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Retreat, Day 4

buttonshellWords achieved today: 3045 (letting myself get away with less because it’s a teaching day, but maybe I’ll get in a few more tonight)
Current Hearts of Tabat wordcount: 87687
Total word count for the week: 13067
Total word count for this retreat: 13067
Worked on Hearts of Tabat, Exiles of Tabat, short story (“You Remind Me of Summer”)
Time spent on SFWA email, discussion boards, other stuff: 30 minutes, plus whatever I do tonight
Other stuff: Taught the first section of “Writing Your Way Into Your Novel”, prepped for Sunday’s class
Steps: 6410

From Hearts of Tabat:

Adelina paused by Serafina’s desk. She studied the secretary, who looked up. She wore her usual plainly cut clothes, one of the signs of a worshipper of the Moon Temples. That was, as far as Adelina could, Serafina’s only similarity with Eloquence, but most of what Adelina had ever known of the temples previously had been via the instruction or example of her secretary.

She asked now, “Serafina, how does the Temple handle marriages?”

“The priests arrange them, when people are ready,” Serafina said.

“How does the priest know when they are ready?”

“They come and ask the priest to find them someone, and they prove in conversation that they are ready to be with someone in that way, and to begin to raise a family.”

“Is that the point of the alliance, the family?” Adelina said, intrigued. “Are there Triad marriages, as there are among the merchants?”

She felt foolish as Serafina eyed her. I am treating her as though she were some sort of menagerie creature, she thought, and that is unkind. Shame twitched at her even harder when Serafina patiently said, “No, our marriages are not about economic alliances in the way that merchant marriages are. Such alliances would be reckoned a little sinful because they are apart from the norm, truth be told.”

“What is their purpose then?”

“To create children, who will spread the faith.”

“Should the faith not spread it, if it is good enough?” Adelina asked, fascinated, and realized her misstep when she saw Serafina’s frown. “I beg your pardon,” she said quickly. “It is only that”¦”

“It is only that the Moon Temples are not much regarded among the merchants and the nobles because it is a religion of the poor,” Serafina said frankly. “To speak of things that are not reckoned in profit or loss is thought a little shameful among the merchants, and the nobles do not like talk of doing good for its own sake.”

That startled a laugh out of Adelina, who had never heard her clerk be so cynical. “What has flushed all this truth from you, then?”

“You should not pay attention to Eloquence Seaborn,” Serafina said severely. “It is not a match the Temples would approve of, and he is a fine young man, with a good future in them ahead of him.”

“Is he to become a priest?”

Serafina shook her head, then nodded. “A layman’s priest, someone who does not live in the Temples and do as the Priests do, but lives among other people and acts as a go between and an example. That is a special role, and it is the one that has been prepared for Eloquence.”

It occurred to Adelina that the Temples were a relatively small gathering and so Serafina had known Eloquence and his family all her life. She said, “I am thinking of taking an apprentice, one of Eloquence’s sisters.”

“That,” Serafina said slowly, “could be a good or bad notion, depending on which you mean to do so with.”

“The youngest one. Perseverance.”

“Ah.” Serafina’s frown cleared a little. “She gets picked on by the rest of them, I think. To be out from under all of that would be a good thing for her, let her shine a little and come into her own. But I thought she was apprenticed to the tanner?”

“She is, but she says she hates it. I found her crying over it.”

Serafina pursed her lips. “It is not for the child to determine her own apprenticeship. That is for her elders to do, with the Temples’ advice, in order to place her where she will be best prepared for life.”

“But at the time she was apprenticed to the tanner, this opportunity was not available to her for the Temples or her elders to know about,” Adelina pointed out.

“That is true.” Serafina wavered. “You should consult her brother,” she said finally.

“I will,” Adelina said. She did not mention her earlier conversation with Perseverance or the fact that she had already promised the girl an apprenticeship. There was no need for Serafina to know the exact timeline.

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Plotting and Re-Plotting Stories

Sculpture at the Redmond Public Library
I'm always trying to add new writing tools to my toolbox; ways of plotting and replotting stories for rewriting are always useful.
Here’s another example of using a Stumbleupon-discovered post to spur a rewrite.

The story I just finished, whose working title is “Villa Encantada,” is one whose beginning I wrote over a year ago. I picked it up last summer and added a couple of scenes, but something about it has felt wrong and it’s been just lumpy scenes stuffed full of description of a balcony garden. I was pretty sure it didn’t begin where it was supposed to, and also pretty sure that the best thing to do would be to start it again from scratch, write it, then mine the previous efforts to see what should get folded into it.

So when I read this post on plotting out stories, I decided to use it to plot out mine. All you do, according to the oridinal webpage, is complete the sentences. I’ve thought about the story and its theme and know it about halfway well enough, I think.

1. Once upon a time . . . there was a woman who could not forgive herself.

2. Every day . . . she tried to kill herself in the very smallest of ways, cigarettes and high heels on stairways.

3. Until this . . . she meets a new neighbor, who is bossy and ominous and presumptuous.

4. Because of this . . . she tries to make friends and allies in the rest of the apartment complex.

5. Because of this . . . The bitchy neighbor, who is a witch, attacks her in increasingly powerful ways, leading up to a third neighbor’s death.

6. Until finally . . . the protagonist is pissed off enough to stop feeling guilty and react in a way that saves herself.

7. For every day . . . I’m not sure what to do with this last, but I’ll wrap the story up with some gesture that shows that her forgiveness of herself is a lasting and life-changing thing.

Okay. That let me start thinking about it in terms of scenes, once I had the overall arc in my head. From there I did start from scratch and write the story from my head. In the process I found myself adding a frame story. Once I finally had that draft I could go through the first version and fold in passages that I wanted to keep. I’m still not happy with the end, but at least I have a complete story now that I can tinker with.

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