Jane and I have finally hammered out the opening of the new novel, Except the Queen which I think will set our feet on the right path for the rest of the novel. I am feeling pretty pumped about it because I thought the novella (which we are expanding to novel length) was plotted so tightly I was a little worried about how we were going to grow it to three times its length.
One of the aspects of the novella I noticed was how much we got away with by merely suggesting something, rather than having to give any great details. It was quite a good trick I think -- and we pulled it off because the entire novella was written in letters between two fairie sisters who had been not only banished from the Under Hill world of the Fey, but also stripped of their mortality and their magic. After a life of arrested adolescence, they found themselves middle-aged and living in different cities. So the drama had to focus on what could reasonably fit in a letter -- with all of the more extravagant details left out.
To open up the story into a novel required us to think about the implied issues we never fully developed -- those issues that will give us more rounded, full blown characters, rather than the sketches that appeared in the novella. We are delving deep into the ideas of immigration, exile, memoir and memory, and the "other," which here is human, fey, and parts in between. It's turning out to be a pretty rich story emotionally.
Working with Jane is amazing. I am the tortoise -- no doubt about it -- I make lots of notes, I wander around in a daze thinking about the "whole" thing, I write slowly. I plod...but I write "long" (good thing because my character, the sister Meteora is a famous talker) which nicely offsets Jane who writes in explosive, visually rich short bursts -- mystical and visionary (which is much like her character the elder sister Serana). And then there are the emails....tons of them, all starting with "what about this....?"
So I have decided to spend a little more time recording here how we manage over the next four months to get this project done. That's 90,000 words or so in four months...about 5,000 to 6,000 words a week. Oh...yeah we can do this. If you are interested, you might want to read the original story, "Except the Queen" in Marvin Kaye's The Fair Folk (which won the World Fantasy Award for best anthology).
