As Floodtide approaches the events that form the climax of Mother of Souls, I can't escape the need to fill the reader in on a bunch of activities that my protagonist Roz is not only unaware of, but is mostly uninterested in. Roz knows, in theory, that her employer is the royal thaumaturgist and that means she makes up mysteries for Princess Anna. But the details? Not something that touches her directly. And the part being played by Luzie Valorin's magical opera is entirely outside her everyday experience.
teasers
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I confess it: I love playing a long game in planting foreshadowing and setting things up. The failure mode is having some readers complain that I stick in random events and people as if they were meaningful and then drop the thread unresolved. You can't take every single reader aside personally and assure them, "Trust me, it's going to be relevant. Just hang on."
Although it's a motif that needs to be used sparingly, I enjoy the times when I can show the same event or interaction from different points of view. In Mother of Souls we see Serafina shopping for a small statue of Saint Mauriz to give Celeste as a parting gift. It's an expensive keepsake: more than Serafina can afford to spend and more valuable than anything else Celeste owns (though this aspect is only hinted at).
Between the time between when I established floodtide as a facet of life in Rotenek and now with the book with that title is moving towards publication, the effects of weather fluctuations have become a lot sharper in people's awareness. The massive persistent flooding in the American midwest this year is shocking, but less in the general news than more focused floods due to hurricanes and the like.
Since last week's teaser, the editorial revisions on Floodtide have been completed--the quickest and most painfree editing process I've ever experienced! It'll be nice not to have that hanging over me during my upcoming travel to Worldcon.
I'm not going to lie: I love to embed intellectual "Easter eggs" in my stories that may pass under the radar of 90% of my readers and only be fully appreciated by maybe 1%. I never want anyone to feel excluded by those hidden treats, but I do want to reward close attention and familiarity.
Several of my teasers have harped on the theme of how to take a plot-essential situation and set it up so that the readers view it as a natural consequence of the setting. In one sense, it can be manipulative, but in another sense, as an author you have a vision of how things have always been. Your task is to communicate that vision in a way that feels effortless.
Setting up those expectations needn't be focused only on the immediate plot requirements. Because everything you write needs to be consistent in some way with the underlying truths of your fictional world as a whole.
There's a chapter where my central characters spend a day exploring the waterways of the city: the Rotein River itself, the new industrial transport channels, and the old chanulezes, which had their origins in domesticating the hydroscape of the city. Some of the chanulezes acted as a second set of roads, some as little more than drainage ditches, and some had long since been bricked over and forgotten...
One of the things that's going to make Floodtide a hard sell to the lesfic crowd is that it's not a capital-r-Romance novel. For all that Roz's interest in other girls drives key elements of the conflict throughout the book, this isn't a book about finding True Love (tm) and achieving a romantic happy ending. It's very much about finding out that you can have a wide variety of intense emotional relationships with people that aren't sexual and that contribute every bit as much to your happiness as a girlfriend would.
The first inspiration for Floodtide--before I had any clear idea of plot--was having a handful of secondary character in their late teens and wanting to do something with them at that age before they stepped into their adult roles. One of the characters I most wanted to see more of was Margerit's cousin Iulien. Iuli was one of those characters who just grew on me.
I usually set up the teasers to work through examples from the book in strict sequence, but I had some thoughts on the drive this morning that prompted tying it in to the chapter 9 sample. (And frankly, chapter 8 is all a bit spoilery, so maybe I'll skip over it entirely.)
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