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

The voice of this story, like many others in the Kateverse, comes out rather more archaizing in the first ( Read more... )

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: A breakthrough!  I've finally teased apart the threads of the infamous Four Agenda Pile-Up at Garcastle.  Lord Evil now has something to do that is... worthy... of him; Relatively Okay Genius's masterstroke, disentangled with few changes from the former muddle, shows up as much more shocking and brilliant; and there ( Read more... )

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: At least 6 hours of the last 24, some of them very early in the morning, spent on a rigorous analysis of Lord Evil's Emergent Masterplan, and discovering...

...that it all cancels down to a 'scheme' Wile E. Coyote would have returned to Acme Co. for a warranty replacement.  In my defence, Lord Evil does jet a ( Read more... )

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: Making castles less EFPy and lords less idiotic since early yesterday evening.

Garcastle was way top-heavy, and my always-shonky first move in the fall of Carrowglaze is pretty much officially a stumble.  I think I'm going to have to enlist at least one of the marginal, late-mentioned players in Langdale - the ones I ( Read more... )

I finished up my most pressing donkey-work on Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland, and am now the proud possessor of:

1) A complete scene breakdown, which I'm using as a template for all high-level revision passes;

2) A story calendar, which is considerably less buggy than I'd suspected;

and

3) A digest of all the political/diplomatic matter in the story, ( Read more... )

Until I started this comb-through of Lord of the Rings, I'd forgotten just how much of this Tolkien manages to pack in. You can hardly turn around at any point in the first book without falling into another bout of it. The fact that this impression never particularly lingered until I went looking for it, suggests that it's very well integrated ( Read more... )

"Last night you began to tell me strange things about my ring, Gandalf," said Frodo. "And then you stopped, because you said that it was getting late, and we still had another sixteen pages to go..."

Well, nearly ( Read more... )

And the other post that got lost in the crossing:

I've just run across some excellent posts on the subject of Mary Sue and her variously-named male equivalent - that Very Special Character, arising from the world of fanfic, who can scarcely be better described than in these words of blackholly's:

Spock gets a long-lost daughter with purple eyes who's an ( Read more... )

In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien has so many intricately detailed secondary stories which require exposition, that he uses just about every single expository technique on Earth, and several in some pretty exotic orbits. I think this variety is one of his strengths, because of all narrative techniques, exposition is one of those which get oldest ( Read more... )

First off, I'm killing that extended metaphor of complex composition as mapping its real and untold 'imaginary' stories to the mathematical complex plane. Nice provocation but useless visualization. I'll keep the term 'complex' for the use of untold or very partially told implicit stories as critical elements of a whole tale, until I've a ( Read more... )