauty does now.  Because Bright Young Thing is being a very bad person.

Lob Lazy at the House of Silence - 180 words, skipping ahead to the passage of chorus-like fairy-tale linkage between Second and Third Sons' Quests.  More fun with King Dead and Queen Rotten.  And I think this has given me the glory-and-trumpets linkage to follow Third Son's eventual... achievement.  Kateverse history does crop up in strange guises!

Part of the present productivity boom seems to depend on always having something to write opportunistically when the main line is too difficult or too harrowing to speed.  This hasn't worked before, and I'm thinking it has to do with the obvious failure mode: writing everything up to the difficult bit, until all yarns are tangled at once and choke off together.  But slow slogging progress on what's bogged down, with relief writing to keep the flow free elsewhere, may prosper better.  Slog the key, and play the oil for the lock?

The Popinjay: 430 words closing the Sister Scene.  Beauty has EVIL STEPSISTERS, but apparently not a flying pink pony.  I am going to have to ration the amount of quality family time these people get onstage, since I doubt I can get away with more than two or three scenes like this in a single story.  Also, I must remember not to try and drink fluids whilst channelling Bright Young Thing's conversation.

Me and my big mouth: Turns out it wasn't such a good idea to make jokes about dreaming Thomas Covenant: the Musical, after all.

Okay, it wasn't a musical.

And of course I didn't get to recruit James Stewart, and especially not Campaspe.  In fact, guess who got to play Our Blithe Hero?  Yes.  How right you are.

And the script seemed to be derived from some alternate volume of the Last Chronicles, Against Creator's Running Out of Money - the scene I was acting being an indefinitely prolonged "Thomas and Linden go to confront the evil powers at Revelstone, but first they must stock up on frozen waffles at Tesco!" slice o' not very much life. 

I and the friend who was playing Linden spent more time kvetching about the wallpaper script than we did actually rehearsing it.  And since, in the way of dreams, rehearsing it meant actually being inside the world it described...  Ah, Morpheus! Forgive!

The Popinjay: second chapter begun, with 870 words.  Father is still missing, and Money Spider nerdsplains the fantasyland credit crunch to Bright Young Thing and Beauty, with the ultimate assistance of the Treasure Fairy and the Default Troll.  How will they all avoid getting eaten, and will her younger sisters irritate her into the grave first?

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 220 words, skipping ahead to stay in Langdale, and starting Fiery Younger Sister's scene.  Not a nice head to be in.  All generous rage and no warmth, like a flame that has only an edge.  Narrowly clever, viciously funny, earnestly vulgar.  I think she has one more viewpoint scene coming up after all, in the final battle with the Bad Baron.  It would take a strangely misapplied courage to refuse her that.

I dreamed of spam.  There is no refuge anywhere!

The Popinjay: 930 words.  Beauty's father wishes Something would stop doing him favours.

This is showing all the makings of a short novel.

The Popinjay - 700 words yesterday.  Beauty's father finds a creepy mansion.

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland - 110 words this morning.  Slept ill, and had no time to drop the lightning-bolt.  My last scene before switching to unplanned-but-needful new point of view for a bit.  This will be the first time we see things from eyes neither Kate's nor Luke's.

I may be even more torpid than usual in commenting for a while, since:

1) Kate & Co. are calling; and,

2) Important RL stuff is calling; and,

3) Lobelia Sackville-Baggins has called already, and walked off with most of my spoons in her umbrella.

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.

I am now back on phone and net.  Also on Hello World! this morning, I slept horribly, and presently exhibit the mental characteristics of a rather surly oyster.  Managed about three sentences of the Beastly Tale in an hour.  Working title now changed from Cosara Town to The Popinjay.  It's almost as much about Beauty's family and their friends as it is about the monstrous liaison.  Don't know where that's been done already.  Probably not this way, anyhow.  Looking to be a novella or short novel, at present.

Clamming up now until I wake up.