(no subject)

As you may or may not recall, I've been working on a teen novel about a high school senior named Sage.

Well, "novel" is possibly a little strong. It's more than long enough to be a novel, but it's more like a series of loosely connected vignettes featuring a rotating constellation of characters, some of whom have what a generous person might term "story arcs," but most of whom simply fall off the face of the earth.

Clearly, something had to be done.

So I've spent the week pruning subplots. Away with the newspaper! Adios to most of the colleges subplot! Even Geneva must go!

Geneva the character, not the city. She wants to be called Jen; Sage thinks it's ridiculous to truncate an awesome name like Geneva, and therefore never remembers to do so. Their friendship was doomed anyway, but nonetheless having to cut it out of the novel felt like clubbing a baby seal to death.

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, what's left may actually be coherent and have an emotional arc and, you know, all that other good stuff. And I have ideas for how the story ends now! Or if not ends, precisely, at least I know what the climax looks like.

Priests in Sutcliff

Are there any good priests in Sutcliff? There are a few who are simply ineffective: the fellow who teaches Randal to read in Knight's Fee, and the guy who teaches Minnow to read in Lantern Bearers.

No, wait, Lantern Bearers also has the monk fellow with the bee skeps who helps Aquila. He was awesome. I latched onto him like a bear to honey because he was the only happy person in that whole book.

Plus he had bees. Beekeepers are automatically amazing.

But otherwise, Sutcliff's priests always seem to be whipping people into violent frenzies. (The bee monk never seems to preach to people; possibly that's why he's a good guy.) In Eagle of the Ninth it's the druid priests who drive the locals to their suicidal attack on the Roman fort, and the druid priests stir up trouble again in Frontier Wolf (though of course there's more to it than that). In Knight's Fee, the bad guy dresses up as a priest to rally a nearby village to attack the castle where Randal lives.

It's too bad that Randal didn't catch hold of the villain then, because I bet the church would have happily dropped a cathedral on his priest-impersonating head. And I can't imagine anyone would have trusted De Courcy again after that. It's hard to get less honorable than pretending to be a priest in order to bring a witch hunt down on your enemies.

And of course the action in Sword Song kicks off when Bjarni drowns a priest who kicked his dog. Bjarni and the narrative seem to agree that this was a regrettable but nonetheless justified act, which is a little weird. Not that I'm in favor of kicking dogs, but murdering dog-kickers seems like an overreaction.

(I'm having trouble getting into Sword Song. Bjarni is prickly and self-centered, and not in a fun way. He seems to think it vaguely unjust that he's being punished for committing murder.)

...as so often with these posts, I don't have some grand theory to wrap this up: it's just a pattern that I've noticed. And I think a story from the point of view of one of those trouble-making druids might be interesting.