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Project: Musketeer/Jewish playwright novel
Market: Probably Storm Moon, unless I'm advised it might work elsewhere
Deadline: 10K in the file by 2/1 for the orgasm_circlet challenge: ACHIEVED!
New words written today: That's a goddamned good question, as I was adding notes and revising an existing scene as well as adding new words. However, there are 973 all-new words of conversation.
Mean things: It is now November, not June, and the casement window is drafty.
Fun things: Mimi is entirely unfazed by Olivier's revelations
Today's Google searches: HA. Forget Google, today I got to check out Franz Hals paintings at the Met for reference purposes!
I meant to work on the vampire story today, I really did. I knew I had two Metro-North train rides, two hours each, just lovely for writing. And my laptop fits in my everyday purse.
fadethecat , I will NEVER stop being grateful.
But, possibly because my plans today were with
txanne , who has been so amazingly helpful with French history details and explanations, this morning in the shower I got hit with a solution to the stuff about the Musketeer Project timeline that had been bothering me. I knew starting at their initial courtship didn't work because of insufficient conflict, but if I started it after the siege of Privas, there was just not enough TIME to put in all the fun, sexy, relationship-illustrating and character-developing bits I'd envisioned before the quests started. But it made so much sense for King Louis to give Olivier his Sekrit Mission at Privas -- one so dangerous that if he survived it, the king would restore his father's lost title and lands to him, which he'd only been looking for a way to do since he was, oh, sixteen... and, of course, having that possibility in front of him is what makes Olivier propose to Mimi, which is what triggers her parallel quest to resolve a Thing From Her Past before she feels free to marry Olivier. And it all would resolve by the surrender of Montauban.
For those of you who haven't been staring at the dates the way I have, the siege of Privas ended on May 28, 1629, and Montauban surrendered on August 21, 1629, with a treaty following in September. Kind of a compressed time frame.
The solution turns out to be simpler than I thought: start the story with Olivier's return after the year-long siege of La Rochelle, which finished near the end of October in 1628.
They're still an established relationship, beginning with a reunion suits me, and the long absence gives me a perfect lead-in for introducing Olivier's relationship with Christophe. Which is the new conversation I wrote today.
November through May gives enough scope for fun sexytimes and some low-level external conflicts just to show what their lives look like, so the reader will get a sense of just how much a marriage proposal changes their relationship... even before Mimi reveals her secrets to Olivier. The reader will have been let in on them earlier, at least some of them, I think.
And June through August is a nice time frame for the quests. They're both relatively simple. I may be able to stick with a Mimi POV throughout and handwave what Olivier does, as I'm not much of an action-adventure writer; maybe we can get all the details we need of Olivier's adventure through him telling her after? Work it like a flashback, maybe. Because as far as I'm concerned, this is Mimi's story.
But it's a hell of a lot more workable than it was when I set it aside last week.
Tomorrow: housework. And back to the vampire.
I meant to work on the vampire story today, I really did. I knew I had two Metro-North train rides, two hours each, just lovely for writing. And my laptop fits in my everyday purse.
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
But, possibly because my plans today were with
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
For those of you who haven't been staring at the dates the way I have, the siege of Privas ended on May 28, 1629, and Montauban surrendered on August 21, 1629, with a treaty following in September. Kind of a compressed time frame.
The solution turns out to be simpler than I thought: start the story with Olivier's return after the year-long siege of La Rochelle, which finished near the end of October in 1628.
They're still an established relationship, beginning with a reunion suits me, and the long absence gives me a perfect lead-in for introducing Olivier's relationship with Christophe. Which is the new conversation I wrote today.
November through May gives enough scope for fun sexytimes and some low-level external conflicts just to show what their lives look like, so the reader will get a sense of just how much a marriage proposal changes their relationship... even before Mimi reveals her secrets to Olivier. The reader will have been let in on them earlier, at least some of them, I think.
And June through August is a nice time frame for the quests. They're both relatively simple. I may be able to stick with a Mimi POV throughout and handwave what Olivier does, as I'm not much of an action-adventure writer; maybe we can get all the details we need of Olivier's adventure through him telling her after? Work it like a flashback, maybe. Because as far as I'm concerned, this is Mimi's story.
But it's a hell of a lot more workable than it was when I set it aside last week.
Tomorrow: housework. And back to the vampire.