Goat Notes

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 140 words, and my heroes have reached the field of contention at last. I thought the swooping-in narrative perspective at the beginning of this chapter was purely a device to provide context, but now I see it does another job: helping provide a sense of farewell to Golden Kate, who is after all riding into a peril from which she cannot reasonably expect to return, even in victory. And precisely because she has nothing to hope for herself, her fierce old heart is lightened at last, and the mood of the piece lifted up and into stranger tension.

My big job for today is to plan out the events of the Assize and the Battle in detail. Timing and its failures are going to be everything here: this is one bit I simply can't make up as I go along, or out of the elvish mists in my head.

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 600 words.  Something went wrong, and nobody knows what, except that most of their best-beloveds are off somewhere else doing hair-raisingly dangerous things.  Kate and even Hero-Father reach the end of their respective tethers here.  This concludes Kate Scene I from Garcastle. 

The other half of Kate's scene belongs after Bonecold Refugee's, and fixes the timing.  If I really wanted to kaleidoscope this chapter, I could give viewpoint to Hero-Father instead.  That might be taking things to the point of self-indulgence, though it would explain why the Event that gives the chapter its real title is intelligible to the person who perceives it.  H'mm!

Ruddy long chapter, this is shaping up to be.

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: Luke came down this morning like a thunderbolt back into Langdale, in the 20 words I wrote of my new chapter.

Then on the train journey into work, I detected a stupidity and deleted 17 of them.

But that's nothing.  Last night's plot twist gave me a notion for how to get rid of another 5K or so of my least favourite words during the redraft.  Diplomacy is much more fun on the hoof!

Next job: fix his revised itinerary, and match up the times for the thing he, Kate, and Kate's son are all glimpsing from separate places.  I may have to commit quite a dance between viewpoints in this chapter: all those three, certainly, and probably Elegant Elder Sister, and maybe even Flashy Elder Brother too.

One of the bits I like most about writing is its power to suddenly re-enchant my own world, when I find myself thinking the thoughts of a character wholly unlike me, and seeing a vision I'd never have seen otherwise.

Is there any spirit so really earthbound that it has never soared in its fancy on the high winds, and seen the wide world laid out beneath it with the fierce keen eyes of a hawk?  Certainly, fantasy writers from Le Guin to Lackey and beyond have loved to tell of it, and bring it to life in their waking worlds.

I am no predator, for all that.  But my current protagonist has the predator's mind par excellence: she is a fierce falcon of her world, an aristocrat who believes implicitly in the aristocratic spirit.  She is also, at the moment, a falcon who is trying very hard to be a good mouse - albeit, if humans were mice, Kate might be a sort of corrupt Reepicheep fumbling towards the dawn.  So it was only by her courtesy that I could glimpse this, this morning:

- That we envy the hawk's eyesight, from its eminence, with the world spread wide beneath it, and all the creatures thereof in its sight and danger.  But the mouse's world is just as gigantic as the hawk's, and it sees much that the hawk never will: as the green translucent spears of the grass all about it, and the shadow of terror and mystery that blots out the Sun.  And Kate felt all the thrill and hazard of that this morning - and I through her, and I don't ever think it would have crowded in on me otherwise.

It is a wonderful thing to sit at my beige coffee-stained keyboard, and share the mind of somebody so dreadfully alive.

630 words, and flowing.