Crummy news from a barrel of quarters exceeded my cumulative tolerance yesterday, causing me to whistle like an irritated steam engine and spend much of yesterday tooting off the pressure in sundry manners.  Bagged three books I was waiting for in passing, still have one-and-a-half left.  I'd hoped to be fit to sleep before midnight, but nah.  Scored a measly couple of hours' doze somewhere.  Meh!

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 100 words introducing the second scenelet of the Young Duke.

About a page of a new Wood of Weyre story, very loosely based on The Famous Flower of Serving Men.  The setting is the fairy-tale world of Breaking Night Mountain, which I guess is something like Mercedes Lackey's Five Hundred Kingdoms might be, were its creator as shifty and perverse and Dionysiac as she is conspicuously not.  One of the reasons I keep coming back to this setting, other than its being pleasingly silly and roomy and a natural for backdrop for outrageous tragicomedy, is that it stands just  on the edge of the narratives we know, whilst being so obviously born of  a historical dynamic that's bending it right away from anywhere traditional fairy-tales can keep on happening.  Or any other tales terribly familiar in our terms, either.  I kind of want to know how that's going to end up!

A new Kateverse folk-song, this one from the titanocommunist opposition: Jolly Saturday.  The devil gets good tunes everywhere.

I also began to invent my second bouncy new tune of the day; but when the lyrics began to arrive, I decided firmly but fairly that the world does not really require I'm an Asshole and That's Okay at this particular juncture, and have now successfully applied the brain bleach to most of it.

Now I know why I was hung up so long on the ending to the Wassail arc of Killer-Kate. It was the wrong bloody ending! I wish the back of my brain would talk to the front more clearly than it does.

"Enter Sir Richard of Clover Clough, bearing the Stone that Starts the Avalanche," made such a good turning point, and had so much of the cheap melodrama I love to drop in the right place. Unfortunately, having written it I can see that it's only going to complicate and dilute the main story beyond sense. I'm very fond of Sir Richard, who plays a significant offstage part in the missing thirty years of the story; but either he is going to continue as Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Book, or he's going to have a bit-part in the diplomatic sub-plot. Not a particularly comfortable part, either; but there's a lot of that going round in this story.

The trouble with giving Clover Clough an active rôle is that Richard's agency comes at the expense of my protags', by making everything that happens afterwards reactive - the sort of thing, in fact, that the Fairfielders might have done in some form anyway.  It gets things moving, all right.  But Kate and Luke need to be doing that.  Almost in the hour of their acceptance, they need to kick over the traces, as the Founder comes up with yet another cunning plan for preserving stalemate with a whole array of much more powerful opponents.

They need to make the Founder fight - which means showing her a path both to victory and to long-term peace that neither she nor her brilliant and diverse circle are capable of devising for themselves.  I've always known what my old reprobates had that would let them do that.

What I ought to have realized is that the story becomes axiomatically weaker, if I let the current of circumstance work with them rather than against them.

My gut evidently knew this all along, but was incapable of telling my head until the offending current had started flowing down the page. 

I.  Hate.  Revision.

Squillions of words, all writ with a pigeon-feather dipped in water.