It All Comes 'Round Again
Jan. 30th, 2006 03:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lenora_roseFirst, a Public Service Announcement:
I now have social tickets for March 10th ($10.00). Anyone from Winnipeg who would like to come and party, let me know!
Heck, if you're not from Winnipeg, you could always stop by and party anyhow. But I'll udnerstand it mroe if you don't.
______________________
Um. Lord Alystair, a visitor from Edmonton and the actual winner of the archery tournament, decided to give one gift for courtesy to the fighters,a nd one to the archers. So I just got acknowledged as the most courteous archer at the event. Er. Those who know me can please stop laughing. (I received a very pretty if rather more orientally ornamented knife for the above. It was that or a bottle of red wine, and, as they say, "a girl needs a knife...")
Can I say I'm envious? He's got superb aim, and he can shoot 12 arrows in 30 seconds (My top ever was 8, my average is 6-7, depending on how in practice I am) The fastest Winnipegger gets 8 regularly and occasional 9s). The back-quiver helps with the speed, but even so. It's very clear they drill more and train harder there than here. I've heard criticisms of Western Canada's SCA culture, especially the Kingdom in BC, but I've been getting mostly good impressions of the Kingdom that covers most of Alberta and Saskatchewan. And if they're uber-archers -- well, should I ever move back to my Dad's city, there'll be one more perk.
Anyhow, having to work Saturday meant I missed all the fun and games in the afternoon part of the event, heavy fighting and goofing off and all. We arrived with just time enough to greet a variety of people, in and out of town, whom we haven't seen for a while, and a few we have seen recently, and few we've never met. Then it was sit down for Court.
There being no major royalty there this time, no big awards were given out, so it was over fast, and feast was promptly set to go. The theme being Baba Yaga: Bad Things Come in Threes (we've had two prior Russian/Ukrainian events featuring Baba Yaga's appearance), we got borscht and perogies and cabbage rolls and salmon cakes. All very excellent, though the last was a point of contention for at least one person; she's allergic enough to fish that the smell of it cooking can make her ill for a few days. She left before feast, but not before they started heating the fish. At the post-revel she did look less than well, but she got all the complaining about it out in one burst and spent the rest of the evening in what looked like a good mood in spite of it.
Anyhow. We did some dancing through the feast, and much talking, much teasing of Tao_of_Erec for getting the largest quantity of perogies and eating a disturbing number of them, much joking with Amaryllis, who I never see enough. Somehow, my main activity besides eating seemed to be to lean on Colin and flirt outrageously with abacchus (and to a lesser degree, his fiancee.)
We were a bit slow to the post-revel, as I managed to successfully break a glass in the coruse of putting the dirtied feast gear in the sink. (On the second try. I was so grateful it didn't break the first time that I had to drop it exactly the same way immediately after.) But that party was equally fun, if low key. I gossipped with the other two brides-to-be about wedding stuff, watched the visitor from Edmonton do card tricks and discuss how some are done. (By no means did he give away his whole oeuvre.) Chatted with all variety of people. Then my lingering cough decided to really flare up, and it was time to go, and get cough meds, and sleep.
_______________
The big scene is done. The right things blew up in the right ways -- mostly internal, emotional blow-ups. I found a way to have my female lead not turn into a tree that's in character for all concerned (that was part of what the struggle was -- I could think of ways to persuade her out of it, but another character on scne seemed to ahve every reason int he world to push her right back into it.) If anything, her failure to do so, and the failure of others to convince her it's the thing to do, leaves a lot more wreckage in the scene -- the kind of wreckage, that is, that makes good story and will link to the climax, not the kind that makes you go, "How the #*$&#! do I resolve this mess?"
Then I ran through another edit clean-up of the chunk of tale-within-a-tale, the same one I was bitching about at great length in this post back in November. Not least because, what with the complete rearrangement of events, it's now surrounded by entirely different scenes, though it's still in the same relative position in the text.
I've been contemplating splitting it into numerous smaller pieces (The story has four distinct parts) and spreading them through the text from this point forward as discrete sub-stories, but so far I haven't found a satisfactory way to deal with the biggest problem this break-up presents -- which is that the reader would get the information slowly, while the protagonist gets it all in one swoop.
(General principle of 21st century writing: The reader can know things the point-of-view characters don't. But if the point-of-view characters know, and the writer hides it from the reader anyhow, it tends to make a modern reader very mad at the writer. The reader can be mad at the characters, at the world, at the silly ideas -- but not at the writer.)
Next: A new scene, from scratch.
Well, tonight, next up, more archery. I do truly wish I had new arrows, though. Or at least that I'd broken slightly fewer right before the event. Harder to fix technique when the equipment is inconsistent. I wonder if we'll have time between Social and wedding for an arrow-making session or two?
I now have social tickets for March 10th ($10.00). Anyone from Winnipeg who would like to come and party, let me know!
Heck, if you're not from Winnipeg, you could always stop by and party anyhow. But I'll udnerstand it mroe if you don't.
______________________
Um. Lord Alystair, a visitor from Edmonton and the actual winner of the archery tournament, decided to give one gift for courtesy to the fighters,a nd one to the archers. So I just got acknowledged as the most courteous archer at the event. Er. Those who know me can please stop laughing. (I received a very pretty if rather more orientally ornamented knife for the above. It was that or a bottle of red wine, and, as they say, "a girl needs a knife...")
Can I say I'm envious? He's got superb aim, and he can shoot 12 arrows in 30 seconds (My top ever was 8, my average is 6-7, depending on how in practice I am) The fastest Winnipegger gets 8 regularly and occasional 9s). The back-quiver helps with the speed, but even so. It's very clear they drill more and train harder there than here. I've heard criticisms of Western Canada's SCA culture, especially the Kingdom in BC, but I've been getting mostly good impressions of the Kingdom that covers most of Alberta and Saskatchewan. And if they're uber-archers -- well, should I ever move back to my Dad's city, there'll be one more perk.
Anyhow, having to work Saturday meant I missed all the fun and games in the afternoon part of the event, heavy fighting and goofing off and all. We arrived with just time enough to greet a variety of people, in and out of town, whom we haven't seen for a while, and a few we have seen recently, and few we've never met. Then it was sit down for Court.
There being no major royalty there this time, no big awards were given out, so it was over fast, and feast was promptly set to go. The theme being Baba Yaga: Bad Things Come in Threes (we've had two prior Russian/Ukrainian events featuring Baba Yaga's appearance), we got borscht and perogies and cabbage rolls and salmon cakes. All very excellent, though the last was a point of contention for at least one person; she's allergic enough to fish that the smell of it cooking can make her ill for a few days. She left before feast, but not before they started heating the fish. At the post-revel she did look less than well, but she got all the complaining about it out in one burst and spent the rest of the evening in what looked like a good mood in spite of it.
Anyhow. We did some dancing through the feast, and much talking, much teasing of Tao_of_Erec for getting the largest quantity of perogies and eating a disturbing number of them, much joking with Amaryllis, who I never see enough. Somehow, my main activity besides eating seemed to be to lean on Colin and flirt outrageously with abacchus (and to a lesser degree, his fiancee.)
We were a bit slow to the post-revel, as I managed to successfully break a glass in the coruse of putting the dirtied feast gear in the sink. (On the second try. I was so grateful it didn't break the first time that I had to drop it exactly the same way immediately after.) But that party was equally fun, if low key. I gossipped with the other two brides-to-be about wedding stuff, watched the visitor from Edmonton do card tricks and discuss how some are done. (By no means did he give away his whole oeuvre.) Chatted with all variety of people. Then my lingering cough decided to really flare up, and it was time to go, and get cough meds, and sleep.
_______________
The big scene is done. The right things blew up in the right ways -- mostly internal, emotional blow-ups. I found a way to have my female lead not turn into a tree that's in character for all concerned (that was part of what the struggle was -- I could think of ways to persuade her out of it, but another character on scne seemed to ahve every reason int he world to push her right back into it.) If anything, her failure to do so, and the failure of others to convince her it's the thing to do, leaves a lot more wreckage in the scene -- the kind of wreckage, that is, that makes good story and will link to the climax, not the kind that makes you go, "How the #*$&#! do I resolve this mess?"
Then I ran through another edit clean-up of the chunk of tale-within-a-tale, the same one I was bitching about at great length in this post back in November. Not least because, what with the complete rearrangement of events, it's now surrounded by entirely different scenes, though it's still in the same relative position in the text.
I've been contemplating splitting it into numerous smaller pieces (The story has four distinct parts) and spreading them through the text from this point forward as discrete sub-stories, but so far I haven't found a satisfactory way to deal with the biggest problem this break-up presents -- which is that the reader would get the information slowly, while the protagonist gets it all in one swoop.
(General principle of 21st century writing: The reader can know things the point-of-view characters don't. But if the point-of-view characters know, and the writer hides it from the reader anyhow, it tends to make a modern reader very mad at the writer. The reader can be mad at the characters, at the world, at the silly ideas -- but not at the writer.)
Next: A new scene, from scratch.
Well, tonight, next up, more archery. I do truly wish I had new arrows, though. Or at least that I'd broken slightly fewer right before the event. Harder to fix technique when the equipment is inconsistent. I wonder if we'll have time between Social and wedding for an arrow-making session or two?
