I must have repressed the memory of this stage of writing Ryswyck; in fact I know I did, because I blithely assured myself it wouldn’t take so long to write the second book in this ‘verse now that the ‘verse itself was properly realized. And that’s true so far as it goes. But I forgot about the transitional stage of plotting, where you move from needing to know what happens to needing to know why.
There’s just no rushing this stage, and I hate that. It bears such an aggravating resemblance to nothing being done at all. Since I’ve been obsessed recently with the volcano eruption on La Palma in the Canary Islands, lava metaphors are coming to mind: you hope a lava stream will traverse the topography in a way that is most expedient and least destructive, but of course what the lava is looking for is the path of least resistance.
It’s in this frame of mind that I said to Erica this week:
Me: still tearing my figurative hair out over plot lines in TLT
Me: currently Speir is Miles Vorkosiganing her way through Bernhelm Palace and I am half minded to let her
Her: lol
Me: it’s more entertaining to me right now than the Berenian conspirators are being
Since Speir is the protagonist of all matters happening on the Bernhelm side of the strait, this is hardly surprising. But following this little meander has yielded some cascading insights into other parts of the plot, and so I’m not only not sorry I indulged it, I’ll probably use most of it.
Incidentally, Miles makes a handy metaphor for some of the things I intend for Speir — they’re quite different characters and I wasn’t particularly thinking of Miles when I developed Speir, but as an online acquaintance once said, “Plot doesn’t happen to Miles; Miles happens to plots,” and that’s the kind of person Speir is growing to be. The events of Ryswyck stifled her energies in certain ways, or at least forced her to direct them inward; that dynamic is in a process of change. And like Miles, Speir is having to find workarounds for disability and disadvantage, mostly via trial and error. Sometimes a lot of error.
In any event, aggravatingly slow as it is, this stage of the project is still engaging and holds promise for more velocity in the future, which is the encouragement I need at the moment.
