hrj

I've been agonizing for some time about how to deal with the beginning and ending of the story. In the original version of the first few paragraphs, I was playing this little hide-and-seek game about introducing the baron and his bodyguard before revealing that the bodyguard was a woman and one of my protagonists. But this was badly in conflict with my overall format that uses only a tightly-filtered 3rd person POV -- the opening bit, by definition, had to be much more omniscient. At the other end of the story, I really wanted some way to convey "and they lived happily (if adventurously) ever after" without committing myself to any particular future specifics. The other day, a paragraph came to me in a voice more or less of some person of a future generation giving a brief and clearly somewhat mangled bio of Barbara's later life that makes it clear both that she and Margerit continued a very close relationship but also that the romantic nature of their relationship was not "official" (which would be difficult to justify in the historic context -- even an alt-historic context). And it occurred to me that I could modify the opening paragraphs with some vaguely parallel language to make the two sections book-end the story a bit more neatly. (Both bits include the affirmation that the cultural setting of the story allows for a social category of "the Eccentric" who is allowed, within limits, to break social conventions in the same way that the very rich and the very powerful are allowed to. This is a useful thing to establish early on since it presents a context for various of my characters' activities and interests.)

So now the main text (which sticks to the alternating tight-3rd POV) is bracketed by a Prelude and a Coda that fulfill my storytelling needs without looking sloppy on a stylistic basis. I'm much happier. We'll see what my eventual readers think.