Goat Notes

The Bridge to the End of the Night: 475 words of, eh, bridging passage, summarizing a long and often hair-raising afternoon's conversation, whose details I don't want to dump upon the reader beyond giving the general context and flavor.

The voice of this story, like many others in the Kateverse, comes out rather more archaizing in the first draft than it probably ought to be on completion. There's a quote with Katy talking overly like Katy-from-her-own-legend, and I'll want to amend that on the first-pass revision I'll perform on the Prologue once I've finished it.

The theme of the uttermost bridge pervades this tale in various guises, and I think the climactic scene I'm leading up to here is going to contain its first appearance, or at least its strong foreshadowing.

The Bridge to the End of the Night:  1,150 words.  It seems the Prologue is two scenes, not one - problem propounded, problem resolved, or at least problem resolved to be attacked from a newly promising angle.  Well into the second scene now.  The long summer evening is paling over smoky-tenemented Sellawick, and Katy's partner is showing us his mettle.  Even I sometimes forget just what he is and can be: I've seen him in no such mood since that day on Maltby Edge, two dozen years in his future, and two years ago for me.  I do believe I've missed him.

...with a marathon session of 3,800 words, and by golly I'll know it tomorrow.

Go well, proud Kate, fell Luke, Katy my bravest and dearest; and thou, even thou, mad bad Kit Fox!  There will be Redraft; there will be Reworking; there will be Carving Something Readable Out Of This Whopping Big Monster.  But for now, there is this: four years I have known you, and the best part of three years written you, and well I have grown to love you all.  If it is in my power, you and your friends and lovers, companions and children, will see this outer world through many other eyes than mine, and your tale be made a fit one for remembering deep and wide, with joy and tears and catches of sudden ridiculous laughter abounding.  Let us see what I can do for you, who have done so much for me.

It's done.  I don't know what to say.  I don't know what to do.  I think maybe I'll have a glass of red in celebration, to start with.

Iechyd da, all!

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 3,500 words.  The climactic showdown with the Big Bad finished, and with it the last full chapter.  Now there's nothing left of the first draft but a moderately long epilogue.

Bunny = happy!

Spent an interesting evening upholding the funky monkey side of a friendly debate between Pan narrans, the Storytelling Chimp, and Homo faber, Bob the Builder.  A rum do rather, what with my being the science technician, and the other party the theatre manager.  The venue was the lobby-bar of the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel, that magnificent folly of a cathedral to Being Elsewhere Soon.  Bright Young Things seemingly fallen through some rift from the Twenties flitted through the dim spaces, in tuxes of unvarying shadow and ballgowns glowing every colour will-o'-the-wisp flame - until at last an enormous invasion of bagpipes put all other sights and speech to rout, ours included.  I think we each concluded that the environment had pretty much illustrated the perspectives we came in with.

It is hard, though often rewarding, to communicate across that deep narrow divide between those of us to whom Secondary Worlds are things in themselves, and those to whom they are only tools for producing a desired effect in the Primary. 

This was a good session in a setting I'm glad to have discovered, and will certainly nick detail from for any number of purposes before I'm done with it.  I do wonder, though, how anybody actually manages to feel comfortable in a place like that - for all the excellent physical comfort, pleasant service, and intelligent layout it has to offer.

I think I must always be a bit of a peasant at heart.  Explains something, above and beyond my more mutable beliefs, about the kind of tales that draw me.

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 250 words.  The party for the final venture assembles, and comes down to the Duke's town of Garton.

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 660 words of the last full chapter.  Bad weather, bad dynamics, and brave hope.  Winter can trump clever ideas any time it feels like it.

Tomorrow I have other commitments and shall be lucky to get any writing in at all, so I thought I'd get this sequence started early.

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 1,600 words.  A big dump of the treaty, as the truthful yet bigly bullshit tale goes out to the lords and commons of Alland.  It's well seen that there were two of the best lawyers and two of the best diplomats for a week's ride around, at that Conference!

To the reader it should be obviously both true and bullshitty, but the thrust of it still obscure.  That is because said thrust has not yet been driven through its target, and we all love us some nice surprises.  I shall probably dramatize this dump into a short chapter of its own in the redraft, to balance the recent short chapter which is apt to disappear totally as an entity; but that day is not this day.

One final scene, and as domestically liminal as the first, before this megachapter is done with.

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 240 words.  Kate scores, for once in her life, a palpable hit on Mostly Okay Genius.  Oddly, it is her hit that shows him in a better light than almost anything he is doing or saying in this phase of the book.  Not that he can very much appreciate that...

Lord Evil [aside]: MWAHAHAHAHAHA!

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 690 words.  Golden Kate has done it to me again, and in a way I could least have imagined from her of all people.  But now it's happened, it's more like her than anything.

And because the Young Duke is, as previously noted, also like her...

...the scene has come fully alive at last, and the fire-tide flows fast to the end.

is very attractive indeed, but unhappily it is a narcissus.

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 1,450 words.  Our heroes' proposals amended and concluded.  The Young Duke's inevitable response.