Chapter Ten: Shan and Priscilla Ride Again

[rolanni]

We have a lot of phone calls and mundane business to take care of tomorrow, so, our busyness is your early chapter!

Please note that, with the posting of this chapter, there are only five more ahead of us.  Do recall that we've been viewing an incomplete work, and it will not end tidily.

Here's your link to Chapter Ten.

Enjoy!

Comments

[bandicoot.livejournal.com]

Thank you :)

[amm-me.livejournal.com]

Aaahhhhh! Thanks.

Now we get to some real meat. I had begun almost to think this was a coming-of-age about Gordy.

In your Auctorial Reflections at the stopping point, do youthink you will be able to tell us where you were heading? Before Maine, and Other Stuff, got in the way?

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

Might be; might not. What we have this far is so jumpy, it would need a top-to-bottom rewrite to smooth it out, and see what the hooks are, and which hooks are the most compelling. The problem is that the Universe has gone on, and this story is basically your Neanderthal-found-in-a-glacier.

the reality of the Tree

[amm-me.livejournal.com]

I haven't read the chapbooks in order of publication in a great while. The Tree has simply always been there. When was its first appearance?

Re: the reality of the Tree

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

Oh, let's see.

The Tree didn't get a lot of discussion in the first three books, by which I mean Agent of Change, Conflict of Honors, Carpe Diem.

The first published mention of the Tree as a physical presence is in Local Custom, and in Scout's Progress, we begin to understand that it's actually communicating.

But! Steve and I had taken a couple whacks at what eventually became the Crystal books back around the time the first three books were published -- we have a lot of partials from that period, like Shan and Priscilla Ride Again -- and Jela came with a Tree. So, we did know that there had been a Tree, and it amused me to suppose that there still was a Tree in the Dark Times, when Custom and Progress were written.

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

I suspect this is part of your writing process, but what does it mean that we have an outtake chapter ten (and fifteen) and a chapter ten? Would they normally be braided together to become the final chapter ten, or would one displace the other? I have a feeling that outtake means literally we tried writing it this way, then decided to do it another way, but... asking is better than guessing, eh? Thanks!

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

Hard to tell what we might have done, had we taken this out to the end, and I daren't try to reconstruct our thinking at this distance.

What we usually do is -- we don't throw anything out, even if the scene/chapter/line/whatever is removed from the WIP. Sometimes, the scene is just in the wrong place; sometimes, it's in the wrong book; sometimes it's something we had to write in order to work something else out, and won't itself appear anywhere.

The first 25,000 words of Alliance of Equals are "outtake chapters" from Dragon in Exile -- because I was trying to write two books at once, and those chapters simply didn't belong in Dragon.

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Thanks! So an outtake is like a branch (sorry, I'm thinking code control systems). That explains it.