Snippets and revisions

I'm using this week's retreat to work on the revisions for Dragon Weather, as well as doing some reading for a non-fiction project. But the blasted book is getting longer, which was not the idea, and, well...

It's partly that I am not the most organised writer -- as I've said before, I don't outline, and I follow threads as characters wherever they seem to want to go. This isn't also the productive, as sometimes characters do things I'm really not prepared for that upend the entire project. (I had a huge battle with Iareth Yscoithi while writing Living with Ghosts, because she would keep doing this. Some characters are more trouble than others.) In the case of Dragon Weather, though, it's partly because when I started writing it, I thought it was going to be a novella, a sort of family comedy with a sprinkling of Arthurian tropes. I didn't expect a novel. I didn't expect dragons. They just walked in and made themselves at home.

So there's a lot of unevennesses in the draft, and I'm having to weave new threads into earlier sections. I've ended up with a lot of new scenes which accounts for the increase in word count. Hopefully, I'll be able to cut more in the later parts and fine-tune everything to keep the book at a sensible length.

Meanwhile, there are ghosts and dragons and very organised government witches, and I am having too much fun. Here's a snippet from today's revisions.

About the ghosts, redux

No-one, not even Iris, has ever been sure how many ghosts there are at the Tall House. Some, after all, are more obvious than others. Some are shy or seasonal or only visible to particular types of people.

You’ve heard about Great Uncle Claudius already. He’s the youngest and most active of the human ghosts and he’s mostly harmless. Morgan suspects he only haunts the Tall House because he’s too lazy to move on. Lady Gwenda is more annoying, because she has Opinions and expresses them whenever she feels like it. The entire family are grateful that she only walks around the spring equinox, because no-one likes perpetual commentary on table manners and clothing and what one is doing in the privacy of one’s own bedroom.[1] She’s also a terrible snob and really judgy. She approved of Iris and Morgan, but held a particular spite against Meryl, who she considered weak and declassée and a blot on the family escutcheon. Which probably was yet another reason for Meryl’s instability.

The woman under the stairs is, as Angus said, mostly only detectable by women, and, as far as anyone knows, never moves. The smell is annoying: Gale makes a point of keeping a tall vase filled with seasonal flowers or boughs nearby, and burns incense regularly. He says the ghost responds best to the smell of roses, but the Powers alone know how he knows this. The footsteps on the landing are more troublesome, and none of Angus’s girlfriends before Sebille were comfortable staying overnight because of them. When Lynette was thirteen, she devoted much of her summer holiday to researching them and trying to discover what it was they were in search of. But she didn’t come up with any firm conclusions.

No-one in the family has seen the faceless man, which is a relief. As a child, Angus was fascinated by the story and Gale fretted endlessly that he might do something stupid and be cursed for life. Gareth says Angus is too unimaginative to notice, even if that happened, but Gale isn’t convinced. Gavin discourages talk of the faceless man to begin with, because no-one needs extra reasons to worry. He is believed to be a distant relative, however, and guilty of some heinous crime long ago. “Why else,” says Rory, “would he be hanging around being so awful?”

“Because family,” says Gavin, gloomily, because his relatives really are a lot.

The ghosts know more than they let on, of course: such is their nature. But they seldom give anything away.

Skirt of the day: Holy Clothing blue.

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[1] Gareth swears she tries to get between him and Lionors. “Like a freezing cold, snobby, vocal contraceptive.” The rest of the family do not want this image.

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