Blood and Ink
My pinch hit was Blood and Ink, for Lloyd Alexander's Westmark trilogy.
WARNING: Do not read this story unless you’ve read all three of the Westmark books. It will not make any sense otherwise, and will spoil the books.
Do read the books; they are remarkable. They are in print and quite short, and also fast-paced; you could read all three over a weekend.
They begin as cheerful, witty Ruritanian adventure, with lost princesses and con artists and tyrants-and revolutionaries seeking a republic. And then, without any jarring shift in tone, they unobtrusively slide into a very understated meditation on the price of revolution, the horrors of war, and how far a person can go into madness and still come back. And all this without ever losing an essential sense of wit, compassion, and grace.
Alexander is most famous for his Welsh mythology-based Prydain chronicles, which I also love, but I think the Westmark trilogy is his best work. The first book, Westmark, seems slight when you first read it, but I urge you to persevere; it’s a lot less slight in retrospect, and the second book, The Kestrel, is both my favorite of Alexander’s novels and one of the best war novels I’ve ever read. The third book, The Beggar Queen, brings the series to a satisfying close.
This was an incredibly difficult story to write, beginning when I nabbed the pinch-hit and saw that I knew the recipient, vee_fic. I found that quite intimidating, because I would feel personally sad if I didn’t write the story she deserved.
Massive spoilers for the trilogy and also my story below the cut, beware.
Vehemently asked for a story about life in war, or after war (when other wars might be about to begin); she requested that Theo, Mickle, and Florian be included; and she asked that it be set during the second two books, or post-series.
I re-read the books, and noticed three things: they were just as good as I remembered; The Kestrel is such a compendium of fucked-up things that happen in war that it was hard to think of any incident that hadn’t actually happened in canon; and that Florian and Mickle are very rarely in the same place at the same time (and are especially unlikely to be after the end of the last book, unless you’re positing a much longer time gap than I wanted to.
First I thought of revisiting the incident in which the Monkey offers to mercy-kill a dying soldier. I wrote that part first, and it stands pretty much as you read it. Then I thought of writing the scene where Theo and Mickle once more find themselves involved in a revolution-perhaps a very different one, or perhaps not. But then I couldn’t figure out how to fit Florian in. I also discovered that Alexander’s understated tone is extremely hard to mimic. In desperation, I tried putting Florian in a dream sequence. (Mickle’s dream, that she recounts in the finished version.) Then I tried having Theo’s scene be his dream-flashback, as a parallel. The whole thing didn’t work. I mailed it to Oyce, who said so.
I stared at it for a while, then cut the “dream” framework and scene, and decided to abandon the original plan of having one scene each focusing on Theo, Mickle, and Florian, or even one each on Theo and Mickle, plus the final one. Then the muse descended and told me to write a scene very early on in the series, with Florian having Theo design propaganda posters. The exchange between Justin and Florian occurred to me as I was finishing the scene- and ended up becoming the heart of the entire story.
With the new scene at the beginning, the whole story worked about a million times better. Whew.
WARNING: Do not read this story unless you’ve read all three of the Westmark books. It will not make any sense otherwise, and will spoil the books.
Do read the books; they are remarkable. They are in print and quite short, and also fast-paced; you could read all three over a weekend.
They begin as cheerful, witty Ruritanian adventure, with lost princesses and con artists and tyrants-and revolutionaries seeking a republic. And then, without any jarring shift in tone, they unobtrusively slide into a very understated meditation on the price of revolution, the horrors of war, and how far a person can go into madness and still come back. And all this without ever losing an essential sense of wit, compassion, and grace.
Alexander is most famous for his Welsh mythology-based Prydain chronicles, which I also love, but I think the Westmark trilogy is his best work. The first book, Westmark, seems slight when you first read it, but I urge you to persevere; it’s a lot less slight in retrospect, and the second book, The Kestrel, is both my favorite of Alexander’s novels and one of the best war novels I’ve ever read. The third book, The Beggar Queen, brings the series to a satisfying close.
This was an incredibly difficult story to write, beginning when I nabbed the pinch-hit and saw that I knew the recipient, vee_fic. I found that quite intimidating, because I would feel personally sad if I didn’t write the story she deserved.
Massive spoilers for the trilogy and also my story below the cut, beware.
Vehemently asked for a story about life in war, or after war (when other wars might be about to begin); she requested that Theo, Mickle, and Florian be included; and she asked that it be set during the second two books, or post-series.
I re-read the books, and noticed three things: they were just as good as I remembered; The Kestrel is such a compendium of fucked-up things that happen in war that it was hard to think of any incident that hadn’t actually happened in canon; and that Florian and Mickle are very rarely in the same place at the same time (and are especially unlikely to be after the end of the last book, unless you’re positing a much longer time gap than I wanted to.
First I thought of revisiting the incident in which the Monkey offers to mercy-kill a dying soldier. I wrote that part first, and it stands pretty much as you read it. Then I thought of writing the scene where Theo and Mickle once more find themselves involved in a revolution-perhaps a very different one, or perhaps not. But then I couldn’t figure out how to fit Florian in. I also discovered that Alexander’s understated tone is extremely hard to mimic. In desperation, I tried putting Florian in a dream sequence. (Mickle’s dream, that she recounts in the finished version.) Then I tried having Theo’s scene be his dream-flashback, as a parallel. The whole thing didn’t work. I mailed it to Oyce, who said so.
I stared at it for a while, then cut the “dream” framework and scene, and decided to abandon the original plan of having one scene each focusing on Theo, Mickle, and Florian, or even one each on Theo and Mickle, plus the final one. Then the muse descended and told me to write a scene very early on in the series, with Florian having Theo design propaganda posters. The exchange between Justin and Florian occurred to me as I was finishing the scene- and ended up becoming the heart of the entire story.
With the new scene at the beginning, the whole story worked about a million times better. Whew.