Goat Notes

From an unpublishable fragment in which a definite non-poet attempts to recount a part of the backstory which does not translate reasonably into prose, from a place where even the physics rhymes instead of repeating.

I don't know that I'll get any prose out of this excursion myself, but I did get some enlightenment on one of the Kateverse's wilder mysteries.

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: First pass on the horsey stuff, of which I know very little. I went through looking for major errors/ideas with the aid of Judith Tarr's extremely helpful Writing Horses, and her Horseblogging posts at Book View Cafe, both of which I can highly recommend. I don't seem to have committed any of the truly classic horrors, but several things could be a lot better, including:

( Noticing how much horses pervade my characters' society in comparison to my own. )

And the little details will be legion, but I knew that already, and that's for correction in the fine edit.

For horse people reading these posts: what most annoys you about the presentation of horses in fantasy when it's wrong, or pleases you when it's right? Who gives you a real sense that their characters are riding horses, instead of bicycles, cavalry canines or daydreams?

For non-horsey folk: what horse-related stuff throws you out of the story, or draws you in?

In other news, my home Internet was on the blink again this morning, so communications may or may not get irregular presently.

I caught one! Right at the beginning of Katy Elflocks, before I knew or thought I'd need to care about the details of the wider kingdom, I had Luke's father give him his ridiculously destructive magic sword as a parting gift - and it is explicitly the case that the old king has borne it into battle and knows what it's like, albeit clearly he doesn't think it's that useful a treasure for a modern monarch. But in the light of the way the worldbuilding subsequently develops, this is slightly more out of context than Henry VII's handing over his invincible Excalibur to his frisky younger son Hal.  I shall have to revisit this, one way or another.

Went through the Puffin Superior's plotline before bedtime. Huge amounts of detail there which will never make the story, but give me a better handle on and a better set of questions about that enigmatical and seriously pivotal character in the latter chapters of Kate. Since I didn't foresee her in Katy, and used her Sisterhood only as a background detail in another context, that's going to be one important place for me to work on foreshadowing and incluing in the earlier story. Also, major worldbuilding chore: finally sorting out to my own reasonable satisfaction how the wider local religion works, both officially and in practice. That turns out to be another matter on which my ideas have changed considerably during the telling.

From last night's belated birthday treat, the memory of a large and luscious Chez Gérard steak followed by pear in red wine syrup is still suffusing me with feelings of tenderness and bounty towards the wide world.

Lob Lazy at the House of Silence: 480 words, writing the ritualistic fairy-tale linkage between eucatastrophe and dénouement while it's hot. Or, in this case, while pleasantly crisp and chill.

This has been giving me some interesting insights, not only into the Kateverse's alt-Scandinavian cultures, but into the things they know that maybe I don't. This linkage stuff, for instance, strikes a seam in their folklore that... well. There are Deep Mysteries in this world that Katy Elflocks knows about, and the gods and the Elvish Court and suchlike; but here's plain proof that at least one other mortal once learned them too. Likely in more detail than Katy, who has other cares and interests she considers much more wholesome.

I wonder now who this world's Woden-figure really was. If he wasn't exactly Mercury after all, but knew something of the god's ways... and didn't mind screwing around with some heavy necromantic crap... Oho!  He could be my ultimate source, and plenty more.   I wonder whether I'll ever get to develop any of that. Not in anything I'm writing at present, either way.

And here, as a special bonus because it is gibbering away in my head, is a little riddle-chant those healthy hearty Nordic nannies like to teach their children.

There is probably a reason that all the Nordic-descended cultures seem to have drifted towards bland mainstream neo-Olympianism.

230 words this morning of a scene I hadn't the hardiness for yesterday after work - wherefore I fled to put the last coat of varnish on the new door instead, and pursue its various sequels.

This passage is actually part of a celebration, and done with goodwill on all parts.  But it's a mediaevaloid country custom, in a hard and dangerous place, albeit an unusually kind and free community.  When I saw how roughly the mock battle for the New Year was going to play out  ("She wouldn't know she'd won if she'd not spent blood nor tears on it," says the canny seamstress-witch Ciss Cross-Stitch in the back of my head, advising the Founder of Fairfields as to why it isn't always sensible to persuade people to behave sensibly), all my sensibilities both old-fashioned and new-fangled positively cringed.  Even my court-reared characters winced.

Which suggests to me that I have at least something right about the tone.  If a community of medieval peasant-pioneers on the ragged edge of Elfland thought and acted inside my modern comfort zone, I would certainly be getting them wrong.

Of course, too far outside the consensus modern comfort zone, and that's a potential problem for the reader.

What I'm trying to do, whether this particular scene survives the final cut or not, is to conjure a place in some ways rawly uncomfortable, and in others warm and welcoming - so that the whole should be seamless, and at best dearly desirable for the reader to visit, or at worst wholeheartedly believable in the way it speaks to my tumbleweed protagonists of 'home'.

Elsewhere, I am still being wormed, and Edward Lessingham has just turned up with wood and tools and interminably described ornamentation to fix up his half-cocked frame story.