Chapter 20
Chapter 20
It has been four months (!) since I last posted a chapter to A Secret Gate: my excuses are an amalgam of Real Life, unexpected rites of passage, physical setbacks, intersections with the children’s busy adult lives, holidays-and a surprising mutiny in that part of my brain that quietly, and mostly benignly, oversees the creation of this story, deferring graciously the better part of the time to Merry, or to Pippin, or to Jamy.
I never planned to write this chapter. It was nowhere on my radar. A very tiny part of it-very small indeed!-was intended to be seen as a vignette in another chapter like the last that progressed through a series of scenes showing different characters going about their businesses in different places, the whole of it designed to carry us onward to many poignant meetings and leave-takings. I never saw this coming.
I had three vignettes finished and one begun when I realized I was in trouble. An astonishing amount of information and description seemed to be attached to the simple little scene I had anticipated writing-geography, cartography, genealogy, history. A new OC appeared, with some surprising antecedents. The Flaubert conundrum (how to get Milady down the front steps and into her carriage-in other words, choreography) became a daily nightmare, which, mixed with the wandering brain fogs of menopause and fibromyalgia-together with Thanksgiving, Christmas and the arrival of a first grandchild-almost wiped me out entirely.
I thought I must have taken a wrong turn. Surely there was a way to do this briefly! I stripped huge amounts of text away and began again, but it all crept back-‘well, we DO need to know this…If we don’t address this now, we’ll have to play catch-up later, and it will be cumbersome and gratuitous at best….’ On and on, and by now the chapter was closing on 30 pages and wildly overbalanced. I went every day and banged away at it, and sometimes my brain literally tried to shut me down-I fell asleep at the computer!
Finally, I began to see that the vignette was a chapter all on its own. And over time, I began to see why it insisted on being. The overseer had wrenched the reins out of my hands for a reason, one I was very slow to see: it was time to think ahead a little and to lay the foundations for Book II, time to insert an important new character into the reader’s awareness: the Outlands-the Wide World beyond the Shire. In this way, when Merry and Pippin cross the Brandywine for the last time, they will not be stepping into a void; there will be a World and a preliminary cast of characters waiting for them.
I hope I was right to do this; I don’t so much question the overseer as my own interpretation of the directive. I hope you enjoy this chapter and find something to like in the people you meet and the places you go. I think Jamy and Mat did, though Jamy-well, more about that later!
You can find the chapter on my website here: http://entropyhouse.com/elanor/secretgatechaptertwenty.html and it should be up at Stories of Arda in a day or two. As always, thank you for your interest in my story. :)
It has been four months (!) since I last posted a chapter to A Secret Gate: my excuses are an amalgam of Real Life, unexpected rites of passage, physical setbacks, intersections with the children’s busy adult lives, holidays-and a surprising mutiny in that part of my brain that quietly, and mostly benignly, oversees the creation of this story, deferring graciously the better part of the time to Merry, or to Pippin, or to Jamy.
I never planned to write this chapter. It was nowhere on my radar. A very tiny part of it-very small indeed!-was intended to be seen as a vignette in another chapter like the last that progressed through a series of scenes showing different characters going about their businesses in different places, the whole of it designed to carry us onward to many poignant meetings and leave-takings. I never saw this coming.
I had three vignettes finished and one begun when I realized I was in trouble. An astonishing amount of information and description seemed to be attached to the simple little scene I had anticipated writing-geography, cartography, genealogy, history. A new OC appeared, with some surprising antecedents. The Flaubert conundrum (how to get Milady down the front steps and into her carriage-in other words, choreography) became a daily nightmare, which, mixed with the wandering brain fogs of menopause and fibromyalgia-together with Thanksgiving, Christmas and the arrival of a first grandchild-almost wiped me out entirely.
I thought I must have taken a wrong turn. Surely there was a way to do this briefly! I stripped huge amounts of text away and began again, but it all crept back-‘well, we DO need to know this…If we don’t address this now, we’ll have to play catch-up later, and it will be cumbersome and gratuitous at best….’ On and on, and by now the chapter was closing on 30 pages and wildly overbalanced. I went every day and banged away at it, and sometimes my brain literally tried to shut me down-I fell asleep at the computer!
Finally, I began to see that the vignette was a chapter all on its own. And over time, I began to see why it insisted on being. The overseer had wrenched the reins out of my hands for a reason, one I was very slow to see: it was time to think ahead a little and to lay the foundations for Book II, time to insert an important new character into the reader’s awareness: the Outlands-the Wide World beyond the Shire. In this way, when Merry and Pippin cross the Brandywine for the last time, they will not be stepping into a void; there will be a World and a preliminary cast of characters waiting for them.
I hope I was right to do this; I don’t so much question the overseer as my own interpretation of the directive. I hope you enjoy this chapter and find something to like in the people you meet and the places you go. I think Jamy and Mat did, though Jamy-well, more about that later!
You can find the chapter on my website here: http://entropyhouse.com/elanor/secretgatechaptertwenty.html and it should be up at Stories of Arda in a day or two. As always, thank you for your interest in my story. :)