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hrjIt seems a bit weird to be blogging about the plot of Mother of Souls (the 3rd Alpennia book) when I'm still finishing the revisions for The Mystic Marriage (Alpennia #2), but it'll be nice to have a ready head of steam when the time comes to start writing.
The one-sentence summary of Book 3 has been "Margerit founds a women's college", but the romantic arc and the personal conflict revolve around music and opera. The two focal protagonists have no connection with high society this time: one is the visiting aspiring scholar from Rome, Serafina Talarico, who you'll get to meet in passing in Book 2; the other is a widow with two young sons that she's struggling to support by giving music lessons, doing musical copy-work, and taking in boarders (including a certain foreign scholar).
But the flavor of my multi-layered stories has set up an expectation that we'll have a thread of high politics running through the book as well and I hadn't gotten a handle on how that might work into things. And then, as these things usually happen, a few random strands that I'd introduced (or planned to introduce) for unrelated reasons suddenly braided themselves together. To wit:
item: I've introduced the annual rising of the Rotein as part of the rhythm of the landscape and implied that the label "floodtide" suggests the occasional catastrophic event. I've taken some notes and collected pictures of urban flooding in Europe with an eye toward having one of these more catastrophic late spring floods at some point.
item: I have an idea for a side-story that's predominantly a flashback to Jeanne's first love that will be triggered by this catastrophic flood and the threat of disease associated with it. For various logistical reasons (sorry, no spoilers, so no details) this should be scheduled in the latter part of Book 3.
item: I've been becoming enamored of a sort of overlapping story (Alpennia 3.5) focusing on the assorted collection of late-teenage characters that have been accumulating, along with a couple of new ones who will be introduced at least in passing in Book 3. One of these new ones is a girl who rows one of the water-taxis on the river. I need a plot-conflict for this story that provides an excuse for young people of a wide variety of backgrounds and classes to come together to solve some problem that is both significant and yet not critical enough to be brought to the attention of the grown-ups. Something involving the river and river-traffic fits the first part of those criteria. (To some extent, the river is the "back alley" of the upper class homes along the Vezenaf and a bit of a liminal space where interactions can occur.) The problem for the kids to solve could reasonably be some (as yet unidentified) offshoot of …
item: The magic/mysteries of my world are rich potential tool for international political maneuvering -- one I've barely hinted at so far in Book 2. What if the catastrophic flood isn't entirely natural? What if it's only the start of a larger plan meant to disrupt Alpennia for ulterior motives? This could provide: 1) the political element that had been missing in Book 3; 2) any number of related side-plots of an appropriate importance for the kids to take care of; 3) an impetus for the foreign political (*cough* espionage *cough*) mission that Barbara and Efriturik get sent on in Book 4 (Mistress of Shadows).
It isn't by any means a full plot yet, but I think I have enough seeds to plant the garden. And this is why my books are chock-full of details and characters and events that may seem to be extraneous at the moment: because they may well be the seeds and fertilizer for a plot I don't know I need yet. I not only have Chekov's gun on the mantel, I have a pair of swords in an armorial display on the wall, a suit of rusty armor in a dark corner of the stair well, a pair of dueling pistols in a rosewood box locked away in a chest in the bedroom, and a sword-cane in the umbrella stand in the hall. Because you never know what might be the tool for the job.
The one-sentence summary of Book 3 has been "Margerit founds a women's college", but the romantic arc and the personal conflict revolve around music and opera. The two focal protagonists have no connection with high society this time: one is the visiting aspiring scholar from Rome, Serafina Talarico, who you'll get to meet in passing in Book 2; the other is a widow with two young sons that she's struggling to support by giving music lessons, doing musical copy-work, and taking in boarders (including a certain foreign scholar).
But the flavor of my multi-layered stories has set up an expectation that we'll have a thread of high politics running through the book as well and I hadn't gotten a handle on how that might work into things. And then, as these things usually happen, a few random strands that I'd introduced (or planned to introduce) for unrelated reasons suddenly braided themselves together. To wit:
item: I've introduced the annual rising of the Rotein as part of the rhythm of the landscape and implied that the label "floodtide" suggests the occasional catastrophic event. I've taken some notes and collected pictures of urban flooding in Europe with an eye toward having one of these more catastrophic late spring floods at some point.
item: I have an idea for a side-story that's predominantly a flashback to Jeanne's first love that will be triggered by this catastrophic flood and the threat of disease associated with it. For various logistical reasons (sorry, no spoilers, so no details) this should be scheduled in the latter part of Book 3.
item: I've been becoming enamored of a sort of overlapping story (Alpennia 3.5) focusing on the assorted collection of late-teenage characters that have been accumulating, along with a couple of new ones who will be introduced at least in passing in Book 3. One of these new ones is a girl who rows one of the water-taxis on the river. I need a plot-conflict for this story that provides an excuse for young people of a wide variety of backgrounds and classes to come together to solve some problem that is both significant and yet not critical enough to be brought to the attention of the grown-ups. Something involving the river and river-traffic fits the first part of those criteria. (To some extent, the river is the "back alley" of the upper class homes along the Vezenaf and a bit of a liminal space where interactions can occur.) The problem for the kids to solve could reasonably be some (as yet unidentified) offshoot of …
item: The magic/mysteries of my world are rich potential tool for international political maneuvering -- one I've barely hinted at so far in Book 2. What if the catastrophic flood isn't entirely natural? What if it's only the start of a larger plan meant to disrupt Alpennia for ulterior motives? This could provide: 1) the political element that had been missing in Book 3; 2) any number of related side-plots of an appropriate importance for the kids to take care of; 3) an impetus for the foreign political (*cough* espionage *cough*) mission that Barbara and Efriturik get sent on in Book 4 (Mistress of Shadows).
It isn't by any means a full plot yet, but I think I have enough seeds to plant the garden. And this is why my books are chock-full of details and characters and events that may seem to be extraneous at the moment: because they may well be the seeds and fertilizer for a plot I don't know I need yet. I not only have Chekov's gun on the mantel, I have a pair of swords in an armorial display on the wall, a suit of rusty armor in a dark corner of the stair well, a pair of dueling pistols in a rosewood box locked away in a chest in the bedroom, and a sword-cane in the umbrella stand in the hall. Because you never know what might be the tool for the job.
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Date: 2014-07-26 06:06 am (UTC)Margerit is my hero.
Regarding the flood time, despite having lived near water for 6 years in Amsterdam -- the water in the Netherlands is so highly regulated--, it was only living next to a river last spring that really introduced me to annual floods. Though, in retrospect, we didn't have any this year -- but last year's were pretty impressive, and we were not very badly hit at all. The eastern German cities on the Danube had flooding the worst since the 16th C, and they're still in some cases cleaning up from it.
no subject
Date: 2014-07-26 06:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-07-27 03:59 pm (UTC)I love it when things put in "just because" turn out to be seeds you didn't know you needed. I take this as an indication that the author's subconscious mind is happily participating in story creation, which I think is vitally important. The subconscious knows a whole lot that we often don't consciously know, and if the two work together, remarkably good fiction is often the result. Congrats on your success.
no subject
Date: 2014-07-28 05:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-07-28 05:51 am (UTC)A good example is a scene about 2/3 through Daughter of Mystery when Margerit asks her Aunt Bertrut whether she's ever wanted something desperately enough to make it worth telling the world to go to hell. And Bertrut says something like, "Yes, dear, I did - but it wouldn't have been worth it." I have no idea what it was that Bertrut wanted that badly, or why she thinks differently now. But some day I may have a situation that it will be the answer for.
no subject
Date: 2014-07-29 12:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-07-29 04:57 am (UTC)