Asafia's bargain

There's a discussion over on the Clarion Foundation blog about teasers, which in this case means choosing excerpts for brief readings.
The following may be too long, but I think it stands reasonably well on its own. I may be too close to the story to judge.
A scene added in the last revisions of The Willow Knot to flesh out the Wicked Aunt:

Asafia stepped into the marshwater, and black mud rose about her bare feet, dabbled at the hem of her white shift. The fat moon bleached hair and skin to like pallor with her linen. In her arms she bore bundled cloth.

"I have woven," she said to the darkness. "I have woven strong within and without, for the love I bear you and for the gifts you give."

"Weaver woman," said the darkness. "What do you bring me?"

Asafia shook her burden out, in meshes that caught moonlight with shadow. "A net to snare birds. To snare frogs. And those who pass between shapes shall not pass through this."

The darkness reached out with hawk's talons to hook the net, with stumpy fingers to worry at the knots, with a blunt muzzle to snuffle at the cords. "The strands sting. What virtue have they?"

"Strands of courtesan's hair for the snare of lust, plied with threads of shrouds for the grave that none escape. Washed in the tears of an infant, the monthly blood of a virgin, and the spittle of a crone."

Could she have learned the craft of House Sallew, those knots that sealed the king's secrets, how much more power would her net have? But that was an old grievance, and Asafia put her niece's sullen obstinacy out of her thoughts. This prince of the marshes was cunning, and she must not be careless.

Its tongue rolled out, touched the net and shrank back snail-like. "What ask you for this?"

"A flask of nix-water." She added, "And safe departure from your lands."

The muzzle flattened to a child's pouting mouth, sharp teeth showing as the upper lip drew back. "The night'll come that you forget, and I'll have your blood and bones."

"Then who should make you a net to snare the silver birds?" Asafia threaded scorn into her voice. "You'd sooner have one dish than a hundred meals?"

It squatted at her feet, shapeless as a trick of weary eyes. "Such a dainty dish that one would be, white as swan's flesh." A stinking sigh fluttered her damp skirts. "Well then, clap hands on a bargain." It held out fingers like rotted twigs, and Asafia took them in her clean hand, felt them yield in her grip like a cluster of frog's eggs. It giggled. "Be one with me, you'll need no nix-water to change your shape."

Asafia said, "To be consumed comes to all mortal flesh without your aid. Give me my flask."

recollected in coziness

I'm sitting in the kitchen, with the woodstove huffing and crackling to itself, with peanut butter cookies and cheese scones on the counter and a cup of tea beside me. Outside it's raining gently, but not quite dark enough for me to draw the curtains. I can see the tight little clumps of blossom on the plum tree still, and the leaves coming out on the roses.
The kitchen curtains are newish. The winter was cold enough that I scoured through the thrift shops for something I could stand looking at (though, as Mark said, any curtain becomes invisible after a month anyways), and came up with nice slubby linen with a powdering of fat stars for the wide window, and two long tan corduroy pieces for the tall window. Then I stencilled fleur-de-lys in dark red over the tan, to make it less boring. So now I can shut the outside away if I want.

This week I've been sleeping in until 6 or 7 a.m., and reading, not writing. I'll post some book reviews in the next day or so, but I thought first I'd ramble a bit about revisions, since that's what I've been immersed in when not engaged in salaried labour, for the last couple of months.

So, yeah, revision. Willow Knot completed came out at almost 130k wordcount, and after getting my beta readers' feedback I hacked it down to 105k, which was at the high end for what I understood agents would look at for a first novel (90k is preferable).
What I took out in that pruning was:
introspection. Any time a character thought something over and those thoughts resulted in action or decision, I cut the thoughts and demonstrated them through the action.
incident that contributed to atmosphere rather than plot, or that began a plot thread that was later cut.
description of anything already established, even if the writing was pretty.

Then, after 30 form rejections or silences, I got an agent. Woohoo! (I still don't quite believe this.) Phone call and email and a list of further revisions, with the perk that I could bring the wordcount up to 125k or so.
A note, here. Agents often ask for revision. I understood this, because I tend to binge-research, and I'd researched agents, and the process of querying, and what's involved in being represented by an agent. But I've run into enough beginner writers who are astonished and somewhat distressed by the idea that an agent, while loving one's work, doesn't think it is perfect as it stands, that I feel I should emphasise this point.
So. Agents may ask you to revise your novel. My agent (a little quiver every time I type those words, still) began as an editor, so she knows what she's doing when she suggests revisions.

First lot of revisions: tighten up the time in the woods, and spread the more eventful events more evenly through those years; build up Myl's knowledge of plants and the hardships & hunger of the forest; make Myl's adjustment to the court more gradual and show her finding her way; simplify the political situation within and without the kingdom.
The wordcount went up to about 120k, and I shipped it off.
Thing I was sorry to lose: the establishing of a House of Commons.
Thing I was happy to add: a masque! and more of the bear.

Not unexpectedly, there was more to come. Second lot of revisions: tighten up the time in the woods, this time by wordcount more than events; build up Myl's ear for charms & magic; add brief episodes of Midame's doings in the first half of the story; establish the elves so as to raise the question of whether Errigenie is elf-touched; intensify the tension between the two kingdoms & bring them to the brink of war; tie the conspiracies together; clarify Alard's scepticism and give him more time for character development in the last part of the story.
The wordcount went up to about 122k, and I shipped it off.
Kind of funny things: the suggestion that I add scenes from Midame's pov, and the suggestion that Nomency and Lusantia be downgraded from kingdoms to duchies or counties. Both of these were things that I had considered in the first writing, but had held back on.
It was suggested that I cut the black thing. This is where I balked, and instead have tried to tie the black thing more closely to Midame and to the marsh events. I may still have to cut it, but I feel it has a job to do, particularly in being what breaks Myl's hope in the forest and inclines her to accept Alard's offer of return.

General thoughts about revision.
Writing is like painting. Add more words, cover up mistakes, fill in layer after layer to create an illusion of 3-dimensionality. Really it's all paint and flat, but add light and shadow and you will deceive the eye.
Revising is like carving. Take away what obscures the form. Start with chisels and mallets, finish with sandpaper. It can't be done in one go, the way the writing can. I have to go back the next day, and back again, each time finding more (though less at a time) of what obscures the form, and removing that piece, that layer, that corner.
Another metaphor altogether: what my agent showed me, and what I found for myself once I started looking, is that I have all the pieces for a strong scene, all the lego blocks for the pirate ship or space shuttle, but I haven't put them together. For example, Alard is carrying his unconscious friend through the forest, evading the conspirators who want to kill him and, unknowingly, the bear (more bear!). Did his injured friend rouse and rave? Did the conspirators pass nearby? Did the bear? Here's where I scuff my feet and look at the ground. Um, no. No, it didn't occur to me to do anything with those pieces, like snap them together into a more intriguing shape. Not until this most recent revision.
Naturally, I can look at someone else's writing and see where they missed an opportunity to build suspense or excitement. That's easy. It is to be hoped that I can now look at my own and do the same. At least in the second draft.

Closing with a brief arthritis report. The right elbow is annoying, and the left foot (the ball thereof). Both thumbs are a bit twingey if I stretch them out, but that may be due to using the belt sander to rough out the puppet heads last week (in case you wondered where that carving metaphor came from). Overall pretty good.

On becoming real

A statistical update
Queries submitted to agents: 33
Form rejections: 18
Rejection by no response: 7
Requests for partial: 3
Request for full mss: 1
Offer to represent: 1

Timeline
May 10 - e-query sent.
May 12 - partial requested.
May 13 - full requested on 2-week exclusive.
May 27 - phone call scheduled.
Jun 1 - phone call and offer.


So, yes, I have an agent. And I have a page-and-a-bit list of Large Structural Revisions that Willow Knot needs, and a deadline to complete them.
And yes, I did spend portions of Monday going 'bwuh-bwuh-bwuh' and OMG!!! and if you are my close friend and haven't already heard this news, it's because I've been dazed and struck silly by sheer good fortune.
As I came out of the daze, I was overtaken by the unnerving realisation that being something very much like a Real Writer means Real Deadlines, not self-set deadlines like 'must finish 2d draft or can't do Nanowrimo'.
But I will try not to gripe about fear of deadlines and doubts of my own competence, because I know there are a good many as-yet-unagented writers out there who would gladly smack me upside the head for any such griping.

a bit early for the mellow fruitfulness

I am beset by apples. Two dehydrators (one with the charming name of Jerky Express, the other the Snackmaster) are humming away in different notes--possibly reducing my hearing in the 'annoying hum' range--and an apple crumble cools in the fridge, yet a heaped mixing bowl of apples remains untouched. Oh, and a bag of apples was left surreptitiously on our neighbour's porch. (Passive voice used to avoid identifying the agent.)
This is just the windfall of two days, you understand. I've filled two tupperware storage tubs with dried apples, and this from the windfalls of the first tree. I'm thinking of offering a sandwich bag of dried apples to anyone who sends me the postage, which Mark thinks would be about $3 for the smaller size of padded envelope & mailing costs.
I don't know--any of my theoretical readers interested in utterly organic apple slices, dried only by air, with no sulfates or sulfites or whatever it is, not even lemon juice?


Assorted signs and portents: a sign that I've been neglecting new writing in favour of revising. I was bustling around the big table, laying out the dancers cloth for painting, and realised that a spider had built a web from the corner of my laptop to the corner of the bookcase beside it.
Unfortunately both cameras were away from home, one in Pennsylvania and one camping somewhere (Saltspring?) so you must rely on my words only. A small tawny striped spider, possibly thumbnail size with legs extended, swaying gently in the centre of a full-size classic-style web showing as thin angles of light where the sun struck.
I'm enough Scot that I won't kill a spider, so I spoke gently to it, and lifted the mooring strand from my laptop over to the bookcase. The web rolled up and the spider scrambled to the upper regions. Hoping that we could reach an understanding, I got myself a cup of tea, sat in the windowseat and opened up the Refuge doc, to establish my territory.
The next day the spider had moved down and covered the spot where I put my teacup. Okay. I spoke gently once again, and lifted the bottom of the web. The spider retreated behind a corner of Trinity's multicoloured unicorn picture and remained there while I typed.
Repeat the next day. I don't mind a spider in the corner. I just want my seat and the place where I put my cup free. I'm still hopeful that we can work this out.

A sign of whose meaning I am unsure: my willow bush dropped its leaves. A few years ago, while at the Golden Swan event in Oliver BC, I broke a couple of willow wands from a tree at the event site, wrapped them in damp paper, brought them home and stuck them in a jar of water. One survived and grew, and I put it in a jar of dirt, eventually transplanting it to a flowerpot. Then to a bigger flowerpot, and off the windowsill where it no longer fit to the back steps. It survived late repottings, dry spells, a crushing snowfall (that killed the upright shoot and sent it growing off at an angle) and being blown over. Presently it sits on the front porch, in the biggest flowerpot I have, and most recently survived going unwatered while we were in England.
Even though I've been watering it regularly, this month it was losing its leaves, and those that didn't fall off were brown and withered. Yet I couldn't find any sign of parasites or other damage. Did it need repotting again? Was I willing to repot it endlessly, when I could barely lift its latest home? (Answer: no.) Also, I was busily ignoring any possible parallels between the growth and die-off of the willow and of The Willow Knot.
This week I see that new growth is springing out, little clusters of leaves replacing the fallen ones. Willows are hard to kill.


Writey things: I was at Bolen Books and found a copy of Year's Best SF, so yes, I looked in the hon. mentions list to make sure, and yes, the Elfland story was in there. Also the amazing Jen Pelland had two hon. mentions - woo! and her name spelt right, I think.
I've sent my registration off to the 3-Day Novel Contest. I see that it's the same weekend as the Farthing Party, but since I can't afford to get to that one anyways, I'm not too conflicted. I am almost decided to get a membership to Worldcon 2009, though, which also means stumping up the money to get to Montreal.

The polishing of draft 3 of Willow Knot is almost finished. I've cleaned up the timeline and fixed some motivations, clarified how Tyl came to be enchanted, and some things like that. I'm a little happier with the proposal scene and with Midame's testimony. (can a woman give testimony? what would she hold onto?)
I've also been thinking on prusik's tough question of what the book is about, though mostly by trying to come up with a logline / elevator pitch / summary. I'm much better at doing this with other people's books, naturally. I think the book is about responsibility and when to let go of it; about how love is more complicated than it looks and easier to mess up than you'd think; about how some things are better unmade. None of which are very helpful or intriguing.
Logline attempt: "When Mylla's brother is trapped by enchantment, all she wants is to free him. But to do that she must save a princess, a kingdom, and herself." I want to work in that she has to accept the help of the king who executed her father, but I can't get it to flow yet. Will think more, though really I should be coming up with a two-paragraph summary, not a two-sentence one.
Also I should finish the polishing first, and take my territory back from the spider.

drafty in here, hur, hur.

Other than reading the last bit over in the morning, to be sure there isn't some error that makes a nonsense of it all, I'm done with the third draft of The Willow Knot.
104k wordage by Word's count.
Tomorrow I'll muck about with copying the file onto this-here computer and emailing it to round two of beta-readers. Plus printing out a double-spaced version for Paul, who prefers hard copy.

This coming week I will be living in the later 14th century, where laptops are unknown, and where Linot is only literate enough to keep her account-books in order.

And now I'm going to bed.

sheathe machete, take out hammer

I have cut just under 26k from a 129.5k manuscript. I'm torn between a euphoric sense of accomplishment, and grinding guilt that I let anybody--still less anybody I hold in affection--read 26 thousand unnecessary words.
I am so sorry. Really. I will never do it again. The gratitude part just makes me feel worse about it.

The next step is to re-enter at the first chapter and go through, pausing at the angle brackets to hammer home various elements that were scanted.

Clarifying the material culture of Nomency and environs--I hadn't considered that the default tech level for a fantasy is, say, 13th-15th c. Western Europe. Willow Knot, being a Grimm fairy tale (Grimm 11, Brother and Sister), is set in late 1700s Europe, roughly during Kleinstaaterei, something before the time the Grimms were collecting stories. This won't automatically occur to most readers, so I need to drop more clues about the material culture, earlier on.

Establishing that religion exists, without making religion a big honking issue. I've changed 'the Dear' to 'the Dear Lord' throughout, and hopefully that will do most of it. I can't count on an audience who know all the words to I Know Where I'm Going.* I'm still worried that US readers (okay, humour me briefly in the delusion that I will have readers I don't already know personally) see evangelical Protestantism as the model of religion good or bad, and will be bemused or unconvinced by any faith less insistent. But there is nothing I can do about that. For sure I can't write an equivalent to 1700s German states without religion. It would be like writing the European Middle Ages without religion--that gives you the Society for Creative Anachronism.
That was a joke, but never mind.

Clarifying why Myl is paranoid about being indebted. First to another person, because of Midame reminding her how grateful she should be, and how she owed her aunt obedience and affection--which is part of what messes up her relationship with Alard. Then to any creature in the Maerchenwald, because the stories are pretty clear that if you take without asking, or take without paying, the thing you took is going to bring you down. I can't assume that level of folktale knowledge in a reader, so it needs to be reiterated beyond the once or twice.

Laying in the clues of Midame's 'rescue' of the unborn child, via what Myl witnessed and partially remembers, which is also how she learned to hear spells running in water--this will be a tough series to complete without being either too obscure or clunkily obvious. If I can do it, it will wrap things up very tidily.

Establishing that Alard and Myl do not marry for love, and maybe clarifying that no one of their class and time would expect to.
Alard marries her out of guilt, in an attempt to set things right, to close the question of alliance with Lusantia, to get an heir, and to use her supposed gift for unsealing. He doesn't explain any of this to her, so establishing it is going to be more than a little difficult, working from her pov.
Myl marries him in hope of freeing Tyl from enchantment, to restore her family's estate, and because refusing the king is usually a bad idea.
I sure hope nobody reads this looking for a tale of True Love and Soulmates. They do love each other by the end, but--.

Laying in the groundwork for the plot against Alard, the example of the duke of Valdosa in his extravagance and how he finances it, and the resentment of Fadric and others that they can't use his method because Alard forbids it.
Concentrating the exiles subplot on Lusantia, with Valdosa being the impulse for the regicide subplot. It may still be too complicated, but I guess I'll find out.

Building Truda's manipulation of the ladies in waiting, which will be tricky because it happens out of Mylla's sight. I laid some clues in Donvina's outburst, but probably not strongly enough.
I've made it more obvious that Truda is the one who tells Alard about the sweetmeats--did anyone wonder why she was so quick on the spot after Alard told Myl off and went off in a huff? And why Mylla went into labour so soon after Truda's posset? Nobody commented on it, but maybe that means it was perfectly clear.

Simplifying Baldolf's aims. I was still working out what he wanted in the second draft, and by the end of it I knew, but if I'd gone back to trim out the false leads, I would have started rewriting the whole damn thing and it was time to step back.
Resolution: never let anyone see anything earlier than the 3d draft ever again.

Doubtless there's more - oh, the scene where Lina warns of the witchcraft rumours will be revised from a simple meeting in the garden to a full-out fight between two of the ladies-in-waiting, over one encouraging the extravagance mentioned above. I've realised that I will have two 'shower scenes' and a catfight, and an unplanned pregnancy. Exploitation fairy tale!

Anyway, Willow Knot draft 3 sits at 103.6k, and I figure I can go up to 110k while filling holes and polishing. Ideally I'll finish that process before our pre-technological Living History Week at Fort Rodd Hill. That's the end of this month. Excuse me while I gird my loins.

*'I know where I'm going,
I know who's going with me.
I know who I love,
But the Dear knows who I'll marry'

The machete unsheathed

Finally revising: I spent a week house-sitting for friends in Vancouver (it was originally to be house- and cat-sitting, but the cat was boarded at the vet's instead, since I'm not qualified to give injections to any living thing) and finally, finally, I got stuck into the revision of Willow Knot.
Apparently I'm still recovering from the cold I brought back from the UK, since I was hacking up phlegm randomly through the day, and falling asleep between 7pm and 9pm each night.
Still and all, I got at least 5 hours of steady pruning in each day, and cut at least 10k wordage. Plus doing a little tidying and dusting to earn my keep.
What I removed: restatements of previously established material, which I think is a workshop habit resulting from posting chapter-by-chapter; notes to myself describing places and plot points (cleverly disguised as narrative, but not necessary to the reader); groundwork for plot or motivation that didn't end up happening.
The unicorn is gone, gone, pretty though it was. The babes in the wood remain, because I believe they're thematically important: not all tales end well. Some incidents are intensified, like the encounter with the head groom in chapter one, which is now nastier and introduces the 'traitor' point.
The first part is still a survival narrative, like Hatchet, or My Side of the Mountain, or half of Canadian literature, depending which critics you read. That's what drew me to the story in the beginning, the question of how the little sister manages in the forest by herself, and since she knows her brother is enchanted, how does it affect her actions and decisions?
FutureBarb notes: about 17k has presently been removed, but some of it will have to come back as the holes are filled.

I made sure to go for a walk each day, and the house is in a pleasant part of Vancouver, with quirky little shops and restaurants, second-hand bookshops and (oh no!) dollar stores.
I'd brought books from my To-Be-Read pile, and still ended up buying books, at Book Warehouse and at two of the used-book places. I also bought (doom! doom!) notebooks. What could I do? There were at least three dollar stores within an easy walk, with notebooks and stationery decorated with oddly translated English or strange images:


The icecream snowmen are just creepy. I love them. You can find more of Menji's notebooks here. I also found new Barunson notebooks, and a Young Art pocketbook that says 'I Love Coffee'.

I did read books, filing it under 'research', though most of it was reacquainting myself with the subgenre of fairy-tale retellings. I finally read The Door in the Hedge, but wasn't as taken by it as I'd hoped after Deerskin and Beauty. I finished A Telling of Stars, and got started with Winter Rose and A College of Magics.
But it's late, here, so I'll comment on them later.

interlude: what's your story about?

The Willow Knot: As mentioned previously, I've been bunging the Willow Knot file out to my Deeply Appreciated beta-readers. In the course of making sure that the file hadn't undergone some strange transmogrification while being transferred (the Star Trek transporter beam cock-ups are nothing compared to what I can do pushing a file through three different OSs), I did a bit of a read-through before sending it out. Then I had to stop, because I'd be wanting to tweak and smooth, and fix some of the problems I know are in there.
But since the point of this exercise is to get feedback on what needs to be in the story and what doesn't, doing cosmetic repairs would be a waste of time.
It would be helpful, of course, if I knew from the start what needed to be in the story. To do that, I'd need to know what the story is about. This may be what's called 'theme'. I'm not sure. Theme is sometimes stated as a sort of moral lesson--"possessive love leads to loss" for instance--that reminds me inescapably of the Snakes and Ladders board we had when I was a kid, which was all moral lessons. Sometimes theme is stated in a single word, like 'courage' or 'endurance'. Some writers have their themes in place before they start writing, others find out partway through. And I suppose some wait for the critics to tell them what it was.

If I have a theme, and my body of work may not be sufficient a body of evidence to argue for that, I think it might be: It's more complicated than you think. And messier.
One of the ideas (I hesitate to consider it a theme) that I seem to be working with in Willow Knot is the idea of one's own story, or of how stories intersect.
Myl is in the Maerchenwald, the Folkloric Woods, the Enchanted Forest where the stories live, where they begin and often end. She doesn't know whether she's in her own story or someone else's. After all, she's the older sister, and stories usually belong to the youngest child. Maybe she's a walk-on in someone else's story, and she does seem to play that part. She's even the Supernatural Helper in one, or seen as such. Other characters pass through, having their own stories to follow to the end, touching the edges of her story.
Which is a concept that appeals to me, and ties in with one of the Viable Paradise lessons, that every piece on the chessboard thinks it's a queen. But that concept fights with another one, that everything that stays in the story needs to be necessary to the story in a clear and straightforward way. Which would mean that only those scenes that belong to Myl's storyline should stay. The scenes that belong to the idea of 'the forest harbours strangeness', for instance, don't need to be there.
It depends what the story is really about. At this point, I'm going to ask the readers what it's about for them.

Nanowrimo: pretty darned slow. The weekend was not as productive as I'd hoped, and this weekend I'll be in transit for some part of it, and at an SCA event for part of it. Saturday will be booked, at least. However, I'm taking the laptop, and hopefully I can get some use out of the travel time, and afterwards be able to pry the text out of the laptop again and push it into my desktop.
And perhaps those circs will allow me to recapture the panic and urgency of the 3-day. Man, it's hard to have the longer time stretching out, and the foolish confidence that one can catch up, by just oh, doubling or tripling one's wordcount. Well, difficult for me. Other people, I see, finished their 50k last week.
The event I'm attending is the Tir Righ Investiture, and the reason I'm going is that it's the Principality Arts & Sciences Championship, and supposedly I'll be doing some judging, though the details seem to be a bit up in the air.

Palindromic rheumatism: hands, particularly the left hand, stiff for the last couple of days. No difficulty in moving them, no problem typing, just discomfort. It takes conscious effort to close my left hand into a fist. My guess is that if I weren't on the meds, this would be a flare-up. On the Monday the knuckles of my left hand were a bit swollen, but not painful.
Hm. In December it will be a year since I figured out that there was something going on with my joints that wasn't a rotator cuff injury. Happy anniversary, mm?

my writing space

Orogeny posted a pic of her writing space, and I am torn between envy and admiration, especially of her gorgeous red sponge-painted wall. Athenais has a lovely clean-lined one as well.
Me?
Well, I have two spaces. Here's my downstairs isolation cell (no internet access) where srs writting gets done:


It's a window seat, and I am a total sucker for window seats (one of the reasons we bought the house, the main one being a room big enough for the 10x4' table). This is where I write in the mornings, when the house is quiet.
It doesn't look nearly as cluttered as it actually is, due to my not being able to show the full space. Wait, this is what it looks like from my side (note clutter):


And here's my upstairs writing space--I do have a sponge-painted wall behind it, in 'colours left over from the painters'.



I guess 'comfortable clutter' is about the kindest I can say, here.

Other writey stuff: I'm thinking of trying NaNoWriMo next month. This is my carrot (or is it the stick?) for finishing the second draft of Willow Knot this month and getting it to betas. Which reminds me I should confirm who still wants to beta it, considering that it's getting up to 110k (ah, the heady days when I groaned about it reaching 90k, dear dead days that they were when I was young).
So. If I don't finish the second draft, which includes cleaning up the new material enough that I'm not consumed with embarrassment about someone else seeing it, by the end of October, I can't do NaNo. So swear I.
But if I do get that done, I can play NaNo for the month of not looking at Willow Knot and getting fresh eyes.
This weekend I got the 'queen comes back from the dead' scene written, and revised the confrontation between Myl and one of her ladies-in-waiting. The lady has fallen ill and whispers are going around that she's been bewitched, and what did happen to Myl's brother anyways, hm?
I was aiming for drama, but. The chief lady-in-waiting, Havoisie, who's otherwise a bit of a self-important figure of fun, asked the stricken one just what was wrong with her. On hearing the list of symptoms, she sniffed and said 'You're not bewitched, you're with child. And if you think the queen had aught to do with that, your mother shouldn't have let you out alone.'
So Myl doesn't get a big dramatic moment. Sigh. But this may be better.

Next weekend I'll be at VCon, the Vancouver Science Fiction Convention, guest of honour Peter Beagle.
I hope I can get the subplot about the Lusantia refugees and the guilds all tucked in by then.

drizzling and happy writey stuff

Reading up on 18th c. German society, I discovered something that may just have to go into the Willow Knot. A pastime of wellborn ladies, called parfilage, which at first I read as persiflage, but no, less wit required.
Parfilage, or in England, drizzling (I'm not making this up) was the pastime of unravelling gold braid, lace, or trim. Yes, really. Taking ornament apart. Now, I can see not wanting to waste gold thread, and unpicking or unravelling it seems a thrifty thing to do, akin to sides-to-middling sheets, a housewifely task my own mother performed. (If you're not familiar with that, it's exactly what it sounds like.) But as a courtly hobby? As something to fill one's days, up there with tambour-work and opus anglicanum?
Must be an exaggeration, I thought, and started looking for more references. Which I found. It does seem to have begun as an economy, with old-fashioned or worn uniforms and livery being refitted--cutting the buttons off and that sort of thing, and the remainder being given to charity/the poor. The braid could be unpicked, and the gold thread sold back to the goldsmith. Simple enough.
Somehow it was taken up by the nobility, in France and Austria, then in England (England is always a late adopter). Noble ladies were never without a bag to hold the unravelled braid, scissors, and a tool for unpicking. Court business and social gossip had a continual accompaniment of tsrr...tsrr...tsrr. (History of Needlework Tools and Accessories, Sylvia Groves, 1966)
Where did they get all the braid and lace? Aha, here's the meat of it. Gentlemen friends brought them old jackets and suchlike, as gifts. But the enthusiasm outran the supply of old clothes, and pretty soon the clever goldsmiths started making little figures and ornaments of galons that a gentleman could give to a lady for brief admiration followed by careful destruction.
"Sheep, dogs, squirrels, cradles, carriages in miniature, &c. were offered, admired, and then pulled to pieces for 'parfilage'. It afforded good opportunity for innumerable gallantries. A gentleman went to a masked ball in a costume purposely composed of cloth of gold and bullion, worth two hundred pounds, which he sent next day to a lady." (Lady Sarah Davison Nicolas, 1849)
A lady sufficiently flirtatious and industrious could reportedly earn 100 Louis d'or in a year. With apparently no damage to her reputation, either for the labour or the rapacity.
I'm not at all sure what I'm going to do with this, but it fits so clearly into the braiding / untying / knotting themes of Willow Knot that it must go somewhere in the court section.

In other news, I've found another way to make things difficult for Myl. She's been aware that she's vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft, or just nasty gossip, and today I figured out where that's going to happen and how. Yes. And how difficult it will be for her to confront or even track down.
A discussion on the book forum reminded me of the old belief that scratching a witch's face enough to draw blood would break her spell, and I think that's going to fit in nicely.
And last weekend, though I didn't get as much written as I'd hoped, I did figure out a way to up the drama of the scene where Alard has his last chance to catch Myl before she returns to the willow for good. Not only does he get to deal with the walking corpse of his queen (well, she's mostly dead) but Midame will be on the scene as well, and will probably try to prevent any reconciliation by whatever means she has access to.
More characters to keep track of in the room, but much better if she's there.

The awkward part is that I probably won't be home this weekend, although I have all sorts of bits to add to the story. I won't even be near an electrical outlet, most likely. The best I can do is to bring the research books I need and spend my spare time (which there will be hours of) reading what I didn't get to at Pennsic.

Presently reading: Blood and Ivory, by P.C. Hodgell, Meisha Merlin, 2002. I'm enjoying it, mostly because I like Hodgell's books, and I'm happy to read more of Jamethiel Priest's-Bane regardless. The stories so far are fairly slight, giving more depth to backstory already established in the series. It's for fans, and I'm a fan, so that works out nicely. It probably wouldn't appeal to someone who hadn't read the series, or to someone who wasn't also interested in how a writer develops a character. Jame has been with Hodgell since her teens or childhood, by the looks of it, and has gone through many settings and incarnations. I had a little thrill of confirmation to see that Tai-tastigon was intentionally a Fritz Leiber setting, because that's what I thought it was back when I first began reading.
As always, I'm vastly impressed that Jame escapes Mary Sue status. I don't quite know how, because I'm sure she'd score very high on the test. Perhaps because Hodgell is playing with the tropes, winding them until they snap?

standing in a draft

It all depends how one defines 'complete'. The ever-expanding first draft of The Willow Knot is 91k. The last quarter has many notes-to-self about bits to expand or insert. The story is all there, yes. The narrative isn't, necessarily.
My first drafts of short stories or of chapters (to be posted on workshops, for instance) are fairly clean. I usually tweak and polish while re-reading, so my standard for first draft may be more tight-arse than some. Notes to self have usually been replaced by the relevant text before anyone sees them. This leaving it as is and going off for a month(ish) to research and work on other things isn't what I'm used to. I'll have to see how it works.
Rather presumptuous to talk about 'what I'm used to', when I've completed, oh, one co-written novel thus far. Siege of the Revenants was composed mostly on email, writing and emailing back and forth to each other for about a year, writing scenes as the fancy took us, leaping about in space and time. Then fitting the jigsaw together and noting the missing scenes (sky, sky, sky, reflection of sky, grass, sky). I did the note-taking, but M-- did the first collation and first full draft, so it's doubtful whether I have completed a first draft previously.
Revisions, heck yeah. I like revisions. It's the instinct to tidy rather than clean.

Conventional wisdom is that the second draft is the first draft trimmed by 10%. I know for certain sure this will not be the case. I'll be able to trim, yes, but I'll be adding at least another 5k, and it wouldn't surprise me if the second draft verged on 100k. Unfortunately, there isn't the 10k of angst and explanation that I cut out of Siege, so the third draft reduction is going to take out meat as well as fat. Bones have their own beauty, scraped clean.
My study's ornament, thou shell of death.
Once the bright face of my betrothed lady,
When life and beauty naturally fill'd out
These ragged imperfections
Okay, so Tourneur didn't agree.

In the meantime, I've gotten back to "Climbing Boys", and after that, I hope, to "Elementary Magic" (which needs a new title). I'm reading the Secret Memoirs of Princess Lamballe, and Bohemia in the eighteenth century, by Robert Kerner, by way of research. Both of them have odd prose styles, demanding to be read out loud, which I would, if I weren't slowly recovering from a sore throat.
I've got some lovely books on palace architecture, which I'm not letting myself look at until I've finished "Climbing Boys".

It's very odd to plop into the window seat in the morning and open the short stories folder instead of the novels folder. I've been set on the one storyline since October (with a break for writing "Chimps on a Blimp") and I'm a creature of habit.
Priscilla doesn't mind. She nags me to get into the window seat and make her a lap, so she can wedge herself against the laptop and turn into a purring shedding muff. This the cat that wouldn't go near a lap when she first arrived. But perhaps since I pull a duvet over my legs, she can pretend she's not really on my lap?

Submissions and rejections: Bunged "Spellcheck" off to On Spec, which has to maintain a percentage of Canadian content (yay for restrictive culture laws!) to keep its grant. In a spirit of what the heck, entered Fold in the Glimmer Train Fiction Open, which accepts entries up to 20k wordage. I'll have to check if "Bride" is anywhere presently, because I don't think I've hit Realms of Fantasy with it yet. "Foretold" has come home to me, unwanted by Fantasy Magazine, and I may try it at Weird Tales (received a recent issue of WT from Ferret, so I have an idea what they print).

Just finished reading: You Don't Have to Be Evil to Work Here, But It Helps, by Tom Holt. This is a follow-on from The Portable Door, but could probably be read on its own. Hapless Brit becomes involved with magic, gods, random heroes and bureaucracy, finds frustration, danger and love. I really should post a couple of the contract provisions for selling your soul to the Devil, which are all too plausible. It's a book that requires being read out loud to whoever else is around--not least because they'll be wanting to know what you're giggling at.
All Together Dead, by Charlaine Harris. Both the friend who lent this to me and another friend who was present said that this instalment was disappointing. I'm undecided.
Bad aspects - perhaps I should have expected it from the title, but there are definitely too many characters. Some show up just for the sake of showing up, as if it were a reunion episode on tv. I agree that Harris should bounce her 'continuity girl' rather than mentioning her in the acknowledgements. The first chapters are full of characters introduced with tags and explanations, and several of them don't do anything to justify the introduction. Yes, it can be difficult to enter an established series and not know who everyone is, but there's always the option of providing an annotated character list before the story starts. (I love Bubba as much as the next reader, and it's nice to know that he made it through the New Orleans flood, but he Doesn't Appear In This Story, so don't waste space on him!)
Good aspects - my friends said that nothing happens or changes, and the changes in Sookie's relationships aren't fully established or explored; the focus is more on the big picture of vampiric politics and human retaliation. In that big picture, there are some serious changes, and I'm curious how the vampire hierarchy will shake out in the next book.

childhood was better the first time around

As an exercise, I recently bought a copy of Classics Illustrated Junior no.554, The Enchanted Deer, vaguely recalled from my childhood. I'm pretty sure I also had 548 The Magic Pitcher (story of Baucis and Philemon), 553 King Thrushbeard, and 555 The 3 Golden Apples (Hercules and the Apples of the Hesperides). I may have had others, but memory fails.
Some of the Classics Illustrated were excellent. The War of the Worlds and Time Machine (especially the cover paintings), Faust and Macbeth, those stand out. The Juniors were a mixed lot. The art is pretty flat and stereotyped, and the selection of stories is all over the place. The majority are Grimm tales, but Andersen and Ruskin (King of the Golden River) get a look in, as does Browning (Pied Piper) and Frank Baum (Wizard of Oz). Greek mythology, English folktales (Jack and the Beanstalk), American tall-tales (Paul Bunyan) and Russian tales (The Salt Mountain) fill in gaps. The Runaway Dumpling may be Japanese. It's a bit difficult to tell from the cover art.
You may have guessed that my interest in The Enchanted Deer is not only that I read it in childhood, but that it's a retelling of Grimm 11, Brother and Sister. I was curious to see how the adaptation was handled, because the story has some awkward aspects. For instance, our heroine is murdered and comes back as a fairly physical ghost.
So. First off, the children are given names: Gretchen and Jon. Jon is established as the older, and as the caretaker. He carries Gretchen's bucket and shares his bread with her; he's half a head taller. This is a bit jarring when he's the one who can't control his thirst, but ties in nicely with Gretchen's vow "You have always taken care of me. Now I will take care of you." (Though I have to think that a deer is better adapted to surviving in the wild woods than a small girl is.)
The wicked stepmother is a sharp-featured woman in a headscarf, who conjures up the children's images in a bonfire, rather an effective panel, and curses "Brooks and streams, who drinks of thee will be an animal instantly" a scansion not entirely satisfactory. The three animals of the streams are lion, tiger and 'deerlet'--roebuck being too foreign a word, perhaps.
Deer-Jon is a dead ringer for Bambi with a haircut. Gretchen makes a collar for the deer not from her garter (another foreign concept unless elasticised and worn by Goldrush dancehall girls?) but from her golden necklace, which contrasts rather with her patched clothing.
So far we're keeping pretty close to the story, with a few fireworks added. Gretchen and Deer-Jon live happily in the cottage they find, and two panels show them growing older. The deer gets little stubby antlers, then a 4-point rack. Gretchen gets taller, develops a bosom and hips, but her tightly braided hair remains the same length, and her clothes magically grow with her. Her skirts, in fact, lengthen from above her knees as a little girl to below her knees as a young woman. The square blue patch on her red dress remains in the same position.
Not that I worried about any of this as a child.
The young king--whose hair is the same odd grey-brown that Jon's was--comes to hunt, specifically to hunt the enchanted deer with the gold collar, a nice shortcut. Three times the deer begs to go and be hunted and bounds merrily away (yes, with that wording each time) and leads the hunters a merry chase (yes, that too).
Here's where the story diverges. The wicked stepmother (remember her?) chooses this third day to come and spy on them. For unexplained reasons, she changes herself into a black deer with a 5-point rack and follows Deer-Jon, while both are followed by the king's hunters. The king himself is being led to the cottage, where Gretchen lets him in, thinking it's her brother knocking.
Gretchen tells the nice man that her evil stepmother enchanted her brother into a deer (how she figured this out is unclear) and the two of them race off to stop the huntsmen. Fortuitously, both the enchanted deer and the black deer have been captured, not filled full of arrows or had the dogs set on them (hm, no dogs visible). The stepmother, perhaps fearing this fate, turns back into herself and is promptly accused by Gretchen. The king explains that he's the king (something which has escaped everyone's notice, despite the large golden crown he's wearing) and commands the stepmother to break the enchantment.
Jon reappears, startling a small Disneyish bird which has no lines in this scene. Now, when enchanted, he was wearing a blue jacket patched at the elbows, blue overalls with patches on knees and seat (sort of a lederhosen pattern, but not leather) and a white shirt. Reappearing, he wears a short-sleeved white shirt, tight-fitting blue trousers (or hose, I can't be sure) and ankle-boots replacing his low shoes. The golden necklace has vanished--perhaps he bought the clothes with it during the changeover.
The witch skulks off, the king proposes to Gretchen and she accepts. "So they all went off to the palace and lived happily ever after."
It's rather a clever shortcut, really. It avoids the issues of the pregnancy and delivery, the queen's murder, the substitution of the stepmother's daughter, and the burning at the stake. I'm not sure any of the adaptations for children deal with that part of the story. At least, I haven't run across any that provide an illustration for it. A little strong for the picture-book audience, perhaps (by which I mean the reading-out-loud parent).

Writing: The Willow Knot is about 87k, which means 12k more than my original estimate, without quite being finished yet. I'll be in transit for the next few days, so my writing time will be variable, but I'm still reasonably confident of finishing the first draft this month. I'm feeling slightly daunted by the coronation and wedding scenes, and would dearly like to cheat and have it all pass in a blur of colours and noise and be briefly memorialised at the end of the day. But that would be cheating.

I've mostly recovered from the trauma of registering my domain name. There's a placeholder page, with a not-bad template (better than the rest of yahoo's rather dull selections) and a little bit of text. Looking at it, I can't think of very much more to say. Perhaps I should leave it as it stands?
But my son offered, as a Mother's Day present, to design my website. Which was very sweet of him, and I accepted. I shall try not to be too exasperating during the process.

Just finished reading: Blind Justice, a Sir John Fielding mystery, by Bruce Alexander. Good fun and a quick read. The period setting was nicely handled, and young Jeremy isn't terribly irritating. There's some sententiousness, as his older self--the narrator--points out his younger self's failings, but that does fit with the time and tone. Two usages made me blink a bit. Lady Goodhope speaks of a footman who "turned up missing", a jokey phrasing I'd place at not earlier than the 1920s, just off the top of my head. Sir John Fielding warns Jeremy of becoming "disorientated" in the city. I seem to recall orientate arriving as a back-formation from orientation, the previous (in my lifetime!) verb being orient. I haven't verified this with the OED, though. The solution to the mystery is very suited to the time, though it would be completely over the top in a modern setting. One could imagine a broadsheet ballad coming out afterwards, with cheap woodcut headers.

ghostly online presence

This morning I registered my domain name. I feel a bit queasy and what-have-I-done? about it. I'll have time to adjust, because Mark is off to Kalamazoo (and Tyler too, whoops, wrong rhyme) and I decided to go with Islandnet through him. Nothing can be done until he returns, by which time my stomach should have settled.
Islandnet's $10 Cdn a month, but they're local and easy to get hold of. Which reminds me that I need to start collecting receipts and things so that I can figure out what to do about my taxes next year. Argh. I've seen what Mark goes through doing the small business taxes thing for Gaukler Medieval Wares, and now I'm venturing into the self-employed course?
He keeps saying "You're allowed two work-related conferences a year!" in a cheerful voice. I hope that means he'll keep on doing my taxes.
I suppose designing a website could be fun, in between the screaming in frustration and banging my head parts. Should I have lots of blinking lights and contrasting backgrounds? Maybe some Flash animations to liven things up?
Let's see. Things a website should have: index, bibliography, news, excerpts, bio?

Writing: Finally, into the last quarter of Willow Knot. 83k - did I once say blithely that I was allowing myself 80k so I'd have 5k slop allowance? Ha. I'll be lucky to get out of first draft under 90k. On the good side, much of the last quarter is already written, including the ending. And I'm starting to see my way through the court/intrigue part, and understand what happened there.
I know who the bear is now, and an acute reader should pick it up pretty quickly as well.
Began the conversation that should lead to Alard proposing to Myl (Mylla now) but they've veered off into talking about the divine right of kings (not in those words). That's all right, since it works towards Myl's purpose at court and the dream-vision.
I'm feeling a little more confident about them falling in love in a meeting-of-minds Heyerish way, which is my ideal. Not that I can write as well as Georgette Heyer, but at least if I aim high I fail higher than if I aim low.
I've also realised that neither of them will be in love when they marry, and that Myl's going to enter it in quite a cold-blooded way, hoping to get security and free Tyl from enchantment. With luck the reader will be fond enough of her by then to forgive this unromantic attitude.
I will--I will finish the draft this month. I swear. Witness this.

The first 3 chapters of Cost of Silver (pt. 1 The Astrologer's Death) went up on my LJ. *flinches at admission of having a Livejournal account*. Ferret caught me up on a major historical glitch, which I am humbly grateful for her doing. She also pointed me towards a way around it. Words are insufficient to thank her. Bookherder (another Furtive Scribbler) demanded the next chapter, even if I've run out of festival names (octave, quinzaine - then what? I dunno) so I'll probably do it, because cliffhangers are cheating.
Re-reading the first chapters pleased me--I've gotten past the 'this is all dreadful' stage and reached the 'this isn't bad, did I write it?' stage. If I picked it up in a shop I'd read further.
Soon I'll be able to get back to Astrologer, while letting Willow Knot sit before revision. One of my OWW critique semi-circle was asking about it, too.
Maybe get the Boxer Rebellion magic story and the poltergeist chimney-sweeps story done as well?

Glimmer Train rejected "Foretold", no surprise, and "Bride" didn't win for short fiction, again no surprise. Tesseracts rejected "Spellcheck" which will leave me wondering if I should have sent "Bride" instead--my two stories with Canadian settings.
"Spellcheck" is off to SH, "Foretold" to Fantasy, and "Bride" to Clarkesworld because it has a sexy vampire and I only need 4 more rejections to meet my 2007 goal.

Today I am a real writer

I was tempted to make that 'Today I am a woman' but it's a bit late, really. Or 'real boy', but I never much liked Pinocchio (and was his name really a rude joke?)
The second issue of Coyote Wild is up on the web. And my long story, The King of Elfland's Stepdaughter, is there in the table of contents. Right where people can come along and read it.
This is the first story I've sold. It was the second short story I wrote with the intention of submitting for publication.
When I re-read it, I was surprised that I felt no urge to tweak or fiddle with it. It's not perfect, I'm sure, but it's complete. I've released it into the wild and it isn't really mine anymore. It belongs to the people who read it, in their eyes and their interpretations of what I thought I was saying. Fly away, little bird.
Not to say that I'm anything but twittering with excitement over having a paid-by-the-word story out there with my name on it. 'Cause I am twittery. And we'll see how philosophical I am if there's a negative review--what price my zen-like detachment then?
Please insert here any mental images of over-excited dancing icons that seem appropriate to you.

Writing: The Willow Knot hit 75k (about time!) as I completed the first draft of chapter 12. Chapter 13 is (for now) intentionally left blank. Chapters 14 to 20 are drafted, with gaps. The proposal, the opening of documents, and the trial are still to be written. The complete draft will run over 80k, I'm almost certain. Still, I'm really liking how the changeling hints worked out, and I don't think they'll overweight the story.
There are going to be bits of story that don't get explained or resolved, though. Like how Midame acquired witchy powers, and what happens to the bear who may be an enchanted man. I'm okay with that. Hopefully an editor will be as well. It will leave some openings for fan-writers, should I achieve that distinction.

Presently reading Concepts of Cleanliness: changing attitudes in France since the Middle Ages, by George Vigarello (Cambridge 1985). Much fascinating social detail, from the communal baths of the Middle Ages to the obsession with clean linen in the 1600s, including a paragraph on lousing (yay!) and the information that "Certain women with particularly nimble fingers even made a profession of it". The sociological/psychological argument, about the skin being seen first as a barrier and then as utterly permeable and vulnerable (with water, especially warm water, invading the body and bringing disease with hit) is presented straightforwardly. A relief, that, because sometimes I really cannot be doing with French academic writing. I'm a third of the way into it; I expect it will be my lunchbreak reading for another few days.

research happy things

Alright, blogs are useful in one way. When I want to hop up and down and do the happy dance over some petty triumph of research or plotting or characterisation, and nobody in my real life is likely to do anything but say 'well, that's good' in a 'smile, nod, and hope she goes away' sort of voice, I can come here.
In the root story, Little Brother and Little Sister, the queen is done to death (it's unclear what happens to her body) in the following way:

they carried the weakly Queen into the bath-room, and put her into the bath; then they shut the door and ran away. But in the bath-room they had made a fire of such deadly heat that the beautiful young Queen was soon suffocated.

Straightforward, right? Except for where she gets to and how she returns to feed her baby and so on. But don't mind that for now. What's important is that I have a major scene to write that takes place in a bath-room. A royal bath-room. (Badstube, in the original German.)
Which looks like what? Where in the palace would it be? Steam bath or immersion? Water heated how? What's the floor made of? And so on.
Sure, I can go and look at Ingres, though his Turkish Bath is a bit more crowded than I think is plausible for the plot--in fact it's hard to make out the decor, so well-fleshed is the room. The Small Bather is likelier, if a more modest establishment.
I've been looking at a nice Victorian book advocating public bathhouses and laundry houses to improve hygiene in the cities. I've been looking at books of architecture. I was even courageous enough to google sauna and "bath house" and found a useful short history of the Finnish Sauna, with the following amusing notes:

He probably means the people in northern Germany, especially near the Baden area, who are rather loose with their morals. Among these people there are some who are so loose and degenerate in the hot baths that they even drink and sleep and allow themselves all kinds of evil and other foolishness in the baths. If such immodest creatures were found with their customs in Nordic bathing places, they would immediately be carried out and thrown into the deep winter snow drifts with the risk of being smothered. In the summer they would be thrown in ice cold water and left some time without food.

Which is interesting, but doesn't necessarily help me. So back to the bookstacks, where today I was lucky. First I found Die Bauernhausformen im Baltischen Raum (Farmhouses in the Baltic, roughly) with lovely drawings of rustic saunas and bath-rooms (Badestube, here) both set in the earth like a root-cellar and combined with a summer kitchen in one long building. There's the bath-house on Midame's farm, that Myl can remember wistfully, to establish the idea of steam baths.
Then a guidebook to The Royal Palace of Visegrad, with complete floorplans (as far as excavated at the date of publication) including the stove, the fuel storage, the water supply and drainage, the two rooms, one the sudatorium, the other not cleared but probably cool baths.
As a backup, I have Whitehall Palace, by Simon Thurley, an account of the excavations, including a sunken pool (Charles II did all right by himself) and a possible steam bath heated by a huge ceramic-tiled stove.
So now I can get it right. And I'm probably going to steal Visegrad for Alard's palace, because why not? It had great plumbing. And add some 1700s decor, to bring it up to date.

I'm ludicrously close to 75k, and still have about half the plot for the court section to go. Some ruthless cutting to come, clearly, but not until all the first draft is done. Then I'll put it away for a couple of weeks and draw maps and floorplans.

Writing-avoidance activities, series one: Worldbuilding

I am presently tempted to get out the coloured pencils and start drawing maps. So far I've kept rough track of the forest part of Willow Knot with a series of concentric circles that represent one-half day of walking, with the willow cottage at the centre. I fear that once I expand that 'map' to discover where the country borders are, I'll have to revise about half the directions I've been using. The road between the capital cities will almost certainly be reworked.
I've been putting it off, but the coloured pencils are calling me, especially as I get into the 3d section, Myl at court. I'll need some idea how the countries work, how close the cities are, means of travel, and so on.
Which means I need to make important decisions. So far I've thought of the story as set in the Grimm Brothers Maerchen Forest. Boreal forest, foot and horse travel, material culture at late 1700s level. Magic is real, sometimes, but it's the magic that most uneducated people believed in, so there's little adjustment to make. Other times magic is fraud, but frauds and tricksters show up in folktales often enough.
The real countries (France, Germany) may exist, but the action takes place in 'kingdoms' that are more like principalities or duchies, and may be revised into duchies etc. later. As long as I'm dealing with peasants and foresters, I can that vague. (There's a terrific scene in Witchfinder General where Marshall and the soldiers pursuing King Charles reach the coast and find an old man (mending nets?) who doesn't know the king has fled, doesn't know anything about kings or Protectors. Bare sandy beach, grass, and the wind blowing over their voices. It's as if they've reached the edge of the world.)
But once the story reaches the court, the situation has to be firmed up. I need names and maps. I can approach this a few different ways.
(Pause to strongly recommend Wrede on Worldbuilding)

1. make up a fantasy world. I really don't want to do this. Really, really, really. I don't know enough about geology, geography, politics and logistics to even start. I suck at invention.
2. alternate history. Take the map as it stood at the turn of the century, change the names of all the countries and fiddle the borders a bit. I think Guy Gavriel Kay approaches it that way.
3. go the Ruritanian / Graustarkian route and just fiddle the borders to squish a few small countries in amongst the big ones, maybe in disputed territories like Alsace-Lorraine. Caroline Stevermer did that in College of Magics, I think. I don't count it as alternate history (though I suppose it is) because the trick predates the category.
   

Obviously I now have to find old maps of Europe, and books on the history of mapmaking. Obviously.
I'll need a rough map of the forest and the marsh, showing the road, the robbers' den, the willow cottage and the edge of Midame's lands. I'll need a floor plan for the palace for the 3d part. I may need a layout of the capital city, but I'll probably steal that fairly directly from a city map of the appropriate time and appropriate landscape, if I can figure out those out.
Maybe I'll do that in the evenings, instead of reading FandomWank.

Another thought experiment: If your book were published, and acquired not only readers but fans, what sort of fanfiction can you imagine being written from it? How might you feel about characters being revised, and which characters or situations do you think might be more susceptible to revision?

The answer to yesterday's question is: Wait one or two days. If the swelling etc. just stops, it was the arthritis. My knee is almost normal today, which seems unlikely if it had really been injured.
Nice to have that figured out.

Thought experiment for today

If you had an unusual form of arthritis that caused your joints to swell and stiffen randomly, how would you tell whether you had injured yourself?
Yesterday my right knee was stiff. I attributed this to the ravages of age, and to sitting and typing for a few hours. Walk it off, I said, in the voice of an internalised PE coach. It remained stiff, though more flexible when I exercised it gently. I could achieve almost the full range of motion--but not simultaneously with putting weight on the joint. Oh well, can't have everything.
Today it's swollen and resists motion, though I can move it slowly. Going up and down stairs (which I do often at home) has gone all Christopher Robin-ish. I only need a Pooh-bear to thump down the stairs head-down behind me. At least I'm not reduced to doing it on my bum like a toddler; given my present dimensions and the narrowness of some of the steps, perhaps riskier than walking.
I don't know. Perhaps I've really injured myself and should right now be sitting in the walk-in clinic, waiting 3 hours for a doctor to probe my knee and tell me to take an anti-inflammatory (which I can't, because I am).

Just finished reading The Silence of the Langford, by Dave Langford, with introduction by TNH. I bought it at Potlatch, and was barely 1/3 into it when it was swiped by my husband, along with He Do the Time Police in Different Voices. This deprivation did allow me to get some writing done undistracted. When Silence (was) returned, my productivity dropped, because I kept picking the damned book up and reading another selection. "Trillion Year Sneer" and "Inside Outside" in particular, though I rejoiced in every poke at Stephen R. Donaldson, having been unable to get more than a couple of chapters into White Gold Wielder (if that was the first one).
But it's finished now, and I'm only distracted by the question of what did happen after Harry Harrison introduced Langford to Donaldson?

Writing: the alleged raison d'etre of this blog
So I had my main character up a tree, and the current baddies were poking torches at the tree to set it on fire. The rescued princess was stashed in a somewhat skimpy hiding place all too nearby, and the transformed brother had buggered off somewhere. It was dark, with a waning moon.
The tree, for no particular reason, was on a low mound (okay, it was so it wouldn't set the whole forest on fire if it burnt) with the remains of a stone circle lopsidedly around it. There wasn't much cover, other than some brambles and bracken. The princess was under brambles at the base of the only really standing stone.
How to get them out of this? I was torn.
On the one hand, I'd been recently listening to a couple of versions of the King Orfeo ballad, and was drawn to the idea of having the stone turn out to be one of the gates to the fairy mound, and the princess being taken under the Hill, saved from the robbers, but possibly under the spell of the Fair Folk, and Myl having to rescue her again--would she even want to be rescued this time?--with potential uncertainty later whether she had brought back the mortal princess, or a changeling?
The debit side is that I'm wordcount-wise on the final lap, and this risks bringing in a major subplot and changing the emphasis of the novel. The credit side is that it's just very cool, is all.
The alternative was to bring back the dark shape that had menaced Myl and Sefina during their watch through the night over the guard's corpse. I'd put that in to keep things from getting sleepy and dull, but had lately been thinking it might be the same as the bear that attacks Myl in the spring. If Tyl had run off to find the shape (not yet identified as bear) and goaded it to chase him back into the midst of the robbers, that would remove the immediate threat without overweighting the story elements. Potentially, another rule of three or triad: once to be seen, once to help, once to harm. As uncertain and equivocal as the forest, both danger and shelter.But darn, the fairy hill idea was cool.
So I asked for opinions on the Furtive Scribblers thread, and Holly agreed that the fairy hill was cool, but also agreed that the bear-shape would fit more tidily in the story. Yay Holly!
After that I figured out a way to still hint at the changeling idea.
The Willow Knot stands at 72k, and I have all the court intrigue still to cover, and the Lurv subplot to flesh out, and a trial to write. In 8k, and that's including the slop factor I've left myself. Damn plotty stuff, it never fits in the space it's supposed to.

Critiquing - fireweed blossoms on the burnt-over patch

I've been going through a dry spell of critiquing. Or had reached a plateau. A flat, dry plateau. Not a slough of despond, fortunately, but not exactly inspiring, either.

I like critiquing. My strength is probably line-critting rather than big-picture issues. I'm good at spotting continuity breaks, and inconsistencies, and keeping track of where the characters are in a scene. That's 'good' in the sense of amateur reviewer, not in the sense of 'people who get paid to do that'.
It was fun, because I could see where small changes could make a real difference, even something as minor as reversing the order of clauses in a sentence. Where someone could cut a couple of words and make a sentence stronger. Easy things to do, for the most part. Sometimes the other writer would immediately pick up on those tricks, and we'd have a back-and-forth where he'd apply the points that made sense to him (not all--this wasn't slavish). His next subs would be stronger and tighter, and more his own voice. It's very cool when that happens. Like showing someone the little painting tricks for trompe l'oeil, and watching them run with it.
I tried to google a citation for the line about editing and the irresistible urge to meddle with someone else's writing, but couldn't--probably because I'm not sure of the exact wording. I did find this:
"We live in a world where the three great motivators of humanity are 1) Food, 2) Sex, and 3), the need to change someone else's writing."
from Joe Clifford Faust's blog. It may be the primary source, but I expect the sentiment has been expressed before the advent of the internet, or even of wordprocessors.
In the interests of honesty, I'll admit that two people told me to never review their work again. In the interests of snarkiness, one of them had an MC who was an escaped slavegirl with natural healing powers and a mind-bonded unicorn, who was taught swordsmanship by an enchanted wolf, and whose hair changed colour when she worked important magic. I said as gently as I could that her heroine was verging on Mary-Sue territory. I guess I wasn't gentle enough.

Then, in the fall of last year, critting became a chore. I'd skim through submissions on Absolute Write's Share Your Work forum, and through the under-reviewed subs on the Online Writing Workshop, and I wouldn't be able to think of anything to say. Or I'd think, well, I could suggest that the writer do this or that, but would it really make a difference? Would they listen, would it matter if they did? Rather like depression, but specific to critiquing. The rest of my life was good--in fact I was excited about attending Viable Paradise.
The irony of this did not escape me. I was going to spend a week critiquing other people's work, in person, and I couldn't stir my stumps to critique online?
I pushed myself. I reminded myself that once I got started, I'd find things to say, and that, reading my crits afterwards, I'd find them more coherent than they felt while I was writing them. But while I did write a few, I fell with a flump off the Top Reviewers List on OWW and disappeared.

Well, after VP I'd be reinvigorated, right?
Yes, for my own writing. That zoomed (at least by my slow-and-steady standards). No for crits. I whined about it on AW, and got a few head-pats, a suggestion that maybe I needed to examine my motivations, and one very thoughtful post from Linda Adams: that since one learns by giving critiques as much as by receiving them, "you may not be doing critiques because you've learned what you need at this point."
I took comfort in that, and tried to think of it as plateau rather than burnout. I did crits here and there, usually of under-reviewed pieces, so I wasn't just repeating what other reviewers had said. (That's my usual practice. If someone's received more than two or three reviews, I figure the useful points have already been made.)

Gradually through March, the base urge to mess with other's prose has slowly, tentatively returned, like a crocus pushing through the soil, or some other trite simile. Whether it's really back, or about to be smushed into black slime by a late frost, I don't know. But I've posted three crits on OWW, and four brief crits and one multi-part line-crit on AW, which is more than I've achieved since, oh, November.

Writing, the stuff I'm really supposed to be doing...
The Willow Knot hit 71k this month. I'm slowing down, because I've reached the point where I need to figure out which scenes still need to be written, and write those, not just bumble around in the world and see what I trip over.
I also need to work out the details of the plot against Alard, and what makes it necessary to move at that point. Who gains what?
On the happy side, there's a fever-dream that I'd sketched in after Myl's encounter with the bear, where she's taken underground (foreshadow willow-root rescue later) and sees the root-forest as the reverse of the branch-forest, as lively and as beautiful, for all that it's worms and bugs instead of birds and squirrels. Originally it was just an idea that I thought was cool. Now I'm thinking it may tie in thematically with the latter part of the story, Myl at court. She's been humbled, now she's raised as high as she can go, but she'll need all the skills she learnt at the bottom to keep herself safe at the top. And she can see how necessary the roots of the tree are to the crown (pun, sorry) which may not be as clear to those who've never looked down.
Something for me to think about, if I can avoid being heavy-handed and preachy!

Just finished reading The Thread That Binds the Bones, by Nina Kiriki Hoffman. Very nicely written--she's a stylist. The premise is pretty much ZennaHenderson's The People gone bad, which is intriguing. Very readable, but I felt it skimpy in parts. Not that I wanted an explanation or backstory for the Family, or why they have Clearly Symbolic Surnames, but that the baddy was such a shadowy figure until the end, and it seemed the other characters were overlooking the source of the problem (which was perhaps established too early, or I'm too quick at guessing). Also I didn't really feel afraid for the hero; his powers were so mutable and adaptable I felt sure they'd rise to the occasion.
I enjoyed it, and I'd read other books by her, but it did make me wonder if she was held back by wordcount limits or other considerations.

Accomplishments and the alternative, writing.

The Willow Knot hit 65k yesterday, which means I'm within 10-15k of finishing the first draft. Bearing in mind that experience has shown that I'm not very good at estimating the wordage needed for specific plot events. Both the Elfland story and "Fluke" were meant to be regular-length short stories and ended up at 11k each (Elfland later flensed to 9k, and yes, better for it).

Things I'm happy about:
I got to use a classic fairytale motif, and bonus, one that most modern readers will neither be familiar with nor find easy to accept--motif T(2) 1962.2 'sleep by lousing'. Those fairy tales where the ogre or the dragon or the hero puts his head into the maiden's lap and she 'combs his hair' to put him to sleep? Lousing him.
This is the second rescue, which Myl accomplishes by guile, where Tyl accomplished the first rescue by unexpected and resolute action. Myl louses the old woman who keeps house for the robbers (as well as fixing her a restful posset and filling her straw mattress-tick with soothing herbs as well as straw) causing her to fall asleep, so Myl can get at the barred door.
In another part of the forest, whoops, the story, I'm building the threat to Alard. The background needs working out yet, so many details may change, but it looks as if Alard will be aided three times by actions Myl took in the past, each triggered by Tyl.
First he escapes his pursuers by Tyl leading him to the track Myl built in the marsh.
Second, some attackers are done in by being driven into the osier field, linked to Myl through the willow and her use of the osiers, and by Tyl (this is quite pencilly) scratching Alard and flicking his blood into the marsh to pay for its alliance.
Last, the rescued princess, now grown to warrior-queen and hunting outlaws, with her guard does in the remaining attackers, then realises that she has Alard in her power (and her counsellors have been advocating invasion), but as she and Alard discuss this, Tyl comes forward and she recognises him as the deer-companion of the wild girl who rescued her, and who refused reward, asking only for one favour in some time to come.
The really fun part of this is the princess/queen, who is very odd indeed. Jim Macdonald did say to cherish your secondary characters, and certainly Sefina and the princess are blossoming. Or night-blooming, in the latter instance.

Less happy:
The braiding / knotting / basketwork motif arose unexpectedly while I was writing the opening chapters. It's turned out to be quite important. While I don't aim for the Dick Francis ideal of learning a new skill for each book (it was his wife who got her pilot's licence, I think, for one book) I do like to have some slight acquaintance with how it feels to do something.
I can braid my hair, but otherwise I have very little manual dexterity with the fibre arts. My mum tried to teach me how to knit, and I couldn't do it. A couple of accomplished spinners have tried to teach me how to spin, and it didn't take. I can sew on buttons and that sort of thing, but tying a weaver's knot to join two pieces of thread is beyond me.
Working with thread seems to provoke a sort of allergic reaction, where my hands, although they do not change in outward seeming, function with the equivalent grace and skill of cartoon hands, the kind with three fat fingers and fewer joints.
But I must learn. So I took out The Ashley Book of Knots, by Clifford Ashley, chockfull of information and helpful diagrams. Here's an illustrative anecdote:
"Several years ago, from my printed directions in the Sportsman Magazine, and with no other assistance, my cousin, Hope Knowles, tied without error Knot #2217, which has forty-nine crossings, making therewith a covering for the knob of her father's automobile gear-shift lever. She was barely eleven years old at the time."
Can I follow in young Hope Knowles's footsteps (fingermarks?)? No, apparently I can't. I've managed to follow Ashley's diagrams for precisely one (1) knot thus far, and that's the granny knot. Besides the lack of manual dexterity, I seem to lack the ability to make any sense at all of his diagrams. I can do one step, but how the cords get from that one step to the next is a complete mystery to me. In fact, I've done better looking at the diagrams of completed knots and working it out from those.

still writing, still submitting

Let's see.
Realms of Fantasy rejected "Foretold", and Strange Horizons rejected "Bride of the Vampire" (though they liked the writing). I was going to send Bride off to RoF, but after thinking it over for a while, I submitted both of them to Glimmer Train, one as a regular submission, the other as a contest entry. Mark fronted me the contest fee, on the rather sweet grounds that I'd subsidised his career in its early days.
Glimmer Train doesn't do genre. I write genre, mostly fantasy. So was this a bad idea? Well..."Foretold" deals with gods and men, a conflict which has had some long-term mainstream usage, and one plot aspect (men forgetting the gods) is kind of tired in an sff context, but may look fresher to someone without a genre background. It also has a deeply downer ending. (Rocks fall, everybody dies) which seems to be a commonplace of mainstream or litfic.
"Bride of the Vampire" doesn't have a lot of plot. It's more observational, what I think is called 'slice of life' by some. There are some pop-cult refs which will probably sail past someone who only reads litfic, but they also sailed past an sf-reading critiquer, so it's fortunate the minimal plot doesn't depend on them.
"Milk Run", retitled "Chimps on a Blimp", has floated off to its fate, whatever that might be, so I'm back to working on The Willow Knot.

I've had another happy plotty thing happen. Once Myl gets hold of a hatchet, she can make full use of the osier-bed she found at the marsh. I'd sketched in much of what she does, very lightly, and my old fascination with the prehistoric-to-medieval timber trackways through marshland popped up. Causing her to make narrow hurdles (the fence kind, not the jumping kind) and make a secret pathway out into the marsh, along the lines of the Sweet Track.
I don't know yet whether she'll need it herself, but with the addition of a threat to Alard to the plot-mix, and him being (as according to the original text) away hunting while she's giving birth, I'm pretty sure that he's going to need that trackway to escape from the people after his head. Tyl, of course, will be the one to lead him to it, and that will give Tyl more presence in the events, which he needs.
When Myl first finds the osier-bed, she sees it as a troll army, frozen while erupting from the earth, with the stools being their contorted faces, and the osier coppicing a crown of spears on each. So I'm playing about with the idea of having the osiers do something thorough to Alard's pursuers, during the night, so it's all by sound-effects and no one's quite sure what's happening but it sounds nasty. We'll see.