Just a quick update tonight.  I am well and truly into Part Two of the novel now.  As hazy as some aspects of Part One were, Part Two is even more so.  Things are starting to come together–or spiral all apart, it’s a little hard to tell.

I have been discovering plot bunnies, as the NaNo community calls them, those threads of ideas that have a way of multiplying.  I had been without any real plot for the second half of the book.  Now I seem to have fallen into two plot threads, sort of three, and I’m not quite sure how they’re going to fit together.  Either this is great, or I have completely lost control.  I can’t tell which yet!

So I am trying to trust the process, and we’ll see what happens…

One thing I am enjoying–I’ve found a way to bring in a character who originally only existed as a throw-away line in my other novel draft.  For that story, I had to explain why Prince Randolph was on a quest when he had neither the skill nor the inclination for the task.  So he mentioned in passing a battleaxe aunt who had pushed him into it.

Randolph himself is not in this year’s NaNo novel, but I decided I was getting too many royal families and it would be wise to make the princess of this one Randolph’s sister.  Which means she has the same battleaxe aunt…and I’ve decided the aunt should appear in this novel, and be responsible for one of my new plot threads.  Whatever else I do with these plot bunnies, I’m pretty sure the aunt is staying in some form!

For tonight’s excerpt…how about meeting the Battleaxe?  There have been a great many developments since my previous excerpt, and Maggie is traveling to the castle in Rokinley, Michael’s country, with Michael and his brother Laurence.  They’re about to meet a traveling party from the royal court, which sends Maggie into something of a panic because she’s still pretending to Laurence that she’s the Princess Evangelina, and has no idea how she’s going to get out of that once she tells it to the entire court.  Michael’s only advice is to keep smiling…

And Maggie smiled, and kept smiling and promised herself she would ask for an audience with the king immediately when they got back to the castle, that was the only way to handle this now, and Michael had better come because she was really going to need some kind of support now, especially if it all came to throwing herself on someone’s mercy, and all she had to do right now was just smile and…

And then the door to the largest of the carriages, which had rumbled up a few minutes behind the faster horses, opened.  A woman stepped regally out, and Maggie stopped smiling.

The woman who came out of the carriage did not take the help of the footman standing ready to hand her down.  She was a tall woman with severely pinned-back hair, wearing a gray dress cut on stern lines.  She was not unusually large, though people tended to forget that when she’d been out of their sight for any length of time.  Her eyes were a startling blue.  She had a kind of beauty, but the word people more often used was imposing.

Maggie stared at her, paralyzed.

It was Lina’s aunt.  The king’s sister, the one everyone knew really ran Giramm, the one everyone in the court—but never to her face—called the Battleaxe, with equal parts respect and terror.

The Battleaxe stalked directly towards Maggie, and the laughing, cheery court of Rokinley parted like the sea to let her pass.  Maggie knew that courtesy demanded she get down from her horse, but she clung to her perch as the only possible high ground she could command.  At least she was above the other woman, and could make a galloping escape if she had to.

The Battleaxe stared up at her in silence for a long moment, and Maggie wasn’t sure if the rest of the group had fallen silent or if she just couldn’t hear them over the pounding of her heart in her ears.

Then the Battleaxe smiled and said, “My dear Evangelina, it’s so good to see you.”

We’re finishing up the first weekend of NaNoWriMo!  I was lucky to have a fairly quiet couple of days, so I’ve been able to get a nice jump on my word count–even though I also went to my writing group on Friday.  🙂  Right now I’m about 2,000 words ahead of the goal, which is very good because I know I’ll have a couple of days next week with very little time to write.

So far I’m enjoying the pace, especially the way the process moves so much faster when I write like this.  Inspiration has been coming at a rapid rate so far, and those lightning bolt “oh, that’s how it should work!” moments are among my favorite parts of writing.  I don’t know if I could sustain this long-term, but it seems to work for a month–or at least four days so far…

My biggest lightning bolt up to now has helped me (I think) work out one of my biggest plot problems previously.  You see, my premise got me into a very particular corner.  The whole concept of the book started when I was reading fairy tales and somehow sparked off this idea about an imprisoned hero who has no actual ability to fight the monster, but keeps standing up to defend the heroine anyway.  The villain finds that funny, and backs off–until the next day.  And so it keeps repeating day after day.

I loved the dynamic of that interaction, and I think I’ve been able to write it to really work for the hero.  The trouble was, it didn’t work at all for Maggie, my heroine.  For the dynamic to work, Michael can’t have an actual chance when he stands up to the evil king, which means that there’s really no place here for Maggie to do anything.

I can’t stand passive heroines, and there I was in a corner with a heroine who had to be passive, at least for the first section of the book.  This was probably the biggest thing that got me stuck the first time I tried to write this book.  But, on about November 2nd, lightning inspiration hit me.  I’m frustrated by this–and Maggie can be frustrated too.  I don’t have to have a passive heroine–I can have an active heroine who’s being forced by circumstances to be passive, and she damn well doesn’t have to like it!

It was a really helpful breakthrough for the character, and for the feel of this part of the novel.  And I’ve come up with a few things Maggie can do or at least try to do, around the fringes of this focus-point conflict.

There are more plot holes farther down the line, both things don’t make sense and sections I just don’t know what to do with yet…but with any luck lightning will continue striking!  For tonight, here’s an excerpt.

           Maggie woke up the next morning to find that she was still here.  The idea was somehow even more oppressive the second day than it had been the first.  She lay in the ridiculously large bed, stared up at the canopy, and tried not to roll over onto her stomach and cry into the pillow.  If she managed to resist that impulse, then maybe she could muster enough will to get up.

            It might not have been as bad if she didn’t feel so aimless.  She wanted to do something, and she was at a loss to know what.  It was entirely possible that this current situation, exactly as it was, was going to go on for days or even weeks.  If the last two days were any indication, she could stay in this sort of limbo, not quite slipping into further hells, for the foreseeable future.  At least until Michael developed a stronger sense of self-preservation or, as seemed vastly more likely, King Maurus decided to stop being amused.

            So she had some space.  And it made her want to claw the walls that she couldn’t think of anything to do with it.  Escape plans and exploring were all well and good in theory and no doubt would be just the thing in a story, but the fact of the matter was she had no real direction and no clear ideas, and wandering around this castle, well…how likely was it really that she was going to find a secret tunnel, or a magic sword, or…anything, really.

            She had always been the instigator.  She had always been the one who made things happen if there wasn’t enough going on.  It was a byword in Beaumont, that she and Lina always got into some kind of enormous trouble in February.  One year it was nearly drowning trying to skate on a frozen pond; another year all the hunting dogs around the castle became decidedly drunk when their water was not-too-mysteriously spiked; and then there was the time she and Lina actually snuck along on a hunt and then got lost and…it was really just as well that no one knew about the time she’d dared Lina to climb out on the roof of the highest tower, and then of course she had to do it herself too.  If they had slipped, that would have been a story to top them all, one they probably wouldn’t have lived to tell.

            Things happened in February because winters were quiet and by February Maggie got tired of waiting for someone else to make things happen.

            Now here she was in the most awful February of them all, metaphorically speaking, and found her hands completely tied.  She wanted to do something besides stand there silently while King Maurus smirked and Michael went all noble.  She wished she knew how to do magic, or even how to fight.  Sure, one February she had tried to get one of the guards to teach her and Lina swordplay, but that had been stopped long before March.  A talent for instigating mischief seemed hardly likely to help her here.

            She didn’t cry, and she did eventually muster up the willpower to drag herself out of bed.  She pulled on the first dress her hand touched in the wardrobe, some frothy blue concoction, obviously not designed for anyone who actually did anything.  Fine.  It was perfectly suitable, then.