A Falling-Off of Late

I've been poking about in my archives, initially to see how I had misled melymbrosia about Stealing the Elf-King's Roses, and then, well, naturally, I got sidetracked. I was somewhat astonished to see how frequently I posted entries last year. I'd like to say that I am posting fewer now because I am well engrossed in writing my books, but that is unfortunately not the case.

The Hills/Whim sequel really is coming to life, though. It's probably going to have just two viewpoint characters, alternating more or less evenly. I'd got bogged down in Arry's first bit because of a singular lack of notion about the plot, and I couldn't get Ruth's started. I had a dandy opening line, but nothing else. Then I reread Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles, as mentioned previously in these pages. Arry is the utter contradiction and opposite of anybody one could write about with any Dunnettesque technique currently available to me. But The Whim of the Dragon was influenced in a myriad of odd ways by Dunnett, and Ruth's viewpoint works very well with some of Dunnett's typical attitudes. I always knew that no reading or rereading, however motivated, ever goes to waste.

The Liavek novel, unwanted though it is, is also much too lively to put aside. It's probably just as well that I can work on it at my speed rather than that entailed by having a contract, because the cast of characters is going to be unwieldy if not managed carefully, and I'm coming out of three entire books' worth of tight third-person narrative by people under twenty, whereas this one has a wild array of ages and is probably going to have some epistolary aspects. I can feel them looming, but they are not looming very fast.

I guess that's the writing update. I'll let it go out into the ether, and try to be a trifle organized about how I issue updates about other matters.

Pamela.