Good productive week, though I suffer the usual challenge of balancing everything. I got lots of viewing done for Time Travel on Screen, but less Demand Media work than I’d planned. I also sent off two article queries (one for Chemical Heritage, one for History Magazine), and a couple of applications for regular freelance work with various markets.
I finished a rewrite of All Happy Families in the hope of reading it at Tuesday’s writer’s group, but the reading schedule was a bit confused so it’ll be a couple of weeks.
And I did a lot of work replotting Southern Discomforts. I resolved the plot problem that was bugging me last week (just why do the elves want my protagonist involved in all this) but faced another one, figuring out my villain, Gwalchmai’s agenda. More precisely I know what he wants (Olwen MacDonal dead) and I thought I knew how he’d get it: Kill people she cares about until she gives in.
However when I resumed working on the outline, my gut started screaming No No No—and my gut is never wrong when it screams like that. So I sat down and tinkered with things and I think a little tweaking makes it work. First he’ll try to confront her openly, but he’s cheating. Then she discovers he can’t die. And now that he knows this for sure (he had some doubts) he’s going to pressure her into a duel (less overt killing but plenty nasty, like kidnapping several babies from the maternity ward and replacing them with stocks (lumps of wood enchanted to look like the baby. But dead).
Fortunately, Olwen has a trick that will buy her time … but I’m not entirely sure it would work. I will have to think about that.
I’ve also put some work into thinking about the setting, Candleston, county seat of Candleston County in Northeast Georgia. And since everything I think about is fascinating, I’ll share.
Candleston was an early Georgia settlement, though like much of colonial America, “settlement” was too kind a word when it started. However it had the advantages of the MacDonals, Olwen and Aubric arriving there about the same time as the settlers. They offered protection against the natives, they were skilled hunters and faerie magic is very good for farming. Plus they had bulls and horses (a few of each) to breed with the humans’ stock, and that produced fantastic lineages.
Candleston has been, in short, a phenomenal farming community. However as happens elsewhere, some farmers either die without passing the land on, or succumb to people offering money for development. So the town’s been rapidly growing, easily 20,000 people now. About a quarter of them are newcomers from Atlanta (either commuters or emigres) and the remainder are about 50/50 black and white.
Candleston is built on a small river, one concentrated town center surrounded by outlying homes. And of course, several churches (there might be a synagogue but the Jewish community is small). Unusually for an American town of the era, it has lots of roundabouts and zero crossroads (except in some of the new developments): crossroads interfere with the flow of Earth power, so they weaken faerie magic.
There are almost no chains in Candleston because the MacDonal influence is pro-local mom-and-pop stores. And they have a lot of influence (I’ll get into that another time). The town itself is attractive and the black neighborhoods are surprisingly decent: while the MacDonals didn’t oppose segregation, they saw no reason to treat the town’s black people poorly. And they have ways of making their views felt.
Of course the backstory stuff is good, but that won’t save me if the plotting isn’t solid. Still, knowing my setting doesn’t hurt.
August 1, 2014 · 8:04 pm
