caper_est | Entries tagged with vacuum cat

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 680 words, finally! After a week of writing absolutely sweet Football Association, finished the scene where the Young Duke and the Puffin Superior confront our heroes about the sudden shortage of Kates and Bonecold Refugees. Rather them than me. The boys are not in the loveliest of humours, either.

I keep underestimating Hero-Father. I know he encourages that, but he's not supposed to be able to do it to me!

Now I need some linking matter, to bring the Allingdale crowd up to the crisis of the Night Without Stars. I shall spend my odd minutes today nerding about how they get to that point of temporary stability, before all the bricks come tumbling down again.

Must. Finish. Chapter. I want this first draft done by the end of October...

Current Mood: refreshed
Current Music: Geatgi - Angelin Tytöt

Oh sod it! It has to be expelled from my system, sooner or later!

Here, found in the ashes of a burnt-out village hall whose surviving walls bear strange and troubling markings about which I will not and must not think too curiously, are the only remaining documents in the case of You Won't Believe It!, the ill-fated off-Millbank musical based on Stephen R Donaldson's First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever.

The necromancy and bibliomancy involved in assembling our all-star, all-volunteer cast has been strictly investigated by the proper Authorities, who inform me that it is not to blame for any of the subsequent unfortunate events.

( The Cast, who are all completely innocent, especially the ones with tentacles. )

As to the specific cause of the disaster, the Investigator diagnosed 'Natural Justice' and departed. I have no idea what she was talking about.

Those who have perused the cast list will readily understand that certain... improvements were necessary to render the original story fit for public performance. The surviving passage - which it appears that the fires refused to consume, no doubt for reasons which seemed good to them - is given below the cut, and translates a notoriously problematic episode from Lord Foul's Bane into popular and family-friendly entertainment, in a style we like to think will prove both edifying and touching.

( That Scene from the first act of 'You Won't Believe It!' )

Concerned citizens may be reassured that High Lord Elena turns out (perhaps unsuprisingly) not to be Covenant's daughter; so that after Lord Foul is laughed to destruction in the classic audience-participation number Behind You!, and the Creator cures Covenant's leprosy and resurrects Elena into our world to live happily ever after with him and all Drool's gold and their very own herd of Ranyhyn ponies on Haven Farm, there is nothing in any way illegal or tasteless about the miracle. Nor about the closing song. Believe This! is a very superior song, especially when Campaspe is performing it. And she is not rude, as the vulgar-minded would have it. She is a cultural and classical treasure of the Western tradition!

Concerned citizens may also be reassured that we can no longer get permits or insurance to perform this big marabou stork anywhere within the Sirian Sector or for twenty parsecs around it. Also, everybody who knew the script in any detail was rehearsing it in the hall when... that which occurred, occurred. No least human remains were ever discovered, so it is possible that they will some day return and enlighten us on the matter; but it is also, after all, possible that they will not very much care to talk about it.

Current Mood: full of it
Current Music: Hellfire, I can't get that thing out of my ears now!

Yesterday I failed to notice that what I was doing wasn't so much finishing a chapter, as fissioning one. The main characters' recent habit of out-thinking me has rather changed the nature of the episode involved.

So before this chopped chapter is truly finished, I need to bring forward one of Luke's scenes, in which he must beat a force of heavy cavalry that he cannot outrun and dare not engage. Topically in Real Life, the best laid plans of mice and men get the blazes blown out of them by the weather. Especially in England, and countries inspired by it. I'm now debating whether to be tactically cruel and have him driven over the pass by close pursuit, or morally cruel and have him draw his pursuers that way on purpose, for lack of any remedy less desperate.

Minor but really annoying problem: the old title is now completely inappropriate for either of the new chapters. The second new chapter clearly ought to be called Cockshut Time, since that is the bit where all the traps and counter-traps snap shut, and all that remains to be seen is who were the hunters and who the woodcocks. Also it's thematically proper, since it directly precedes the Rising arc's long-planned climax, which was always called The Grey Wolf in the Red Gloaming. But what of the first chapter?

I'm currently working with New Braidings along Allwater - 'many-braided Allwater' is the great river of Allingdale, and a stream notoriously of the opinion that more channels are better. I guess that describes it well enough, especially considering the effect of Luke's actions now moved here; but did ever anything so blithely advertise A Chapter of Transitions? Bleh.

It is beginning to sound a bit better than when I invented it this morning. And yet, yet...

I have no cat and I must vacuum.

Current Mood: restless
Current Music: Unfinished Life - Kate Wolf

Sunday I finished the audiobook of The Worm Ouroboros. (Sigh.) I really must get a better microphone and do my own bit for Librivox!

Random thought: the Worm is supposed, within its rather creaky frame-story, to take place upon Mercury - a conceit the author does nothing with, and swiftly appears to forget. But I happen to be reading the Divine Comedy at the moment, and today I got to the Heaven of Mercury - in which dwell those good souls who nonetheless often put worldly honour above God. Considering the whole mood and ethos of the Worm, and that the erudite Eddison could not possibly have been unfamiliar with Dante, I am suspecting this may not be by accident.

...The Duchess Sriva is making suggestive noises in my ear about the ambiguity of the ending, and what it might look like from the inside, and whether there is any outside and what it really is. She points out that I really ought to get all that heavy triple-velvet prose out of my head before it contaminates Killer-Kate too grievously, and intimates that we could have a very nice time exploring the philosophical and political issues, in wasted and waterish Witchland, in Temenos by the sea.

Sriva is like that. She has also incited Lord Spitfire of Demonland to come knocking on my door, and since Spitfire is the sort of hero whom E R Eddison thought was a complete nutter, this is not a siege to regard lightly. Yet remain I unremoved. Mostly.

Must. Not. Write. Worm. Fanfic. Must. Not...

("Lord, it is a mindworm from Witchland with her train. She demandeth present audience...")

560 words on the actual project, and before that the lyric of the Fairfields Wassail, which does not appear in the main text but which a passing dustless cat required of me before I proceeded further.

Current Mood: awake
Current Music: That Ole Devil Called Love - Billie Holiday

Finished the folksong, which was a 'Riddles Wisely Answered' plot with a twist appropriate to its world. Just for once the tune is a real one in our own setting: The Bonnie Banks of Airdrie (Child #14). Ewan MacColl had earwormed me with that one, but bad. The Benball Stair has now done its job, namely to give me my mind back.

The lady appears to be a conflation of Katy Elflocks - the protagonist of the completed panel of Three Katherines of Allingdale - and the King of Elfland's daughter from her tale. The minstrel appears not to have read the terms and conditions on the back of his poetic licence.

This was totally the reason that I only managed a beggarly 195 words on the main story yesterday. The word-shortage has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I'm heading into a complicated and painful argument, or with the unpleasant discovery that the viewpoint that hurts most for it, is also the right one - for exactly the same reasons.

Meyer's Law is all too valid for writing. Ow, ow, ow!

Current Mood: slogging
Current Music: Bill Brown - Ewan MacColl

1200 words and a revoltin' amount of cat-vacuuming behaviour in between, and at bloody last I've finished that interminable draft chapter that I've been telling from the viewpoint of my recycled Prince Charming.

In this cold late spring, there's something downright perverse about spending so much of my leisure in a story set smack-dab in the middle of winter. Brrr!

Sleepy tea and warm bed now. Brain frozen. Mind frozen. Thog tired.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Goodnight, Sweetheart - from The McGarrigle Hour

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Goat Notes

Gray Woodland, Writing on the Hoof

Entries tagged with vacuum cat

No Dust Shall Settle upon the Cats of Ask and Embla

Seven Hells for Failed Taste

Chapter Accidents

Styleworm

Earwormery and Sluggishness

Goodnight, Popsicle Prince

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