Fic stuff
So, after more than a year and 200+ pages, A Bit Too Much Good Work is COMPLETE. Remind me never to attempt novel-length fic again, and especially not alternate-POV-of-a-canon-book fic, because that stuff is a bitch to plot and write. Bonus ficlet about Amiri Arqua here: Magnetism and Gravitation.
The rest of this post will be a very long and rambly discussion of That Shakespeare Scene, plus a few notes on the development of various OCs, since there were a few people at AO3 who asked for it. (Everything under the cut is extremely spoilery, and will make no sense if you haven't read ABTMGW anyway.)
Some general notes, first: This whole plot-line was hard to write. (The bomb-threats case, which I meant to be a straight-up, Christie-style fair-play whodunit, was a cinch by comparison.) I knew, going in, that I wanted to write a scene with a ridiculous number of fast-penta induced Shakespearean confessions, but trying to figure out what people were going to confess to was the tricky part. I did settle, early on, that I wanted there to be one character who had done something genuinely treasonous, and that this person needed to be Byerly’s friend or ex-lover, someone that it would really hurt to betray; one character who was guilty of some ordinary, not-really-an-ImpSec-matter crime; and one or two others who had done something guilt-inducing but not at all criminal. I had originally planned to decide exactly what these “somethings” were by finding suitable quotes, and writing my OCs and their guilty secrets around the quotes, but I found that I was drawing a complete blank; I’d picked out By’s four passages very early on, but couldn’t come up with anything for the other party guests.
Eventually, I figured out that it had to be done the other way around; once I knew who the characters were and what they wanted to hide, it was much, much easier to pick suitable bits of Shakespeare.
So, the quotes themselves, their origins, and how I picked them:
Spoken by unidentified characters:
“Have we eaten on the insane root that takes the reason prisoner?” - This is from Macbeth, when Macbeth and Banquo first meet the witches, although here, it’s just meant to be the sort of quotation that might pop into someone’s head after taking a totally unknown drug.
“‘Tis not ten years gone since Richard and Northumberland, great friends, did feast together, and in two years after were they at wars -” King Henry in 2 Henry IV. Straight-up free association after Lex Vorlynn mentions that his guests might have noticed some changes since the last time they were all together.
Spoken by Byerly:
“I know you all, and will awhile unfold the unyoked humor of your idleness...” - Prince Hal in 1 Henry IV. In the play, it’s an admission that Hal has been hanging out with his dissolute companions for political ends of his own, and isn’t really the debauchee he appears.
“A woman’s face, with nature’s own hand painted ... Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure.” - Sonnet 20, in which the speaker is in love with his (male, very beautiful) friend and decides to settle for friendship. As By realizes a few chapters later, this one is All About Alain. (I decided as far back as Protective Coloration that he'd fallen for Alain pretty much at first sight and discovered shortly afterwards that Alain was about as heterosexual as they come. The dynamic between them didn't work if there was any possibility of a romantic relationship, but I needed a reason why By would have been interested in this prole kid in the first place.)
“I follow him to serve my turn upon him; we cannot all be masters, nor all masters cannot be truly followed ... Others there are, who trimmed in forms and visages of duty, keep yet their hearts attending on themselves; and throwing but shows of service on their lords, do well thrive by them and when they have lined their coats, do themselves homage ... But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve for daws to peck at; I am not what I am.” - These are all from the first scene of Othello, in which Iago admits that his “friendship” with Othello is all a carefully honed performance. At this point in his career, By is ambivalent enough about it to cast himself as Shakespeare’s most notorious villain; besides, I’d already decided in “Protective Coloration” that he’d been cast as Iago in a school play when he was a teenager, so I figured the speech would come to mind right away.
“Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, so do our minutes hasten to their end...” - Sonnet 60. I’ve actually got no idea why this would pop into By’s head at this particular moment, except through free-association with the idea of saying good night and goodbye, but I wanted a quotation that would get Rish thinking about mortality and human frailty - and then lead her to the realization that “the faint swish of his blood in between beats, like waves lapping the shore” that she noticed in chapter 4 is an actual heart murmur.
Spoken by Niko Vorprzhevalsky:
With Vorprzhevalsky, what you see is what you get. He started off as a one-off joke whose only line was “My horse, my kingdom for a horse!” (Richard III), only then he turned into a running joke. “O happy horse” is spoken by Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra, and I've used it shamelessly out of context. “My horse is my mistress,” on the other hand, is the Dauphin in Henry V, and is completely in context; the Dauphin and Vorprzhevalsky would be kindred spirits!
Spoken by Rudy Fairchild:
“To be or not to be ... This is a question? Uh, outrages of fortune, be all my sins remembered, whatever.” - This is, obviously, a very muddled attempt at the most famous part of Hamlet. Rudy, however, was the one case where the character grew out of the passage rather than the other way around. I conceived of him as simply a not-very-bright washed-up celebrity with substance abuse issues who would make a convenient patsy for Oliver; it was a bit of a surprise to me when he turned out to be actually suicidal, and even more of a surprise when he picked himself up after hitting bottom and found new creative life as a tolerably decent singer / songwriter. (FWIW, I picture his new sound as a cross between the Righteous Brothers and “Garden Party”-era Rick Nelson.)
Spoken by Oliver Vorkyl:
“Thus do I ever make my fool my purse” - This is, once again, Iago, after he has successfully manipulated the wealthy-but-foolish Roderigo into financing his schemes.
“Ha, ha, what a fool honesty is, and trust, his sworn brother, a very simple gentleman ... To have an open ear, a quick eye, and a nimble hand is necessary for a cut-purse; a good nose is requisite also, to smell out work for the other senses. I see this is the time that the unjust man doth thrive.” - This is Autolycus, the con man and petty thief from The Winter’s Tale; it’s meant to be a fairly straightforward confession of Oliver’s modus operandi.
Spoken by Katya Vorzohn:
“O the difference of man and man! To thee a woman’s services are due; my foot usurps my head - a fool usurps my bed - body - something” - Goneril from King Lear, who doesn’t love her husband, the Duke of Albany, and is planning to have an affair with the bastard-born but extremely hot Edmund instead, much as Katya would like to be having an affair with Evon Margraves. (Katya, like Rudy, is not very good with Shakespeare, but she can be excused for getting this line muddled - the Quarto and Folio texts of Lear are a bit different from each other, and some editors have suggested additional emendations.)
Spoken by Evon Margraves:
Am I a lord, and have I such a lady? Or do I dream, or have I dreamed till now? I do not sleep, I see, I hear, I speak ... Upon my life, I am a lord indeed, and not a tinker, or Christopher Sly.” - Christopher Sly, in the induction to The Taming of the Shrew. Sly is a commoner who has just been dressed up as a lord, for a prank, and is feeling ill at ease in his new role (although he adapts to it very quickly!) Evon, from a wealthy and aggressively social-climbing prole family, is also feeling pretty uneasy about the social position he’s expected to fill, and he’s both sorta-kinda in lust with Katya and aware that there’s no there there. (The “lady” in the quotation is a pure illusion, by the way, a page boy who has been dressed up in women’s clothes and tutored to play the part of Sly’s “wife.”)
This is, incidentally, probably the most obscure bit of Shakespeare in this scene, along with the two quotes from Sylvie. It’s canon that the general level of Shakespeare knowledge on Barrayar is very high, to the point where people memorize entire plays, but I wanted some characters to be noticeably more proficient than others. Evon has a master’s degree in Old Earth cultures; Sylvie is from a very arty, intellectual background; they both stump Byerly, who is no slouch himself, since in my headcanon he’s both a frustrated actor and secretly more bookish than he lets on. (I wondered if this was a little self-indulgent, since canon!By doesn’t go around quoting Shakespeare - and then I realized that canon!By goes around quoting Sheridan,* and decided I might as well indulge like crazy.)
* It’s the “mad in white linen” line toward the end of CVA. I suspect LMB picked the phrase up via Heyer and may not know the original source, but what the hey.
Spoken by Sylvie Vorpennick:
Ah, Sylvie. As I said, I started with the idea that By would be forced to sacrifice somebody he actually cares for on the altar of duty, and got no further than this idea for a long time. Then I was looking up something unrelated at the Vorkosigan Wiki and stumbled across the information that a husband could be held responsible for his wife’s crimes under Barrayaran law, and that was when Sylvie’s whole character and story line flashed into my head, more or less complete. The ideas that she was an idealistic political-dissident type, that she engineered her own divorce to protect her husband, that she chose By as her co-respondent without knowing about his real profession, and that she would betray herself by choosing that particular passage from 2 Henry VI were all born at that moment. Shortly afterward, McSorley decided to do everything that he does at the end of the story. Byerly would have handed her over to starve; McSorley refused to allow it.
“For ‘tis a meritorious fair design to chase injustice with revengeful arms” - This is from The Rape of Lucrece, and it was the closest thing I could come up with to a reference to Sylvie’s actual crime of arms-running. (Hey, we’re told that people on fast-penta tend to be very literal.)
“Come you, my lord, to see my open shame? Now thou dost penance too. Look how they gaze, see how the giddy multitude do point and nod their heads, and throw their eyes on thee. Ah, Gloucester, hide thee from their hateful looks, and in thy closet pent up, rue my shame and ban thine enemies - both mine and thine ... The ruthless flint doth cut my tender feet, and when I start the envious people laugh ... But be thou mild, and blush not at my shame, nor stir at nothing till the axe of death hang over thee, as sure it shortly will” - Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester, from 2 Henry VI. She has been found guilty of necromancy-and-other-nefariousness in order to advance her beloved husband’s career; her status as a noblewoman protects her from execution, but she’s forced to do public penance, and she knows her crimes will bring him down and lead to his eventual murder, even though he had no part in them.
In my head, Sylvie follows By’s instructions after the end of the story and survives, but Philippe never finds out why she slept with Byerly, and never forgives her.
The rest of this post will be a very long and rambly discussion of That Shakespeare Scene, plus a few notes on the development of various OCs, since there were a few people at AO3 who asked for it. (Everything under the cut is extremely spoilery, and will make no sense if you haven't read ABTMGW anyway.)
Some general notes, first: This whole plot-line was hard to write. (The bomb-threats case, which I meant to be a straight-up, Christie-style fair-play whodunit, was a cinch by comparison.) I knew, going in, that I wanted to write a scene with a ridiculous number of fast-penta induced Shakespearean confessions, but trying to figure out what people were going to confess to was the tricky part. I did settle, early on, that I wanted there to be one character who had done something genuinely treasonous, and that this person needed to be Byerly’s friend or ex-lover, someone that it would really hurt to betray; one character who was guilty of some ordinary, not-really-an-ImpSec-matter crime; and one or two others who had done something guilt-inducing but not at all criminal. I had originally planned to decide exactly what these “somethings” were by finding suitable quotes, and writing my OCs and their guilty secrets around the quotes, but I found that I was drawing a complete blank; I’d picked out By’s four passages very early on, but couldn’t come up with anything for the other party guests.
Eventually, I figured out that it had to be done the other way around; once I knew who the characters were and what they wanted to hide, it was much, much easier to pick suitable bits of Shakespeare.
So, the quotes themselves, their origins, and how I picked them:
Spoken by unidentified characters:
“Have we eaten on the insane root that takes the reason prisoner?” - This is from Macbeth, when Macbeth and Banquo first meet the witches, although here, it’s just meant to be the sort of quotation that might pop into someone’s head after taking a totally unknown drug.
“‘Tis not ten years gone since Richard and Northumberland, great friends, did feast together, and in two years after were they at wars -” King Henry in 2 Henry IV. Straight-up free association after Lex Vorlynn mentions that his guests might have noticed some changes since the last time they were all together.
Spoken by Byerly:
“I know you all, and will awhile unfold the unyoked humor of your idleness...” - Prince Hal in 1 Henry IV. In the play, it’s an admission that Hal has been hanging out with his dissolute companions for political ends of his own, and isn’t really the debauchee he appears.
“A woman’s face, with nature’s own hand painted ... Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure.” - Sonnet 20, in which the speaker is in love with his (male, very beautiful) friend and decides to settle for friendship. As By realizes a few chapters later, this one is All About Alain. (I decided as far back as Protective Coloration that he'd fallen for Alain pretty much at first sight and discovered shortly afterwards that Alain was about as heterosexual as they come. The dynamic between them didn't work if there was any possibility of a romantic relationship, but I needed a reason why By would have been interested in this prole kid in the first place.)
“I follow him to serve my turn upon him; we cannot all be masters, nor all masters cannot be truly followed ... Others there are, who trimmed in forms and visages of duty, keep yet their hearts attending on themselves; and throwing but shows of service on their lords, do well thrive by them and when they have lined their coats, do themselves homage ... But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve for daws to peck at; I am not what I am.” - These are all from the first scene of Othello, in which Iago admits that his “friendship” with Othello is all a carefully honed performance. At this point in his career, By is ambivalent enough about it to cast himself as Shakespeare’s most notorious villain; besides, I’d already decided in “Protective Coloration” that he’d been cast as Iago in a school play when he was a teenager, so I figured the speech would come to mind right away.
“Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, so do our minutes hasten to their end...” - Sonnet 60. I’ve actually got no idea why this would pop into By’s head at this particular moment, except through free-association with the idea of saying good night and goodbye, but I wanted a quotation that would get Rish thinking about mortality and human frailty - and then lead her to the realization that “the faint swish of his blood in between beats, like waves lapping the shore” that she noticed in chapter 4 is an actual heart murmur.
Spoken by Niko Vorprzhevalsky:
With Vorprzhevalsky, what you see is what you get. He started off as a one-off joke whose only line was “My horse, my kingdom for a horse!” (Richard III), only then he turned into a running joke. “O happy horse” is spoken by Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra, and I've used it shamelessly out of context. “My horse is my mistress,” on the other hand, is the Dauphin in Henry V, and is completely in context; the Dauphin and Vorprzhevalsky would be kindred spirits!
Spoken by Rudy Fairchild:
“To be or not to be ... This is a question? Uh, outrages of fortune, be all my sins remembered, whatever.” - This is, obviously, a very muddled attempt at the most famous part of Hamlet. Rudy, however, was the one case where the character grew out of the passage rather than the other way around. I conceived of him as simply a not-very-bright washed-up celebrity with substance abuse issues who would make a convenient patsy for Oliver; it was a bit of a surprise to me when he turned out to be actually suicidal, and even more of a surprise when he picked himself up after hitting bottom and found new creative life as a tolerably decent singer / songwriter. (FWIW, I picture his new sound as a cross between the Righteous Brothers and “Garden Party”-era Rick Nelson.)
Spoken by Oliver Vorkyl:
“Thus do I ever make my fool my purse” - This is, once again, Iago, after he has successfully manipulated the wealthy-but-foolish Roderigo into financing his schemes.
“Ha, ha, what a fool honesty is, and trust, his sworn brother, a very simple gentleman ... To have an open ear, a quick eye, and a nimble hand is necessary for a cut-purse; a good nose is requisite also, to smell out work for the other senses. I see this is the time that the unjust man doth thrive.” - This is Autolycus, the con man and petty thief from The Winter’s Tale; it’s meant to be a fairly straightforward confession of Oliver’s modus operandi.
Spoken by Katya Vorzohn:
“O the difference of man and man! To thee a woman’s services are due; my foot usurps my head - a fool usurps my bed - body - something” - Goneril from King Lear, who doesn’t love her husband, the Duke of Albany, and is planning to have an affair with the bastard-born but extremely hot Edmund instead, much as Katya would like to be having an affair with Evon Margraves. (Katya, like Rudy, is not very good with Shakespeare, but she can be excused for getting this line muddled - the Quarto and Folio texts of Lear are a bit different from each other, and some editors have suggested additional emendations.)
Spoken by Evon Margraves:
Am I a lord, and have I such a lady? Or do I dream, or have I dreamed till now? I do not sleep, I see, I hear, I speak ... Upon my life, I am a lord indeed, and not a tinker, or Christopher Sly.” - Christopher Sly, in the induction to The Taming of the Shrew. Sly is a commoner who has just been dressed up as a lord, for a prank, and is feeling ill at ease in his new role (although he adapts to it very quickly!) Evon, from a wealthy and aggressively social-climbing prole family, is also feeling pretty uneasy about the social position he’s expected to fill, and he’s both sorta-kinda in lust with Katya and aware that there’s no there there. (The “lady” in the quotation is a pure illusion, by the way, a page boy who has been dressed up in women’s clothes and tutored to play the part of Sly’s “wife.”)
This is, incidentally, probably the most obscure bit of Shakespeare in this scene, along with the two quotes from Sylvie. It’s canon that the general level of Shakespeare knowledge on Barrayar is very high, to the point where people memorize entire plays, but I wanted some characters to be noticeably more proficient than others. Evon has a master’s degree in Old Earth cultures; Sylvie is from a very arty, intellectual background; they both stump Byerly, who is no slouch himself, since in my headcanon he’s both a frustrated actor and secretly more bookish than he lets on. (I wondered if this was a little self-indulgent, since canon!By doesn’t go around quoting Shakespeare - and then I realized that canon!By goes around quoting Sheridan,* and decided I might as well indulge like crazy.)
* It’s the “mad in white linen” line toward the end of CVA. I suspect LMB picked the phrase up via Heyer and may not know the original source, but what the hey.
Spoken by Sylvie Vorpennick:
Ah, Sylvie. As I said, I started with the idea that By would be forced to sacrifice somebody he actually cares for on the altar of duty, and got no further than this idea for a long time. Then I was looking up something unrelated at the Vorkosigan Wiki and stumbled across the information that a husband could be held responsible for his wife’s crimes under Barrayaran law, and that was when Sylvie’s whole character and story line flashed into my head, more or less complete. The ideas that she was an idealistic political-dissident type, that she engineered her own divorce to protect her husband, that she chose By as her co-respondent without knowing about his real profession, and that she would betray herself by choosing that particular passage from 2 Henry VI were all born at that moment. Shortly afterward, McSorley decided to do everything that he does at the end of the story. Byerly would have handed her over to starve; McSorley refused to allow it.
“For ‘tis a meritorious fair design to chase injustice with revengeful arms” - This is from The Rape of Lucrece, and it was the closest thing I could come up with to a reference to Sylvie’s actual crime of arms-running. (Hey, we’re told that people on fast-penta tend to be very literal.)
“Come you, my lord, to see my open shame? Now thou dost penance too. Look how they gaze, see how the giddy multitude do point and nod their heads, and throw their eyes on thee. Ah, Gloucester, hide thee from their hateful looks, and in thy closet pent up, rue my shame and ban thine enemies - both mine and thine ... The ruthless flint doth cut my tender feet, and when I start the envious people laugh ... But be thou mild, and blush not at my shame, nor stir at nothing till the axe of death hang over thee, as sure it shortly will” - Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester, from 2 Henry VI. She has been found guilty of necromancy-and-other-nefariousness in order to advance her beloved husband’s career; her status as a noblewoman protects her from execution, but she’s forced to do public penance, and she knows her crimes will bring him down and lead to his eventual murder, even though he had no part in them.
In my head, Sylvie follows By’s instructions after the end of the story and survives, but Philippe never finds out why she slept with Byerly, and never forgives her.