I’m about to commit map¹. I’ve been deliberately trying to hold it all in my head to avoid the mistake of not leaving myself enough room to play with in future, or the temptation of join-the-dots quest plotting. But I need to work some things out about the layout of the University that nothing short of scribbling them down will do. It’s just enough different from what you’d get by mashing a few Cambridge colleges together that my mental model is having trouble holding together.

It’s not cat-vaccuuming. (Although blogging about it may be.) Thinking about it has already cleared one bit of awkward plot for me (I just needed to change which side of the river the back porters’ lodge is on). I’m hoping to post some new content after Easter.

¹I’ve known people self-deprecatingly, or perhaps publishing-industry-deprecatingly, refer to themselves as “committing trilogy”.

Having just had offline crit from Ingi….

That’s another positive response for Aurelius being a fascinating character, both for the reader and within the world. Which is really, really encouraging, because the greater story is about his character (when it’s not being meta) and the reaction of other characters within the story to him don’t make sense unless he’s got a certain presence. If I can keep this up, I’ll be very happy.

The big negative was that the in media res opening is too much in media and the res is insufficiently engaging. I don’t think I can sensibly push the start any further back for this story, but there is always space for an early one within the bigger picture. And I think that primarily wants to be about who Gules is, with more background on Tethera.

A huge problem I’m having with this is that the world and the characters have been sloshing around in my head for a very long time now, and dribbling it out is a very fine line between obscurity and infodump. Gules is clearly too obscure at this point for his pivotal role in this story, which is why the “backfill” should be about him. There’s also a great inconsistency about how much physical description a character gets on introduction, which makes it look like there should be an early, descriptive introduction. And tells me who I get to use in the earlier story. But Ingi said there was something of Lucius Malfoy about Aury, which set me off into crippling giggles at the thought of adding him to the wielders of this set. The scary thing is, I’ve enough of this world in my head to know where the damn sword would come from.

I don’t think I mentioned it here, but the work in progress is conceived of as five (or so) largely self-contained sections whose background events come together to form an overall story. The five parts I had ready formed the first section. I’ve just put up the final part, so you can now read the whole thing. (Although of course you get the parts presented in reverse order.)

I’ve almost got the first part of the second section ready, so that could go up next week. How long it will be before the next update is anybody’s guess, though. My instinct is to make use of this natural break to build up some more material (and give me some time to work out what this section is called). I said 3000 words a week was a high target, and what I’ve managed is more like 2000 in eight weeks. Even skipping three updates (two through being ill, one through having something else to say) hasn’t bought me the time needed. So: it might have helped me unblock, but progress is still slow. It could be a long while before you get to fin dout what happens next.

I have my fingers in three creative pies. Or maybe my feet in three creative camps. I’ve already talked about photogrpahy, which is where I think I have the talent; and writing, which I feel compelled to attempt. The third leg is music, and that’s the one I really enjoy. The Blue String Pudding reunion reminded me just how just how good it feels to be making music with other people (the most fun you can have with a group of at least three people?). Sometimes, in this breed of music, I feel being at the keyboard can be something of a cheat. With the right patch, I can provide a contribution essentially no-handed (but two-footed). But it still feels good. There aren’t many fields of creative endeavour, I think, where collaboration adds so much to the experience of artist or audience, except possibly acting, and music has the advantage that a band can be as good as, or even better than, its best member, while a cast will be limited by its weakest. I might not be much of musician, but by hooking up with people like Steve (lead) and Jeremy (drums, and it was noticable how much we missed him at the reunion) I can be part of producing something better than I could on my own.

(No update to the fiction this week: you’ve got something else from me, and it gives me an extra week to try and get part 6 written.)

Inspired by two things. Firstly, Kaet’s “Drawing a week” as an attempt to put something behind the effort to get unblocked and just write. Secondly, I’ve now posted two witters about this stuff in rather abstract terms and Ingi has pointed out that it’s very difficult to comment on what I’m doing without something more concrete. So. Over at my WordPress blog I’ll be posting 3000–4000 words’ worth a week, starting from today. I’ve got five parts ready to go, so that gives me a month to start trying to get ahead of the curve. Now, 3000 words a week is probably going to be pushing me, so I expect it to slow down once I’ve caught up. Or I might stop, if everyone says “Why are you bothering?” But some kind of schedule might impose the discipline I need.

Yeah, I know the names are crap. That can be sorted out later.

Update: Now up, part 2. In which not a great deal happens.

Update: Now up, part 3. In which the plot thickens.

Update: Now up, rather delayed by music and illness, part 4. In which matters come to a head.

I actually wrote something this evening.

See, there is a section I’d skipped ahead to writing. I think of it as the hinge of the story—it’s the point where everything changes as three revelations pile in on top of each other.

Except … I’m not sure I’ve got them in the right order. The first is fixed, but hot on its heels come two pieces of news from half way across the continent. One is a political situation spiralling towards civil war—it shouldn’t have an impact on the protagonist, half a continent away and in a very different country, but by the end of the story it most profoundly will have done so. The other, the bearer of the news doesn’t initially believe—half-forgotten monsters from the past have returned to stalk the land. This is something which could end up having the kind of impact on the continent of the black death hitting Europe. It’s also going to have an impact on the protagonist—he already knows this has happened, and has been enjoined to secrecy—but within the arc of this story it’s a rather incidental one. It’s more of a set up for what I know happens afterwards.

Originally, I wrote the delivery of these two pieces the other way round. And I’ve just realised that the result is “OMG, it’s the end of the world! And to make things worse, this distant country is about to break out in a civil war which won’t touch us!” I’m not sure I could write a finer example of bathos if I tried. Plus which, it over-telegraphs which is the more important to the story. So I’ve just rewritten it the other way round. I think the result is more natural, and improves the story telling. Although I’m willing to be told otherwise. And, while it was largely a pile of cut-and-paste, it means I’m writing again.

The so-called work in progress has in fact seen practically no progress for several years. At one end, it’s suffering from a traditional kind of writer’s block—I had ambitious (in terms of technique, rather than size) plans which I’ve realised I have no idea how to pull off. (First-person narration needs to convey a piece of information to the reader without the narrator being aware of it, and without ever breaking out of first-person.) At the other, there’s a purely practical block going on in terms of finding the space in my life to sit down with a solid chunk of a couple of hours to write in, which is what I need to get anywhere.

And in-between is the stuff which worries at me. Namely, is the work even worth progressing? I still want to tell the story (and the one that follows). I desperately want to do something with the setting and genre (“canal punk” fantasy mystery). But. There are Problems.

1. The names, for the most part, suck. Because they’re pretty much all just placeholders. If I went into trying to invent proper names, I’d get distracted into inventing languages, and I need at least five of those. But they’ve been attached to their characters and places and languages for so long now that it’s going to be difficult to think in other terms.
2. Relatedly, I thought the trick of writing the occasional words and phrases which are supposed to be in one of these other languages in French was quite good. After all, whatever the characters are mostly speaking, it isn’t English, so why shouldn’t their second language be similarly “translated”? However, I’ve been told that this is a Really Bad Idea, which completely blows my confidence in what I’m doing.
3. The character of the narrator makes dramatic tension rather difficult. Because he’s wealthy, well-connected and magically gifted, it’s rather hard to put him into any situation where there’s any real peril. (It’s kind of the point that he is all these things and still manages to cock it up all by himself.)
4. On top of that, I’ve just realised that his narrative style is seriously deadpan. Which is entirely appropriate to how he is, but I’m worried that it results in a lack of engagement.

So, I don’t know whether it’s worth my while ploughing through this edifice, or scratching this project and taking what I’ve learned, particularly about what makes a narrator, and starting over.