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When writing the first two Alpennian books, I did a lot of revision along the way. I have a secret confession that I enjoy reading my own writing, so it's natural for me to go back and re-read what I'm working on. And then the revisions just flow. Especially for Daughter of Mystery, the story changed a lot in the writing, and it made sense to go back and adjust the continuity when I jumped the tracks and took plot or characters in a different direction.
Drafting Mother of Souls was very different. I deliberately plowed ahead creating first draft without any revision at all. At most, I stuck some reminders in the sidebar comments section of the Scrivener file. That means that one of the big parts of the current editing pass is to bring all the earlier chapters in line with where the story ended up. It's also a time to notice the events I'd originally meant to include that somehow fell by the wayside.
Originally, a very minor intersection of the plot about the effects of magical weather control on the Rotein river, and the plot about Margerit's decision to buy a property to start a women's college involved the specific geographic situation of the property and the possibility that, if river levels remained lower on a long-term basis, that property might become valuable to shipping interests. There was an idea about possible intrigues around the purchase, and other interests angling to buy it out from under her, and whatnot. Well, that ended up on the cutting floor. It was in the outline notes, but never made it into the draft. No loss: there wasn't a convenient place to spin it out, and the timelines didn't leave much place for it.
Originally, Serafina's husband, Paolo, was a relatively ordinary scholar and archivist who sometimes went haring off to acquire interesting books. They met because he was something of a colleague of Serafina's father, and he married her in large part because he found it convenient to acquire a housekeeper and secretary for the price of a wife. Pretty soon, fractures started developing in this backstory. For one thing, Paolo needed to be independently wealthy. Some of the logistics of their lives didn't work at all on the salary of a Vatican archivist. And if he wasn't working there fore the money, why was he there? For another, I couldn't quite make sense of just why he'd decided to marry Serafina in particular, given those reasons.
Things fell more into place when I started getting ideas for some of the major plot elements of Mistress of Shadows (which will be a direct chronological follow-on to Mother of Souls, even though I plan to write Floodtide and the Tanfrit story first). Now Paolo is something of a black-sheep member of a wealthy family, and his work at the archives is due to his particular interest in texts about Mysteries. That job is also cover for his own private collecting activities in the field. He married Serafina, not simply for a general clerk/housekeeper, but because he knew about her mystical sensitivity and thought her talents would be invaluable in finding, interpreting, and using magical texts. In return, he promised to teach her how to work mysteries.
When those expectations fell apart on both sides, the marriage went sour altogether. But now, Paolo's extended "business trips" have a more focused purpose, and it makes more sense for him to have family money (and for Serafina to be able to draw an allowance through banking connections, even when traveling). Now it makes much more sense that he would decide to marry a woman who is socially unsuitable (though more for reasons of class than race) and keep her separate from his family connections. (This also created a context for how Serafina met Francesca, her first female lover, if Francesca is a cousin of Paolo's and was curious enough to track down and meet his scholar-wife.) And with that history--where Serafina first met him as a scruffy and careless-of-convention scholar, and only later discovered that he had high society roots from which he was deliberately keeping her separate--Serafina's intense self-consciousness and anxiety about her lack of sophistication have a more solid grounding.
And now all I need to do is add all that, naturally and unobtrusively, into the first chapters where we meet her!
Drafting Mother of Souls was very different. I deliberately plowed ahead creating first draft without any revision at all. At most, I stuck some reminders in the sidebar comments section of the Scrivener file. That means that one of the big parts of the current editing pass is to bring all the earlier chapters in line with where the story ended up. It's also a time to notice the events I'd originally meant to include that somehow fell by the wayside.
Originally, a very minor intersection of the plot about the effects of magical weather control on the Rotein river, and the plot about Margerit's decision to buy a property to start a women's college involved the specific geographic situation of the property and the possibility that, if river levels remained lower on a long-term basis, that property might become valuable to shipping interests. There was an idea about possible intrigues around the purchase, and other interests angling to buy it out from under her, and whatnot. Well, that ended up on the cutting floor. It was in the outline notes, but never made it into the draft. No loss: there wasn't a convenient place to spin it out, and the timelines didn't leave much place for it.
Originally, Serafina's husband, Paolo, was a relatively ordinary scholar and archivist who sometimes went haring off to acquire interesting books. They met because he was something of a colleague of Serafina's father, and he married her in large part because he found it convenient to acquire a housekeeper and secretary for the price of a wife. Pretty soon, fractures started developing in this backstory. For one thing, Paolo needed to be independently wealthy. Some of the logistics of their lives didn't work at all on the salary of a Vatican archivist. And if he wasn't working there fore the money, why was he there? For another, I couldn't quite make sense of just why he'd decided to marry Serafina in particular, given those reasons.
Things fell more into place when I started getting ideas for some of the major plot elements of Mistress of Shadows (which will be a direct chronological follow-on to Mother of Souls, even though I plan to write Floodtide and the Tanfrit story first). Now Paolo is something of a black-sheep member of a wealthy family, and his work at the archives is due to his particular interest in texts about Mysteries. That job is also cover for his own private collecting activities in the field. He married Serafina, not simply for a general clerk/housekeeper, but because he knew about her mystical sensitivity and thought her talents would be invaluable in finding, interpreting, and using magical texts. In return, he promised to teach her how to work mysteries.
When those expectations fell apart on both sides, the marriage went sour altogether. But now, Paolo's extended "business trips" have a more focused purpose, and it makes more sense for him to have family money (and for Serafina to be able to draw an allowance through banking connections, even when traveling). Now it makes much more sense that he would decide to marry a woman who is socially unsuitable (though more for reasons of class than race) and keep her separate from his family connections. (This also created a context for how Serafina met Francesca, her first female lover, if Francesca is a cousin of Paolo's and was curious enough to track down and meet his scholar-wife.) And with that history--where Serafina first met him as a scruffy and careless-of-convention scholar, and only later discovered that he had high society roots from which he was deliberately keeping her separate--Serafina's intense self-consciousness and anxiety about her lack of sophistication have a more solid grounding.
And now all I need to do is add all that, naturally and unobtrusively, into the first chapters where we meet her!
