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For reasons I don't know, James had a pollon his lj about whether or not all prologs ought to be cut from fantasy novels. I'm probably misreporesenting that. My own response was that prologs ought to be be reformatted as beginning chapters and then judged as to whether they should remain.
Which made me realize that almost everything I've written in The Drummer Boy so far is probably prolog-material and I should probably not start the story three years before the birth of the protagonist, but rather ten or twelve years after. I even know the real secret reason why I started it where I did and it's not pretty. It's because a big chunk of the story really ought to take place on an early twentieth-century sort of
battlefield (with the not-Poles running cavalry and archaic formations and yes, using drummer boys to communicate orders to the troops, as you do in the early twentieth century while your opponents are using automatic weapons and chemical warfare). And honestly, honestly, honestly, I hate battlefield writing. I hate writing it. I hate reading it. I skip those scenes in most books, or at least, skim them.
The only battlefield scenes I can recall enjoying were: (1) the cattle raid early on in The Prize in the Game by Jo Walton, in which the events of the battlefield communicated so much about the world and world view of the story, everything from material culture through the medicinal system and how magic and gender worked and (2) a couple of scenes in a couple of Cherryh books, where the battles were fast and confusing and the participants were overwhelmed and nearly helpless, and then on the other side, life goes on, and it seems almost like nothing happened because of the battle, but everything happened, the entire universe is changed forever.
So originally I was thinking that the story was really about how the protagonist ends up in this ridiculaous and dangerous position (being a drummer boy on a semi-modern battlefield), and I wanted to tell everything about the not-Polish world in which he lived. And I was thinking that the reunion with his not-brother was a kind of a coda to the story, and the protagonist's ultimate fate was almost of no consequence as far as the story goes.
But because I've been ruminating about what a prolog is and what it does and why people feel like writing them though people don't usually feel like reading them, I've been thinking that while it's entirely true that all this backstory stuff is the real true story of the story, it doesn't really want to be hanging out in the front of the book like that. It's kind of boring to read in a lump, like it's all infodump. A paragraph at a time, I'm mostly pretty pleased with what I've written so far. But it's been months that I couldn't make progress even though I knew exactly what was coming next (and no, I'm not one of those writers who discovers the story in the act of putting words on the screen, so "knowing what happens next" is not why I was unable to make progress). I think it's because I have known for a long time that fifteen years' worth of "The Great Marsh goes on and on" and finicky details about inheritance and bloodlines that are important to everyone in the backstory but not to the protagonist and wave after wave of a fatal epidemic and cabbage soup and hot milk and more cabbage soup and hot milk and even or possibly especially small magical events that hint and hint and hint . . . is just a big slodge when it shows up in an unbroken lump at the front end of a war story, even if the story is also a romance and a story about magic and landscape and memory (yes, that's an overt reference to Landscape and Memory by Simon Schama, which is an amazing, amazing book, also about not-quite-Poland).
So. What this means, I think, is that I begin again. This time I begin, I think, with the first appearance of the army recruiter, and the dancing that happens in his vicinity (dancing as army recruitment is Not Polish, as far as I know, it's more on the order of Hungarian, but that's okay, because this world is not our world, and this land is Not Poland).
On another front. When I went to the Kolo festival, I bought a random CD. That is, I told the guy selling them that I was interested in music from someplace other than the main places our dances come from, with an emphasis on maybe Western Slavicsorts of people. So I ended up with a recording of choral music from Poland. Which I do not love. It has nothing in it that grabs me: it sounds like church music. So sad.
On still another front: all the babies were exhausted and didn't want to sleep today. They were exhausting to be around. I had two different people come to help at different times because Lourdes was sick and had to go home. While they were there, the babies calmed down -- there were enough arms to go around, and though the babies didn't know either of them as well as some other people who have come more often, they liked them. You want to calm a strange baby down? Sit down nearish to them and talk very softly about what's going on in the room. Smile gently. Don't make a move on them until you see them relax and start to beinterested in you, and then move slowly.
And finally: Quince blossoms for the last week, and oxalis. I think I have to declare early spring has started. The radish flowers don't count because they never completely stopped.
Which made me realize that almost everything I've written in The Drummer Boy so far is probably prolog-material and I should probably not start the story three years before the birth of the protagonist, but rather ten or twelve years after. I even know the real secret reason why I started it where I did and it's not pretty. It's because a big chunk of the story really ought to take place on an early twentieth-century sort of
battlefield (with the not-Poles running cavalry and archaic formations and yes, using drummer boys to communicate orders to the troops, as you do in the early twentieth century while your opponents are using automatic weapons and chemical warfare). And honestly, honestly, honestly, I hate battlefield writing. I hate writing it. I hate reading it. I skip those scenes in most books, or at least, skim them.
The only battlefield scenes I can recall enjoying were: (1) the cattle raid early on in The Prize in the Game by Jo Walton, in which the events of the battlefield communicated so much about the world and world view of the story, everything from material culture through the medicinal system and how magic and gender worked and (2) a couple of scenes in a couple of Cherryh books, where the battles were fast and confusing and the participants were overwhelmed and nearly helpless, and then on the other side, life goes on, and it seems almost like nothing happened because of the battle, but everything happened, the entire universe is changed forever.
So originally I was thinking that the story was really about how the protagonist ends up in this ridiculaous and dangerous position (being a drummer boy on a semi-modern battlefield), and I wanted to tell everything about the not-Polish world in which he lived. And I was thinking that the reunion with his not-brother was a kind of a coda to the story, and the protagonist's ultimate fate was almost of no consequence as far as the story goes.
But because I've been ruminating about what a prolog is and what it does and why people feel like writing them though people don't usually feel like reading them, I've been thinking that while it's entirely true that all this backstory stuff is the real true story of the story, it doesn't really want to be hanging out in the front of the book like that. It's kind of boring to read in a lump, like it's all infodump. A paragraph at a time, I'm mostly pretty pleased with what I've written so far. But it's been months that I couldn't make progress even though I knew exactly what was coming next (and no, I'm not one of those writers who discovers the story in the act of putting words on the screen, so "knowing what happens next" is not why I was unable to make progress). I think it's because I have known for a long time that fifteen years' worth of "The Great Marsh goes on and on" and finicky details about inheritance and bloodlines that are important to everyone in the backstory but not to the protagonist and wave after wave of a fatal epidemic and cabbage soup and hot milk and more cabbage soup and hot milk and even or possibly especially small magical events that hint and hint and hint . . . is just a big slodge when it shows up in an unbroken lump at the front end of a war story, even if the story is also a romance and a story about magic and landscape and memory (yes, that's an overt reference to Landscape and Memory by Simon Schama, which is an amazing, amazing book, also about not-quite-Poland).
So. What this means, I think, is that I begin again. This time I begin, I think, with the first appearance of the army recruiter, and the dancing that happens in his vicinity (dancing as army recruitment is Not Polish, as far as I know, it's more on the order of Hungarian, but that's okay, because this world is not our world, and this land is Not Poland).
On another front. When I went to the Kolo festival, I bought a random CD. That is, I told the guy selling them that I was interested in music from someplace other than the main places our dances come from, with an emphasis on maybe Western Slavicsorts of people. So I ended up with a recording of choral music from Poland. Which I do not love. It has nothing in it that grabs me: it sounds like church music. So sad.
On still another front: all the babies were exhausted and didn't want to sleep today. They were exhausting to be around. I had two different people come to help at different times because Lourdes was sick and had to go home. While they were there, the babies calmed down -- there were enough arms to go around, and though the babies didn't know either of them as well as some other people who have come more often, they liked them. You want to calm a strange baby down? Sit down nearish to them and talk very softly about what's going on in the room. Smile gently. Don't make a move on them until you see them relax and start to beinterested in you, and then move slowly.
And finally: Quince blossoms for the last week, and oxalis. I think I have to declare early spring has started. The radish flowers don't count because they never completely stopped.