Alpennia: first drafts and info-dumps
Jun. 2nd, 2015 09:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjI'm still on schedule with my "complete first draft of one chapter per week" program. Last week I finished up Chapter 3, which is Serafina's first chapter. Although Luzie and Serafina are both "new" characters for this book, in some ways Luzie's first chapter was easier because we'd never met her before at all. Whereas we'd been introduced very lightly to Serafina towards the end of The Mystic Marriage.
That introduction was entirely from other people's points of view, so we knew only what Serafina chose to reveal about herself, and one thing I'm discovering as I write her is that Serafina shares a major trait with Jeanne: she is very careful and strategic about the face she presents to the world. She has no choice, of course, about the physical face she presents. Alpennia is not devoid of people of color, but neither are they commonplace, and especially not in the upper levels of society. Serafina has been granted the honorary middle-class status that comes with education--we occasionally are reminded just how honorary it is, seeing Akezze's fluctuations between being treated according to her working class origins and her reception as a scholar and teacher. But Serafina herself feels very out of place when interacting on a social, rather than an intellectual, level with her new Alpennian friends.
In order to understand these layers, we need to know a bit more about just how it is that a second-generation Ethiopian immigrant to Italy ended up working as her husband's proxy as a Vatican archivist. We also eventually need to understand just why she is driven to master the ability to create mysteries of her own, and how it is that she has only smatterings of an esoteric education. We need to know what the background of her marriage is such that she had the freedom and the economic ability to take off on her own for an extended trip to Rotenek. And we've been told that she's had at least one female lover back in Italy and doesn't appear to consider that in conflict with her married state.
That's a pretty massive info-dump. And currently, it's sitting there in a nearly undigested lump at the very beginning of Chapter 3. I have no intention for it to remain there. Bits and pieces of that text will eventually be moved into other chapters and other contexts, so that all will be revealed gradually. Eventually, the information in Chapter 3 will be pared down to just enough to establish who Serafina is and how she relates to the other characters. But for now, there it sits.
That introduction was entirely from other people's points of view, so we knew only what Serafina chose to reveal about herself, and one thing I'm discovering as I write her is that Serafina shares a major trait with Jeanne: she is very careful and strategic about the face she presents to the world. She has no choice, of course, about the physical face she presents. Alpennia is not devoid of people of color, but neither are they commonplace, and especially not in the upper levels of society. Serafina has been granted the honorary middle-class status that comes with education--we occasionally are reminded just how honorary it is, seeing Akezze's fluctuations between being treated according to her working class origins and her reception as a scholar and teacher. But Serafina herself feels very out of place when interacting on a social, rather than an intellectual, level with her new Alpennian friends.
In order to understand these layers, we need to know a bit more about just how it is that a second-generation Ethiopian immigrant to Italy ended up working as her husband's proxy as a Vatican archivist. We also eventually need to understand just why she is driven to master the ability to create mysteries of her own, and how it is that she has only smatterings of an esoteric education. We need to know what the background of her marriage is such that she had the freedom and the economic ability to take off on her own for an extended trip to Rotenek. And we've been told that she's had at least one female lover back in Italy and doesn't appear to consider that in conflict with her married state.
That's a pretty massive info-dump. And currently, it's sitting there in a nearly undigested lump at the very beginning of Chapter 3. I have no intention for it to remain there. Bits and pieces of that text will eventually be moved into other chapters and other contexts, so that all will be revealed gradually. Eventually, the information in Chapter 3 will be pared down to just enough to establish who Serafina is and how she relates to the other characters. But for now, there it sits.
