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Alpennia: As You Know, Babs...
May. 19th, 2015 09:32 amOne of the most awkward aspects of writing a continuing series is getting the right balance of "getting up to speed" at the start of a new book. That was the One Big Thing that I got editorial feedback on for The Mystic Marriage. (For Daughter of Mystery the One Big Thing was "I have no idea what any of these people look like!") It doesn't help that my natural writing style is, "Plunge the reader into the middle of things and expect them to keep up!"
In The Mystic Marriage we get plunged right into needing to know the backstory because the book starts out with Antuniet's point of view, so there's the whole thing with, "Who is this and what is she doing in Heidelberg, and why do we care?" And then immediately in chapter 2 it's, "Who are Margerit and Barbara and what are their relationships to each other and the rest of society?" By the time we get to Jeanne's point of view in chapter 3, there's a basic background, and besides which we aren't expected to know that much about her already.
The opening chapter for Mother of Souls (which is complete in draft now) was much easier, in some ways. We start off with the point of view of Luzie Valorin, widow, mother, boarding house keeper, music teacher, and brand new never-before-met character. So we can meet her without any expectations and I can use her chapter to remind the reader (or explain anew) the basic facts about Alpennia and the city of Rotenek without too much complication. Luzie does interact with a couple of characters we've met before in The Mystic Marriage: the up and coming violinist Iustin (one of her boarders) and--by passing reference--the composer Ion-Pazit, and the composer Fizeir whose operas were roundly panned by the characters of the previous book. There's no specific need for the reader to remember them at this point (although familiarity will be rewarded by foreshadowing).
I'm working on converting some existing chunks of text into the second chapter at the moment. This one follows Barbara on an early summer trip to the title-lands of Turinz, to pick up some strands from that side of her legacy. In a brief space of time, we need to know who and what Barbara is, and come up to speed on her incredibly tangled familial history and how it relates to the purpose of her journey. Margerit gets a brief reference in that tangle, to establish her identity and their relationship, but she isn't physically present in this chapter so we can save that complication for later. We do, however, have to juggle the continuing characters of Barbara's estate manager LeFevre, her cousin and armin-in-training Brandel, and her armin Tavit. (Which, of course, requires explaining the profession and social context of the armin.)
LeFevre got rather short shrift in The Mystic Marriage which made me sad as I'm very fond of him. I don't know that he'll get that much more page-time in Mother of Souls. This makes it tricky to demonstrate how much of a foundational rock he is in Barbara's life, which is very much a key to their relationship. Some day I may need to feature him in a short story, just to fit in some of the interesting parts of his life that would be distracting in the novels.
Brandel is going to continue to have a fairly low-level presence in this book. He's a long-term project and will become more important in later books. (Although, being a boy, he never gets to be a focal character.) And in this chapter we're going to learn something quite interesting about Tavit's back-story which ties up a couple of loose ends from the last book. Another loose end from the last book--the peculiar and unexplained hostility Barbara encountered on several occasions from Baron Mazuk, whose lands border on Turinz--will also feature in this chapter and set up one of the multiplicity of themes for the book: the social, economic, and political conflicts around industrial canal building in Alpennia, and the complications of some rather odd recent weather patterns.
That's quite a lot to get done in one chapter! (And even the raw text-chunks currently add up to a rather long chapter, so I may see of some of the bits can be moved later. There's a particular discussion with LeFevre that might be able to be delayed fairly easily.) And then I get to tackle my other new viewpoint character in chapter 3.
In The Mystic Marriage we get plunged right into needing to know the backstory because the book starts out with Antuniet's point of view, so there's the whole thing with, "Who is this and what is she doing in Heidelberg, and why do we care?" And then immediately in chapter 2 it's, "Who are Margerit and Barbara and what are their relationships to each other and the rest of society?" By the time we get to Jeanne's point of view in chapter 3, there's a basic background, and besides which we aren't expected to know that much about her already.
The opening chapter for Mother of Souls (which is complete in draft now) was much easier, in some ways. We start off with the point of view of Luzie Valorin, widow, mother, boarding house keeper, music teacher, and brand new never-before-met character. So we can meet her without any expectations and I can use her chapter to remind the reader (or explain anew) the basic facts about Alpennia and the city of Rotenek without too much complication. Luzie does interact with a couple of characters we've met before in The Mystic Marriage: the up and coming violinist Iustin (one of her boarders) and--by passing reference--the composer Ion-Pazit, and the composer Fizeir whose operas were roundly panned by the characters of the previous book. There's no specific need for the reader to remember them at this point (although familiarity will be rewarded by foreshadowing).
I'm working on converting some existing chunks of text into the second chapter at the moment. This one follows Barbara on an early summer trip to the title-lands of Turinz, to pick up some strands from that side of her legacy. In a brief space of time, we need to know who and what Barbara is, and come up to speed on her incredibly tangled familial history and how it relates to the purpose of her journey. Margerit gets a brief reference in that tangle, to establish her identity and their relationship, but she isn't physically present in this chapter so we can save that complication for later. We do, however, have to juggle the continuing characters of Barbara's estate manager LeFevre, her cousin and armin-in-training Brandel, and her armin Tavit. (Which, of course, requires explaining the profession and social context of the armin.)
LeFevre got rather short shrift in The Mystic Marriage which made me sad as I'm very fond of him. I don't know that he'll get that much more page-time in Mother of Souls. This makes it tricky to demonstrate how much of a foundational rock he is in Barbara's life, which is very much a key to their relationship. Some day I may need to feature him in a short story, just to fit in some of the interesting parts of his life that would be distracting in the novels.
Brandel is going to continue to have a fairly low-level presence in this book. He's a long-term project and will become more important in later books. (Although, being a boy, he never gets to be a focal character.) And in this chapter we're going to learn something quite interesting about Tavit's back-story which ties up a couple of loose ends from the last book. Another loose end from the last book--the peculiar and unexplained hostility Barbara encountered on several occasions from Baron Mazuk, whose lands border on Turinz--will also feature in this chapter and set up one of the multiplicity of themes for the book: the social, economic, and political conflicts around industrial canal building in Alpennia, and the complications of some rather odd recent weather patterns.
That's quite a lot to get done in one chapter! (And even the raw text-chunks currently add up to a rather long chapter, so I may see of some of the bits can be moved later. There's a particular discussion with LeFevre that might be able to be delayed fairly easily.) And then I get to tackle my other new viewpoint character in chapter 3.
