caper_est: The grey wolf in the red gloaming. (golden kate)
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.
caper_est: caper_est, the billy goat (Default)

Slightly more rested.  About 400 words of The Popinjay, covering Beauty's father's business trip.  Many of these, without any premeditation, ended up as a rhapsodic catalogue of the stuff he carries from his profoundly obscure hometown to a merely undistinguished market on the other side of the wild woods.  It is amazing how much better that carries the story over the leagues than the merely descriptive linking passage I was going to write instead.

This is, specifically, a full-on fairy tale without fairies or princes, or even any very notable role for soldiers and peasants and woodcutters.  It is about merchants and clerks, artists and physicians, diffident middle-class ingenues and howling madness from beyond the walls of the world.  And, I find, it is also about the abundance and kindliness and strangeness of those currents of life where silver is a nobler metal than steel.

And - to get back to the root of the original rose - where spells may be this thing or that, but promises are everything.

Which in turn, no doubt, explains why the trip turns out not to be any matter of lost and found argosies, but a necessary reaction to a very mediaevaloid credit crunch.  I swear I never planned this!

As to the main WIP, I have a serious Kate-out scheduled for the weekend, and shall oblige myself at least to finish the interminable council scene by one means or another.

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caper_est: caper_est, the billy goat (Default)
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